When does the brain work best?
The peak times and ages for learning
What’s your ideal time of the day for brain performance?
Surprisingly, the answer to this isn’t as simple as being a
morning or a night person. New research has shown that
certain times of the day are best for completing specific
tasks, and listening to your body’s natural clock may help
you to accomplish more in 24 hours.
Science suggests that the best time for our natural
peak productivity is late morning. Our body temperatures
start to rise just before we wake up in the morning and
continue to increase through midday, Steve Kay, a
professor of molecular and computational biology at the
University of Southern California told The Wall Street
Journal. This gradual increase in body temperature means
that our working memory, alertness, and concentration
also gradually improve, peaking at about mid morning.
Our alertness tends to dip after this point, but one study
suggested that midday fatigue may actually boost our
creative abilities. For a 2011 study, 428 students were
asked to solve a series of two types of problems, requiring
either analytical or novel thinking. Results showed
that their performance on the second type was best at
non-peak times of day when they were tired.
As for the age where our brains are at peak condition,
science has long held that fluid intelligence, or the ability
to think quickly and recall information, peaks at around
age 20. However, a 2015 study revealed that peak brain
age is far more complicated than previously believed and
concluded that there are about 30 subsets of intelligence,
all of which peak at different ages for different people. For
example, the study found that raw speed in processing
information appears to peak around age 18 or 19, then
immediately starts to decline, but short-term memory
continues to improve until around age 25, and then begins
to drop around age 35, Medical Xpress reported. The ability
to evaluate other people’s emotional states peaked much
later, in the 40s or 50s. In addition, the study suggested that
out our vocabulary may peak as late as our 60s’s or 70’s.
Still, while working according to your body’s natural clock
may sound helpful, it’s important to remember that these
times may differ from person to person. On average, people
can be divided into two distinct groups: morning people tend
to wake up and go to sleep earlier and to be most productive
early in the day. Evening people tend to wake up later, start
more slowly and peak in the evening. If being a morning or
evening person has been working for you the majority of
your life, it may be best to not fix what’s not broken.
(Dana Dovey. www.medicaldaily.com, 08.08.2016. Adaptado.)
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