In the past two years, mass layoffs from large Internet companies have been revealed, among which the development posts are in the disaster areas, and the vast majority of the developers who have been removed are programmers over 35 years old.
For many, 35 is a business. Why programmers after 35 are not very popular, and people have given many answers. In fact, a very realistic problem is that those once thriving young people, after 35, may not be as "competent at work" as the new generation.
Recently, researchers and their collaborators from the University of Munich analyzed 24000 professional games data from 4294 professional chess players from 1890 to 2014, and found that the cognitive function of human brain will reach the peak at 35, then decline all the way, and the decline rate after 45 years old begins to be more and more obvious.
Not only that, the researchers found that human cognitive ability is increasing, for example, for people born in the 1870s, the cognitive ability of their peers born in the 1970s is about 8%.
The research papers are entitled "life cycle patterns of coordinated performance over the long run", which was published in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAs) on October 19.
As we all know, human cognitive ability will become stronger with the increase of time in the early life, and gradually weaken in the late life. So, when does the cognitive function of human brain begin to weaken?
In the past century, this problem has been perplexing neuroscience scholars. Because it is very difficult to evaluate the cognitive ability of human objectively and dynamically, so the previous research on the relationship between human cognitive performance and age is relatively small, and the evidence is very limited.
In order to evaluate the relationship between cognitive ability and age objectively and dynamically, the researchers analyzed the data of over 24000 chess competitions in 1890-2014, and 1.6 million chess data made by 4294 participants. By comparing the chess player action with professional chess computer action, the data of the cognitive ability of the chess players can be obtained.
As for why chess is chosen, the researchers say, "in our empirical model, we rely on professional chess data, because it is a typical evidence of human brain activity. At the same time, we have saved all the data of the world chess competition in the past 125 years. If we compare one person's actions with the actions of powerful computers, we can get a very objective cognitive score. "
In the process of assessing the cognitive ability of the players, the researchers selected only the actions between step 10 and step 100 in each game of game to exclude the players from the influence of the chess score. Meanwhile, researchers ruled out 3422 players who played less than five games.
The results show that cognitive ability in human life cycle is humped. The growth rate is fast between 0-20 years old, slow growth between 20-35 years old, slow decline between 35-45 years old and rapid decline after 45 years old.
