Superager

What areas of the brains of superagers are activated more than those of ordinary seniors?

Researchers have spent years studying superagers in an attempt to understand what sets the senior citizens apart.

Mr. Markoff soared over the bar of what researchers designate a super-ager — a person over 80 whose brain seems decades younger. And that made his brain highly valuable to research, said Tish Hevel, chief executive of the Brain Donor Project, a nonprofit in Naples, Fla., that is affiliated with the National Institutes of Health.