This Modern Sequestration

Brain power can decline from age 45: study

"What a drag it is getting old"... ~ Mick Jagger

by Agence France-Presse
Friday, January 6, 2012

 

 

Cognitive skills can start to fall from the age of 45, not from around the age of 60 as is commonly thought, according to research published on Friday by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Researchers led by Archana Singh-Manoux from the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France and University College London observed 5,198 men and 2,192 women over a 10-year period from 1997.

The volunteers were London civil servants aged between 45 and 70 who had been enrolled in a long-term health study.

Over the 10 years, the participants were tested three times — for memory, vocabulary, and skills in aural and visual comprehension.

During this time, there was a 3.6-percent decline in mental reasoning in men aged 45-49 and a 9.6-percent fall in those aged 65-70. The corresponding figures for women were 3.6 and 7.4 percent.

“Cognitive decline is already evident in middle age,” says the paper, which defines this as the years from 45 to 49.

The findings should spur further research into spotting and braking cognitive deterioration, the authors hope.

Many societies face an “exponential increase” in the number of elderly people as a result of increases in life expectancy, they note.

“These changes are likely to have a profound influence on individuals’ lives and society at large. Poor cognitive status is perhaps the single most disabling condition in old age.”

Intendix lets you type with your brain

My brain can type!

I’ve just typed out the words ‘howdy chum’ with the power of my mind – which is incredible really because my mind has the wattage of a dead glow worm.

Credit for this remarkable feat goes to Intendix, a piece of software designed for people unable to communicate any other way. It’s on show at CeBIT, and about two seconds after seeing it demonstrated I’d badgered Clemens Holzner – the software’s developer – into letting me have a go.

The first step was to measure my “large head” – Clemens didn’t take my badgering sitting down – in order to fit the skull cap designed to monitor my, for want of a better word, brain activity. Cold gel was applied to help the electrodes register my brain waves, and the cap was attached to a wireless transmitter which sent the information to the Intendix software on a nearby laptop. The entire process took about ten minutes, and by the end of it I looked like Darth Vadar’s ugly brother.

Clemens pressed a button, and suddenly my brain was ticking along on the laptop screen, peaking and troughing with alarming regularity. Watching your EKG spike every time you concentrate is like holding out your secrets in both hands, and when he joked that “everybody can read your mind”, I didn’t feel he was too wide of the mark.

The next stage was to teach the software to recognise how my brain looks when I concentrate. To do this, I was presented with a grid of letters arranged in a qwerty layout. Lights flashed across the letters, and every time one caught the letter I wanted to type, I had to count it off in my mind. During the training phase, Clemens typed in a random selection of letters and I counted each one off 30 times in thirty seconds. At the end of the thirty seconds, the letter I was thinking of flashed up on the screen.

By this point, we’d drawn a small crowd, and when he told me to think of a word, my evil brain immediately suggested several that would have caused me to be chased out of Hannover. Instead I settled on ‘Howdy chum’ and for the next four and half minutes I concentrated on the grid of letters and typed using my addled brain.

Clemens claimed that in a quieter environment, with somebody experienced with the software, you could probably get to one second per letter, though he admitted it would be “very tough.”

Watching the software in action, I was staggered by the possibilities of it, especially as it’s now being sold to consumers directly. Unfortunately, those consumers will need to shell out about 9,000 euros to type using the power of their mind, and I suspect at that price, most people’s thoughts are going to stay firmly in their own head for the time being.