How old are you? Odds are your answer is a number of years — a metric known as your "chronological age." Although this number isn’t meaningless, it fails to capture the full picture of aging. Your "biological age" may be a far more useful metric. This is the degree to which your biology has changed over a given period of time.

“Aging is starting at a molecular level, and over time this is going to give rise to all the functional changes and manifestations that we tend to see with aging,” says Dr. Morgan Levine, author of the book True Age. Unlike chronological age, your biological age is malleable: Scientists know that it’s possible to slow biological aging by maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

But is it possible to actually reverse the aging process? See what Dr. Levine has to say about the potential of anti-aging research in this Big Think interview.

0:00 The aging illusion

1:42 Chronological age vs biological age

3:17 Your biological age is malleable

4:32 Measuring biological age

6:26 How to find out your biological age

6:54 Get informed, change your age

7:25 Can we reverse aging?

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About Morgan Levine:

Morgan Levine was previously a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the department of Pathology at Yale University where she ran the Laboratory for Aging in Living Systems. In 2022, she was recruited to join Altos Labs as a Founding Principal Investigator at the San Diego Institute of Science. She currently leads a research group at Altos Labs working at the intersection of bioinformatics, cellular biology, complex systems, and biostatistics with the overall goal of understanding the molecular trajectories aging cells, tissues, and organisms take through time.

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