Clues to how ‘super-agers’ retain youthful memories
Some loss of memory is usually considered an inevitable part of aging, but new research reveals how some people appear to escape that fate. A study by investigators at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital examined a group of older adults with extraordinary memory performance and found that certain key areas of their brains resembled those of young people. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, is the first step in a research program aimed at understanding how some older adults retain youthful thinking abilities and the brain circuits that support those abilities. The program is led by two senior authors of the new study — Bradford Dickerson, a Harvard Medical School associate professor of neurology and director of the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit in the MGH Department of Neurology, and Lisa Feldman Barrett of the hospital’s Department of Psychiatry. While most older adults experience a gradual decline in memory ability, some researchers have...