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Crystallized intelligence usually increases in the normal brain as one ages.

Wisdom differs widely between individuals of different ages and is not a necessary consequence of older age.

On memory tests, elders tend to perform best in the early morning, with performance declining by afternoon.

While clinical research is awash in studies comparing normal brains with brains affected by various diseases, comparisons of normal brains at a younger age with normal brains three or four decades older are less frequently encountered.

For one thing, as a person advances in age, their brain is increasingly likely to demonstrate some pathological change. Among people in their 80s, for instance, somewhere north of 70 percent will show at autopsy some of the pathological features of degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. (This is not the same thing as saying that they have Alzheimer’s disease, because some proportion of these people with mild pathological brain changes may perform perfectly normally when tested in their later years.) But since the percentage of 80-year-olds with signs of brain pathology is that high, one has to avoid comparing a normal brain of a 20- to 40-year-old with a 60-year-old diseased brain. Extra caution is needed to ensure that the elderly brain is indeed normal for age.

In volunteer subjects in their 20s and 30s, the estimation of normality is easy: Acceptable performance in school, healthy socialization patterns, and, later, work achievement can serve as proxies for normal cognitive function. If you restrict the upper limit of the comparison group to 60 years of age, external markers of achievement are also easily discerned—success over a long career coupled with a stable emotional history and general life satisfaction can serve as acceptable indicators of healthy cognitive function. In both........

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