Episdoe 88: Closing in on One Million
Mon Dec 01 2025
Why do some people stay mentally sharp well into their seventies and eighties, while others begin to struggle with memory much earlier in life? MindCrowd, an ambitious online brain study created at TGen, set out to explore that question more than a decade ago. Instead of bringing small groups of volunteers into a lab, Matt Huentelman, Ph.D., and his team did something almost unheard of at the time: they opened the study to anyone with an internet connection. In just a few minutes, participants answered basic questions and completed simple tasks that measured memory and reaction time.
Over time, those millions of data points have revealed how thinking, learning, and remembering evolve across the human lifespan. Today, MindCrowd is nearing an extraordinary milestone: one million participants. That massive, global dataset representing people of all ages, backgrounds, and countries has made possible discoveries that simply couldn’t be captured in traditional studies.
Researchers have seen clear patterns in how response time changes with age, consistent performance differences between men and women, and even surprising findings about participants with high blood pressure. And despite our widespread fears about Alzheimer’s and dementia, MindCrowd reinforces a hopeful truth: roughly 87 percent of us will not experience dementia in our lifetime.
As the project approaches the one-million mark, Dr. Huentelman joins us to talk about what study’s already taught us, the outliers who intrigue him most, why identifying the factors that protect, or challenge, our brain health matters to every one of us, and how this work moves us closer to the goal of precision aging.
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Why do some people stay mentally sharp well into their seventies and eighties, while others begin to struggle with memory much earlier in life? MindCrowd, an ambitious online brain study created at TGen, set out to explore that question more than a decade ago. Instead of bringing small groups of volunteers into a lab, Matt Huentelman, Ph.D., and his team did something almost unheard of at the time: they opened the study to anyone with an internet connection. In just a few minutes, participants answered basic questions and completed simple tasks that measured memory and reaction time. Over time, those millions of data points have revealed how thinking, learning, and remembering evolve across the human lifespan. Today, MindCrowd is nearing an extraordinary milestone: one million participants. That massive, global dataset representing people of all ages, backgrounds, and countries has made possible discoveries that simply couldn’t be captured in traditional studies. Researchers have seen clear patterns in how response time changes with age, consistent performance differences between men and women, and even surprising findings about participants with high blood pressure. And despite our widespread fears about Alzheimer’s and dementia, MindCrowd reinforces a hopeful truth: roughly 87 percent of us will not experience dementia in our lifetime. As the project approaches the one-million mark, Dr. Huentelman joins us to talk about what study’s already taught us, the outliers who intrigue him most, why identifying the factors that protect, or challenge, our brain health matters to every one of us, and how this work moves us closer to the goal of precision aging.