Despite overwhelming evidence, your grandparents might actually be smarter than you- Meg Mickelsen

The general consensus, especially amongst the ever cocky, bright, idealistic younger generation, is that cognitive ability declines with age.  Although this stipulation may be pessimistic for our futures, I might venture to say that often the young expect to die tomorrow and conversely be immortal, thus old age seems to forever surprise. Yet this stipulation of intelligence deteriorating alongside our bodies may still prove false.  Whether its falsehood be a blessing or a curse, I must leave to you.  New research suggests that the human brain indeed works slower with age, but only because it is fuller with knowledge.  Similar to a computer, our brains move with a great alacrity when new and as we acquire more data, their previous swiftness diminishes.  Before this research came to light, it was thought that the data we acquire through life is not "saved" and our ability to compute and process this data spontaneously deteriorates.   With respect to this new research, I ask you: is a person who knows 2 birthdays and can recall them immediately and with perfect accuracy smarter than the person who knows 2000 birthdays but can only recall them 9 times out of 10?  Furthermore, recent discoveries suggest that the average older adult's vocabulary is being highly underestimated.  A common test of linguistic prowess, asks testers to make word pairings(paired associate learning), such as necktie.  The younger testers were able  to accurately pair words up, but they also quickly accepted nonsense pairings, only because the pairings featured words that are often used in close proximity, such as up-down.  Older testers showed a deeper understanding of the language, by refusing these nonsense pairings and only accepting word pairings that "make sense."  All of this research is important to me, because I believe that one of the most profound, confounding, complex problems that humans confront is how to understand and reconcile with other generations.  As a teen, this conundrum acutely affects me and it pains me to consistently see older generations assume that humans have become less intelligent, poignant, adaptive, resourceful, good.   At this insult, I balk and defend my generation, insisting that we strive to be even better than our parents, and that our youth brings us some abstract innate understanding.  Still, the best solution I have found is to simply believe that we change.  Generations change and as they loose value in one area the gain it in another, so it goes with the individual. Our grandparents have no mystical unattainable wisdom, nor are they often the idiots we assume them to be, wrecked and ruined with the burden of advancing years.  They have simply changed.  Read more about this research here http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140120090415.htm