The Neuroscience of Being Human
The Neuroscience of Being in Your 100s (Centenarians)
The point at which the brain has outlived every actuarial prediction, every cultural assumption, and almost every peer, and when neuroscience must finally reckon with what it means for a human brain to have operated continuously for a century or more
2,083-word article with 8 Harvard references.
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To reach one hundred is to possess a brain that has done something statistically remarkable. Fewer than one in five thousand people in developed nations becomes a centenarian, and the brain that arrives at this milestone has navigated a century of structural change, neurotransmitter depletion, vascular compromise, and accumulating pathology that the overwhelming majority of brains do not survive. Total volume has decreased by thirty per cent or more. The hippocampus is profoundly atrophied. White matter integrity is severely compromised. And yet the centenarian brain is not, in every case, the cognitive ruin that the statistics might predict. A substantial minority of centenarians retain cognitive function that defies explanation by conventional models of ageing. This fully referenced article explores the neuroscience of the centenarian brain, examines the genetic, structural, and psychological factors that distinguish those who reach one hundred with cognitive function intact, and argues that the centenarian brain represents not the final chapter of decline but the most extraordinary demonstration of human neural resilience that the species can produce.
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