Derek Thompson

Paul Kudrowski, thank you very much.

Hi everybody, Derek here.

In December, my wife and I welcomed our second baby girl into the world.

I'm gonna be taking some time off, but we wanted to keep the pod going through the holidays.

So we're gonna be re-airing some of our favorite episodes from the last 12 months, a kind of best of compendium.

And this list includes interviews that really stuck with me and others that really stuck with you and you had lots of feedback and thoughts on, including this one.

I'll be back in the new year with fresh content, but until then, happy holidays and happy new year.

Today, the science of super-agers.

Memory is the glue of human identity and experience.

Without memory, our focus softens, our experience of the world blurs, and our identities melt away.

As people age, however, their memory declines, leading in some cases to dementia and Alzheimer's.

Many billions of dollars have been spent to understand the biological basis of these phenomena, the basis of dementia and cures for Alzheimer's.

In most cases, these efforts have failed spectacularly.

In some ways, I think Alzheimer's might be one of the most profound and stubborn mysteries in modern science.

But what if, rather than study the brains of people with advanced memory loss, we instead studied the brains of people with the opposite condition, extraordinary memory and brain health in old age?

For the last few decades, Sandra Weintraub, a scientist at Northwestern University, has been part of a team studying the brains of super-agers, her term for people 80 and older who have the memory ability of those in their 50s.

In a new paper published this year to considerable fanfare, she found that super-agers don't seem initially to have much in common.

They don't share a diet or an exercise regime or a set of maladies or medications.

If one thing unites them, however, it's this.

their social relationships.