What Two Women in Their 90s Taught Me About Brain Health

Deborah Kan is an award-winning journalist and founder of Being Patient. In this “Thought of the Week” column each Friday, she highlights one of the key stories shaping the future of brain science. 

Dear readers,

Last weekend, at my niece Liz’s brunch in New York, I met Barbara and Beverly. Barbara is 93 and just had hip surgery. She was walking up and down stairs. Beverly is 94, but she moves like someone decades younger, upright posture and fully present. Liz told me they’ve been friends since the 1950s. 

The two women have spent their lives in the West Village, they know their neighbors, the local shops know them, and they still walk around the neighborhood and go out to dinner. Neither has ever married. Neither has children or family nearby. By most measures of aging risk, they should be struggling. They are not.

What struck me wasn’t just how remarkable they are. It was what their lives have in common: community, connection, and constant engagement with other people. Not as an occasional pleasure. As a way of life.

That observation sent me back to something I learned years ago, when I sat down with Dr. Claudia Kawas, a neurologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent two decades running the 90+ Study, one of the longest-running studies of people who live into their tenth decade and beyond. Her team found something I’ve never forgotten. 

When they looked at people over 90 who had amyloid plaques in their brains, the protein deposits associated with Alzheimer’s, but never developed dementia, they searched for what those people had in common. They expected it to be diet, exercise, or genetics. The answer surprised them. The one thing they could identify: roughly eight hours of social engagement a day.

When I told Dr. Kawas that sounded like a lot, she was matter-of-fact about it. Talking to other people isn’t passive, she explained. You take in new information, connect it to what you already know, formulate a response, and store new learning. Conversation is cognitive exercise. The brain is working the entire time.

Barbara and Beverly have been doing that for seventy years together, without ever framing it as a brain health strategy. They just built lives rich in connection, and their minds reflected it.

I think about my mother, who developed Alzheimer’s in her 80s, and I wonder about the role loneliness may have played alongside environmental risk. I don’t know the answer. Science doesn’t either, not fully. But when I watched these two women move through a room, I felt something shift. The question isn’t only what goes wrong in the aging brain. It’s what, for some people, quietly keeps going right.

What I have learned is that there is a reason to reach toward connection wherever you can find it, for the person you may be caring for and for yourself.

With hope,

 Deborah