Derek Thompson

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.

I wonder, number one, if you're familiar with that work, and number two, if you see some kind of underground river that might connect these two pieces of research.

Well, that's too bad because my next question was going to be to ask you to speculate about the mechanistic level.

So maybe we can just make up answers here.

What you said a few minutes ago made me think that, you know, there's this cliche that you should do crossword puzzles as you get older to maintain these neural connections, right?

As if memory is just training for some crossword puzzle marathon you're supposed to do in your 90s.

But I wondered as I was listening to you,