Who are you calling over the hill? The truth about brain ageing

It's not necessarily correct that our cognitive skills decline as we get older.

- Sarah O'Connor

When I was in my late 20s, I remember reading a pop science article which told me that I had already passed my cognitive peak. I had barely started my career, and already my brain was apparently on an inexorable downward slope.

I shrugged it off at the time, but as I enter my 40s, I find the idea more depressing. How many years before people begin to tell me encouragingly that what I lack in cognitive skill I make up for in "wisdom"? Am I going to have to start doing crosswords to slow my inevitable decline?

Not necessarily. A new longitudinal study has painted a very different picture of what happens to people's cognitive skills as they age. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development runs a programme in which it tests the literacy and numeracy skills of adults aged 16 to 65 across 39 countries. Germany, uniquely, retested a panel of participants 3 1/2 years later.

Based on this data, a group of academics found that people's skills did not appear to peak in their 20s or 30s. In fact, they continued to increase up to about 45 years old in literacy and about 40 in numeracy.