



Your brain ages in five distinct stages, new research shows
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The brain goes through five distinct stages between birth and death, a new study shows. Scientists identified the average ages—9, 32, 66 and 83—when the pattern of connections inside our brains shift.
The brain’s adolescence phase, they discovered, lasts until age 32, and then it enters a period of stability until early aging begins at 66. The study could help explain why brain-related conditions arise at certain ages, and could provide a better road map to understanding healthy aging. “Maybe there is something going on that is changing within the brain structure or being optimized that sort of leaves us vulnerable for these specific things," said Duncan Astle, a professor of neuroinformatics at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study, which was published in November in the journal Nature Communications.
The study’s authors examined results from about 4,000 brain scans taken from people in the U.S. and U.K., ranging from a newborn baby to a nonagenarian. The scans helped show white matter, the fatty substance that insulates the nerve fibers connecting brain regions.
Researchers could see the physical connections and build a map of pathways that change over time. They created an “average brain" for each year of life, Astle said. Then they examined a dozen characteristics and used a machine-learning algorithm to help pinpoint moments of significant change in the data.
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