LONDON -- Memory loss, far from striking late in life, creeps up on people from their mid-20s, according to research published on Wednesday.
Psychologist Denise Park of the University of Michigan found that people's performances in a wide variety of memory tasks deteriorated steadily from an early age.
"It's not as though you hit 60 or 70 and fall apart. We're falling apart as we speak," the New Scientist magazine quoted Park as saying.
Park tested 350 people from 20-somethings to octogenarians.
She found that the decline in performance between those in their 70s and 80s was the same as that between the 20s and 30s, dispelling popular notions that mental abilities fall sharply after a particular age.
Fergus Craik, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, said the results were surprising, both because the decline started so early and because it seemed to happen at the same rate for many different memory tasks, the magazine reported.
