Lifeboat Foundation

In the fifth decade of life, our brains start to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated over the ensuing decades. ⁠ https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/great-brain-rewiring-after-age-40/ Big Think.

In a systematic review published last year in the journal Psychophysiology, researchers from Monash University in Australia swept through the scientific literature, seeking to summarize how the connectivity of the human brain changes over our lifetimes. The gathered evidence suggests that in the fifth decade of life (that is, after a person turns 40), the brain starts to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated and connected over the ensuing decades, with accompanying effects on cognition.

Since the turn of the century, neuroscientists have increasingly viewed the brain as a complex network, consisting of units broken down into regions, sub-regions, and individual neurons. These units are connected structurally, functionally, or both. With increasingly advanced scanning techniques, neuroscientists can observe the parts of subjects’ brains that “light up” in response to stimuli or when simply at rest, providing a superficial look at how our brains are synced up.

The Monash University team pored over 144 studies that used these imaging techniques to probe the brains of tens of thousands of subjects. From this analysis, the researchers gleaned a general trend in how the networked brain changes over our lifetimes.