Generation Gap Growls with New Gusto

Well, it's that old generation gap thing again. It's back just in time for the great recession....!

Giving a long-standing battle cry a new shout, University of Virginia professor Timothy Salthouse has released his findings about the way young and old brains function. Only his thesis is worse than most of us thought (with either our young or old brain). Salthouse says the cut-off point is 22.

Good lord, at 22 most of us are too young to even suspect what it means to be old. Our young brains are throbbing inside young bodies that tell us that both our brain and our body will feel like this forever. Not so, insists the brainy professor, and to prove it he has the cognitive test results from 2000 healthy people ranging from 18 to 60. Using puzzle-solving, word-recall and story details, he concludes we hit our peak at 22. And by 27 -- well forget it (as you probably will anyway) because you're already sliding down the other side of the brain's functionality.

Dr. Salthouse does throw us a cookie on our inevitable slide by suggesting that with age comes wisdom. At least when defined as "storehouse of vocabulary and general knowledge." However, lest we sliders get too giddy, Salthouse goes on to say this wisdom gig usually tops out at about 60.

One number that does not accompany his report is his own age, which I take to be somewhere midway between his appointed benchmarks. Usually most researchers are comfortably "midway" which lends them that much desired aura of scientific objectivity. In my case, 22 is so long ago I can only fictionalize it in my old brain; and even 60 has now become the-good-old-days.

All things and brains considered, professor Salthouse's thesis places President Obama, at 47, right smack in the middle of the brain's peak potential. Of coures neither the professor nor we can prove that. However, there is a good hint to that effect when you graph the daily barrage of criticisms aimed at the President's. Currently, the percentage of criticism from the young and the old, from the left and the right, graph out about equal. And as any history of democracy will suggest, leaders who make both extremes equally angry are leaders generally proceeding down the right path.

One thing neither Professor Salthouse nor President Obama has attended to yet is the way this recession is widening the generation gap in the pursuit of jobs. Right now the competition for entry level jobs in supermarkets and fast-food restaurants is being won by the older brains. The New York Times recently reported that in this market the 16-24 year olds have lost 2 million jobs and the 65-and-olders have added 700,000.

How does one try to summarize all these studies and numbers....? Perhaps one turns to some wise elders for their reflections from the far side of the slide:

Poet Robert Frost observed: "The reason worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work." And playwright Arthur Miller: "Maybe all one can do in this life is hope to end up with the right regrets."

Neither professors nor statisticians need add anything more.....