It’s easy to fixate on everything you’re getting worse at as you age.
But there is new research which challenges the assumption that ageing
is inevitably a process of cognitive
and physical decline.
In an ageing society, it feels shortsighted and a missed opportunity not to devote serious resources to exploring what older people do better.
But in the meantime, here are some peaks that we do seem to hit in later life.
A study of 125 years of chess matches, which analysed more than 1.6m moves
in 24,000 games, found players made
the most “optimum” moves at about 40.
There is a lot going on in chess – perception, memory, problem-solving – but older players’ “training
and the accumulation of experience”
seem to confer a lasting advantage.
Chess: 40
In the “mind in eyes” test, participants look at photographs of strangers’ eyes and have to guess their mood; it’s used
as a test for emotional intelligence.
Research has found that people start achieving the highest scores in their 40s.
Reading a stranger’s mood: 40s (and beyond)
This has been replicated in other tests
of emotional intelligence.
We continue to read people well
from our 40s right into old age.
A 2020 study of people who had finished 100km ultramarathons found that women peaked at between 40 and 44, and men at 45 to 49.
This isn’t a fluke: research consistently confirms that ultrarunners peak far later than other athletes. Even more interestingly, the longer the race – duration or distance – the older the peak performance seems to come.
Ultramarathons: 40-49
The baseline assumption is that young people think fast and so perform better on tests that require speed, while older people do better on tests of knowledge.
Arithmetic: 50
But one of the later-life peaks –
perhaps later than you might imagine –
is in arithmetic ability, with test subjects best able to solve arithmetical
problems around age 50.
Author Jojo Moyes has ridden since childhood; this year she not only entered her first dressage competition at 54,
but won.
Age brings mental resilience and perspective, she thinks. “You’re better able to rationalise. You say: OK, I might fuck up, but it’s not a disaster."
Dressage: 50s
Healthy self-esteem is a key component of good mental health, and a long-term data analysis has found it climbs
from adolescence onwards,
peaking somewhere between 50 and 70.
Interestingly, 2020 research from Japan found self-esteem continued to rise from adolescence right into old age,
without the drop other studies had found.
Self-esteem: 50-70
A study of more than 6,000 people
in the US aged 20 to 93 found “SQoL” – that’s sexual quality of life –
remains stable as we age.
Sexual satisfaction
and wisdom: 60s?
The authors suggest ageing “may be associated with the acquisition of skills and strategies that can buffer age-related declines in SQoL, particularly in the context of a positive relationship”.
Apart from physics prize winners,
who tend to be younger, Nobel recipients are often in their 50s and 60s.
Winning a Nobel: 61 and 63
The average age of winners is now 44,
but 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai
and 25-year-old Lawrence Bragg,
who won the physics prize in 1915,
are significantly skewing that.
In 2010, researchers tried to test
for “wisdom” by asking participants
to study social conflicts which were
then evaluated blind by experts.
Conflict resolution: 65
"Older participants showed more wisdom than younger … and middle-aged adults," the study concluded, with 64.9
as the average age of the participants
in the top 20% of performers.
Part of Dr Joshua Hartshorne’s 2015 study on cognitive peaks involved crunching data from 10,000 people trying out tests on a puzzle website.
In that, vocabulary scores peaked at 65.
Vocabulary: 65
That isn’t so surprising, according
to Hartshorne, whose area of expertise
is language:
“There are things that really require a lot of time. There’s just so much language you have to learn. It doesn’t matter how fast you think; there’s no way of getting around the fact it takes decades to even come across certain words.”
Research suggests older adults are more emotionally stable and less impulsive; they are better able to maintain positive relationships; and “agreeableness” increases substantially with age.
Being nice: over 60
The amygdala, the brain’s fear centre, shrinks with age, causing older adults
to become more trusting, compassionate and empathic. Men produce less testosterone, which makes them less aggressive and less disagreeable.
In a 2014 poll of 80,000 Americans, satisfaction with body image
peaked for women at 74.
Body confidence: 74 (for women)
For men, it came even later, at about 80.
A poll from 2014 is hardly definitive evidence, but a literature review in 2015 also found “the importance given to body image as it relates to physical appearance is lower” in western seniors than
their younger counterparts.
“Happiness may seem like a young person thing,” says Daniel Levitin,
a professor of neuroscience
at McGill University.
Happiness: 82
“But the surprising thing is when older people are asked to pinpoint the happiest time of their lives, the most common response from a telephone survey of Americans’ wellbeing was