You’ve got until 35 until your memory starts heading downhill, suggests recent research published in Psychological Science. (Sorry if you’ve already celebrated your 35th birthday.)
For the study, neuroscientists at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital ran 48,537 people between the ages of 10 to 89 through a gamut of brain-teaser tests, all designed to evaluate memory, emotion-recognition, number skills, and vocabulary.
Among their findings: Working memory—the ability to hold onto facts, names, or numbers for a short amount of time (say, when someone tells you a phone number and you have to repeat it in your head until you have a chance to enter it into your cell)—peaks at age 25, holds steady until 35, and then slowly starts declining. Meanwhile, previous research from one of the study’s coauthors shows that people’s short-term memory of visual information (what color is your date’s eyes?) peaks in the early 30s. Womp, womp.
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Why so early? No one’s quite sure. “The simple answer is that we get better during childhood as our brain matures and as we learn, and then our brain starts to break down and we get worse,†says coauthor Joshua Hartshorne, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “But that doesn’t really explain why the peak is in early adulthood, as opposed to at five years or 50 years. The answer to that question is that we don’t know.â€
The silver lining is that long-term memory—which is responsible for helping you find your keys or parking space—actually increases up to about retirement age before it starts declining, notes coauthor Laura Germine, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital.
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Plus, this and other research suggests that adults hang on to their long-term memory longer than they used to, she says. “There’s something that we are doing that is good for our cognitive behavior that we weren’t doing generations ago.†It might be education, Sudoku, diet, exercise—that’s for further studies to decide.
Still, it’s clear that the more you exercise your mind, the stronger it gets—whatever your age, says Hartshorne. Try this easy way to keep your memory on-point birthday after birthday.
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