Age Wise

The Mysterious, Remarkable Memories of ‘Superagers’

Some old brains look and work like those of twenty-somethings

Robert Roy Britt
Published in
4 min readJul 23, 2021

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Image: Fakurian Design/Unsplash

Among the frustrations of growing older, at least for many of us, is the increasing struggle to remember people we’ve met, or what was for lunch yesterday. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why: Our brains shrink, and communication between different parts gets fuzzy.

But for some older folks, dubbed by scientists as “superagers,” the brain remains remarkably and mysteriously intact, virtually indistinguishable by several measures from the noggins of 20-somethings. Separate groups of scientists around the country study these superagers on an ongoing basis, as they age so darn gracefully, in hopes of finding ways to prevent dementia in the rest of us.

A new study examine the brains of people, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), as they took complex memory tests involving the recall of images and descriptions. One group of 40 people was, on average, 67 years old. Another similar-sized group averaged age 25. The superagers’ visual cortexes — where what we see is processed and shuttled to the other parts of the brain — did not look or perform like those of other people their age.

“The structure of superagers’ brains and the connectivity of their neural networks more closely resemble the brains of young adults,” says Alexandra Touroutoglou, PhD, director of imaging operations at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Frontotemporal Disorders Unit. “Superagers had avoided the brain atrophy typically seen in older adults.”

In this three-dimensional rendering of the human brain’s cerebral cortex, red blobs indicate regions that were significantly thicker in superagers than in typical older adults. The top row shows the outer view of each hemisphere; the bottom row shows the inner views. Image courtesy Felicia Sun et al. via Alexandra Touroutoglou and Yuta Katsumi

More going on upstairs

I asked Touroutoglou and her colleague, Yuta Katsumi, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry at the hospital, if the superagers’ superior performance held up across the range of ages in the study, from 61 to 81.

Short answer: Yep.

“We did not find a significant association between age and memory recall among superagers, suggesting that their recall ability was similarly high…

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Robert Roy Britt
Elemental

Editor of Aha! and Wise & Well on Medium + the Writer's Guide at writersguide.substack.com. Author of Make Sleep Your Superpower: amazon.com/dp/B0BJBYFQCB