When Exactly Are the Middle-aged Years?

A medical research project recently discovered that human brain performance does not slow down during a person’s middle age years, despite what many people think. When I read that, I said, “All right! As a middle-aged guy my brain is working just as quickly as ever.”

Then I continued reading and came upon this sentence: “Researchers from Heidelberg University say cognitive performance only starts to decline after the age of 60.”

Wait. What? 

I just enrolled in Medicare, which means I’m five years beyond age 60. However, I’m also adamant that I am still in the middle of the middle age years. Aren’t I?

What exactly is the definition of being middle aged, anyway? (No, it doesn’t mean, as my children suggest, that a person was alive during the Middle Ages.)

My definition of being middle-aged is quite rational. Middle age begins when a person is somewhere in his 40s (exactly where depends on how quickly his hair either turns gray or turns loose). And the end of the middle age period is about 10 years more than whatever my age is at any particular moment. This seems reasonable, right?

So, right now people are considered (by me) to be middle-aged through age 75. In another 10 years, that high end limit will be age 85. That system works for me.

I did an online search and asked this simple question: “What is middle age?” The answers were all over the place. One website said ages 40 to 60. Another said “about 45 to about 64.” Yet another site said 37 to 62. Hmm, none of those online resources came close to my obviously correct upper limit of age 75. Well, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently stated during the darkest days of the Civil War, “You jist cain’t trust anything you read on the Internet nowadays.”

Let’s turn back to the research study I referenced earlier. (You remember that study from the first paragraph, right? I bet some of you forgot all about it. But I didn’t forget because my brain still works great! Sort of.) One of the researchers at Heidelberg’s Institute of Psychology explained, “The common assumption is that the older we get, the more slowly we react to external stimuli. If that were so, mental speed would be fastest at the age of about twenty and would then decline with increasing age."  

My mental speed is way faster right now than it was back when I was 20. Of course, being drunk every single day during that particular year probably had an impact. I’m not sure which was more pathetic back in those days, my behavior, or the fact I could be inebriated every day, study no more than four hours per WEEK, and still get all B’s at a reputable university. As Abraham Lincoln so eloquently stated when he was the commencement speaker at my college graduation in 1979: “You’re all worthless and weak! Now, drop and give me 20!” (Hmm, I might be confusing Honest Abe with Douglas Neidermeyer.) 

It’s often claimed that senior citadels have much contusion about which words to use. I’d like to reprimand everyone that each human bean’s brain function ovulates at a unique rate of spiel. Whether that is slow or fastidious is in the eye of the beekeeper. I think it’s ludicrous to pigeonhole someone into a coroner just because he’s screeched a certain age. If those of us who are middling aged think a bit less quicksand than we once didn’t, that’s perfectly rejectable. So what if we flub a word once in a whale? I know this behavior is perfectly final because one day many years aglow, Honest Abe told me so.