Reference
Alexa Mousley
The finding that brain wiring reorganises in five stretches, with turning points near 9, 32, 66 and 83, is from work she led.
Mousley led an analysis of diffusion MRI scans from 3,802 people between birth and ninety, asking not how well any of them performed but how the connecting fibres in their brains were arranged. The answer was that the arrangement does not change at a steady rate. It changes direction, and it does so at four points, which carve a lifespan into five stretches the authors call epochs. The sharpest change of direction sits at about 32.
Two limits belong with the finding, and the researchers state both. The scans come from many different people rather than from the same brains followed for ninety years, so the epochs describe a population and not an individual life. And there are far fewer scans at the top of the range than in the middle, so the turning point near 83 rests on thinner evidence than the earlier three.
Referenced work
- Five ages of the human brain (University of Cambridge, on the Nature Communications paper, November 2025) reference
Elsewhere
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