Richard Restak - The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

Copyright 2022 by Richard Restak

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-7027-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-7028-7

Cover design by Mona Lin and David Ter-Avanesyan

Cover illustration by Getty Images

Printed in the United States of America

To the beloved memory of my sister, Louise Restak Ollstein

CHAPTER I

WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT MY MEMORY?

HOW COMMON ARE MEMORY WORRIES?

There are many reasons to care about your memory. Consider these: the development of a superpower memory enhances attention, focus, abstraction, naming, spatial visualization, verbal facility, language, and word acquisition. In a phrase, memory is the key to brain enhancement.

In America today, anyone over fifty lives in dread of the Big AAlzheimers disease. Small social gatherings (dinner, cocktail parties, etc.) take on the atmosphere of a segment from NPRs weekly quiz show Wait Wait... Dont Tell Me. Thats the one where guests vie with each other in intense competitions to be the first to come up with the names of such things as the actor playing a role in the latest mini-series everybody is binging on. Almost inevitably, someone will pull out a cellphone to check the accuracy of the person who responded first. Quick, quicker, quickest lest others suspect you of coming down with the initial symptoms of the Big A.

Although Alzheimers disease is not nearly as common as many people fear, nevertheless worries about perceived memory lapses are increasingly expressed to friends. They are also the most common complaint that persons over fifty-five years of age bring to their doctors. Such memory concerns are often unjustified and arouse needless anxiety. This widespread anxiety has helped create a national pre-occupation with memory and signs of memory failure. One of the reasons for this panic is the confusion in many peoples minds about how we form memories.

Try to remember something that happened to you earlier today. It doesnt have to be anything specialany ordinary event will do just fine. Now consider how that memory came about.

At my request, you recovered a memory for something that you probably would have not thought about, if I hadnt prompted you to recall it, and you hadnt made the effort to retrieve it.

Reduced to its essentials, memory involves re-experiencing something from the past in the form of a recollection. Operationally, memories are the end products of our efforts in the present to recover information that is stored in our brain.

Memorieslike dreams and acts of the imaginationvary from one person to another. My memories are distinctly different from your memories based on our personal life experiences.

Memory also differs from pictures or videos of events from the past. While these technologically based versions of the past can serve as memory stimulators, they are not themselves memories.

IS MY MEMORY FUNCTIONING NORMALLY?

In order to answer that question, lets first address the idea of normal memory function. Below are several questions, which I invite you to check as involving either (a) an example of a perfectly acceptable memory or (b) perhaps the beginning of a potentially serious memory problem.

Question A. After scanning the newspapers and selecting several bargains I drove to the mall, parked my car and went into the store selling these bargains. When I came out I couldnt remember where I had parked, and I had difficulty finding my car. It took me several minutes to locate it in the crowded parking lot. a or b?

Question B. After exiting a store where I had gone to purchase several items that were on sale, I came out and couldnt remember whether I drove to the shopping center or someone dropped me off there. a or b?

Question C. I cant remember the names of my grandchildren. a or b?

Question D. When I get together with my sister, she and I have very different memories of events we both participated in as children. a or b?

Question E. I used to play a pretty good game of bridge, but now Im messing up. I cant remember what cards have already been played. Nobody now wants to partner with me. a or b?

Question F. While driving home from the office, I took the wrong exit. I have never done that before. a or b?

Question G. I have increasing difficulty remembering names. a or b?

Question H. Before I go into the food market, I have to write everything down or I will forget one or two items. Yet in my work as a professional actor I have no problem, even in my eighties, studying a script over a weekend and on Monday engaging in an early rehearsal without referencing the prompt script. How can that be? a or b?

Question I. I packed my car ready for a trip, but when I got in the car, I had no idea where I was planning to go. a or b?

Answer A. The answer to this is (a) perfectly normal forgetting. At the time you drove to the mall, you most likely were mentally preoccupied with the bargains that you were intending to purchase. Your concentration was far removed from such quotidian concerns as where you will park your car. You simply slipped into the first available parking place closest to the store and rushed inside and started shopping. Since you were not at all concentrating on the location of the parking place you selected, you couldnt remember its location when you came out of the store. As Samuel Johnson stated over two hundred years ago, The art of memory is the art of attention. The attention that Johnson referred to is an internal attention: riveting your mental powers on a single external object. Lacking attention to the parking place, you could only form an imperfect memory, or in this specific instance, no memory at all. We will have a lot to say about attention later.

Answer B. The correct answer here is (b): Perhaps a potentially early and serious impairment in normal memory functioning. In this example, instead of having difficulty remembering one item out of many (where you parked) you lost the ability to recall how you even arrived at the mall in the first place along with all the interactions that would invariably take place along the way if you were driven there (talking with the driver, listening to the radio, etc.) or on public transportation (choosing a seat, looking out the window, etc.).

Answer C. (a) Remembering the names of ones grandchildren is closely aligned with the interest you have in your grandchildren, and children in general.