Walked into a room and forgotten why you were there? Lost someone's name a few seconds after being introduced? These slips happen at any age, but after fifty each one starts to feel like a warning.
There is a better place to look than the slips. A small group of people over 80 remember as well as people 20 or 30 years younger. A team at Northwestern University calls them SuperAgers, and when their brains were scanned, the brains looked younger too.
What do they have that others their age don't? Not a pill, and not a puzzle app. The answer starts somewhere stranger, with a man who could not make a single new memory.
Memory is more than one thing
In 1953, a 27-year-old American named Henry Molaison had an operation to stop his epileptic seizures, which had grown so bad he could no longer work. Much of the hippocampus on both sides of his brain was removed. It is the part that turns the day's events into lasting memories, but in 1953 that was not yet known.
The seizures eased. His memory did not survive. From then on he could not hold on to new events: a person he met, a meal he ate, a conversation, all of it gone within moments. He could still recall much of his childhood. He lived until 2008, and though he was told how much his case meant to science, he could never keep hold of it.
Then came the mirror. He was asked to trace a star with a pencil while seeing his hand only in a mirror, which reverses every movement. On his first try he strayed outside the lines about 30 times.
By the tenth try that day, five or six. By the third day he made almost no mistakes. Each time, he had no memory of ever having done the task before. His hand remembered. The rest of him was never told.
Memory, it turned out, is not one store but several systems, run by different parts of the brain. One handles events, one skills, and one the few seconds of whatever you are holding in mind right now. Lose one, and the others keep working.
A British musician named Clive Wearing shows the same split even more starkly. In 1985 a brain infection damaged his hippocampus, and since then his memory for events has lasted between seven and thirty seconds. His diary is page after page of entries like "Now I am really, completely awake", the earlier ones crossed out, because he has no memory of writing them. He greets his wife with joy every time she walks in, as if after years apart, even when she has only left the room for a moment. Sit him at a piano or an organ, though, and he still plays complex pieces, sight-reads and conducts a choir.
The brain is incredibly adaptable, capable of growing and forming new connections throughout your life. Henry Molaison's mirror star showed it with the little he had left. The scientist who studied him for 46 years tells his whole story in .
Meet the SuperAgers
A SuperAger is someone over 80 whose memory for events, what they did, read and heard, is at least as good as the average for people aged 50 to 65.
When their brains were scanned, the outer layer, the cortex, was thicker than in other people their age. Next to people aged 50 to 65, it showed no thinning at all. One strip toward the front, the anterior cingulate, was thicker than in either group, the younger one included.
A head start could explain a thicker brain. It could not explain what came next. Twenty-four SuperAgers and twelve ordinary 80-year-olds were scanned twice, about 18 months apart. Both groups lost cortex, as every ageing brain does.
The ordinary group lost 2.24% a year. The SuperAgers lost 1.06%, about half as much. Same number of candles, half the wear. Both groups had much the same schooling and the same measured intelligence.
Five SuperAgers' brains were later examined after death, and that front strip held two more surprises. It had fewer of the tangles that mark Alzheimer's disease. It also had more von Economo neurons, a large, spindle-shaped brain cell found in only a few places in the human brain, the anterior cingulate among them.
A team in Madrid found the same pattern in Spain. They followed 64 SuperAgers and 55 typical adults, all around 82, for up to six years. The SuperAgers lost grey matter more slowly, most of all in the region that forms memories. Out of 89 things measured about their lives and health, two set them apart most: they moved faster, and their mental health was better. They did not exercise any more often. The Harsh Truth About Aging: Decline or Longevity? has what walking pace says about how a body is ageing.
What they have in common
A brain like that makes you wonder about the life around it. So the Northwestern team asked 31 SuperAgers and 19 average 80-year-olds six sets of questions about how their lives were going. They covered independence, purpose, growth, accepting themselves, being in charge of their days, and relationships with others.
Both groups scored well on almost everything. On one scale alone the SuperAgers stood apart: warm, trusting relationships with other people. Their edge was at the dinner table.
That is a link. It does not prove that friends build a brain. The team wonders whether it is tied to the thicker front strip and its rare cells, and which would come first is still unknown. It fits, though, and it is the cheapest habit on this page.
Written at 22
In 1986, a group of 678 American nuns of the School Sisters of Notre Dame agreed to be followed into old age, and to give their brains to science when they died. Before they took their vows, as young women, each had written a short account of her own life.
Decades later, those pages were taken out again, and the team counted how many ideas each young woman had packed into her sentences, a measure they called idea density. They then compared it with how 93 of the same women, by then aged 75 to 95, did on memory and thinking tests, some 58 years after the writing.
Low idea density at an average age of 22 went with poorer scores in old age. Fourteen of the sisters had since died, and their brains were examined. Alzheimer's disease was found in every one of those whose early writing had been low in ideas, and in none of those whose writing had been rich in them.
Fourteen is a small number, and an essay at 22 is not a sentence for life. What it does suggest is that the mind you build early carries a long way. Dementia Risk, linked below, has what the sisters' brains showed after death.
Don't retire your brain
Retirement changes the shape of a day more than almost anything else. Two economists compared people in their early 60s in the United States, England and eleven European countries. Where pension rules pushed people out of work earlier, memory at that age was lower, and by enough to matter. Because the timing was set by the rules rather than by anyone's health, the authors argued that leaving work was causing the drop, not just following it.
A later look at American men in their 60s added a twist. Work seemed to do the most for the mind when the job made them think.
New experiences matter in a second way. Ask adults over 40 to recall their lives, and their memories bunch up between roughly 10 and 30. Those years are full of firsts: leaving school, marrying, a first child. Novel events are a likely reason they stick. Firsts are still on offer at 60. The sofa has never supplied one.
So when the job ends, replace what it gave you. Learn new skills: a musical instrument, a new language, or cooking unfamiliar recipes. Dementia Risk, linked below, has why the new and the hard do more than the familiar crossword.
An instrument may be one of the better choices. When 70 adults aged 60 to 83 were tested, those who had played for at least ten years in their lives did better than non-musicians on memory for images, on naming, and on planning and switching between tasks. Age, schooling and exercise were matched. It is a small group, and a link rather than proof.
Two languages, honestly
A new language deserves a closer look, because it once looked like a shield. Among 184 people diagnosed with dementia at a memory clinic, about half had spoken two languages all their lives. Their symptoms had appeared four years later, on average, than in those who spoke one, with everything else measured the same. Once dementia began, it moved at the same speed.
That made headlines. Then the work that had followed people forward in time, starting before anyone was ill, was pooled, with 5,527 bilingual people among them. Together it found no protection at all. The earlier comparisons had looked back from the clinic, and they were easily swayed by schooling and by culture, including how soon a family brings someone in to be checked.
So learn a language because it is hard and you will use it. As a shield against dementia, it is unproven.
A perfect memory is not the goal
Give Jill Price a date, and she can tell you what she did that day and what day of the week it fell on. Her case was first described in 2006, and the condition has a name now, hyperthymesia. Fewer than 100 people in the world are known to have it.
She calls it a burden. The memories run on their own, all day, the hard ones as vivid as the good. And her memory is selective. She was an average student and does poorly at memorising facts. After several hours with two interviewers, she could not say what either of them was wearing.
Even an ordinary memory is not a recording. Students shown films of car crashes were asked how fast the cars were going. When the question said the cars "collided", the average guess was 32 miles an hour. With "hit", 34. With "smashed", 41.
The word asked afterwards had reshaped what they remembered. Your memory is less a video camera than a storyteller with opinions. For how far that storyteller can wander, read .
Then there is the word stuck on the tip of your tongue. William James described the feeling in 1890, and in 1966 two Harvard researchers first tested it by reading out definitions of rare words. People who were stuck could often still give the word's first letter, or where its stress fell. The word was there, and the way to it had gone quiet. It happens at every age, more often with age, and with words you use rarely or haven't used lately.
Meanwhile the store keeps growing. Across 48,537 people tested online, different abilities peaked at different ages, and vocabulary did not peak until about 65. Brain Fog: What Causes It, and What the Timing Tells You has why a bigger store makes for a slower search.
A healthy memory is not one that keeps everything. It keeps what matters and lets the rest go. The name that slipped away a few seconds after hello is part of that system, not a fault in it. 7 Natural Remedies to Boost Your Memory, linked below, has why names slip away first. Forgetting that gets in the way of daily life is a different matter, and Dementia Risk, linked below, has the changes worth getting checked.
The basics, briefly
You don't need to overhaul your life. A handful of everyday things carry most of the weight.
Drink water. Dehydration can impair concentration, and even a mild shortfall makes tasks feel harder. Water is the drink that fixes it without adding anything else.
Sleep. Sleep is essential for memory consolidation, the night shift that files the day away. Learning: The Key to Personal and Professional Growth has how sleep locks in what you learned.
Move. The SuperAgers in Madrid moved faster, and physical activity is good for the brain over decades. 7 Natural Remedies to Boost Your Memory, linked below, has what exercise does for a single memory, and when to time it.
Calm the long stress. Chronic stress can negatively impact memory. Stuck in Survival Mode has what a body full of stress hormones does to the memory centre.
Keep alcohol rare. Years of heavy drinking can leave the brain short of thiamine, vitamin B1. The result is Korsakoff syndrome, named after the Russian Sergei Korsakoff, who described it in the late 1800s. It wipes out new memories and fills the gaps with invented ones, told in good faith and with confidence. The storyteller again, with no one checking its facts.
Write it down. Calendars and lists reduce mental clutter. Let the paper hold the shopping, and keep your memory for living.
Feed it. Meat, fish and eggs carry much of what the brain uses most: DHA, choline, vitamin B12 and iron. 7 Essential Nutrients Your Brain Craves has each one and where to find it.
The brain you keep
You control how you care for your brain. The SuperAgers' story has no app and no capsule in it. Their brains shrank more slowly, and they kept close, warm ties with other people. The sisters who stayed sharp had been building rich minds since they were young. The workers who kept their memory kept thinking.
What will your next step be? This week, call someone you have been meaning to see, and put a date in the calendar.
Watching a parent forget? Dementia Risk: What It's Linked To, and What You Can Change — your ears, blood sugar and sleep, what the nuns' brains showed, and why learning something hard beats the crossword.
Names keep slipping? 7 Natural Remedies to Boost Your Memory—and the Three That Pass the Test — why names vanish, which remedies pass and which fail, and what your phone remembers for you.
Know someone who checks every forgotten name for signs of decline? Send them this, and make a date to see them.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own memory or health, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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