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Despite volunteering and working out at the gym several days a week, socializing often with friends and family, reading all kinds of books and doing daily puzzles, 85-year-old Carol Siegler is restless.
“I’m bored. I feel like a Corvette is being used as a grocery cart,” said Siegler, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Palatine.
Siegler is a cognitive “SuperAger,” possessing a brain as sharp as people 20 to 30 years younger. He is part of an elite group enrolled in the Northwestern SuperAging research program, which has been studying older people with superior memories for 14 years. The program is part of the Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
“I’ve auditioned twice for ‘Jeopardy!’ and did well enough to be invited to the live auditions. Then Covid hit,” Siegler said.
“Who knows what good it would have done,” he added with a laugh. “What I’ve told my kids and anyone else who asked me, ‘I may know a lot about Beethoven and Liszt, but I know very little about Beyoncé and Lizzo.'”
To be a SuperAger, a term coined by Northwestern researchers, a person must be over 80 and undergo extensive cognitive testing. Acceptance into the study only occurs if the person’s memory is as good as or better than that of cognitively normal people in their 50s and 60s.
“SuperAgers must have exceptional episodic memory, the ability to recall everyday events and past personal experiences, but then SuperAgers must only perform at least average on other cognitive tests,” said cognitive neuroscientist Emily Rogalski, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine.
Only about 10 percent of people who apply for the program meet those criteria, said Rogalski, who developed the SuperAger project.
“It’s important to note that when we compare SuperAgers to average adults, they have similar levels of IQ, so the differences we’re seeing aren’t just due to intelligence,” he said.
Once accepted, colored 3D scans of the brain are done, and cognitive tests and brain scans are repeated every year or so. Analyzing the data over the years has yielded fascinating results.
Most people’s brains shrink as they age. In SuperAgers, however, studies have shown that the cortex, responsible for thinking, decision-making and memory, remains much thicker and shrinks more slowly than that of people in their 50s and 60s.
A SuperAger’s brain, usually donated to the research program by participants after death, also has larger and healthier cells in the entorhinal cortex. It’s “one of the first areas of the brain to be ‘attacked’ by Alzheimer’s disease,” Tamar Gefen, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern, said in an email.
The entorhinal cortex has direct connections to another key memory center, the hippocampus, and “is essential for memory and learning,” said Gefen, lead author of a November study comparing the brains of dead SuperAgers with those of cognitively normal young and old people. and people diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.
The study also found that SuperAger brains had three times less tau tangles, or abnormal protein formations inside nerve cells, than the brains of cognitively healthy controls. Tau tangles are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
“We believe that larger neurons in the entorhinal cortex suggest that they are more ‘structurally robust’ and may be able to withstand the formation of neurofibrillary tau tangles,” Gefen said.
Gefen also found that the SuperAgers’ brains had many more von economo neurons, a rare type of brain cell, than have so far been found in humans, great apes, elephants, whales, dolphins and songbirds. Corkscrew-like von economo neurons are thought to enable rapid communication across the brain. Another theory is that neurons give humans and great apes an intuitive edge in social situations.
The von economo neurons were found in the anterior cingulate cortex, which forms a collar at the front of the brain that connects the cognitive and reasoning side with the emotional and feeling side. The anterior cingulate is thought to be important for regulating emotions and paying attention, another key to good memory.
Together, these findings seem to point to a genetic link to becoming a SuperAger, Gefen said. However, he added: “The only way to confirm whether SuperAgers are born with larger entorhinal neurons would be to measure these neurons from birth to death. This is obviously not possible.”
SuperAgers share similar traits, said Rogalski, who is also the associate director of Feinberg’s Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease. These people stay physically active. They tend to be positive. They challenge their brains every day, by reading or learning something new; many continue to work into their 80s. SuperAgers are also social butterflies, surrounded by family and friends, and can often be found volunteering in the community.
“When we compare SuperAgers to normal people we see that they tend to endorse more positive relationships with others,” Rogalski said.
“This social connectedness may be a characteristic of SuperAgers that distinguishes them from those who are still doing well but are what we would call middle or normal age,” he said.
Looking back on her life, Carol Siegler recognizes many SuperAger traits. As a child during the Great Depression, she taught herself to spell and play the piano. He learned to read Hebrew at his grandfather’s knee, poring over his weekly Yiddish newspaper.
“I have a great memory. I always had,” Siegler said. “I was always the kid you could say, ‘Hey, what’s Sofia’s phone number?’ and I would only know it from my head.”
He graduated from high school at 16 and immediately went to college. Siegler earned his pilot’s license at age 23 and later started a family business in his basement that grew to 100 employees. At 82, he won the American Crossword Tournament for his age group, which he said he entered “as a gag.”
After seeing an ad for the SuperAger show on TV, Siegler thought it sounded fun, too. Being chosen as a SuperAger was a thrill, Siegler said, but he knows he was born with luck.
“Someone with the same skills or talents as a SuperAger who lived in a place where there was very little way to express them might never know they had them,” he said. “And that’s a real shame.”