Dr. Sandra Weintraub

Now, and the term has become overgeneralized.

You can now read a lot of paper.

I'm glad people are interested in this, but some people are saying, oh, well, there are 55 year olds who are doing much better than average for their age.

So they're super agers.

We like to keep it to our 80 years old with memory of somebody 20 to 30 years younger.

We have no other

requirements.

They can have any medical illnesses.

Obviously, if they're very, very sick, we can't study people who have cancer or other chronic illnesses.

But we didn't pick people who have good diets and have good habits.

We just said memory.

We define super-agers.

Okay, so let's go back to the brain.

So in addition to showing less overall shrinkage of the brain over time, we made this discovery in, I think it was 2012, where we looked at different areas of the brain

And we found that there's one particular structure called the anterior cingulate gyrus in the brain that was actually larger in super-agers than in normal-agers and even in 55-year-olds, in younger people.

And then when we got that result, we thought we made a mistake because we've never found older brains better than younger brains.

We had it over and over and over again.

And it kept coming back.

That was a finding.

So we thought, well, what could that be?