Memory and the Middle-Aged Brain

On a Sunday drive, my daughters and I passed a beautifully landscaped senior facility for people with memory problems and I commented on how pretty it was. The conversation shifted to a new topic soon after, and I found myself unable to complete my sentence because I could not recall the word for the strap you secure yourself with in a car.

"You mean seatbelt?'" my older daughter asked incredulously.

"Yes, that's it," I replied, my middle-aged brain delighted to be supplied with the elusive word.

"Maybe we should turn around and take you to that senior place you liked so much," my younger daughter offered, only half in jest.

It seems no sooner do we start needing drug store glasses to read the newspaper than our memories start fading along with our close-up eyesight. Common words and names that used to be on the tips of our tongues become "temporarily misplaced" in our disorganized middle-aged brains; like errant keys, we know they're somewhere, we just can't remember where we put them.

New York Times health and medical science editor, Barbara Strauch, ponders middle-aged brain memory mysteries and more in her new book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. Strauch found that certain types of memory decline with age, such as remembering the name for things and proper nouns, like the name of your cousin's wife or your favorite Japanese Restaurant (or, in my case, a simple word like "seatbelt').

"The problem with names is not a storage issue. It's a retrieval issue," Strauch told interviewer Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air recently. "Those names are not really lost. They're just kind of temporarily misplaced.... The way that they're stored in our brain-the sound of the name and the information about what that name is-is kind of weak."

What happens in such cases is not that you have forgotten the word or name, you just don't remember where it's stored in your brain. For instance, in the case of the actor who starred in the Benjamin Button movie and left his wife for that actress who adopts children from different countries, contextual details about Brad-Pitt-the-person does not match the phonetic syllables of his name, Brad Pitt. So you could consciously try to recall the name Brad Pitt, racking your brain to no avail. But it may not be until later in the day, when you hear the word "cherry pit" on a cooking show, the name Brad Pitt will suddenly pop into your head.

Memory tricks

For that reason, some memory experts advise picturing or associating some aspect of a person's name with the person. Rachel Ray, for instance, is rich and has a sunny disposition, so you could picture her lounging on a chair at a luxury resort (rich Rachel) under the sun's rays. Strauch refers to this strategy as leaving a "neural footprint" in your brain. When trying to retrieve a person's name, she also suggests going through the alphabet, letter by letter, since the sound of the consonant the name starts with could jog your memory.

The good news about the middle-aged brain and memory is that our memory remains strong in some ways. We don't forget how to do most processes, like riding a bicycle or dancing the tango. Nor do we forget most biographical information about our lives.

Some advantages to middle-aged brain

In some cases, Strauch said, our ability to remember things is weaker than that of younger people, though certain cognitive functions, such as inductive reasoning, can be superior. Younger people, for instance, can quickly list the names of more fruits than their middle aged counter parts, but middle aged people who hear the names of a bunch of fruits are quicker to categorize them as fruits.

On an even more optimistic note, Strauch said that although some memory functions decline with age, dementia is not inevitable. So, maybe if I'm lucky, I won't need to move into that senior facility after all.

Sources:
Personal experience
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125902095