Friday, January 06, 2012

Not a major surprise

A major study purports to have found that our brains – in terms of cognitive performance, comprising memory, reasoning and comprehension skills - start deteriorating at the age of 45. This, we are told, is more than a decade earlier than had been thought.

However, the study was conducted among Whitehall civil servants over a decade, finding that among those aged 45-49 at the start there was a 3.6 percent decline in mental reasoning in both sexes over the next ten years.

Why this finding is thought to have any application to the general population is, therefore, rather puzzling. It is axiomatic that, if personnel are not already brain dead when they join the civil service, a few years' employment in that capacity will complete the task of destroying any residual brain cells.

Thus, the only surprise is that, at the ages tested, the civil servants were able to demonstrate any cognitive ability at all. It is certain rare to find any demonstrated in routine contacts with the breed.

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