I’m curious about your claim that at 60-70 years old people start rapidly becoming stupider for reason we don’t know. I thought that I recalled reading that while the various forms of dementia become immensely more common with age, those who are fortunate enough to avoid any of them experience relatively little cognitive decline. Unless you mean only to say that our present understanding of Alzheimer’s and the other less common dementia disorders is relatively limited, so you’re counting that as a reason we don’t know (it is certainly something we don’t know how to fix, so you win on that point).
Hmmm, thanks, but that research doesn’t seem to make any effort to distinguish people with diagnosable dementia conditions from those without, and does mention that the rates can be quite different for different people, so I can’t tell whether there’s anything about it which contradicts what I thought I remembered encountering in other research.
You can look at the UK study directly: paper. They explicitly mention that they are interested in “normative (i.e. non-pathological) age-related differences in cognition” and that they took pains to get a representative sample.
If you accept that their sample is representative, it does show major cognitive decline with age regardless of who got diagnosed with what. That decline is not subtle.
I’m curious about your claim that at 60-70 years old people start rapidly becoming stupider for reason we don’t know. I thought that I recalled reading that while the various forms of dementia become immensely more common with age, those who are fortunate enough to avoid any of them experience relatively little cognitive decline. Unless you mean only to say that our present understanding of Alzheimer’s and the other less common dementia disorders is relatively limited, so you’re counting that as a reason we don’t know (it is certainly something we don’t know how to fix, so you win on that point).
I mean things like this.
Hmmm, thanks, but that research doesn’t seem to make any effort to distinguish people with diagnosable dementia conditions from those without, and does mention that the rates can be quite different for different people, so I can’t tell whether there’s anything about it which contradicts what I thought I remembered encountering in other research.
You can look at the UK study directly: paper. They explicitly mention that they are interested in “normative (i.e. non-pathological) age-related differences in cognition” and that they took pains to get a representative sample.
If you accept that their sample is representative, it does show major cognitive decline with age regardless of who got diagnosed with what. That decline is not subtle.