This article has a particular relevance to those of us who do a lot of coding: - making hundreds of design decisions during the course of a project. The author discusses research showing that Executive Function as it is known is a finite resource. This part of brain function is like a muscle and gets fatigued, leading to less effective decision making - even in apparently unrelated tasks.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making
I see this as true: The brain is like a muscle.
It needs to be used on a daily base. Then it may need a relax-time also.
But then it has more power then ever before - no matter of what age.
Yes that is a better way of looking at it. I wouldn't want to run out of synapses by learning the SDK and Pantheon of other libraries but I see that José's brain is still in good working order :)
When I was 20 (or so), I could go from sun up to sun down in front of the computer writing application code taking breaks only to eat and excrete. Now that I'm older, not so much. I have to take time off and let things percolate in the subconscious.
One thing I've noted is that all coding isn't the same, that is, you have your very difficult tricky issues, stuff in the middle, and then your routine type things. It seems you can't (at least I can't) keep a 'fever pitch' of intensity on difficult tricky issues for too long a time. So if first thing in the morning you spend a couple hours solving something difficult, you had better not spend the next couple hours working on the next real difficult issue. Because if you do, you'll probably spend your next whole day unraveling the problems you caused yourself during your last coding period when you were possibly 85% instead of 110%. In other words - work slow!
I do the tricky 25% of things best in the morning between 5:00 and 9:00 :-).