Forget youthful brilliance – the human mind peaks at 60

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Middle age has a dreadful reputation. Knees creak, waistlines thicken, careers stall. Children demand more than you can give, parents need more than you can manage. The mirror is unkind, the inbox unforgiving. Little wonder it is often seen as the bleakest stretch of life’s journey.

Yet a study offers consolation: however frazzled and arthritic you may feel in your late fifties, this is when your mind is at its finest.

The paper, published in the journal Intelligence, draws on decades of psychological research to produce what the authors have called the cognitive-personality functioning index (CPFI), a single measure that tracks how intelligence, judgment and other key mental and personality traits evolve over the average lifespan.

The results indicate a pattern: that the overall functioning of the human brain reaches its zenith between 55 and 60.

The reason is that different abilities follow different trajectories. Fluid intelligence, which includes reasoning, memory span and processing speed, tends to peak in the early twenties. It then ebbs steadily.

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But the data suggests that so-called crystallised intelligence — the accumulation of knowledge and experience — continues to build for decades. Personality traits also mature: conscientiousness (the diligence to see things through) and emotional stability (the ability to keep calm under stress), increase across adulthood before levelling off in later life.

Other skills bloom late. Moral reasoning — the ability to weigh competing principles — deepens with experience, producing sounder judgments about fairness and duty. Financial literacy peaks in the late 60s, perhaps reflecting a lifetime of dealing with bills.

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People also get better at avoiding the sunk-cost fallacy, the human tendency to throw good money after bad. Experience seems to make them less sentimental about lost causes.

Not everything improves. Cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift smoothly between tasks or strategies when circumstances change, and cognitive empathy, the ability to intuit what others are thinking, fade with age. The motivation to tackle abstract puzzles, known to psychologists as the “need for cognition”, also wanes, on average.

However, in the round the study concludes that in middle age the gains more than offset the losses. The late fifties emerge as the sweet spot: the point when hard-won wisdom compensates for dwindling speed.

This has obvious implications for the worlds of business and politics. Every individual is different and average patterns do not apply to everybody. But Britain’s most visible politicians are leaving the zone of peak performance: Sir Keir Starmer is 63 while Nigel Farage is 61.

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Across the Atlantic, President Trump, 79, falls far outside it. His stamina for rallies may remain formidable, his ability to provoke unsurpassed. But the research suggests that the optimal mix of cognitive sharpness and personality steadiness tends to be found in younger leaders.

Dr Gilles Gignac of the University of Western Australia, who led the study, said: “The mix of accumulated knowledge, judgment and life experience is what shifts the overall peak of human functioning into the late fifties. So, while youth has advantages, maturity arguably brings a broader and more powerful set of tools for navigating complex problems and responsibilities. While some people might find this obvious, it had never been quantified and established scientifically.”