The Telegraph has reported interesting research that concludes many aspects of human intelligence peak at 22, and significantly decline by the age of 27.

The first age at which performance was significantly lower than the peak scores was 27 – for three tests of reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation. Memory was shown to decline from the average age of 37. In the other tests, poorer results were shown by the age of 42.

Yup, Reasoning, Speed of Though… Visualisation… three of the most important skills for physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists! Looks like the colloquil belief held by Mathematicians that you do your best work before 30 is correct…

This is another one of those signs that something serious needs to be done about the education system. Most 22 year olds studying sciences are still… well studying. With the recent decline in accelerated education programs in many western universities, this doesn’t spell positives for the development of scentific breakthroughs.

And yelp! Looks like I don’t have much time left!

According to one of the latest research by Ravi Mehta and Juliet Zhu. Science, you should be more careful what color you set your Windows background. In recent psychological studies, the color red was shown to boost attention to detail and memory, what the color blue improved a person’s creativity. So the next time, you’re stuck on a tough problem, it may well be handy to take a trip to the beach. On other hand, proof reading your thesis is probably best done next to a firetruck. 

There’s some interesting side-effects to this. University multi-choice exams are often printed in a variety of colors, so that each color assigns the correct answer to each question with a different letter. Since neither red or blue presented any disadvantages against the control color `white’, it appears that you can now bias exams against students you despise by giving them uncolored exams. Given how many mistakes I make, I for one will be writing any future tests I have in red ink!

Source:  ”Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances.” By Ravi Mehta and Juliet Zhu. Science, Vol. 324, Issue 5915, Feb. 5, 2009.