TheEye is unimpressed by a paper issued by the University of West Virginia and published in the journal Neurobiology Of Ageing.

Apparently your mental ability hits a peak at around the age of 22 and by 27 you are well on the downward spiral.

The study of 2,000 men and women took 7 years. The lab-rats, aged between 18-60, were asked to solve visual puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols. 9 out of 12 victims peaked at 22 years old. It is unclear whether their brains were cut out and pickled in jars afterwards for entertainment at med student parties.

What positives can we take from this? 27 is when you are first statistically looking dodgy but it’s 37 before the memory starts to….something or other….

On the plus side (or clutching at straws, as TheEye knows it) abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increases until the age of 60ish. The tests are usually performed on patients with dementia to check for deterioration but TheEye prefers to monitor his slide in to decline by increasingly struggling to do the Time and Telegraph crosswords. It’s nothing to do with the absinthe intake, doc.