Super Agers Are Cool. Be One.

By Karen and Erica

Are you, or would you like to be, a super ager? If so, is there anything you can do to enhance the likelihood that you will be?

First–what is a super ager?

These unique individuals, who show outstanding memory performance at a level consistent with individuals who are at least three decades younger, challenge the long-held belief that cognitive decline is an inevitable part of aging.

We’re not sure our memory performance was ever as good as that, but it is something to aspire to. 

Being a super ager has nothing to do with living forever, as apparently a bunch of bros in Silicon Valley are feverishly trying to do. We rather agree with Chip Conley on that score. Live while you are alive. But we do want to live well while we are alive, and that means keeping our wits about us, if we can. In that, we are apparently like other women:

As the longevity movement expands, women are engaging more with it—but often it’s for different reasons than the male biohackers. That has been evident for Melanie Goldey, the CEO of Tally Health, which offers customers epigenetic age tests and preventative health plans. While men dominated the company’s 270,000 waitlist pre-launch at the beginning of 2023, its current client base is moving closer to parity: currently 53% male and 47% female. With a focus on appealing to women, especially those of menopausal age, Goldey markets her products by emphasizing extending health span, instead of defying age to conform to societal beauty standards that favor youthful looks—dewy, smooth skin instead of wrinkles.

So how can we achieve healthy cognitive longevity? Or is it all a matter of genes–in which case one of us is doomed! A scientist who has been studying super agers for years, and has recently written a masterly book on the topic, was asked if genes are determinative.

Not necessarily, according to Dr. Eric Topol, founding director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, and former chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic.

For almost 20 years, Topol has been studying a group of 1,400 Super Agers, or people who reached the age of 80 and beyond without developing one of three common, chronic, age-related conditions (cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease), as part of the Wellderly study.

To his surprise, when his team conducted whole-genome sequencing on all the Wellderly study participants, the researchers found nothing genetic, across the board, that conferred an age and health advantage.

Dr. Topol has just published Superagers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity. It is not for everyone. An Amazon commenter, who describes himself as a fellow physician and big picture thinker who shares Dr. Topol’s passion for connecting trends before they hit the mainstream, says that the challenge with this genre is built into the premise: futurist medical books tend to age about as gracefully as unrefrigerated dairy.  

Dr. Topol’s latest book, 2025’s Super Agers, is no exception. Clocking in at 464 pages (or 15 hours in audiobook format), it’s a densely packed, occasionally repetitive, and highly technical look at the science of aging—squarely aimed at a healthcare-literate audience. Topol dives into the difference between lifespan (how long we live) and healthspan (how long we live healthily without significant quality of life impairments), and as someone in his early 70s himself, there’s a certain urgency to the discussion. He synthesizes a lot of peer-reviewed literature in discussing how we age—and how we might do so better. 

If you really want to be a super ager, perhaps you should read the book, as apparently mental challenges are important. Otherwise, you may listen to Dr. Topol’s views here or here. But certainly take heart: You do have some agency in the matter. Eat Mediterranean, do not eat ultra-processed, do not drink much, weight train, interact with people, learn new things. Avoid anything that causes inflammation. And, maybe, take GLP-1 drugs. Other things matter, like avoiding microplastics and pollution, but for that you need societal change, so vote! Voting is critical for existence, in any event. 

And there is one other thing we learned. In a serious study conducted in the UK, scientists noted a discordant observation: the neuroactivity levels of both super-ager groups were below average, especially for the older super-agers. While our results did replicate prior research that super-agers maintain youthful cognitive function, with a relative absence of neurodegeneration, the older potential super-ager cluster had the lowest neuroactivity of the entire cohort. 

What does this mean? We think it means what we always say: the younger run faster but the older know the shortcuts. How do we get there? 

• According to Google AI:Neuroactivity, or neuronal activity, is the electrical and chemical signaling within and between brain cells, or neurons, that underlies all functions of the nervous system, from basic physiological responses to complex thoughts and behaviors. 
• So what does it mean that older people with youthful cognitive function have low neuroactivity?
• Given that their cognitive performance remained high-powered and youth-like, while the metabolic resources necessary to achieve that performance level decreased, we interpret this as potentially representing a novel super-aging phenotype described as an aging-related metabolic shift into greater neural efficiency. 

Sounds like older people with good brain function get there faster with less effort. Why? Because of our decades of solving problems.

Now, to be clear, we think it useful to try to keep up, in a laywoman way, with science that concerns how we age, and to tell you about what we find. But we are not scientists of any sort. So our conclusion may desperately misread the science. Still, with that caveat, we offer our interpretation of this point–because we like it!

What do you think? Are you a super ager in training? Are you excited about your unprecedented new phase?