[misterjangles]

My experience is pretty much the same as yours. I feel sharper in some ways. I definitely work much smarter than I did in my 20s by magnitudes.

Although, mildly annoying, I find myself more frequently going to another room to fetch something and forgetting what the thing was.

[judk]

Wiser, sure. More productive and efficient, sure. But raw cognitive power to learn wholly new ideas/languages, no way.

[Patrick_Devine]

I dunno.. most of the spoken languages that I've learned I picked up in my 30s (bits of japanese, chinese, swedish, irish). I also took up piano at 38 and can play reasonably well, having never played an instrument before in my life.

I would agree with misterjangles about memory. My 6 year old daughter can beat me the odd time in various memory games. When I do beat her, I think it's probably because I'm relying on strategy as well as memorization. But is my memory getting weaker because I can use strategy instead, or is it just some kind of natural decline?