Researchers often study and analyze what goes wrong with the
brains of people with dementia; but this is not the case here –
researchers from Northwestern Medicinecasked themselves exactly
the opposite: what happens with the brains of the so-called
‘Super Agers’, elder people who still have terrific memories.
Emili Rogalski identified an elite group of people aged over 80,
whose memories are just as sharp and vivid as those 30 years
younger than them. The point was to find out what they have in
common, in order to see what makes them special. After the MRI
scans were analyzed, it became obvious that their brains are
just as young and powerful as average middle-aged brains – as a
matter of fact, one region was actually larger than normal.
Rogalski was astounded by the elasticity and vitality of the
Super Agers cortex – the outermost layer of the brain, crucial
for memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language,
and consciousness. Typically at their age, the cortex gets much
thinner, but in their ca