SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS MEMORY LOSS

We’ve been pushing the theme that you need to relate to your brain in a new way. This especially holds true for memory. We cannot expect memory to be perfect, and how you respond to its imperfections is up to you. If you see every little lapse as a warning sign of inevitable decline with age, or an indication that you lack intellect, you are stacking the odds to make your belief come true. Every time you complain “My memory is going,” you reinforce that message in your brain. In the balance of mind and brain, most people are too quick to blame the brain. What they should be looking at is habit, behavior, attention, enthusiasm, and focus, all of which are primarily mental.

Once you stop paying attention and give up on learning new things, you give memory no encouragement. A simple axiom holds: whatever you pay attention to grows. So to encourage your memory to grow, you need to pay attention to how your life is unfolding. What does this mean, speci cally? The list is long, but it contains activities that come naturally. The only di erence as you age is that you have to make more conscious choices than you did earlier in life:

A Mindful Memory Program

Be passionate about your life and the experiences you fill it with.

Enthusiastically learn new things.

Pay attention to the things you will need to remember later.

Most memory lapses are actually learninglapses.

Actively retrieve older memories; rely less on memory crutches like lists.

Expect to keep your memory intact. Resist lower expectations from people who rationalize memory loss as “normal.”

Don’t blame or fear occasional lapses.

If a memory doesn’t come immediately, don’t brush it o as lost. Be patient and take the extra seconds for the brain’s retrieval system to work. Focus on things or people you associate with the lost memory, and you will likely recall it. All memories are associated with other earlier ones. This is the basis of learning.

Be wide-ranging in your mental activities. Doing a crossword puzzle uses a di erent part of the memory system than remembering what groceries you need, and both are di erent from learning a new language or recalling the faces of people just met. Actively exercise all aspects of memory, not just the ones that come most easily.

The common thread in this program is to keep up the mind-brain connection. Every day counts. Your brain never stops paying attention to what you tell it, and it can respond very quickly. A longtime friend of Deepak’s, a medical editor, has prided himself on his memory since childhood. As he is quick to point out, he doesn’t have a photographic (or eidetic) memory. Instead, he “keeps his antennae out,” as he describes it. As long as he keeps paying attention to his day-to-day existence, he can retrieve memories quickly and reliably.

Recently this man turned sixty-five, as did most of his friends. They began to exchange wry jokes about their senior moments. (Sample: “My memory is as good as it ever was. I just don’t have same-day delivery.”) The man began to notice random lapses in himself, although he had no trouble using his memory when he did research for his work.

“Without really worrying about it,” he says, “I decided to start making a grocery list. Up to then, I’d never made any lists. I went out shopping and simply remembered what I wanted. This was true even if I had to stock my depleted kitchen with several bags of groceries.

“I started keeping a grocery list on my desktop, and an amazing thing happened. Within a day or two I couldn’t remember what I wanted to buy. Without my list in hand, I was helpless, wandering the aisles of the grocery store in the hopes that once I spied potatoes or maple syrup, I’d remember that it was what I came for.

“At first I laughed it off, until one week when I forgot to buy sugar on two visits to the supermarket. Now I’m trying to wean myself o the list. I still intend to, but you get dependent on lists very quickly.”

Learning from his example, sit down and consider the things you could be paying more attention to while using fewer crutches. Our Mindful Memory Program will guide you, since it includes the major areas where it pays to pay attention. The most familiar things may seem unimportant, but they count.

Can you wean yourself o making lists for things that you can remember? Try taking your grocery list to the supermarket but not looking at it. Buy as much as you can from memory, and only then consult your list. When you get to the point that you leave nothing out, wean yourself from the list entirely.

Can you stop blaming yourself for memory lapses? Catch yourself the next time you would automatically say “I can’t remember a thing” or “Another senior moment.” Be patient and wait. If you expect memories to come, they almost always do.

Stop blocking your memory. Retrieving a memory is delicate: you can easily step in the way of remembering by being busy, distracted, worried, stressed out, tired from lack of sleep, or overtaxed mentally from doing two or more things at once. Examine these things first, before you blame your brain.

Set up an environment that’s good for memory, one that has the opposite of what we just mentioned as obstacles. In other words, take care of stress, get enough sleep, be regular in your habits, don’t overtax yourself mentally with multitasking, and so forth. Developing regular habits helps, since the brain operates more easily on repetition. If you live in a scattered and distracted way, the sensory overload to your brain is damaging and unnecessary.

If you are getting older and feel that memory loss could be occurring, don’t panic or resign yourself to the inevitable. Instead, focus your e ort on mental activity that boosts brain function. Certain software, including so-called “brain gyms,” and books like Neurobics, coauthored by the Duke University neurobiologist Larry Katz, are designed to exercise the brain in a systematic way. The reports of reversing mild-to-moderate memory loss by exercising the brain are as yet anecdotal, but they are encouraging nevertheless.

Finally, look upon this whole project as natural. Your brain was designed to follow your lead, and the more relaxed you are, the better that will be for your mind-brain partnership. The best memory is one you rely upon with simple confidence.