Don's Home Health Mental Aging and Intelligence | |
We all hear about cognitive decline with age. Einstein once said, "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so." It was true for him. 50% of adults over the age of 85 are afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. On the other side of the coin, At "The Stroke of Genius Strikes Later in Modern Life", Bruce Weinberg, a labor economist at Ohio State University.says, "Today, the average age at which physicists do their Nobel Prize-winning work is 48. Very little breakthrough work is done by physicists under 30."
A study in 2002 examined 50 Nobel prize winners from each of the three prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine. This study recorded the age of the scientists when they had done the work that was rewarded with the prize and found that the centre points for age were: physics, 34; chemistry, 37; medicine, 40.
John Goodenough, age 94, coinventor of the lithium-ion battery, just got a patent for a new battery which could revolutionize the electric car industry. Brain development: At Life and death of neurons in the aging brain. - PubMed - NCBI they say " Neuron death is restricted in normal aging and unlikely to account for age-related impairment of neocortical and hippocampal functions. ... It appears that the primary neurobiological substrates for functional impairment in aging differ in important ways from those in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.".
Bartzokis et al., has noted that there is a decrease in grey matter volume between adulthood and old age, whereas white matter volume was found to increase from age 19-40.
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