← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English BEST OF: The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study
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A
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 is 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'll eat lunch in this town again? Follow the Town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
This episode was brought to you by ServiceNow. We're for people doing the fulfilling work they actually want to do. That's why this was written and read by a real person and not AI. You know what people don't want to do? Boring busywork. Now with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business, it, HR and more. So your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Tap the banner to get started or visit servicenow.com AI agents a rich life.
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C
Isn'T a straight line to a destination on the horizon. Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn with detours, new possibilities, and even another passenger who are three. And with 100 years of navigating ups and downs, you can count on Edward Jones to help guide you through it all. Because life is a winding path made rich by the people you walk it with. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones Member, SIPC hi everybody.
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B
Derek Here in December, my wife and I welcomed our second baby girl into the world. I'm going to be taking some time off, but we wanted to keep the pod going through the holidays. So we're going to 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 Superagers 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 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 superagers. 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 superagers 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 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 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 Scholz 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. As listeners and readers know, one of the themes I'm most interested in are the ironic ways that modern life conspires to pull us away from each other in this antisocial century. And I am always on the lookout for people and scientists and ideas that explain how we should think more deliberately about socializing as a part of healthy living. Today's guest is Sandra Weintraub, and we talk about her research, the science of super aging, the science of memory and the brain, and why she thinks maybe we should begin to talk about friends and relationships as being a matter of brain health itself. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Doctor Weintraub, welcome to the show.
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D
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
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B
Your research spans memory, aging, Alzheimer's, dementia. What got you into this space?
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D
What got me into this? Well, okay, so if you really want to go way back to my Undergraduate years at McGill University, McGill was kind of the first place in North America to really be interested in the brain and behavior. How does your brain do all the things that you do, think and talk and behave and sing and all of that? So I was incredibly interested in that. But there was no real field that was a clinical field for people who were interested in brain and behavior, unless you wanted to be a neurosurgeon or a neurologist, which I didn't want to do that. So over the years, this specialty developed of neuropsychology. And that's. I decided that's what I wanted to do because neuropsychology is the clinical psychology specialty devoted to working with the results of brain injury. Not, you know, kind of therapy or your feelings, but really somebody who has been developing normally has a brain injury. What happens and why does it happen? And what are the different parts of the brain that cause it to happen? That's where I really started my interest in aging. I then went to work at the Boston Aphasia Research center and was very interested in people who had had strokes, who lost their language. And I worked there for a very long time. And then when I was ready finish my degree and ready to get a job, I had my first job at a hospital that had a lot of older patients and a lot of the older patients that I was seeing. And in those days, of course, people just never got to medical attention until things were really advanced. So I was seeing people who were in pretty late stages of dementia. And as I worked more and more in this field and as we made more progress, we began to realize that you don't wake up with dementia. It starts 10, 20 years earlier. And we started seeing people earlier and earlier and earlier. So then I became really interested 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 visual spatial 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. Then 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. And I got really interested in what is, you know, what, why do those people. Well, how can they preserve their memory?
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B
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.
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D
Sure.
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B
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?
- [10:18]
D
Those are very excellent questions. So the first question, the first thing you asked was, what is aphasia? Aphasia is a term, I mean, if you want to 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.
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B
And when we're defining dementia and Alzheimer's, what are we talking about here?
- [10:55]
D
How long do you have? Because. So normal aging is if you take 1,000 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 the mean. So when you, 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. And that's so, so I don't believe in normal aging. For me, there's no such thing as normal aging. Now, how do you tell if somebody is really having problems and. And when you use the word dementia? We don't talk about dementia. We talk about cognitive impairment because there are stages. So you can start off with what's called mild cognitive impairment. And if this is neurodegenerative, it keeps going over time, and it eventually turns into a dementia, which means that you have cognitive impairment so severe that you can no longer function in your daily life. A lot of people have mild cognitive impairment, and they're fine daily. They can drive, they can do finances. They're just a little annoyed by their memory loss. But when it gets to the point where you're not remembering things, you're misspaying bills, you're forgetting where you're going when you're driving, that's what we call dementia.
- [12:44]
B
You spent decades studying a phenomenon you call super aging. You've talked a little bit about how there's this wide distribution in cognitive abilities among people over 65. Right. Some people are at the lower end. They might be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and some are at the higher end. These, I presume, are the superagers. And to be clear to listeners, this is not about who stays alive the longest. They might think of superagers as someone who lives to, like, 120 years old. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people, absolutely not when they're 85, have the mind of a 55 year old. Tell me about these folks, superagers. How did you become interested in them and what distinguishes them?
- [13:23]
D
Okay, so that takes me back to the early 1990s when I was at Harvard and a group of me and my colleagues were engaged by the Risk Management foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions. I was in neuropsychology at the time. I've been creating tests, and they wanted us to create a little screening test on a computer that we could use to screen physicians over the age of 65 to identify those who might be having cognitive impairment that might then lead to them doing malpractice. So that was very exciting. And we got together and we designed a very lovely test, which I'll tell you what happened to it later. And we then tested over 1000 physicians, ranging in age from 28 to over 92 in different age levels. And what we found was what every other cognitive aging study has found, that if you go from 20 to 30, 30 to 40, 40 to 50, all the way up over 80. The average score goes down, down, down, down, down. But the standard deviation goes up, up, up, up, up. And so in that study we thought, oh, let's look at the top people over the age of 65. I think we had 20 people who were at the top and 20 people at the bottom of that distribution that we compared to each other. And we said, okay, there's got to be, you know, what are they doing? Well, the only thing that differentiated them was that the ones in the top group were continuing to work. But that's kind of a double edged sword because maybe they had already started developing cognitive impairment and couldn't work. But in all other respects there were no differences. They took the same medications, they had the same illnesses. And that's really what got me fired up about. We wanted, you know, we're focusing so much on this average and on the not average, the below average. Let's see what, you know, what's, what's keeping these guys at the top up there. And so the way the test ended up, by the way, was that the Harvard Medical Institutions didn't really want to institute that kind of screening testing, which you can understand. I mean, it's not, I'm not, I'm not disparaging it because in some ways it's not fair. And also it was like the first thing of its kind. Nobody had done this before, so they marketed the test too, and which I don't get any royalties from it. But I did do that wonderful study that really got me off on the super aging trajectory.
- [16:12]
B
I want to roll back on one thing you said before. We talk more deeply about superagers. You said that as you look at people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, median memory scores decline linearly, but the standard deviation grows. So the distribution of memory among people in their 80s is much wider than the distribution of memory among people in their 20s. What surprises me about this is that you find that memory declines linearly. I think I would have assumed the opposite, that memory might slowly drop off in one's 20s and 30s, and then maybe in our 70s and 80s there's like a sudden acceleration downward. But I can see you're shaking your head no, that's not what you found. That's really interesting.
- [16:57]
D
It doesn't seem to be an acceleration. There doesn't seem to be an inflection point. And I think, and if there's one message I want to get across to people, it's that do not assume that age equals loss of cognitive ability. Just don't Assume it. It's so individual. Things change, of course. And you know what? As you get older, your responsibilities go up and your memory is not quite as sharp as it was. So they're kind of. There's an intersection where, you know, you have so much to do, and you're doing so many things that you weren't doing in your 20s that no longer do you have the bandwidth to say, oh, I have to get three things at the grocery store tonight and not forget them. Unless you write them down.
- [17:42]
B
Yeah. This would explain why my wife has pointed out that at 39, I seem to have much worse memory than I did at 29. You got it. We have a child, we have a home, we have complicated jobs. This is. This is really. This is actually wonderful. I now realize that I have a biomedical excuse that I can give to my wife every time she tells me I'm terrible at logistics. It's not my memory so much that slipping, although it might be slipping a little bit, it's that my life is much more complex.
- [18:04]
D
Yes, your. 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.
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B
We're going to 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?
- [19:37]
D
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 called superagers 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. Every person over 60, there's not any people who don't have those things in their brain to some extent or other. In the superagers. The first brain we looked at, as you mentioned, had one tangle. So we were so excited, we thought, okay, we've discovered the secret to super aging. You don't have tangles, you don't make the Alzheimer changes. The next brain we got looked like the brain of somebody who had a dementia because of the number of Alzheimer changes in their brain. But they didn't, they were super. So how can you know there's. There clearly isn't just one way to become a superager. There are several ways. And one of them is you don't make the plaques and tangles for reasons I don't know. And the second is you make them, but you're immune to them. And we do not understand why, why that happens. That's a huge. Also the.
- [21:51]
B
And just to be clear, we don't know why either thing happens. Right. We don't understand where amyloid plaque is coming from necessarily. And number two, we don't understand why some people might have lots of amyloid plaque in their brains, but they're immune to the kind of memory loss effects that distinguish Alzheimer's patients.
- [22:09]
D
Correct? Right. And when you say Alzheimer's patient. So Alzheimer's is one cause of dementia. And so for us, when we say Alzheimer's, we mean we have looked at your brain, you have a dementia and you have Alzheimer's plaques and tangles, or we've seen you in the clinic, you have a dementia and now we have biomarkers and your biomarkers are positive for Alzheimer's. Those people have Alzheimer's. Other people who have cognitive loss, even dementia, we wouldn't call them Alzheimer's because they don't have the Alzheimer's causing it. It's kind of like I always give my patients the analogy, you have a sore throat. Okay, why do you have a sore throat?
- [22:52]
B
Well, I could have bronchitis. I could have Covid.
- [22:57]
D
You have Covid. You ate a hot pizza. You talk too much. You have strep. So it's a differential diagnosis. It's a symptom. Dementia is a symptom. What's causing it? Very, very complicated. And that's another thing I want to get out is that people shouldn't despair. We always get asked, do I have Alzheimer's or dementia? Well, clinically, you may have a dementia, you may not. We do that with our tests. Biologically, we don't know until we do your biomarkers or we look at the brain.
- [23:31]
B
So let's finally get to your most recent paper, which was just about everywhere in the news cycle. You looked at variables that correlated with several hundred superagers. I think I read in the paper there were 290 participants that passed through this study in its 20 year history. So, 20 year history, studying the brains of superagers. To be clear, these are brains of deceased superagers. We are looking full naked brains in the lab, getting really, really close examinations of them. What are you looking for?
- [24:03]
D
Right, but we are looking at people we have followed during their lifetime and characterized their cognition. So if you come and say I'm a superager, I don't like, first of all, let me say that we define superagers. There's no such a thing as a biological superager that came out of the Garden of Eden. We said, here's what a superager is. A person who's 80 who takes this one memory test of 15 words and gets at least nine out of 15 words at the end of 20 minutes, remembering that period. Very, very narrow. So we have self selected these people. It's not like, you know, we're going to go out in the street and find all these. You know, you have to pass a screening test for us to call you a superager 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, that if they're very, very sick. We can't study people who have cancer or other chronic illnesses. But we didn't, you know, we didn't pick people who have good diets and have good habits. And we just said memory and then that's our we define Superagers.
- [25:41]
E
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- [26:09]
B
Learn more@ninjaone.com this episode is brought to you by Zoom. Ever feel like your work tools are working against you? Too many apps, endless emails, and scattered chats can slow everything down. Zoom brings it all together. Meetings, chat docs, and AI companion seamlessly on one platform. With everything connected, your workday flows, collaboration feels easier, and progress actually happens. Take back your workday@zoom.com podcast and Zoom ahead. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. If I had to hire someone for this show, I wouldn't want to pick up just anyone off the street. They need to have the right skill set and background. If I wanted to hire an editor, I'd probably want someone who knew how to use editing software. If I needed a writer, it'd be nice to have someone with experience in journalism who closely follows the political and tech world. When you're running a business, you shouldn't settle for anyone. But the best Indeed can help you find the best. With Indeed sponsored Jobs, you can stand out from the crowd, reach qualified candidates faster, and increase the amount of people who see your job listing. By the end of this ad, companies like yours will have made 27 hires, according to Indeed data. And that's just in one minute. Think of how many hires are made per day. Get the results you want with Indeed sponsored Jobs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com plane that's Indeed.com plain right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the right way with Indeed. So you look at these superagers, you look at what they have in common. You look at what they don't have in common and you conclude that they don't seem to have the same diet, they don't seem to have the same medication, they don't seem to have a similar set of diseases, they don't seem to have similar workout routines. Instead, your paper says the one trait they shared is that they seem to love to socialize. I think the word you used in your paper was garrulous or gregarious.
- [28:24]
D
Gregarious.
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B
You see, I failed the 15 word test because I used a different G word for highly social. Anyway, they were garrulous and gregarious and they had lots of social connections. Expand on that. What is the significance of this?
- [28:37]
D
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 superagers than in normal agers and even in 55 year olds in younger people. Then when we got that result, we thought we made a mistake because there's, we've never found older brains better than younger brains. We had it over and over and over again and we, it kept coming back, it kept, we, that was a finding. So we thought, well, what could that be? And then after we were able to have the first few post mortem autopsies, we looked at that part of the brain and it seems to contain a very special kind of brain cell called a von Economo neuron that, it's called von Economo after the neurologist who, the anatomist who named the neuron after himself. And it's kind of a very peculiar shaped neuron. It happens to be in that part of the brain and in other parts of the brain that are very strongly involved in social brain networks of reading social signs and reading facial expressions and tone of voice and kind of. And that neuron happens to be found in highly social species. Elephants, whales, bonobos, great apes, humans. And so we thought, well, okay, they have the, they, they have the biological matrix for being very social. And so maybe that, maybe that contributes to their being being so social. But we, we have no proof. I mean, you would have to, I don't know what kind of an experiment you would do to compare people who don't have an anterior split.
- [30:54]
B
Yeah, I don't know, maybe you would do a lab animal study where you take the neurons from some mice.
- [31:02]
D
Yeah, you don't want to do that.
- [31:03]
B
You don't want to do that.
- [31:04]
D
I don't want to do that.
- [31:05]
B
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 Scholz, 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.
- [31:50]
D
Yeah, I am familiar with the work. Not as familiar as I am with my own work, but yes. And I believe that their cohort, one of their cohort was Harvard men who graduated in 1942, kind of highly privileged, highly educated, professional. And then they had inner city men who didn't have all those opportunities. And the most striking finding for me was that it didn't matter where you came from, but that social positive approach to life was in both, what made both groups successful for those who were successful. So I don't know. It must be good for. It must be good for you to be. I know that if rats are raised in cages by themselves versus rats raised in cages with other rats that they can play with and be with. If you look at their cortex in the brain, it's thicker in the socializing rats than in the non socializing rats. So there's got to be some kind of an impact of this external stimulation through every single source through which you get stimulation into your brain to help it flourish. But I have no, I don't know anything at the mechanistic level that I can offer here.
- [33:20]
B
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 there's this cliche that you should do crossword puzzles as you get older to maintain these neural connections, 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, if Maybe one reason why social connection protects memory is because at some mechanistic level, at some evolutionary level, memory is for socializing. That is, if you think about the species and where we came from, and you think about the architecture of our brains, which is very ancient, what did we use memory for 100,000 years ago? Maybe it was to remember, oh, that's where the berries are, that's where the poisonous berry is. That's where you're likely to find the really calorie, dense mammals that will move very slowly so we can kill them. Something like that, yeah. But you also have to remember social facts like, oh, that guy is dangerous and short tempered.
- [34:30]
D
Absolutely.
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B
And that woman has a crush on me. And that place over there behind the rock has a very nice tribe and they're sometimes nice to our tribe and we can barter and trade and we can give them berries and maybe a lot of memory is basically a function for being social at an evolutionary level. And so in a weird way, priming that social engine by just being around people turns out to ironically have these protective benefits for our memory as we age much longer than our ancient ancestors, I guess. I wonder, how does that Rudyard Kipling just so story sound to you, Dr. Weintraub?
- [35:06]
D
It sounds very appealing because animals need to know where to find food. They need to know where to find their mate, they need to know where to find the chicks that they left to go and get food to feed them. So I think that, you know, memory is very central and we also know that in the brain, the memory area is very heavily connected to throughout the brain via multiple synapses with many different parts of the brain. So it's kind of a like a way station for all kinds of information and it brings together where the memory center is, internal milieu, what's going on in your body with what's going on in the thinking part of your brain. So it kind of helps bring aligns the internal needs of the organism with what's out there at any particular time. And which is why we're so adaptable. And I think memory is a huge part of it because you have to remember what didn't work.
- [36:15]
B
I wonder if you think there are public health implications of findings like this and the one by Waldinger and Scholz. We tell people that overeating is bad for them, we tell them that sugar is bad for them, alcohol is bad for them, cigarettes are bad for them, environmental pollutants are bad for them, microplastics bad. We're often very precise, don't do this. Don't eat too much of that. This is dangerous. If it is true that social connections are mechanistically protective in this way, that relationships are good for your brain, should we be telling people this in a more clear way? Face to face socializing is declining. People are around each other much less. They're socializing less. Rates of partying, I just read a big piece about this, have been plummeting in the last few years. There's way fewer people hosting or attending social gatherings than there used to be even two decades ago. In that context, this finding seems critical to me and not to put you in the role of being a public health advisor here, although feel free to play that role if you want. Do you think studies like this might have public health implications?
- [37:20]
D
I think they certainly do. And let me make myself clear. So we don't have a prescription for super aging. So I'm not going to tell you, eat this, do this, exercise this, see this many people a week. Don't drink if you have depression. But we do know that there are many lifestyle factors and we always say that what's good for your heart is good for your brain. So whatever you do to keep your heart health, you also want to keep your brain health. But does it mean if you do all those things, you're going to be that way? No. But if you don't do any of them, you're not, you aren't hedging your bets. So basically what you want to do is do anything you can to reduce your particular risk. And some people have more of one kind of risk than another. So it's really personalized and it's. Everybody's looking for the one answer, the pill. You know, what do you suggest people do? Well, I suggest that we have a personalized approach to you. Where were you born, where did you grow up, how many friends did you have? What did you do in school? And what's the context? Who are your parents? What is your genetic makeup? We don't know a lot about the genetics of our superagers. That's going to be an area that's really huge. Is it only genetics? Probably not, but probably a big part of it. And not just longevity. Longevity just means living long. It doesn't mean living well.
- [38:56]
B
If we're interested in advancing a thesis that social connection can provide cognitive protection, that's a very strong claim. And I think we do want to be clear that we're picking up on the right, say causality from your research. Right. It's possible on the one hand, that the things that create sort of brain health also allow people to socialize. And it's also possible that socializing has the effect of improving brain health. Right. So I guess I want to know what's the measure that you used here in trying to assess socializing? Is it the number of friends people have, the amount of time they hung out, or some other general measure of social connection?
- [39:40]
D
So we actually gave them personality measures and then a measure of psychological well being. And these are self, these are surveys where you answer questions and then they get analyzed and it tells you which characteristics have most prominent. So on the personality measures they had more extroversion than normal agers. And on the psychological well being they endorsed. There are several different other things you can connect to psychological well being. But the one thing that stood out for them was the importance of social connections.
- [40:17]
B
Let's talk about the next 10, 20 years. You've been looking at these folks, hundreds of people in the superager study now, for two decades. You have this big splashy study. What's next? What's the next question that you want to answer in this space?
- [40:29]
D
Okay, so 25 years, it didn't happen overnight. And these people don't grow on trees. So we need more people. We just don't have enough to know. We also don't know about super something else. What about somebody who's like, I gave an example of Simone Biles who does a backward flip on a balance beam. I'm sure There are some 70 year olds who can do that. What makes them super in that? So we kind of focus on this little tiny memory thing. So now we want to kind of find out, do these people not only have super memory, but might they have something else super now? Certainly in terms of their cognitive function on all their other cognitive tests, our definition says that they must score within normal limits for their age, not super for their age, only on memory super. And everything else average. Well, the way that we measure things is so some of our tests are so gross that we might now have more methods for using computerized tasks to see, you know, are they quicker at noticing things, are they quicker at responding to not just reaction time, but to important things in the environment? So that's kind of where we want to go next. And we also, we want to know another thing that people complain about when they get older is they can't think of a word or a name. And we want to know how about the superagers? Because that's a kind of memory. It's not the same kind memory for words. But we want to know. They have this incredible memory for words you give them. But what about when they're just talking extemporaneously? Do they sort of pause and say.
- [42:19]
B
Oh, Dr. Weintraub, thank you very much.
- [42:23]
D
And thank you so much for having me. This has been very enjoyable.
- [42:49]
B
La.