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I’ll never forget what’s-his-name

WHERE DID I LEAVE MY GLASSES:
The What, When, and Why of Normal Memory Loss
By Martha Weinman Lear
244 pp. Wellness Central (Hachette Book Group) $13.99

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Martha Lear could never find her glasses, but she’s a trained reporter. Instead of simply worrying whether she had slipped into Alzheimer’s disease, she investigated her problem.

The gist of her discovery is that she need not worry too much because “ ... memory loss is not because we’re getting older, it’s simply because we have too much on our minds.” But there’s far more to Glasses. Age, for example, is also factor. Father Time begins to delete files by the time we leave our twenties.

Glasses is a breezy book, a quick read, but it’s a thorough and interesting, albeit non-scholarly, study of the issue. Lear’s Acknowledgement section lists sixteen different experts consulted, including psychiatrists, psychologists, psychopathologists, neurologists, and a biological anthropologist, among others. She also includes experts in Alzheimer’s disease, although Glasses only discusses that dreaded condition to differentiate it from what Lear terms “normal memory loss.”

Readers will nod in concurrence when the author cites the single thing we most often forget: What’s her (his, its) name?

Why is that so? For one, many of us are constant mental multi-taskers. That means we don’t focus properly when a name is given. More interestingly, names are harder to remember because “they don’t mean anything.” A name “has no context. It does not belong to any category of meaning.”

The cure? The technique most of us have heard about: word association, an invention of the Romans.

So what can we do to improve our memory? Believe everything your mother and now your doctor says: eat right, avoid stress, get adequate sleep. And exercise. Which means not only keeping one’s brain active but also doing something as simple as taking brisk walks. Aerobic exercise tunes up our frontal lobes.

Interestingly, Lear discusses the value of forgetting as well as the nature of memory.

“Forgetting is indispensable.” It’s a survival mechanism. Forgetting keeps our brains from being cluttered with extraneous information, or as one of Lear’s experts, Cornell neurologist Norman Relkin, notes, “We have to forget things that are not salient, because if we did not, we would be in a perpetual state of information overload.”

Logical enough, that, but far less fascinating and compelling than the idea that human memory is both layered and consistently remodeled. First, realize memory isn’t memory, singular. There’s semantic memory for facts, and episodic memory for events. The first is “tenacious,” according to Lear, sticking with us into old age, but the second “is the mischievous wretch that starts playing no-show games with us typically around age fifty.”

Given that we’re in realm of science, we can’t forget declarative memory and nondeclarative memory, procedural memory and prospective memory, and plain old short- and long-term memory. Here Lear’s anecdotes and examples offered to amplify these labels can be both fascinating and familiar.

Particularly intriguing, however, is the idea of reproductive memory, especially when a person considers the place of truth in the scheme of human society. Lear writes, a “ ... computer remembers all or nothing. No in-between. Whereas the brain is filled with in-between. Think of it this way: What you put into the computer is an abstraction of your experience. Retrieve it, and it’s unchanged. What you remember is an abstraction of that experience, then a reconstruction of the abstraction, then a reconstruction of the reconstruction of the abstraction, and so on and on and on ... And of course, the more time that passes, the truer this becomes.”

Bodies slow down as we age. We should not be surprised that our minds slow down also. There are means of coping—mnemonics, word associations, simple lists. And there ways of wasting money attempting to cope, such as most holistic and herbal remedies.

Lear moves on to discuss the genetic, but not necessarily hereditary, nature of Alzheimer’s disease. She concludes with a discussion of the evolutionary nature of the function of the human brain and how it contains memory in a chapter entitled “The Big Picture.”

Glasses ends with an examination of the boomer-inspired anti-aging industry, which Lear feels will be reflected in the mental field by ever-increasingly sophisticated brain-scanning technology, worsening fears of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, and boomer prosperity, all spurred on by a for-profit medical industry. Lear, in fact, believes that we face a cyborgian future. Think computer-driven brain exercises, smart pills, invasive electrical and chemical stimulations, genetic manipulation, and brain implants.

This book is more formidable and intelligent than it appears at first glance. Informative and yet informal, the book reflects Lear’s reportorial skills and her work as a writer and editor for The New York Times Magazine.

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Gary Presley resides in Springfield, Missouri, retired after a career spent primarily in insurance customer service. Although he once had a job writing news and advertising copy for a radio station, his original work was published mostly in local newspapers. He only began serious study of the craft after entering and winning a regional essay contest. Since then, his essays have appeared in publications ranging from Salon.com to Notre Dame Magazine to The Ozark Mountaineer. His memoir, Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, was published by the University of Iowa Press in October 2008. You can follow his journey through postings to his blog.

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