Derek Thompson

So you look at these super-agers, you look at what they have in common, you look at what they don't have in common, and you conclude that they don't seem to have the same diet.

They don't seem to have the same medication.

They don't seem to have a similar set of diseases.

They don't seem to have similar workout routines.

Instead, your paper says the one trait they shared is that they seem to love to socialize.

I think the wording you used in your paper was...

or gregarious?

Gregarious.

You see, I failed the 15-word test because I used a different G word for highly social.

Anyway, they were gregarious and gregarious, and they had lots of social connections.

Expand on that.

What is the significance of this?

Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe you would do a lab animal study where you take the neurons from some mice.

You don't want to do that?

Yeah, I'm not particularly interested in doing it either.

But this is not the first study that has looked at older Americans and come to the conclusion that there is something especially protective or beneficial about social connection.

One of my favorite episodes we've done on this show brought on Robert Waldinger and Mark Scholes, who helped run the Harvard Longitudinal Study, the 80-year study on happiness among Massachusetts men that included all sorts of people, JFK, a bunch of luminaries.

And that 80-year longitudinal study similarly found that the secret, so to speak, of happiness among people with long lives was social connection.

It was the quality of their relationships.