Sunday 5 April 2009

23? You're Past It.

The good Professors at the University of Virginia have made the discovery that mental powers peak at the ripe old age of 22. After that it's all downhill and it's a lifetime of trying to remember where you put your car keys and finding them in the freezer alongside your slippers.
I don't know many sub 22 year olds who are planning on ending World hunger or finding a cure for the common cold, most seem more obsessed with making sure their hair looks good and updating their facebook page and that's how it should be. I know there were people like Beethoven who had piano masterpieces under his belt by the time he was 5 or something but look at his hair, child prodigy maybe but a birds-nest of a barnet. William Pitt the Younger was making plans to run the country at 22 but died before his 50th birthday an alcoholic, unmarried and heavily in debt.
Saving the World from disease, writing classic novels or discovering the right order for MC2 and E should not fall to 22 year olds, it should fall to the older generation who have sowed their seeds and have spent a decade working as a janitor in a Patents Office.
Go off and enjoy yourselves 22 year olds and leave it to us oldies to make the discoveries and write the literary masterpieces but before you go, has anyone seen my house keys? I'm sure i had them a moment ago.

2 comments:

Aaron said...

This is interesting. I have always heard that the brain stopped developing at around 21 (at least that's what they told us in college to try and stop us from drinking before 21 because we would make ourselves dumb). Then the other day I swear I read an article where some scientists basically said the brain is like a muscle and you can build up certain areas by working them out until you were like 60 or something.

Falling on a bruise said...

I thought that the whole idea behind the Brain Training games that are sold for the DS was to build up certain areas of the brain, well that's how they market them. If the brain does stop developing at 21 or 22 then we can do all the sudukos and crosswords as advised by the medical profession to keep the brain active and it won't help anything.
Unless of course, experience kicks in and the brain ticks over on that rather than continuing to develop.