Derek Thompson

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.

In what she called the most surprising finding of her paper, the anterior cingulate region of superager brains had greater cortical thickness.

This matters because the anterior cingulate region is the part of the brain critical for, among other things, socializing.

One possibility is that people who are genetically predisposed to have healthier parts of the brain socialize more and also have better memory.

But another possibility that I think is too interesting to ignore here is that it is social connection itself.

It's socializing itself that helps to maintain cortical thickness.

That is, just as doing like bicep curls strengthens your arms as you get old, deep socializing, deep relationships,