Explaining The Science Behind Memory Loss

[Lunar Loops]

Don't you just love pseudo-science? A little knowledge is definitely a dangerous thing (and there's certainly very little knowledge in this article). How's this for scientific?

"I have a picture of what Ecstasy does to your brain. Basically, it destroys large chunks of it. Ecstasy throws your serotonin into overdrive and burns your neurons out; it murders them."

Anyway, the whole piece is from the San Francisco Chronicle:

EXPLAINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND MEMORY LOSS

For a journalist, memory loss can be a terrifying experience.

Unexplained lapses in memory and her quest to find the root of the problem motivated Cathryn Jakobson Ramin to write "Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife" ( HarperCollins ).

Ramin, who has written extensively about psychology, religion, business, sociology and travel for publications including The Chronicle, the New York Times and O, The Oprah Magazine, spent four years researching and writing "Carved in Sand." She interviewed more than 300 people in midlife, as well as psychologists, endocrinologists, sleep medicine and head trauma specialists, nutritionists and psychiatrists. She also traveled the country collecting data, attending an eight-week mindfulness meditation stress-reduction class and two weeks of intensive neurofeedback -- what she describes as a lot of "hands-on, here-I-am-put-me-in your-chair" research.

"The book is my story. It's my journey," said Ramin. "It's a first-person narrative. People tell me that it reads like a novel."

Ramin, 50, was born in New York City. She currently lives in Mill Valley with her husband, Ron Ramin, a composer for television, and their sons, Oliver, 13, and Avery, 17.

Q: What inspired you to write "Carved in Sand"?

A: I realized that something had definitely occurred in my brain. I simply was not the same person that I had been before, in terms of my ability to do research, take a huge pile of documents, read them, understand them, develop a new concept and churn out a story. I had never realized it was taxing. I just thought it was how everybody did it. I don't think I had a photographic memory; actually there is no such thing as a photographic memory. I just had the ability to absorb a gigantic amount of information and hang on to it long enough to turn it into an article, at which point I would forget it completely when I was finished.

So what was going on? This was not something I wanted to share with the world. It seemed that I would be permanently unemployed if I mentioned this to an editor. How could they possibly respond to a journalist having memory issues? I kept it to myself for quite a while. Eventually, I looked around and wondered, "Why are all these people not remembering the names of books and the titles of movies?" Why is there more information missing than present in half of our conversations, which I came to call the contentless conversation. We all seem to know what we're talking about, but there are no proper nouns.

I thought, "This is not just my problem." It's a general problem many people are having and they all seem to be my contemporaries, given a decade or two, in their 40s, 50s and 60s. They're embracing their lives; they want to live them fully. Sometimes they are still in a position of raising children. They're working and maybe they're considering retiring from what they're doing and starting to do something else. These are all very memory-intensive requirements.

It's not like it used to be 20 years ago, when, by the time you're in your 40s, your kids have gone on to college. We're having the lifestyle people used to have in their 30s in our early 50s. It's the result of delayed everything -- delayed adolescence, marriage and child-rearing. You end up with menopause and adolescence meeting each other. That's probably something that should never happen, but it happens all the time now. I was 33 when my first child was born and 36 when my second was born.

Q: What was it like writing the book?

A: It was an enormous mental challenge. Studies now show that the most important thing that you can do for yourself is to give yourself a mental challenge. That means taking on something that is extremely unfamiliar and fairly difficult. That's how you build and resurrect neuropathways that would otherwise not be available to you.

Q: What kind of mental exercises do you recommend?

A: For me, the mental challenge began by actually needing to write the book, and the end result was the cure. For a lot of people, these mental challenges cover a wide range. Everyone's always talking about doing crossword puzzles and Sudoku. But what the studies really show is that once you're accomplished at something, you've worn out its benefits. So it's important to take on new challenges. People play Scrabble and they play bridge and chess and take up competitive tennis. I know a lot of women who've done it in their early 40s and are apparently addicted to it. The competitive aspect, the strategic aspect is what makes it a mental exercise.

Q: Tell us about the chapter "Recreational Drugs, Alcohol and Other Neurotoxins" and their effect on memory.

A: That addresses all the things that we do in our lives intentionally or by accident that can have an effect on our cognitive abilities later in life. There are a lot of misconceptions about alcohol. When you drink alcohol, even a small amount, you develop what they call cocktail party deficit. Say you get to a party right after work and you haven't eaten and you have a drink. There's a very good chance that you will not remember anything that anyone told you that evening. You are pouring it into an empty stomach, and it is making its way very quickly to the brain.

Substantial alcohol use has a terrible effect on the brain. Alcoholics suffer substantial shrinkage in the gray and the white matter in the brain. People want to know if the drugs that they did in college could be responsible for the situation. The jury is somewhat out on that. There are definitely consequences, in terms of working memory, to smoking marijuana. Numerous studies have come out showing that even a brief short-term experience with marijuana will affect short-term memory for several days or even a week. Studies of people who smoked marijuana 20 or 30 years ago showed no significant brain changes; it's really the ongoing or current use of the drug.

Other drugs have much more severe repercussions. I have a picture of what Ecstasy does to your brain. Basically, it destroys large chunks of it. Ecstasy throws your serotonin into overdrive and burns your neurons out; it murders them. Maybe Timothy Leary thought it was good, but, from the perspective of cognitive function, the brain does not need to be put into overdrive.

Q: What is your earliest childhood memory?

A: I'm not very good on childhood memories. If you've had a fairly traumatic childhood -- and I did, because my parents went through an extremely messy divorce when I was 9 -- the trauma and the stress can pretty much obliterate childhood memories. I met people on my book tour who have come to tell me that they don't remember their childhoods because some big terrible thing occurred. There were deaths, or some act of God that swept away a village -- terrible things far worse than anything that I went through. People have told me about sexual abuse. People who experienced early childhood trauma have dealt with parents who, for one reason or another, were too distracted to bond.

I have vague memories, but I think they emerged from a photo album that I found about 10 years ago that had a lot of pictures of me as a child. I don't think I really remembered any of those things, but they've sort of come back.