Today I had an interesting discussion, which led to many interesting discussions (naturally). The first discussion interested me because the topic of a person hitting their prime came up. When does a person hit their prime? In terms of looks, it was said to be 22 or 23. I didn’t quite agree with that. I think that people reach their full beauty in their 20s, but I’ve seen so many beautiful people in their 30s as well. I wasn’t concerned much with beauty anyways. I wanted the meat of it. If we were talking about physical prime, I want to know when people were their strongest. I felt it was in their late 20s, in concurrence with an Edmonton Aging Symposium video I had seen a few years back, along with the common soccer claim that soccer players hit their prime around 28 (yay Thierry Henry, you’re still in your prime for World Cup 2010 ;P.)
I was far more concerned with intellectual prime though, which is ridiculously difficult to narrow down. It would have to be sometime after the teenage years (obviously), but not so old that one’s brain begins to break down with age. The old age comment is difficult in itself.. not all people suffer from breakdowns as they get older. Some continue to nurse their brains, and never really fall into the whole dementia phase of old age. Aside from that, how do you measure when a human brain is at it’s best? Do you talk about scientific figures, and how much data can be stored, as opposed to how much is being forgotten? Do you discuss IQ scores and explicit knowledge? Or do you consider the mind to be the key thing? Do you consider how sharp-witted and intelligent a person is?
The answer seems to be quite complex. Most of the categories being discussed are subjective, such as beauty, intelligence, IQ scores, wit, and even the possession of knowledge (which schools have tried, and failed, to test for centuries). Subjectivity hinders any real accuracy with this conversation, and it’s down to each of us to decide what we feel a person’s prime is. Personally, I don’t see why somebody can’t be in their prime for their entire life, in a fashion.