Michael Netzley, PhD | Affiliated Faculty, SMU Academy | Founder, Extend My Runway
A 2020 study analysing 1.6 million moves from roughly 24,000 chess games found that brain performance peaks in the mid‑30s and then declines after 40. When that finding circulated in Singapore, it resonated. Not because it was news, but because it confirmed what many professionals here already quietly believed.
Sumiko Tan gave that feeling a public voice when she wrote about turning 60 in the Straits Times. The sentiment she named is familiar enough to resonate beyond any single column. This is not just a personal worry. It is a shared professional anxiety, carried quietly by some of Singapore’s most experienced people.
That research is not wrong.
It measured the wrong thing.
What the chess study captured was the brain’s processing speed and accuracy of high-stakes decision-making. That is the rapid, high-accuracy thinking that powers tournament play and athletic performance. That capability does peak early. But it is only one instrument in a much larger orchestra.
The studies that measured processing speed alone missed the capabilities that develop later, the ones that matter most in the work Singapore’s senior professionals actually do.
What the Brain Actually Does After 45
Research from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Texas paints a picture of the adult brain after 45 that looks very different from the one most professionals carry in their heads.
A 2025 study in Intelligence found that overall mental functioning, the kind that predicts career achievement, peaks between 55 and 60. Separately, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers found that emotional intelligence peaks in the 40s and 50s, while vocabulary continues to improve into the late 60s and early 70s.
Knowing these capabilities can improve with age, or even peak, is one thing. Whether they can be actively strengthened and protected while experiencing heavy workloads is another question. A landmark three-year longitudinal study published in May 2026 answers that directly.
Tracking nearly 4,000 adults aged 19 to 94 using the BrainHealth Index, which is a multidimensional measure of holistic brain fitness, revealed an important finding that challenges the standard ageing narrative.
There is no known ceiling on brain health improvement.
Even participants who entered the study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, as top performers continued to improve across more than 1,000 days of tracking. Those who began with the lowest scores showed the greatest rates of gain. Small, consistent, science-backed habits drove measurable results in only five to fifteen minutes daily.
As Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, Chief Director of the Center for BrainHealth, concluded: “Our brain is not defined by age, it is defined by possibility.”
The standard narrative is not false. It is, however, incomplete in ways that cost people real careers and real contributions.
In the broad window beginning around the mid-40s, what I call the Strategic Brain, your focus can deepen, the capacity to manage complexity expand, and the ability to read emotional dynamics sharpen.
In the window that follows, roughly from the mid-50s onward, what I call your Transforming Brain, you can get better at connecting past patterns to novel challenges in ways a faster but less experienced mind simply cannot.
Chapman calls this integrative reasoning and describes it as your “platinum” cognitive function. It’s what keeps you relevant by synthesising experience into new contexts, updating existing models or perspectives, and extracting fresh insight for today that raw processing speed does not.
It is not a consolation prize for declining working memory. It is a different capability, fuelled by life experience, and on a different developmental timeline.
But here is the catch. As adults, we must deliberately develop higher-order thinking.
Age confers nothing automatically.
And it is precisely the capability that Singapore’s economy now demands of its most senior professionals.
A Specific Demand, on Specific People
In November 2025, MAS placed boards and senior management at the centre of AI governance for every financial institution in Singapore. Not as a formality. But as named, accountable parties responsible for human oversight of AI across lending, risk, fraud detection, and customer decisions throughout the full AI lifecycle.
Most people in financial services read this as a compliance requirement. It is that, but let’s read it differently for a moment.
MAS has mandated that Singapore’s most senior leaders maintain the capacity to evaluate, challenge, and govern AI outputs. The institution cannot delegate that responsibility to vendors or to technology teams. Senior leadership must understand enough, and think clearly enough, to hold the line. That is a specific cognitive demand, placed on professionals who are, in many cases, midlife or beyond.
And it does not stop at financial services. Three profiles illustrate what this looks like in practice.
The manager under AI pressure.
The IMF’s 2024 analysis of AI’s impact on Singapore’s labour market identifies managers as “among the workers with the highest AI complementarity” but only if they possess the skills to work productively alongside it. The manager who can evaluate AI outputs, synthesise what the team cannot see, and hold the judgment call is exactly who the organisation now needs.
That job description draws heavily upon integrative reasoning, it’s trainable, and many managers have never been told.
The PMET who just received the letter.
57.4% of retrenched Singapore residents found new employment within six months in Q4 2025. Those who moved fastest could name, clearly and specifically, the cognitive capability they carry that no AI tool replicates.
In 2026, the BrainHealth Project described a “rebound effect”: during major life stressors, including job loss, illness, and caregiving, some participants used cognitive strategies to recover, sustain, or even improve their brain health through the disruption itself.
You cannot leverage what you have never claimed.
The Professional at the SkillsFuture Crossroads.
Singapore’s Budget 2026 funded NTUC’s AI-Ready SG, which offers structured pathways, subsidies, and career mentorship for workers navigating AI-driven change. Those programmes can fund new tools and credentials. They cannot hand you the reasoning architecture you have built across 25 years of professional experience.
Zoom out and the picture sharpens further. Singapore is now officially a super-aged society. By 2030, one in four Singaporeans will be 65 or older. PMET retrenchments hit 10.1 per 1,000 resident PMET’s in 2025, which is above pre-recessionary norms, concentrated in financial services, information and communications, and professional services.
Singapore’s economy is asking every professional over 45 a direct question: what cognitive capability do you carry that AI cannot replicate? And do you know how to deploy it?
Most people do not have a ready answer. Not because the capability is absent, but because they have never been told what it actually is.
Cognitive Sovereignty
I call the deliberate exercise of these capabilities in the workplace Cognitive Sovereignty.
Not resilience. Not mindset. Not fitness.
Cognitive Sovereignty is the deliberate decision to identify which of your brain’s capabilities are peaking right now, and to protect them from the conditions that degrade them: chronic overload, poor sleep, compounding stress.
The research is clear. The consistent engagement of higher-order thinking, even in small daily doses, produces measurable gains. The threshold is lower than most professionals assume.
The question is whether you are building toward it deliberately or letting it erode by default.
For Singapore executives in financial services, MAS has made AI oversight a governance responsibility. For managers navigating AI-driven restructuring, it is the difference between becoming more complementary to AI and or being replaced by it. For professionals at the SkillsFuture crossroads, it is the foundation on which every new credential, tool, and transition pathway must be built.
The brain at 50 is not a diminished version of the one at 30. It is a different instrument, built for the higher-value work Singapore increasingly needs. The question is whether we are still training people for the economy we came from, or for the one we are entering.
“The brain at 50 is not a diminished version of the one at 30. It is a different instrument, built for different work.”
Train Your Brain: How to Improve Brain Health and Thrive After 45 opens its next cohort on 2 Nov 2026 at SMU Academy. The two-day programme covers the science of the adult brain, research-validated cognitive training techniques, and a practical framework for applying peak capabilities at work.
