Are brains don't give up with age

Comforting research from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

This article in the Daily Telegraph makes it clear that long-term memory remains unaffected with age and a person’s vocabulary, emotional intelligence and social skills may all get better.

Short-term memory, learning skills and the ability to reason do decline with age, the research shows, but not all mental faculties reach their peak when a person is in their 20s as is commonly believed. 

Professor Dilip Jeste of the University of California, San Diego, said: "The fact that older people are slower to respond than younger people is widely seen as a disadvantage. But that's not always the case.

"The elderly brain is less dopamine-dependent, making people less impulsive and controlled by emotion. Older people also less likely to respond thoughtlessly to negative emotional stimuli because their brains have slowed down compared to younger people. This, in fact is what we call wisdom.