The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study

Summary

Plain English with Derek Thompson — Episode Summary

Episode Title: The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study
Date: August 27, 2025
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Dr. Sandra Weintraub, Northwestern University
Main Theme: Exploring the secrets of “super-agers”—individuals over 80 with the memory of people 20–30 years younger—based on Dr. Weintraub’s groundbreaking 25-year study. The conversation investigates what makes these rare individuals distinct, zooming in on the surprising role of social connection in preserving brain health and memory.

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Episode Overview

Derek Thompson sits down with Dr. Sandra Weintraub to discuss her decades-long research on super-agers—older adults who defy the typical pattern of memory decline. Contrary to common hopes that “magic pills” or strict health regimens preserve memory, Dr. Weintraub’s influential study reveals social connection as the critical, unifying trait among super-agers. The episode unfolds with accessible explanations of neuroscience, poignant reflections on what it means to age, and practical considerations for living well.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Got Dr. Sandra Weintraub into Studying Aging and Memory

• Background: Dr. Weintraub’s intrigue began at McGill University, developed through clinical neuropsychology, and crystallized during her early career focusing on dementia and what distinguishes “normal aging” from neurological disease.
• She described seeing patients with severe memory loss and realized dementia’s progression starts decades before overt symptoms. This steered her to the earliest signs of neurodegenerative illness—and to those defying the odds: super-agers.

2. Defining Terms: Aphasia, Dementia, Normal Memory Loss ([10:03], [10:49])

• Aphasia defined as “a loss of the ability to communicate using words,” often due to stroke or neurodegeneration.
• Dementia vs. Normal Aging:
  • Normal aging shows a wide spread in cognitive abilities, with some 80-year-olds rivaling 30-year-olds' memories.
  • “We don’t talk about dementia; we talk about cognitive impairment because there are stages…When it gets to the point where you’re not remembering things, you’re missing bills, forgetting where you’re going…that’s what we call dementia.” — Dr. Weintraub ([11:08]).

3. Memory Decline: Linear, Not Sudden ([16:05])

• Contrary to expectations, memory doesn’t fall off a “cliff” in old age but declines linearly from the 20s onward, while life complexity, not just brain aging, plays a big role in perceived memory issues.
  • “If there’s one message I want to get across: do not assume that age equals loss of cognitive ability. Just don’t assume it.” — Dr. Weintraub ([16:51]).

4. The Discovery and Definition of Super-Agers ([13:17], [23:57])

• Super-agers are not just people who live longest. They are people in their 80s with memory performance comparable to people in their 50s.
• Defined by a strict memory test: “A person who’s 80, who takes this one memory test of 15 words and gets at least nine out of 15 at the end of 20 minutes.” — Dr. Weintraub ([24:16]).
• They aren’t selected for health habits, diet, or exercise—just memory.

5. Physical Brain Changes in Aging ([19:30])

• Aging brains shrink modestly, but super-agers’ brains shrink less. Some super-agers have normal levels of Alzheimer’s pathology (plaques and tangles) yet retain memory—implying both immune and unknown protective mechanisms.
  • “There clearly isn’t just one way to become a superager. There are several ways. One is you don’t make the plaques...And the second is you make them, but you’re immune to them.” — Dr. Weintraub ([20:39]).

6. The Central Role of Social Connection ([27:20])

• Core Finding: The only trait uniting super-agers is a highly social, gregarious temperament.
  • “They were gregarious...and had lots of social connections.” — Dr. Weintraub ([27:22]).
• The anterior cingulate gyrus, a brain region linked to sociability, was larger in super-agers—even compared to some younger people.
  • “We found there’s one particular structure called the anterior cingulate gyrus...actually larger in superagers than...in younger people.” — Dr. Weintraub ([27:37]).
• Neurons in this brain region are linked to social species (elephants, whales, great apes): “...found in highly social species, elephants, whales, bonobos, great apes, humans.” ([28:51]).

7. Interplay With Other Studies and Evolutionary Logic ([30:00], [32:16])

• Derek draws parallels to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which also found social connection as key for longevity and happiness.
• Derek speculates, “Maybe a lot of memory is basically a function for being social at an evolutionary level...priming that social engine by just being around people ironically has these protective benefits for our memory.” ([33:10]).

8. Practical Implications for Public Health ([35:11])

• Socializing isn’t a “prescription” but is likely a major protective factor; it should be considered as essential as diet or exercise in older age.
  • “We do not have a prescription for super aging…But we do know that what’s good for your heart is good for your brain...What do you suggest people do? Well, I suggest that we have a personalized approach.” — Dr. Weintraub ([36:16]).

9. Measuring Social Connection ([38:36])

• The study used personality surveys assessing extraversion and psychological well-being, consistently finding super-agers scored higher on measures of social connectedness.

10. What’s Next in Super-Aging Research ([39:25])

• The next steps include expanding sample sizes and studying whether super-agers have strengths outside memory, such as language or sensory processing, and exploring possible genetic underpinnings.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “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.” — Dr. Weintraub ([16:51])
• “Superagers…We define as 80 years old with memory of someone 20 to 30 years younger. We have no other requirements.” ([24:16])
• “The only thing that differentiated them was that the ones in the top group were continuing to work…in all other respects, there were no differences.” — Dr. Weintraub ([14:08])
• On the main finding: “They were gregarious...and had lots of social connections.” ([27:22])
• On possible mechanisms: “The anterior cingulate gyrus...was actually larger in superagers than in normal agers and even in 55 year olds.” ([27:37])
• On skepticism toward simple solutions: “Everybody’s looking for the one answer, the pill...What do you suggest people do? Well, I suggest that we have a personalized approach to you.” ([36:44])

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Important Timestamps

• [09:55] — Defining aphasia, dementia, and memory loss
• [13:17] — Origins of super-aging studies
• [16:05] — How memory changes with age
• [19:30] — Biological changes in aging brains and Alzheimer’s pathology
• [23:57] — Criteria for identifying super-agers
• [27:20] — The social trait uniting super-agers
• [27:37] — Discovery of the anterior cingulate gyrus connection
• [32:16] — Derek’s speculation: memory’s purpose in evolution
• [35:11] — Implications for public health and socializing
• [38:36] — How social connection was measured
• [39:25] — Next research questions and directions

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Tone & Takeaways

The episode is insightful, approachable, and occasionally playful. Both speakers are keen to demystify brain aging and encourage listeners to value social relationships, not just for happiness, but as potent medicine for the mind.

Dr. Weintraub’s closing takeaway: Embrace a personalized, holistic view of aging—there’s no magic bullet, but deep, genuine relationships may be as vital as anything else for preserving memory and identity in old age.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[C]

Foreign.

[B]

Dr. Weintraub, welcome to the show.

[C]

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

[B]

Your research spans memory, aging, Alzheimer's, dementia. What got you into this space?

[C]

What got me into this? Well, okay, so if you really want to go way back to. 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?

[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.

[C]

Sure.

[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?

[C]

Those are very excellent questions. So 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.

[B]

And when we're defining dementia and Alzheimer's, what are we talking about here?

[C]

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 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.

[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?

[C]

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.

[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.

[C]

It doesn't seem to be an acceleration. There doesn't seem to be an inflection point. 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 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.

[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.

[C]

You got it.

[B]

We have a child, we have a home, we have complicated jobs. 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.

[C]

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.

[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?

[C]

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. 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's 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.

[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.

[C]

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?

[B]

Well, I could have bronchitis. I could have Covid.

[C]

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.

[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?

[C]

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 superagers. 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, 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.

[D]

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[B]

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 wording you used in your paper was garrulous or gregarious.

[C]

Gregarious.

[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?

[C]

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. And 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 it kept coming back. 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 media, 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 biological matrix for being very social. And so maybe that maybe that contributes to their being being so social. But 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 interior split.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe you would do a lab animal study where you take the neurons from some mice.

[C]

Yeah, you don't want to do that.

[B]

You don't want to do that.

[C]

I don't want to do that.

[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.

[C]

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.

[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.

[C]

Absolutely.

[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?

[C]

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.

[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 wrote 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?

[C]

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. 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.

[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?

[C]

So, 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 you 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.

[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?

[C]

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.

[B]

Say, oh, Dr. Weintraub, thank you very.

[C]

Much, and thank you so much for having me. This has been very enjoyable. La.