“Youth,” Douglas Adams wrote, “is wasted on the young.” Having recently passed the hill of 60, I often look back on my younger self with an overwhelming urge to hop into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and give myself a good, hard kick up the arse. Not that it would do any use: as another great English comic writer, Terry Pratchett, wrote: “You then was a twerp”. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.
But is you now, even at 60, all that bad? New research suggests you’ve got a lot to be pretty happy about.
Sure, young adults have the looks, the stamina, even some of the mental capacities. But 60 – ‘the new 40’ – has some good stuff going for it. Maybe you can’t run as fast or for as long, but you’re in the running to be in a pretty good place in your head.
For many of us, overall psychological functioning actually peaks between ages 55 and 60 […]
There’s plenty of research showing humans reach their physical peak in their mid-20s to early 30s.
A large body of research also shows that people’s raw intellectual abilities – that is, their capacity to reason, remember and process information quickly – typically starts to decline from the mid-20s onwards.
This pattern is reflected in the real world. Athletes tend to reach their career peak before 30. Mathematicians often make their most significant contributions by their mid-30s. Chess champions are rarely at the top of their game after 40.
As a younger colleague once remarked to me, “Don’t you get all, like, wise and stuff, at your age?”
When we look beyond raw processing power, a different picture emerges.
In our study, we focused on well-established psychological traits beyond reasoning ability that can be measured accurately, represent enduring characteristics rather than temporary states, have well-documented age trajectories, and are known to predict real-world performance.
Our search identified 16 psychological dimensions that met these criteria.
These included core cognitive abilities such as reasoning, memory span, processing speed, knowledge and emotional intelligence. They also included the so-called “big five” personality traits – extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and agreeableness.
We compiled existing large-scale studies examining the 16 dimensions we identified. By standardising these studies to a common scale, we were able to make direct comparisons and map how each trait evolves across the lifespan.
Several of the traits we measured reach their peak much later in life.
And, yep, we do get all wise and stuff.
Conscientiousness peaked around age 65. Emotional stability peaked around age 75.
Less commonly discussed dimensions, such as moral reasoning, also appear to peak in older adulthood. And the capacity to resist cognitive biases – mental shortcuts that can lead us to make irrational or less accurate decisions – may continue improving well into the 70s and even 80s.
I vividly remember a hippy-ish student teacher, back in my primary school days in the early ’70s, telling us that it was ‘pretty stupid’ that traditional cultures associated old age with wisdom. Like hippies tended to be, turns out he was the one who was pretty stupid.
Our findings may help explain why many of the most demanding leadership roles in business, politics, and public life are often held by people in their 50s and early 60s. So while several abilities decline with age, they’re balanced by growth in other important traits. Combined, these strengths support better judgement and more measured decision-making – qualities that are crucial at the top.
More recently, when I did my university degree, a climate-deranged science lecturer argued that we shouldn’t listen to older, sceptical scientists. Her claim was that the great scientific revolutions belonged to young people. Is that true, though?
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species at 50. Ludwig van Beethoven, at 53 and profoundly deaf, premiered his Ninth Symphony. In more recent times, Lisa Su, now 55, led computer company Advanced Micro Devices through one of the most dramatic technical turnarounds in the industry.
History is full of people who reached their greatest breakthroughs well past what society often labels as “peak age”.
Even the truly earth-shaking revolutions were made by people in their 40s: Einstein, Newton, Galileo. While Tolkien had a long and productive academic career behind him by then, his magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings, was published when he was 62.
It’s not all good news, though.
Overall mental functioning peaked between ages 55 and 60, before beginning to decline from around 65. That decline became more pronounced after age 75, suggesting that later-life reductions in functioning can accelerate once they begin.
So, concentrate on not letting them begin. The science of neuroplasticity shows how our brains can respond remarkably to the right stimuli. Learning new languages, or a musical instrument, are well-known brain-health exercises.
Still, we may not be able to beat the young hares in a flat-out races, but we wily old tortoises can still outsmart the little buggers.
