You can’t give yourself an MRI, and even if you could, do you really know how much gray brain matter you’re supposed to have in the inferior frontal gyrus and the superior temporal gyrus ? (I didn’t think so.)

Because of that, you might think that all you’ll ever know is the biological age of your brain and not the age at which it functions.

Think again.

And when you think again, think about this: What if you didn’t know your date of birth? What if you had to guess at your age based on subjective sensations, such as how deeply you sleep, how achy you are upon awakening, how much energy you have during the day, how hard you exercise?

According to research performed at Seoul National University in Korea and published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience in June 2018, those feelings might be all that you need to know the age at which your brain functions. In a Medical News Today article, researcher Jeanyung Chey revealed that even after she and her colleagues accounted for factors such as personality, subjective health, depressive symptoms, and cognitive function, “We [still] found that people who feel younger have the structural characteristics of a younger brain.”

A fisherman might utter, “Holy mackerel”; a farmer, “Holy cow.” Being a child of the surreal 60s, I want to say, “Far out,” but will write a single word: “Wow.”

Granted, we readily accept that many health-and-fitness barometers are subjective. For instance, while someone middle-aged and out of shape could accompany me on an easy-day bicycle ride and be sore for days, someone under 30 and in racing shape could do so on a tough day, ride 30 miles more and never be sore.

But when it comes to the functioning age of your brain, your subjective feelings do more than just reflect it; they seem to create it.

For their study, Chey and her colleagues recruited 68 people aged 59–84 and looked for specific age-related signs of mental-agility decline. To do so, they employed episodic and working memory tests, questionnaires, and the MRI alluded to in the introduction.

Those MRI scans revealed that those who felt younger also had a higher volume of gray matter in aforementioned brain areas - the inferior frontal gyrus and the superior temporal gyrus - meaning that their brains were functioning as if they were younger.

The paper’s prologue ends this way online: “Our findings suggest that the subjective experience of aging is closely related to the process of brain aging and underscores the neurobiological mechanisms of [subjective age] as an important marker of late-life neurocognitive health.” The Medical News Today report added that the participants who reported feeling younger than their biological age not only had better scores in memory tests, but they were also less likely to feel depressed and felt more optimistic about their health.

Now whether you’re a fisher, a farmer, or a child of the 60s, I hope you can appreciate how a study like this does more than increase our knowledge base about brain health. It is just another of the many examples that helps prove a power documented dozens of times in this column.

The power of the mind.

Chey makes a valid point when she says, “If somebody feels older than their age, it could be a sign for them to evaluate their lifestyle, habits, and activities that could contribute to brain aging and take measures to better care for their brain health.” Yet I can’t help but think it’s equally important to reinterpret those subjective sensations written about before: how hard you exercise, how well you sleep, how much energy you have during the work day, how achy you are upon awakening.

Because when you really think about it, things like being achy in the morning or sore from exercise are not good or bad. They simply are.

The oh-so important question: “How are you going to interpret them?”

Certain interpretations, it seems to me, do nothing more than increase the rate that you age. For instance, how do you interpret that muscle soreness you sometimes feel at the start of a workout?

As more proof that you don’t recover as well as you once did? That you’re a fool for working out so hard at your age? That you should end the workout right now and take a day off?

Or can you find solace in that soreness? See it as proof that you’re still an active player in this game of life even though so many others your age - and younger! - have decided to spectate? Recognize that not feeling like exercising right now means you did it the right way 24 hours ago.

If that’s how you think while you do your warm up, my guess is that soreness will dissipate and after the workout you’ll feel satisfied - and surprisingly young.

Better still, your brain will be so too.