Intellectual Development As We Age

Intellectual development for our purposes of discussion will refer to encyclopedia.com’s definition: “…the changes that occur, as a result of growth and experience, in a person’s capacities for thinking, reasoning, relating, judging, conceptualizing, etc.”

Most people think of the stages of cognitive development in terms of childhood and the four primary areas of development. These are motor (physical), language and communication, cognitive, and social/emotional. Cognitive development in particular refers to how we think, explore, and figure things out. It’s the basis for knowledge, skills, and problem solving. In other words, it’s not stagnant – it grows with us as we learn and acquire new skills and knowledge.

Now, there are categories of intellectual skills – comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, each falling in order. First, we learn, then we apply what we’ve learned. We analyze the situation and see where else we can synthesize this information, and then we evaluate the overall outcome.

The signs of high intellectual power in adults are the same as with children – fast learning, interest in different topics, and the ability to process information quickly. Some studies have found that we tend to hit our cognitive maximum around age 35, where we stay for 10-15 years, followed by a long, slow decline.

The good news is that age also brings positive cognitive changes. Older adults have more extensive vocabularies and greater knowledge of the depth of meaning of words than younger adults. Older adults also have the benefit of a lifetime of knowledge and experiences.

One such category is “lived knowledge.” I’ll use myself as an example here. Many of you may already know that I have bipolar disorder. Now, this is a topic I certainly could have researched on my own, in order to come up with ideas on treatment, coping skills, interpersonal dynamics, the whole thing. And I have researched it – exhaustively! But beyond that, there’re things that I simply could not have learned by reading about them in a book or from watching some video.

Nobody could have explained to me how quickly and easily you can not only lose your cool, but also not be able to get it back under control. Nobody could have told me how it feels to sob uncontrollably during a mixed episode, when all you want to do is sleep at least once in four days. You see, there are just things about lived experience that you can’t learn in stories or online. I can describe the feelings I experience to someone else, but they can’t know what it’s like to be there, unless they’ve been there themselves – something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

Fortunately for me, bipolar disorder is a psychiatric disorder, not a personality disorder. Those we’ll reserve for another entire conversation. But it does lead us to a related topic – personality. Psychologists use the “Big 5” personality traits to study to determine if personality is stable or if it changes over time. Personality is individual patterns of thoughts, behaviors and emotions.

The “Big 5” personality traits are e

asiest to remember with the acronym “OCEAN”

· O – openness to experience – is someone very open to trying new things, or are they more consistent and cautious than curious?

· C – conscientiousness – this is how organized or easy-going you are

· E – extroversion – how much you enjoy other people’s company versus being alone

· A – agreeableness – this is how easily you trust and how compassionate you are to others

· N – Neuroticism – dealing with how many negative emotions you experience

We’ve all seen babies who seem to come straight out of the womb with their own little personalities. We’ve also all seen those personalities change as the child ages and comes across troubles, trials, siblings, friends, enemies, and other circumstances. Personality is perhaps one of the best areas of study for the argument of nature vs. nurture.

While this still hasn’t been solved, we can rest assured that it has at least a little to do with nurture. If you’re in a nurturing environment, your personality can shine in all its glory. In a stifling or even dangerous environment, you will have learned to hide some aspects and really show off others – in a simple effort to learn to survive your upbringing.

And it generally worked – we’re all still here, right? But personality isn’t the only area in which we can affect intellectual change in ourselves. There’s memory, moral development, problem solving, language development, abstract thinking, and so much more!

A few of the changes we’ll all go through as we age are apparent: our hair gets a little (or a lot) gray, our skin wrinkles and begins to sag, there are changes in vision and hearing, more joint pain, and weight gain. Another aspect that changes is our information processing. In middle age, it becomes harder and takes us longer to process and react to information. Attention also declines. You may find as you age that it’s harder to focus on what’s important.

On the plus side, though, emotionally, the older brain is calmer, less neurotic, more capable of managing emotions, and better able to negotiate social situations. Older adults tend to focus more on the positive aspects of life, where their younger counterparts focus more on negative information.

Another plus to becoming an “older adult” is the improvement of executive functioning. This involves linking past experiences with current activity. Things like planning, organizing, strategizing, and time management all fall in this category, and it only makes sense that if you’re combining past experiences with current information, you’ll stand a better chance with more past experiences with which to compare.

Next, let’s explore the concept of “fluid” versus “crystallized” intelligence. Fluid intelligence is defined as the ability to solve new problems, use logic in new situations, and identify patterns. The easiest way to think of fluid intelligence is that you’ll use it slightly differently each time you’re in a new situation. It’s flexible and adaptive. “Street smarts” falls into this category.

Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, is defined by the ability to use learned knowledge and experience. Over time, it gets more stable, as issues and situations repeat themselves and we use the knowledge we already possess to deal with them. When you’re learning a new task, you rely more heavily on fluid intelligence. After a period of time, the task becomes rote, or “crystallized” in your mind.

Now, let’s look at the mid-life crisis. This is essentially a crisis of identity or self-esteem, that happens in middle age. It’s often the result of looking around and comparing who you are with who you thought you’d become when you were younger. It can be triggered by any number of experiences that occur at this point in our lives: aging parents, empty nesting, career stagnation, for example. These things can force us to take a realistic inventory of our own lives, and we often find them lacking.

One thing to be on the lookout for is depression. It’s not unusual in mid-life, particularly when these crises arise. Talking to a professional can help, as can medication when warranted. It also helps to look back at what all you HAVE accomplished – the list is often much longer than we realize if we take the time to take stock.

So, are there ways to avoid the eventual decline it seems all brains make over time? Because believe it or not, it’s not all downhill after 35! The Seattle Longitudinal Study, which tracked the cognitive abilities of thousands of adults over the past 50 years, showed people actually performed better on tests of verbal abilities, spatial reasoning, math, and abstract reasoning in middle age than they did when they were young adults.

There is growing evidence that we can and do learn throughout our lives. Turns out, the brain is relatively plastic, meaning that we’re able to reroute neural connections to adapt to new challenges and tasks. In other words, you CAN teach an old dog new tricks!

Here are a few simple steps to increase your overall intellectual wellness:

1. Read for fun – if you’re self-employed, you may even feel guilty for reading that’s not learning some new skill or researching data or teaching you about mindset. It’s ok – I promise! Pull out that trashy romance or thriller you’ve secretly been coveting and get reading! Reading something you enjoy can improve your intellect by stretching your mind to think in ways it doesn’t in the normal course of things.

2. Debate an issue with a friend but choose the viewpoint opposite the one you truly hold. A little tricky, but important! Focusing attention on information that’s different from your beliefs can improve your intellectual wellness because it triggers our minds to expand and grasp new information.

3. Improve your skills for studying and learning – here’s the place for all that non-fiction reading you’re dying to do. Learn new things about the way in which your mind processes information, and put that into action in your next course, webinar, etc.

4. Learn a foreign language – not only can this one contribute to your intellectual intelligence, it can also improve your employment prospects, something that becomes more and more important, the older we get. When learning new ways to communicate, your mind expands. This helps keep you receptive to new knowledge, but also helps broaden information you’ve already learned.

5. Play a game – that’s right, pull out a deck of cards or a board game, and get to it! It makes no difference if you’re playing alone or with others, as long as your mind is thinking, improvements are being made.

6. Play a musical instrument – music has a tremendous impact on our minds. It can set the mood, communicate effectively, and lighten the heart. It also increases intellectual wellness by learning how to create new sounds, make patterns, and emote through music. Don’t make it hard on yourself – start small with a kazoo or harmonica. They’re both relatively low-cost investments, portable, and somewhat easy to learn. Take this on and watch it open up your world!

7. Write frequently – whether in a journal or notebook to be shared, it can even be something as simple as recipes. We’re all on social media much of the time, and typing into documents when we’re not. We’ve all but lost the art of hand-writing out what we’re thinking and feeling. But, it helps you to be able to identify emotions and understand yourself more and more as your intellectual wellness increases with exposure to deeper thinking

8. Do crossword or sudoku puzzles – while thought of as “leisure activities”, working through puzzles or finding words in patterns uses a great amount of brain power. Increasing your ability to work through these activities can maintain and build intellectual wellness.

While numerical computation and perceptual speed decline in middle and late adulthood, current results show that middle-aged adults perform better on four out of six cognitive tasks than those same people did when they were younger. Verbal memory, spatial reasoning, inductive reasoning, and vocabulary increase until approximately age 70.

The DSM-5 notes that, “intellectual functioning reflects several different components: verbal comprehension, working memory, perceptual reasoning, quantitative reasoning, abstract thought, and cognitive efficacy” (2013). Knowing that each of these has the potential to grow throughout adulthood is great incentive to keep up the good fight. To sum it up – an active brain is a healthy brain, so work your brain the way you work your body – do more than just the bare minimum and you’ll see tremendous results!