I first noticed it on the school run. Every day, a teacher would be stationed outside the classroom door to shepherd the children into the arms of their waiting parents. But one day, as I was about to exchange our usual greeting, my face reddened. I couldn’t remember the teacher’s name.
So it came as no surprise to read the results of a new study, last month, that said women’s brains start going downhill in their 50s - a decade earlier than previously thought. The academics from the University of California found that, on average, the female mind loses up to five per cent of its sharpness between 50 and 60.
Their study, published in journal Plos One, followed more than 2,000 healthy women, aged in their 40s, for 10 years. It found that verbal memory declined by, on average, one per cent every five years, and cognitive processing - including speed of perception and reaction - declined by one per cent every two years.
