Forget About Memory Loss
On April 13 this year, George Sanders suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to do his income tax. Panicked, he filed for an extension. A few days ago, he realized he’d forgotten the extension.
“Lord, this is embarrassing,” Sanders mumbled. “But it’s not like it’s all I’ve been forgetting. I get the new family dog mixed up with the last one - I call Goldie ‘Puddin’, and Goldie’s a lot bigger, 60 pounds heavier. But I still call her Puddin’. And I go to yell at one of the kids and I can’t remember the right name. I thought it was funny when my parents did it. Never thought I’d do it. But I am.”
At age 46, Sanders is facing a problem common to middle-aged men and women. Gradually, it becomes a bit harder to remember things.
“I shudder to think what I might start forgetting next,” Sanders said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just losing my mind.”
And in a sense he is, as is everyone reaching midlife.
“We’re born with a certain number of brain cells,” said Dr. Janice Knebl, chief of gerontology at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. “Over the years, we pick away at them, so the system has less to work with. Just with normal wear and tear, when it comes to memory we can perhaps still do the same things, but not at the same speed.”
When considering midlife memory loss, it’s imperative to understand what isn’t known or agreed upon.
For one thing, there’s no definitive answer to how many brain cells we have to start out with.
“I’ve heard all sorts of numbers, ranging from 100 million to 14 billion,” said Dr. John Aschenbrenner, a professor of anatomy and cell biology at the UNT Health Center. “It’s certainly true that there are a lot.”
How many are lost over the course of a lifetime is another unknown number. And although research programs studying the aging/memory loss process are finding evidence that memory declines as years add up, there are still scientists who insist memory loss has nothing to do with the aging process.
A recent interview in The Washington Post quoted Dr. Zaven Khachaturian of the National Institute on Aging as insisting, “This notion that there is a normal (memory) decline with aging is bunk.”
But Knebl, Aschenbrenner and several others cited a 37-year effort by the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which concluded that all people suffer a decline in memory processes as they grow older.
“It’s a fact: As you get older, cells everywhere in your body die, including brain cells,” said Laura Schneider, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Texas Christian University who will join the Texas Wesleyan University faculty in the fall. “You have to understand it’s going to happen.”
Though we’re born with a finite number of brain cells, it takes time to learn to use them.
“Over the first two years or so of life, these brain cells or neurons have to find connections, called synapses, to link them up and get them working properly,” Aschenbrenner said. “But as we go through life, the natural aging process will gradually cause some of these neurons and synapses to degenerate. Then they can’t work properly, including some of those involved with memory.”
That doesn’t mean we automatically lose our memory functions.
“Kind of a compensatory thing gets started inside our brains,” Schneider said. “The remaining cells sort of work their way around the bad ones and the process goes on.”
But that process does slow down perceptively.
“It’s like any physical differences between 20-year-olds and 40-year-olds,” Knebl said. “The younger people have tremendous plasticity to their systems, they can do things faster. Middle-aged people haven’t lost the ability to do the things they once did, it’s just that their range has narrowed. You can still remember; sometimes you just don’t do it at the same speed.”
Many current midlifers especially fear even minor loss in memory speed because of increased awareness of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Alzheimer’s is another thing entirely, and involves disruption of ability to function in everyday life,” she said. “If you can’t remember the name of somebody you just met for the first time and talked to for a few minutes, that doesn’t disrupt your ability to function. Neither does calling your child by the wrong name once or twice. It’s important to keep natural, minor memory problems in perspective.”
As Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once said, the memory is like an attic. The more that’s jammed inside it, the harder it is to find a specific item.
Schneider agreed.
“By the time you’re middle-aged, you’ve learned a lot of things, met a lot of people,” she said. “Part of midlife memory problems probably result from people that age having so much information to sort of tread through.”
Knebl said she believes middle-aged memory problems are also the result of age-related stress.
“What do lots of middle-aged people have in common?” she asked. “One thing is teenaged kids. Lots of stress there. And their jobs probably are involving more responsibilities, too. When you’ve got lots on your mind like that, it’s natural to have trouble remembering you were supposed to stop at the grocery store on the way home.”
And, sadly, today’s midlifers are survivors of the ‘60s and its “Just Say Yes” generation.
“When you were young, if you drank a lot and did a lot of certain drugs, it was bound to catch up with you,” Knebl said. “You lost brain cells then and had to compensate, so there’s less compensation support when it’s needed now.”
Mary Phillips-Kalvitz, director of case management for the Tarrant Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, cautioned that pinpointing mental effects of youthful alcohol and drug abuse “is kind of a nebulous thing, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying a weaker memory in middle age has to be tied to that. But I would certainly say it can be a contributing factor.”
But the biggest factor of all is obsession with midlife forgetfulness. Worrying constantly about what you’re forgetting will only cause you to forget more.
Besides, Schneider said, even the most absent-minded midlifers can learn simple techniques to remember things better.”The best idea is to write things down,” she said.
“That’s the easiest way right there. Another good strategy is to associate people’s features with their names when you can. If you meet someone named Isaacs, you can find something to remember about their eyes. Hairston and hair, same thing. You can make it into a fun game, and it helps.”