well, joining us now is doctor charles decarli. he is the director of alzheimer's disease research at uc davis and the lead author of this study. doctor, this is pretty fascinating. how did you discover this? well it's interesting, so in the framingham heart study, which is what this is based on, is we noticed that over the decades in a similar duration, that there's been less incidence of dementia. and so i just wanted to understand what's happening with the brain over that same period of time. oh, wow. okay so you noticed that. and then you started looking into it as our brains get bigger. i wondering, are we getting smarter? is that what that means? yeah, that's a good question. the answer is simply yes. we are getting smarter, in fact, there is a phenomenon called the flynn effect, in which the iq has been steadily going up. there's some debate about it recently, but i will just say that that has more to do with how old the test that's based on the flynn effect has become. so it's not accurate, it probably represents our early