For most of us, our chances of developing the disease are highly amenable to interventions, as it takes fifteen to twenty years for the amyloid plaque that is mounting in our brains to reach a tipping point, “triggering a molecular cascade that causes tangles, neuroinflammation, cell death, and pathological forgetting.” What do those interventions look like? Genova’s guidance is backed by current science, but is mostly just parental: exercise, avoid chronic stress, adopt a Mediterranean diet, and enjoy your morning coffee-but not so much as to compromise deep sleep, which is when “your glial cells flush away any metabolic debris that has accumulated in your synapses.” In “Remember,” her first nonfiction work, Genova assures her readers that only two per cent of Alzheimer’s cases are of the strictly inherited, early-onset kind. Her novel “ Still Alice,” from 2007, centered on a Harvard psychology professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Genova, a neuroscientist by training, has spent most of her working life writing fiction about characters with various neurological maladies. In the safe keeping of a psychiatrist’s office (and sometimes with the benefit of MDMA), a patient deliberately revisits the painful memory “with the intention of introducing changes,” revising and gradually overwriting the panic-inducing memory with a “gentler, emotionally neutral version of what happened.” Not quite “Eternal Sunshine,” but if it works, it works. Here, Genova points to promising therapies that take advantage of the brain’s natural tendency to edit episodic memories with every retrieval. Easier said than done, especially with respect to the recurring, sticky memories that characterize conditions such as P.T.S.D. “The more you’re able to leave it alone, the more it will weaken and be forgotten,” she writes. Genova advises aspiring amnesiacs to avoid anything that might trigger an unwanted memory. The business of “motivated forgetting” is more complicated. Joshua Foer employed the latter device, also known as a “memory palace,” to win the 2006 U.S. surgeons collectively leave hundreds of surgical instruments inside their patients’ bodies-chunking information into meaningful units, and the method of loci, or visualizing information in a familiar environment. (An exhausted Yo-Yo Ma once left his eighteenth-century Venetian cello, worth $2.5 million, in the trunk of a New York City yellow cab.) Other strategies include leaning on external cues, such as checklists-every year, U.S. “If you don’t have Alzheimer’s and you pay attention to what your partner is saying, you’re going to remember what they said.” (Distracted spouses, take note.) Also, get enough sleep. (He also turned to the comforts of the bottle and died of complications from alcoholism, although Genova doesn’t mention this.)Īn efficient memory system, Genova writes, involves “a finely orchestrated balancing act between data storage and data disposal.” To retain an encounter, deliberate attention alone will get you most of the way there. “remember in excruciatingly vivid detail the very worst, most painful days of their lives.” The most studied case concerns Solomon Shereshevsky, an early-twentieth-century Russian journalist who, like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, “felt burdened by excessive and often irrelevant information and had enormous difficulty filtering, prioritizing, and forgetting what he didn’t want or need.” Desperate to empty his mind, Shereshevsky practiced, with some success, various visualization exercises: he’d imagine setting fire to his memories or picture them scrawled on a giant chalkboard and then erased. While the average person can list no more than ten events for any given year of life, people living with H.S.A.M. The sixty or so members of our species whose brains are not sieves have their own diagnosis: highly superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymesia. “You can be 100 percent confident in your vivid memory,” Genova writes, “and still be 100 percent wrong.”įorgetfulness is our “default setting,” and that’s a good thing. It is sobering to realize that three out of four prisoners who are later exonerated through DNA evidence were initially convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony. A dream, a suggestion, and even the mere passage of time can warp a memory. The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to “creative editing.” To remember an event is to reimagine it in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. In “ Remember,” an engrossing survey of the latest research, Lisa Genova explains that a healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. Any study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty.
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