Good Friends-More Important than You Think.

I recall a children’s song I learned about the importance of keeping your old friends while making new friends.  So the Kaiser Health News story about friends caught my eye. Good Friends Might Be Your Best Brain Booster As You Age reports on a new study from Northwestern regarding the connection between “brain health and positive relationships.” The Northwestern Study, Psychological well-being in elderly adults with extraordinary episodic memory is an open source article available as well as a pdf.  Here is the abstract from the study

The Northwestern University SuperAging Program studies a rare cohort of individuals over age 80 with episodic memory ability at least as good as middle-age adults to determine what factors contribute to their elite memory performance. As psychological well-being is positively correlated with cognitive performance in older adults, the present study examined whether aspects of psychological well-being distinguish cognitive SuperAgers from their cognitively average-for-age, same-age peers.

Want to live longer and happier, then be nice to your good friends (maybe call them up now and tell them hi!). The article’s concluding summary offers this

SuperAgers endorse higher levels of Positive Relations with Others compared to their cognitively healthy but average-for-age same-age peers suggesting that this aspect of psychological well-being may be an important factor for exceptional cognitive aging. Investigation of the longitudinal effects of psychological well-being on subsequent cognitive performance and investigation of the conceivable relationship between psychological well-being and von Economo neurons in SuperAgers represent intriguing future directions.