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March 2005

GQ Magazine

Don't You Remember?

Reorganize Your Brain

by JAMES O'BRIEN

Lately, it has become an all too common refrain in my marriage. Over candlelight, veal, and Viognier, I'll say to my wife, "This is a great restaurant, honey. How did you find it?" And she'll say, ''We ate here last fall. with my parents. You suggested it. Don't you remember?" Well, no, I don't, and it fills me with a great sense of loss and foreboding, for at 41, I am fast approaching the age when memory degeneration sets in.

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Not only are there maddening narrative gaps in my biographical recall, but more and more the details of everyday life flee my brain like a drunk at a dry wedding. I am forever slamming on the brakes and circling back home to gather the item – backpack, cell phone, dry cleaning – I meant to take with me in the first place.

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And so, late on a chilly night last November, as my berobed, sleepy-eyed landlord, with her usual grudging grace, hands me a spare key because I've locked myself out – again – I come to the shivering conclusion that something must be done. I need to know if I'm not normal. I need to know if my past, and my brakes, can be saved.

FOR ANSWERS, I turn to the Memory Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. There, neuropsychologists administer memory tests to possible Alzheimer's patients, head-trauma victims, struggling students brought in by exasperated parents, and seemingly healthy but neurotic people like me. These tests determine if a brain is damaged, and if so, they help pinpoint the affected area.

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This is serious business, and I'm nervous on testing day. Caffeine and solid sleep are two great friends of memory, and I haven't had nearly enough of either. I imagine failing to remember my name, the date, my address. In fact, these are among the first questions posed. I ace them.

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Over the next four hours, I take seventeen tests, all administered by a sympathetic clinical psychologist named Sarah Reusing. (Later, my results will be given to the clinic's founder, behavioral neurologist Barry Gordon, for interpretation.) We begin with my verbal memory - the kind that, in right-handers like me, is stored in the brain's left temporal lobe. Reusing reads me eight pairs of unrelated words (pig-carpet; forest-monarch). Then she repeats the first word of each pair, and I'm asked to recall the corresponding word (if she says forest, I'm to say monarch).

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The first time through, I score a stunning – a downright soul-crushing – zero. L cannot remember a single word from any pair. Flop sweat glistens on my forehead.

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Then I rally. When, to check my longer-term memory, I'm given the same test at three half-hour intervals over the morning, I devise a strategy: I will make simple, logical connections between word pairs that might help me remember them. Who is monarch of the forest? I ask myself. What's that pig doing on the carpet? My score all three times is perfect. I begin to feel a little better about life.

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On tests for nonverbal memory – those items generally stored in a right-hander's right temporal lobe – I struggle mightily. I'm shown fifty black-and-white portraits of men who look like 1970s business executives.  Then I'm immediately shown pairs of photos, one new and one I've been shown before, and I have an awful time picking out the face I've already seen. Next, in the Complex Figure test, I'm asked to copy a nonsensical geometric figure, and I come up with something reasonably accurate. But when Reusing takes the original away and asks me to try again, from memory, I scribble something that looks like a combination of an isosceles triangle and a whale penis.

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Despite positive reinforcement from Reusing throughout the morning, I leave the clinic humbled and worried. I wonder what Gordon will make of it all.

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THREE DAYS LATER, the results come in. My scores on the nonverbal tests range from average (fiftieth percentile on the faces) to low (tenth percentile on the Complex Figure test). Had l been an architect or a sculptor, this would be somewhat distressing news. But in a writer, Gordon tells me – particularly one who could never draw in the first place – it is more likely a sign of neglect. Memory, he says, takes practice.

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My initial failure to recall words also placed me in the tenth percentile and would indeed be cause for worry, given my profession, if my rousing comeback hadn't placed me squarely in the ninetieth. My improvement indicated that I possess the cognitive wherewithal to develop memory strategics, a skill often destroyed by a stroke, Parkinson's, a head injury, a tumor, or small-blood-vessel disease. I'm clear of these, thankfully, but the basic question remains: What the hell is my problem?

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There are any number of external enemies of memory: excessive alcohol intake, illicit drugs, medications like Xanax and Valium. None of these are my problem.

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Depression and anxiety impede memory as well. And with these, I am quite familiar. As David McCormick, a memory researcher at Yale, told me, memory is "state-dependent." That is, if you are depressed or distracted when information comes in, your ability to concentrate is impaired and your chances for recall are diminished.

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Finally, the fact that my freelance job is fluid and inconsistent may also contribute to my problems. "Absence of routine is a tremendous barrier to memory,” Gordon says. Without a routine, fewer things become habit; everything must be reinvented, and re-remembered, every day.

Gordon's first piece of advice is to develop habits that preclude the need to remember: Why force your brain to recall where you put your keys? From this day on, my keys and wallet and cell phone will always and immediately go in the same place at home. Why try to keep an ever expanding mental to-do list when you can carry a small notepad around and write down what you need to accomplish?

This is all well and good, but I'm looking for some short-term help, a quicker fix. A pill, perhaps? Aren't there memory drugs on the horizon?

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Gordon guesses they're at least ten years down the road.

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Eric R. Kandel, the Nobel Prize-winning brain researcher, is more optimistic. He works with a company called Memory Pharmaceuticals, which is running clinical trials in the States for a drug that will restore the cognitive skills that are lost with aging. "We're trying to make up for what nature has taken away from us,” he says. He predicts a drug will be on the market in five years.

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ln the meantime, we must deal with the natural limits of our human brains.

The first time through, I score a stunning, a downright soul-crushing, zero. Flop sweat glistens on my forehead.

efforts to improve memory

While there is debate about how long the brain must hold an item for it to become permanent, Yale's David McCormick believes the brain notes and then disregards these temporary items by keeping the relevant brain cells active only until the information has served its purpose. But what if it's a ten-digit phone number, a nine-item grocery list?

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That’s where chunking comes in. Chunking is a way to make a list more manageable by morphing, say, ten distinct items into three or four. If you're driving along and your wife calls and asks you to pick up milk, grapefruit, light bulbs, bug spray, beef bouillon, and a pie, you can quickly solder grapefruit to light bulbs, milk to bug spray, and invent beef bouillon pie. Now your brain has only three items to contend with.

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It also works well with numbers. A ten-digit phone number is easier to remember if you chunk it. So 5-1-2-7-8-3-9-6-2-1 becomes 5-12, 7-83, 96, 21. Ten items become four. By chunking, I can actually remember my wife's Social Security number for more than seventeen seconds, which for some reason pleases her.

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REPEATING AND REHEARSING When a memory is formed, something changes – physically changes – in the brain. Cells reach out to each other and connect at what's known as the synapse. The stronger this connection, the stronger your chances of remembering. Repeating and rehearsing, then, are like hammer strokes securing two planks, and it can lock in deadlines, vocabulary words, appointment times and dates, or, best of all, names at a party. This is how it is done: ''Nice to meet you, Emily. Emily, where do you work, Emily? Emily, what's your husband doing with that woman, Emily? Nice to have met you, Emily.”

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SPACING Your brain cells can handle only a limited array of signals at one time. Cramming tends to strain those limits. But if you space out memorizing, say, a speech you'll be giving, you allow your synapses a day or two to, as Kandel says, "mobilize their resources,” to solidify a new memory before the next part of the pattern comes along. I, of course, had no speeches on my calendar, but by spacing I was able, after years of failure, to memorize – two new lines every three days – and recall weeks later the "sound and fury'' monologue from Macbeth.

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MEMORY PARTNERING If all else fails, have other people do the work for you. More a strategy for preserving information than a memorization technique, partnering has you arrange for someone else to remember things for you. Beautiful, no? It's particularly useful when you need to recall something that doesn't interest you a bit: your mother-in-law's birthday, your boss's favorite NASCAR driver, and so on. You are less likely to remember things that don't interest you.

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Still, interest doesn't guarantee remembering. I'm interested in nothing more than good wine, but often, perhaps due to the attendant alcohol intake, I have trouble remembering the specifics of a good bottle at a restaurant. My wife, on the other hand, is less greedy in her drinking than I am. Thanks to memory partnering, she's got quite a growing wine list, on my behalf, in her head.

 

She is particularly strong on Viognier.

I will chunk, space, repeat, rehearse, and memory-partner until these things become habitual.

So I head home, prepared to spend the next few weeks trying various memory-strengthening strategies Gordon prescribes: I will chunk, space, repeat, rehearse, and memory-partner until these things become habitual. I will designate a staging ground in my house for everything l need to take with me whenever I go out. I will make lists in my memo pad, and because I must for my memory, I will sleep. A lot.

 

CHUNKING Just behind your forehead lies the clipboard of your working memory. It's filled with task-oriented items you retain for a minute or an hour and then disregard: a phone number about to be dialed, a name at a business lunch, a grocery list. In 1956, researcher George A. Miller reported that humans can retain about seven of these items on their clipboards at a time. (He even thought this might have something to do with why we have seven seas, seven deadly sins, seven primary colors, seven notes on the musical scale, seven wonders. But let's not hold that against him.)

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memory improvement
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