You can’t immediately retrieve the name of a favorite restaurant, your daughter’s telephone number or where you put the house keys.
“I’m getting old,” you chuckle. “I’m forgetting everything.”
Never mind that the favorite restaurant is one of about a dozen you frequent, that your daughter has moved three times in the last five years or that when you returned home you were rushing to answer the phone and safely put down two bags of groceries. You must be getting old and forgetful and, perhaps, are experiencing the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Well, the chances are very good that your leap from forgetfulness to Alzheimer’s is highly exaggerated. In a 1988 survey in which approximately 15,000 Americans 55 and older were questioned, three out of four reported that they had some difficulty remembering things during the past year.
Forgetting certain things doesn’t mean you have a serious problem — but anxiety about it can create its own problems. You get so worried about your supposed tendency to forget things that the focus is now on the forgetting; you’re now too preoccupied to actually focus on the skills needed to remember.
As most people know, we store memory in two ways. Events or facts that we learned a long time ago are stored in long-term memory. Recently attained information is stored in short-term memory. It is true that the ability to remember things with short-term memory does decline with age more than our ability to recount things from, say, our childhood.
Then there is working memory, which also tends to decline in older people. Here, an individual is trying to remember one piece of information while simultaneously using or processing another piece of information. For instance, if you’re making a cake, you may be measuring out flour but forget if you put in the baking soda. You may forget what ingredients you’ve already added or have yet to add while focusing on measuring one specific thing.
While there’s no single, proven explanation for the decline in memory, some scientists, according to the National Policy and Resource Center of Women and Aging, have developed theories, including:
*Slowing down. As we get older there is a change in the central nervous system that leads us to become slower at processing information — and thus slower in retrieving it.
*Accumulated clutter. Some people have likened the aging mind to a cluttered filing cabinet — the older we get the more information we have stored. We just have too many files to search through.
*Distractions. As we get older, we’re less able to block out irrelevant or excess information. It basically causes a traffic jam and impedes our ability to remember what’s important to us.
*Disuse. We’re not functioning as well mentally because we’re not challenged enough to use our memories.
*Motivation. We do better at the things that are important to us. If we really want to remember something, we’ll find a way.
*Physiological changes. New research looking at neurotransmitters and changes in different regions of the brain may shed light on physiological changes that may contribute to memory problems associated with normal aging.
Additionally, consider the following issues that may physically impact your ability to remember — and that have nothing to do with age:
*Emotional factors, such as anxiety, stress or depression.
*Sensory losses, such as vision and hearing, that prevent you from getting all the information at the outset.
*Distractions such as phones ringing or the dryer buzzer sounding while we were on our way to get something.
*Fatigue that keeps us from being truly alert.
*Medications that cause drowsiness, including cold medications but also alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.
Attitude can be a major factor in your ability to recall information. If you believe your memory is poor, that there’s nothing you can do to improve or maintain it, that you’ll end up dependent and worse, with Alzheimer’s, then you may be sentencing yourself to your own worst fears.
On the other hand, being positive and optimistic about your life and your abilities can do wonders for maintaining your memory.
“The secret of memory is attention,” says Dr. Andrew Weil, whose most recent books, “Spontaneous Healing” and “8 Weeks to Optimum Health,” reflect his interest in integrating traditional Western medicine with alternative medicine. At his Web site, “Ask Dr. Weil” — www.drweil.com — a number of people have written in to ask about dealing with memory loss.
Motivation, he says, is the key, and as we get older some of us may not really be as interested in remembering certain things as we think we are .
Weil notes that many people like to use “smart drugs” like piracetam, Hydergine and selegine as well as DHEA.
But he says that “there really isn’t much evidence supporting the effectiveness of smart drugs and we don’t have information on their long-term use.”
Weil sometimes recommends that older people take gingko biloba for memory. It affects blood circulation, increasing blood supply to the brain and improves the brain’s ability to use oxygen. However, he warns that unless you’re an older person with arterial disease it’s unlikely to help.
Instead, Weil suggest putting your mind through the same kind of conditioning workout you should be doing with your body. Word puzzles are good, he notes, as are picture exercises in which you list what you saw in a picture. Or give your mind a mental challenge by studying something new, like another language.
Here are some additional exercises offered by the National Policy and Resource Center on Women and Aging:
*Visualization: Re-create in your mind a picture of an object you have seen or imagined in the past to improve the “recording” of your memories and their recall. Start by visualizing something familiar around your home. Then think about the color, the shape, if it has any writing on it — every detail possible. Practice this technique regularly.
*Association and imagery: For mental connections or bonds between sensations, ideas or memories, use your visualization technique and add emotional associations to it.
*Selective attention and differentiation: Be attentive to what you choose to concentrate on. If there’s something you want to remember, look at it, analyze it and ask yourself some important questions to plant it firmly in your mind.
And do some practical things like writing things down, putting things in the same place, and repeating information (like a name or directions) over again. Make associations — apples being needed for apple pies — and trigger your memory immediately — place the package you need to take to the post office by the door as soon as you’ve decided to make the trip.