Plain English BEST OF: The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study
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If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellany. I'm founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight, which streamer is on the brink of collapse, and which executive is on the hot seat. Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who will never eat lunch in this town again. Follow The Town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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. 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, Hanging out with friends strengthens the part of our brains that are responsible for memory retention as we age. This is not the first paper to suggest that friendships and relationships are the key to healthy aging. Several years ago, in one of my favorite episodes, Robert Waldinger and Mark Scholes of the longitudinal Harvard study of happiness said the key to a long, happy life was relationships. I think some people resist findings like these. They think they're touchy-feely. They want the elixir of life to exist in a pill or an injectable to be described at the level of precise molecular description and mechanism.
But to me, it makes perfect sense that social fitness would help the social animal as it ages.
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