A 25-year study published this month in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia has produced findings worth sitting with — not because they are entirely surprising, but because of how clearly they point in a direction the mental health field has been moving toward for some time.
Northwestern University researchers have spent a quarter century studying "super-agers" — people 80 and older whose memory performance is on par with someone 30 years younger. These are not people who have simply avoided the worst outcomes of aging. They are people who, in their eighties and nineties, perform on memory tasks the way a healthy 50-year-old would.
The researchers wanted to know what distinguished them. Diet, medication regimen, and exercise routine did not reliably differentiate them from their cognitively average peers. What did distinguish them was consistent: they were highly social. They placed high value on their social relationships and engaged in social connection at a significantly higher rate than their peers.
Super-agers are united by "how they view the importance of social relationships," Sandra Weintraub, one of the Northwestern researchers, told The New York Times, adding that "personality-wise, they tend to be on the extroverted side."
This is not a peripheral finding. It is the central behavioral finding of a 25-year study of nearly 300 people who have managed to do something most people believe is impossible: maintain the cognitive function of middle age well into late life.
What the Research Actually Found
The study is notable not only for its duration but for the depth of its methodology. Super-agers were not just assessed behaviorally — their brains were examined directly. Brain regions critical for memory, decision-making, emotional control, and motivation showed little of the shrinkage typical of their same-aged peers. Super-agers were also found to have a greater number of "von Economo neurons" — brain cells that control social behavior — as well as larger entorhinal neurons, which are essential for powering memory.
The von Economo neurons are particularly worth noting. These are specialized neurons found in the regions of the brain associated with social cognition, empathy, and rapid intuitive processing of social information. Their preservation in super-agers — alongside the behavioral finding that super-agers are highly social — suggests something more than correlation. The neurobiology of social connection and the neurobiology of cognitive preservation appear to share infrastructure.
Emily Rogalski, who leads the Healthy Aging and Alzheimer's Research Care Center at Northwestern, has described social connection as a consistent theme among super-agers, suggesting that engagement and community may play a crucial role in sustained mental acuity.
The Psychological Dimension of This Finding
From a clinical psychology standpoint, this research does something useful: it reframes social connection from a quality-of-life issue to a health issue. Not as an add-on to wellbeing, but as one of its primary inputs — one that has measurable neurobiological correlates and that appears to be among the most powerful protective factors available for the aging brain.
This reframing matters because of how social connection tends to be treated in both clinical contexts and everyday life. It is often positioned as something nice to have — important for mood, valuable for support during difficult times — but secondary to the more concrete interventions we tend to take seriously: medication, diet, exercise, sleep. The super-ager research suggests this hierarchy may be wrong, or at least incomplete.
The research also points toward something clinical psychology has understood through a different lens: that social relationships are not simply pleasant supplements to psychological health. They are one of its primary mechanisms. The nervous system is a social organ. It developed in the context of groups, it co-regulates with the nervous systems of others, and it does not function the same way in isolation as it does in genuine connection.
The loneliness literature has been making a version of this argument for years: social isolation carries health risks comparable to smoking, disrupts sleep, amplifies the stress response, and accelerates cognitive decline. The super-ager research approaches the same truth from the opposite direction — not by documenting what happens when social connection is absent, but by illuminating what becomes possible when it is richly present across a lifetime.
What "Highly Social" Actually Means
It is worth pausing on what the research is and is not saying, because the finding can be misread in ways that are not clinically useful.
The super-ager finding is not that extroversion is required for cognitive health, or that introverts are at risk, or that the number of social interactions per week is the relevant variable. What the research points toward is the quality and importance of social relationships — how much a person values and invests in their connections with others — more than any particular personality type or social style.
Forming meaningful social connections and maintaining social relationships appears to play a key role in the lasting healthy cognitive function these super-agers enjoy. Meaningful is the operative word. A social life characterized by superficial interactions does not appear to confer the same benefit as one characterized by genuine connection — the kind of relationship in which people are known, valued, and engaged with over time.
This distinction also has implications for how we think about the social isolation that remote work, urban mobility, and the disruption of traditional community structures have produced. As I have written previously on this blog, remote work has contributed significantly to the erosion of the incidental social contact that once structured adult life. The super-ager research gives that erosion a longer time horizon and more serious stakes.
Community and Cognitive Reserve
The concept of cognitive reserve is useful here. Cognitive reserve refers to the brain's resilience — its capacity to continue functioning effectively in the face of the physical changes that aging produces. People with higher cognitive reserve can sustain more structural brain change before that change affects their functioning.
Social connection is one of the most powerful builders of cognitive reserve available. This is because genuine social engagement is cognitively demanding in the most productive way: it requires reading context, managing emotion, understanding another person's perspective, tracking the history of a relationship, navigating disagreement, and sustaining interest and investment over time. These are precisely the kinds of complex, flexible processes that exercise the neural systems most at risk from aging.
The super-ager who has maintained rich social relationships across decades has been continuously exercising these systems — not in structured cognitive training sessions, but in the ordinary demands of being a present and engaged person in the lives of others. The cognitive reserve this builds does not show up in any single interaction. It shows up in a 25-year study of people in their eighties who remember things the way someone in their fifties does.
What This Means Now
One of the more clinically useful aspects of this research is that it points toward protective factors that are modifiable at any age — not just lifestyle changes in late life, but the relational habits and investments that, maintained over decades, appear to produce something like super-aging.
What it means clinically is that the tendency to deprioritize relationships — to let friendships drift, to substitute digital interaction for in-person contact, to treat social connection as a lower priority than the more legible demands of work and productivity — has costs that may not be immediately visible but that accumulate over time.
The super-agers are people who did not make that trade. Who continued to show up for the people in their lives, to invest in those relationships, to treat social connection as something worth protecting even when other demands pressed against it. The outcome, 25 years into the study, is a picture of cognitive health that challenges what most people assume is possible.
Citations
Gefen, T., Weintraub, S., & Geula, C. (2025). The first 25 years of the Northwestern University SuperAging Program. Alzheimer's and Dementia. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.70436
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352
The New York Times. (2025, August 7). What super-agers can teach us about social connection and the brain. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/well/mind/super-agers-social-connections.html