When are you past your prime?

by Emrys Westacott

ScreenHunter_618 May. 12 12.10Recently I had a discussion with a couple of old friends–all of us middle-aged guys–about when one's powers start to decline. God only knows why this topic came up, but it seems to have become a hardy perennial of late. My friends argued that in just about all areas, physical and mental, we basically peak in our twenties, and by the time we turn forty we're clearly on the rocky road to decrepitude.

I disagreed. I concede immediately that this is true of most, perhaps all, physical abilities: speed, strength, stamina, agility, hearing, eyesight, the ability to recover from injury, and so on. The decline after forty may be slight and slow, but it's a universal phenomenon. Of course, we can become fitter through exercise and the eschewing of bad habits, but any improvement here is made possible by our being out of shape in the first place.

What about mental abilities? Again, it's pretty obvious that some of these typically decline after forty: memory, processing speed, the ability to think laterally, perhaps. Here too, the decline may be very gradual, but these capacities clearly do not seem to improve in middle age. Still, I think my friends focus too much on certain kinds of ability and generalize too readily from these across the rest of what we do with our minds. More specifically, I suspect they view the cognitive capabilities that figure prominently in and are especially associated with mathematics and science as somehow the core of thinking in general. Because of this, and because these capacities are more abstract and can be exercised before a person has acquired a great deal of experience or knowledge, certain abilities have come to be identified with sharpness as such, and one's performance at tasks involving quick mental agility or analytic problem solving is taken as a measure of one's raw intellectual horsepower.

A belief in pure abiity, disentangled from experiential knowledge, underlies notions like IQ. It has had a rather inglorious history, and it has been used at times to justify a distribution of educational resources favouring those who are already advantaged. Today it continues to interest those who prefer to see any assessments or evaluations expressed quantitatively wherever possible–-a preference that also reflects the current cultural hegemony of science. Yet what matters to us, really, shouldn't be abilities in the abstract–how quickly we can calculate, or how successfully we can recall information—but what we actually do with these or any other abilities we possess. Is there any reason to suppose that we make better use of what we've got before we're forty?

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Monday, September 27, 2010

Are Our Writers As Lousy As Our Bankers?

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Jonathan_franzen_time_magazine There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.

You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader — the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst.

This art is superior to the cascading pile of blockbuster kitsch-dreck-crap that passes for pop culture, but only superior by a few pips.

This art sure ain't Picasso, or Joyce, or Rossellini, or the Beatles, or even Sondheim. It's more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman, more Joyce Carol Oates than James Joyce, more Jeff Koons than Duchamp, more Arcade Fire than the Beatles.

It does not expand the borders of art or wreck the tyranny of the possible or enlarge our hungry little minds.

It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.

For want of a better label, here's a suggested honorific for this kind of art:

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

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