A Preoccupation with Memory Loss

It’s a sign of the times. Every one is talking or writing about middle-age memory loss, or so it seems. I doubt that anyone who is 25 years old has noticed the same thing, of course. They probably didn’t notice when vibrantBrains, a “gym” for improving memory function, opened recently in San Francisco. And they certainly weren’t interested in a lecture there last week by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, the author of “Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife.”

A young, 20-something person probably didn’t catch David Brooks’ op-ed piece, “The Great Forgetting” published in the New York Times earlier this month, in which he wrote, “in the era of an aging population memory is the new sex.” He counted himself among “those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.”

Nor would someone with a young brain be interested in yesterday’s New York Times article, “Memory Training Shown to Turn up Brainpower,” about the findings of a just-published study that focused on the type of memory that is closely related to fluid intelligence. The researchers concluded that “it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent; increasing the brainpower they had at birth.”

Perhaps the best solution to an aging brain’s declining memory function was suggested by Gary Marcus, in a New York Times Magazine article, “Total Recall.” Dr. Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, suggests implanting a small memory chip in our brains, arguing that a brain equipped with a Google-like master map “would allow us to search our own memories - not just those on the Web- with something like the efficiency and reliability of a computer search engine.”

Now that’s an idea that a young techie’s brain can get excited about.