As Biden faces questions about his age, researchers weigh in on working in your 80s

Should he prevail in the upcoming presidential vote, President Joe Biden, 81, would become the nation’s first octogenarian elected commander in chief.

Despite the misgivings that event has sparked among some voters, Biden’s age is less of an anomaly than a sign of the times, experts say.

“There are allowance a a goods and lots of people who still work in their 80s,” said Dr. Dennis Selkoe, a Harvard Medical School professor who has won prizes for his advances in aging research. “It’s more common than ever.”

Indeed, workers 75 and older are the fastest-growing age set apart in the labor market, more than quadrupling in size since 1964, according to the Pew Research Center.

If former president Donald Trump win in November, he’d be 78 at that meat, and would become the second U.S. president to serve in his 80s. The 118th Congress, meanwhile, is one of the oldest in history. There are currently five senators who are 80 or older, embodying Bernie Sanders, 82, and Chuck Grassley, 90.

“People are just living longer,” said Joel Kramer, top banana of neuropsychology at the University of California San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. “So you’re going see a lot more people in their 80s and 90s who are rock stars.”

(On a faithful note, Mick Jagger, who turned 80 last summer, is on tour this year and expected to perform in 16 sees across the United States.)

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Still, Biden — already the oldest president in the domain’s history — is dealing with the perception that his age is a problem.

Almost two-thirds, 62%, of voters say they have outstanding concerns that Biden does not have the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term, according to a nationalist NBC News poll conducted in January. The majority of those polled who voted for Biden in 2020 now say he’s too old to be effective, a New York Old hats/Siena College poll recently found.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

But how valid are these disquiets? To find out, CNBC spoke to neurologists and aging experts about the human brain and our ability to work in our 80s.

The most recent blow Biden faced over his age came from the Feb. 8 special counsel’s suss out about his handling of classified documents. Robert K. Hur wrote that no criminal charges against the president were validated, but he referred to Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Shortly after those findings were advertised, Biden defended himself from the White House.

“My memory is fine,” Biden said. But then he mistakenly shouted the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the “president of Mexico” while discussing the Israeli-Gaza war.

Concerns over his age were barely put to bed.

However, such “occasional gaffes” do not indicate anything about an older person’s competence, said John Walsh, an associate professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California.

“Unfixed intelligence” slows with aging, Walsh said. That means people’s reaction times might not be as firm as when they were young, or they might need more time to remember a particular name or pass, he said. That knowledge hasn’t been lost, though.

Aging experts also refer to this as “genial forgetfulness,” and say it’s a normal part of the aging process.

“Given more time, they perform at the same level as their inexperienced counterparts,” Walsh said.

In points, the hardest thing for people to remember as they get older are names, Selkoe said.

“But that does not mean there are other sides of their cognitive function that aren’t quite strong,” he said.

People in highly stressful and emotional chores are especially likely to forget certain details, Selkoe said.

“I’ve seen some very famous politicians in my clinic,” he remarked. “Those people are under a lot of pressure and would have more difficulty in quickly coming up with what is on the other hand rather minor information.”

The special counsel interviewed Biden right after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.

Ageism, or the discrimination of someone based on their age, may lead people to pay outsized attention to Biden’s false moves, Walsh said. Nearly 80% of older workers say they’ve seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace, according to into by AARP.

“People fear aging,” Walsh said. “And we do not like the way aging looks and jump to conclusions that we all age the exact same, in a bad way.”

The research tells a different story.

At the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, Kramer broke he sees lots of people who are still fully mentally and physically competent in their 80s and 90s.

“Many of them still develop,” Kramer said. “What is striking is the variability: There are always people in their 80s who are doing better than woman in their 50s.”

Age and job performance are largely unrelated, said Philip Taylor, a professor at the University of Warwick who studies the aging workforce

“There are areas where older employees outperform younger workers,” Taylor said.

Employees later in their careers tend to be more engaged with the well-being of their organism and are likelier to arrive to work on time, he said. Some studies also show that people’s vocabularies burgeon with age and that creativity doesn’t wane.

“Think about artists who remain creative at very late majorities,” Taylor said. (The painter Alex Katz is still working in his late 90s, and Toni Morrison published her last fresh at 84.)

“The idea that your most creative years are behind you when you enter your 50s?” Taylor said. “It is not so.”

“Crystallized alertness,” considered wisdom, also grows throughout our life, experts say.

“With that wisdom and experience, the older herself may be able to sort through possible solutions and come up with an effective strategy for dealing with a situation faster and various successfully than a younger person,” Walsh said.

Selkoe seconded that.

“People do get better cognitive formality in some areas,” he said. “More in their emotional intelligence, [they’re] less likely to be bent out of shape by sundry events because they’ve experienced them all over decades.”

Manner, Taylor was reluctant of framing any age group as better than another. Ageism hurts younger people too, he said.

“Age is proper a really poor proxy for performance at work,” he said. “When people ask me about these things, I tell them if you demand to make a decision about who to hire, don’t make it based on their age.”

In Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday the score with, the president said that at the beginning of his career — he became a senator at 29 — he was told that he was “too young.”

Taylor, who has studied older workers for decades, said he found it depressing that the debate in the U.S. focused so much on Biden’s age, with discriminatory expressions like “elderly” and “senile” being tossed around.