‘Super Ages’ with Great Memory Have More Young Brain Cells

Older people with exceptional memories have surprisingly high numbers of young neurons, study finds

By Mariana Lenharo & Nature magazine

Adults whose brains still have high neuron production appear to have better memory and cognitive function than those whose brain capacity declines, according to a study published today in Nature. The authors examined brain samples from deceased donors ranging from young adults to “super-ages” — people over 80 with exceptional memory.

They found that young and older adults with healthy cognition generated neurons, a process called neurogenesis, at high levels for their age. The team estimated that the new neurons represented only a small fraction – 0.01% – of those in the hippocampus, a brain region essential for memory. In contrast, in people with cognitive decline, including people with Alzheimer’s disease, neurogenesis appears to falter: researchers spotted fewer developing or immature neurons in these brain samples.

Surprisingly, a “super-aged” group had an even higher number of immature neurons than the other groups, and significantly more than those with Alzheimer’s disease. However, the group sizes were small and therefore not all results were statistically significant.

On supporting science journalism

If you enjoy this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Maura Boldrini Dupont, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, says the small size of the groups — each had ten people or fewer — is a reason to take the results with a grain of salt.

Understanding the tools the brain uses to generate neurons and maintain cognitive function in older adults could help researchers develop drugs that induce neurogenesis in people with cognitive decline, says co-author Orly Lazarov, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Neurogenesis controversy

The results support the idea that individuals’ brains continue to generate neurons even into adulthood. But this idea has not always been accepted.

In the early 1900s, neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal suggested that the human brain could not form neurons after birth. Eventually, researchers discovered that neurogenesis did indeed occur in childhood, but still thought that was the end point.

“That’s what we taught when I went to medical school,” Dupont explains.

In recent decades, however, this dogma has been challenged by new evidence supporting neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus, thus fueling an ongoing debate in neurobiology.

Although researchers know that neurogenesis occurs in some adult animals, including mice and primates, they have not been able to agree on whether it occurs in the brains of human adults. This is mainly because there are more tools for studying neurogenesis in animals than in humans. In mice, for example, researchers can inject chemicals that trace the birth and development of neurons. This cannot be done on living people and research on human brain samples is limited, Lazarov says.

Protein markers, however, are a tool used by researchers to study neurogenesis in humans. The antibodies can be used to detect certain proteins expressed by neural stem cells – which can develop into neurons – and immature neurons in given brain samples. But Lazarov emphasizes the critics’ argument “that these proteins are not specific enough and could be expressed in other cell types, not just in neurogenesis.”

So scientists turned to single-cell RNA sequencing to find more specific genetic markers of neural stem cells and immature neurons in the human hippocampus.

Towards the future

Lazarov and his colleagues went further in their latest study. They not only used RNA sequencing to identify the genetic signatures of these cell types, but also discovered their epigenetic signatures. Epigenetic markers are modifications of DNA that control gene expression. The team used an assay that identifies which parts of a cell’s DNA are ready to be expressed to determine these signatures. Dupont says the test is a strength of the study.

Lazarov says the next step would be to understand the function of neurons generated in the adult brain. “What we need is functional validation of these cells, to know what they are doing in the human brain,” she says, adding that this would require new imaging techniques sensitive enough to detect this activity.

This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time January 25, 2026.