Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English BEST OF: The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study
20 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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.
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Chapter 2: What are the defining characteristics of super-agers?
in what is the earliest signs of a dementia. We always think of memory loss, but in our case, we've discovered that you can have an aphasia as the first sign of a progressive dementia, or you can have visuospatial deficits, or you can have behavioral changes. So I really got interested in what can these neurodegenerative diseases tell me about the human brain and how it works.
Um, then, uh, there was this thing called normal aging and I started seeing people who were worried about their memory, but they didn't have any problems when they were tested. And so I saw people who were, seemed to be kind of normal for their age. And then I saw people who were incredible that had memories like a 20 year old, you
And I got really interested in what is, you know, why do those people, how can they preserve their memory?
Let me just stop you right there before you finish your story. I would love to make sure that we retrace some of the vocabulary here. Tell me what aphasia is. Sure. And then also, could you slow down and distinguish between what one might call normal memory loss and what is diagnosed as dementia or Alzheimer's?
Those are very excellent questions. So the first thing you asked was what is aphasia? Aphasia is a term, I mean, if you wanna break it down from the Latin, it means without language or without speech. And it is the term that's applied to a loss of the ability to communicate using words, understanding words, reading words, anything that has to do with your brain making words.
Usually it's due to a stroke. but it can also be due to neurodegeneration in the part of the brain that controls your language function.
And when we're defining dementia and Alzheimer's, what are we talking about here?
How long do you have? Because... So normal aging is if you take a thousand people between 65 and 85 and you give them a test and you get a total score on the test and then you average the score on that test, that's what's considered average for that age range, okay? However, if you look at who's at the bottom and who's at the top, you have a huge spread across that average.
I don't know if you know what the standard deviation is, but it's kind of variation around a mean. So when you take 30-year-olds and you do that test, their standard deviation is much, much smaller. If you take 80-year-olds, it's huge. So it means that there are people at the top of that standard deviation that are performing like 30-year-olds. So I don't believe in normal aging.
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Chapter 3: How does socializing impact brain health in older adults?
It's that my life is much more complex.
Yes. your memory is actually slipping a little bit because like the one thing I did was I took, I just went to one of the most popular tests of memory that's marketed and used very widely, the Wechsler Memory Scale. And I looked at what is the raw score? They tell you two stories, very long stories. You have to say them immediately and then you have to repeat them 20 minutes later.
So I looked at the raw scores for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, all the way down to 80. And between 20 and 40, you have a bit of a dip. So it doesn't just start at 65. It starts a lot earlier. But then, of course, your responsibilities. And by the time you're in your mid 40s, you're juggling too much.
We're gonna get to your most recent study, your blockbuster study in just a few minutes, but just one more question here to sort of set the stage for this piece of research. You have these tests that are measuring memory, and memory is kind of an external validity test. It's how memory is presented in the world.
When we look inside of people's brains, especially the brains of older people who we know had Alzheimer's or dementia, or maybe just quote-unquote average memory loss, What are we seeing? Is it a loss of brain mass? Is it shrinking of some parts of the brain?
What is happening physically to that organ that sits inside of our head as we're getting older that might account for declining memory as we age?
Okay, that's a really excellent question. So as people get older, we know that there is shrinkage, that the brain does shrink over time. And we did a comparison between what we call super-agers and normal-agers in how much change is there over a two-year period of time.
There's not a huge change, brain doesn't just shrink, but if you compare super to normal, there's more shrinkage in the normal aging brain than in the super aging brain. Statistically significant, but it's not like a huge amount. The other thing that happens, and I'm glad you mentioned Alzheimer's because I think that Alzheimer's is becoming overused.
Alzheimer's is a disease where there are proteins that get manufactured in the brain that then attack brain cells and kill them. Now, over the age of 65, any brain you look at under the microscope is going to have what are called neurofibrillary tangles that contain tau and amyloid plaques that contain amyloid.
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