While many younger people think little about how long they will live, as we get older, our longevity becomes more important to us. After all, who doesn’t want to live as many years as possible?

Over the past couple of years, we’ve written a number of posts on things that can have an impact on a person’s longevity.

We saw that early birds tend to live longer than night owls, how fast or slow you walk can affect one’s longevity, diet, exercising, supplements and even various germs one contracts and more.

There is no doubt the healthy living – eating right and exercising – does have an impact in helping many people live longer, unless you get hit by a car and killed while jogging for your health, as one man did or if you accidentally ingest something that causes you to get deathly ill or cause a severe allergic reaction.

There is no doubt that taking the right supplements and vitamins can also help one live longer.

Then there is the question of one’s sexual maturity. We know that females tend to mature sexually earlier than males and to be honest, some males seen to never mature sexually.

What control’s one’s sexual maturity? Is it genetics or hormones or both?

What if I told that both your longevity and your sexual maturity are determined by your brain?

According to a new study:

“New Vanderbilt research finds how long humans and other warm-blooded animals live–and when they reach sexual maturity– may have more to do with their brain than their body. More specifically, it is not animals with larger bodies or slower metabolic rates that live longer; it is animals with more neurons in the cerebral cortex, whatever the size of the body.”

Suzana Herculano-Houzel, one of the authors of the study and associate professor of psychology  and biological sciences at Vanderbilt, commented:

“Whether you’re looking at birds or primates or humans, the number of neurons that you find in the cortex of a species predicts around 75 percent of all of the variation in longevity across species.”

In case you are asking, what exactly is the cerebral cortex, I’ll give you a quick biology lesson.

You’ve all seen pictures or drawings of the brain. You know who it looks all wrinkled and folded? That outer wrinkled layer is the cerebral cortex. It is a thin layer (0.39 0.20 inches thick) that is divided into four distinct regions:

• Frontal – the front portion of the brain. Is responsible for higher mental processes including thinking, planning and decision making.
• Occipital – bottom back of brain. Is responsible for visual function.
• Parietal – upper back (between the frontal and occipital) portion of the brain. Is responsible for sensory information including taste, temperature and touch.
• Temporal – bottom middle (the temple areas) of the brain. Main function involves hearing.

The principle they discovered works from species to species and it also works within a species. In other words, the thicker one’s cerebral cortex is, the more neurons it contains and therefore, the longer one will tend to live.