Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine

Improve Your Memory

For a Healthy Brain

Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine

W. R. Klemm, Ph.D.

Published by W. R. Klemm at Smashwords

Copyright © 2014 by W. R. Klemm

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review and Catalog in Publication Data.

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Table of Contents

The Author

Foreword

Chapter 1. Is your brain older than you are?

What happens in aging brain?

Brains don't have to age

Brain inflammation

Aging and the hardening of categories

Slow the mind-aging process

Chapter 2. Relations of Memory to Other Brain Functions

The importance of memory research

Lifestyles of the old and forgetful

Beliefs

Getting a better memory takes will power

Old memories may be wrong

Chapter 3. Treat the Causes of Absentmindedness

How memory is stored

Mindfulness

Distractibility

Stress

Obesity

Exercise

Humor might make you live longer

Memory athlete gimmicks

Chapter 4. The Brain Diseases of Aging

Cold and flu can damage brain

Stroke

Parkinson's disease

Alzheimer's disease

Advice to caregivers

Chapter 5. Rx for Memory

Cognition-enhancing supplements

Drugs affecting memory

Memory drugs on the horizon

Ritalin

Statins

Chapter 6. The Biology for Hope

Decline is not inevitable

New neurons

Teaching old dogs new tricks

Learning and memory schema

Rehabilitation

Tips to help memory rehabilitation work

Memory training for assisted living

Super agers. How to be one

Working memory training raises IQ of adults

Brain exercise really works

Preventing falls

Yoga

Traumatic memories

End Notes

The Author

W. R. Klemm

Memory Medic

Dr. Bill Klemm is a Senior Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University. He has spent a career in brain research, much of which has been on memory. His 50+ years of neuroscience experience and his own aging have given him additional insights into how to age well.

Other recent books by Dr. Klemm

Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (Prometheus)

Memory Power 101 (Skyhorse)

Better Grades, Less Effort (Benecton)

Core Ideas in Neuroscience (Benecton)

Visit his book site at http://wrklemm.com/

Blog, Improve Learning & Memory at ThankYouBrain.blogspot.com.

See profile at Linkedin.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wklemm

Twitter: @wrklemm

Yes, I am a Senior Citizen,

and I am having the time of my life.

The Senility Prayer

God grant me the senility

To forget the people

I never liked anyway

The good fortune to

Run into the ones I do,

And the eyesight

To tell the difference

Reprinted with permission of Frank Kaiser,

Suddenly Senior.com

Prayer does a lot of positive things, but improving your memory is probably not one of them. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve memory that do work, even in seniors.

Foreword

An Interview about the book:

Question: Why did you write this book?

Answer: I am a neuroscientist and have always had an interest in memory. Early on, the interest was there because memory skills made school and college easier to master. Later, I got into research and actually did memory experiments on rats and college students. As I got older, I wanted to stay mentally healthy as long as I could. I see so many of my older friends slipping mentally. It is so sad, and I wanted to do what I can to help people from reaching a stage of mental deterioration. Because I follow the memory research literature anyway, I wanted to share the helpful findings that scientists have been discovering over the last few decades.

Question: I understand it is an e-book. Why did you choose that format?

Answer: That makes it inexpensive. Everybody should be able to afford it. Besides, in e-format it is easy to search around for reminders and topics you want to look up. The book is available at Amazon, but at Smashwords.com you can get it in any e-format, including pdf.

Question: Why do you say that memory is the canary in the brain’s coal mine?

Answer: Many decades ago, before there was technology to detect accumulation of toxic gases in coal mines, miners used to put a caged canary in the mine with them. If they canary keeled over, it was time to get out. Well, memory is like that. Declining ability for remembering is a sign that brain damage has occurred. In this case, by the time you notice a problem, it may be too late. The good news is that training your memory is very effective exercise for the brain, and such exercise of the brain builds robust circuitry that accumulates as a cognitive reserve as one ages.

Question: People are living so much longer and so much grief is happening in families because of dementia and Alzheimer's Disease. How does memory training apply here?

Answer: Research demonstrates that though memory training may not prevent dementia, it surely delays it and allows more years of normal brain function.

Question: How does memory exercise and training help delay brain aging?

Answer: You could make an analogy to how weight lifting builds muscles. Only brain uses different mechanisms. Whenever the brain forms a lasting memory, the brain has to create new circuitry to hold the representation of that memory. The storage space is created by changing the synaptic weightings of the neural circuits that will house that memory representation. By synaptic weighting, I mean basically a souping up of the pathways so that the circuit is preferentially re-set for that particular memory. The weighting has to be achieved by greater neurotransmitter activity. This requires gene activation to grow synaptic junctions and to augment the enzyme systems needed for more transmitter. These gene expression changes create real anatomical and chemical changes. Changing memory changes brain. In terms of aging, this means that a large store of memories creates more circuitry, which means the brain can do more things. This can be essentially a cognitive reserve that compensates for physical deterioration that might be occurring. An example is that autopsies of some people have shown that their brains had the lesions of Alzheimer's Disease, but they never showed clinical symptoms because they had been so mentally active all their life.

Question: Why don't more people make a conscious effort to improve their memory?

Answer: I am baffled. Maybe part of the answer is that any kind of change is hard. Another factor is that many people do not believe they can improve their mental and memory capability. They likely do not know how to improve memory ability, which of course is a main reason I wrote the book. I see this problem even in the young, particularly college students who trap themselves and persist in bad learning strategies and habits, even after I show them a better way. They seem set in their ways, in spite of being young.

Question: How does the information in this book apply to you personally?

Answer: I turn 81 this July and think I can document that I am mentally at the top of my game. All my life I have learned about and used memory enhancement ideas. Although this life has been an experiment with n=1, I think the results are more than coincidence. And research involving other people that I describe in the book supports this conclusion.

____________________________

Chapter 1. Is Your Brain Older Than You Are?

____________________________

Old age is when it takes longer

to rest than to get tired.

____________________________

Each New Year’s eve it’s a little harder to stay up till midnight to do the Happy New Year thing. Are the bags and crow’s feet around your eyes starting to get obvious even to you? Do you buy a larger belt every few years? These are all obvious things that most of we seniors gradually come to experience. But what about the things that are harder for us to see in ourselves, like aging of our brain?

Aging brains typically lose some ability to think and remember. There might be clues, such as forgetting things more than usual. Maybe learning tasks, like learning a second language, are more difficult. Do we still have that laser-like focus we used to have? Do we tend to fall asleep watching TV? These and related signs of mental decline that often go with aging are not inevitable. On the other hand, they may get worse, leading perhaps to brain degenerative disease such as Parkinson's disease, dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

Memory Myth Buster #1:

Memory capability declines with age.

Such decline is common, but not inevitable. This book is designed to convince you that mental function need not decline with age.

Commonly, our body parts wear out at different rates. Often, the joints start to fail first. Sometimes it is the heart or the liver or the kidneys. But sometimes it is the brain.

When the brain starts to deteriorate, it is usually due to causes elsewhere in the body, such as high blood sugar from diabetes that degrades blood vessels and damages nerve terminals, or cholesterol-induced blockage of small blood vessels in the brain, or high blood pressure which can burst vessels. And sometimes the problem originates in the brain directly, such as stress, head trauma, or lack of mental stimulation.

For the society, the problem is that so many people are getting old. In the U.S., about 3.6 million baby boomers reach the age of 65 each year — a demographic transition that began in 2011 and will continue for the next 19 years. Similar demographic shifts occur in many other countries, as modern medicine increases lifespan. Whole societies are being affected in major economic and social ways in countries where the population is aging rapidly, such as Japan (23% over 65), Germany (20.5%), Italy (20.4%), and the U.S. (13%). The countries that show that fastest rate of increased population age, in order, are Iran, Vietnam, Mexico, India, and South Korea. The obvious consequences are a shrinking labor force and shifting of a nation’s wealth to health care.

In some Asian cultures, older people are venerated for the wisdom of their accumulated life experiences. Not so in America. Here, seniors are shunted to the side, deemed incapable of performing the high-level mental tasks required by today’s complex world. But seniors should not be judged as a group any more than other people, such as minorities who may be discriminated against because of their group identity.

____________________________

When I was young, there was no respect for youth.

Now that I am old, there is no respect for age.

I missed it coming and going.

____________________________

Young people say they expect to lose memory ability when older because the brain deteriorates with age. I tell them that improving their memory now will reduce their brain deterioration as they age.

Famous singer, Tony Bennett, just turned 88. He still performs and says he will never, ever retire in a recent interview on National Public Radio TV. Lately, he teams up with Lady Gaga in jazz duets with a jazz orchestra. Bennett says he is still learning to be a better singer. Other people who in past times would be put out to pasture include Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdock. Buffet, age 84 at this writing, still makes billions running his investment firm and is listed as the second richest man in the Forbes list of 400 richest people. Rupert Murdock, age 83, runs and continues to expand his News Corp empire. He is number 38 on the Forbes 400 list.

We live in a new age of health enlightenment. More and more people have stopped smoking, eat healthier food, exercise, and stay socially and mentally active well past the age when in past they would have died. We not only live longer, but many of us live better in old age. We all hope to live better as we age.

I can relate to these people, but not of course in the sense of being famous or rich. But I too started living a healthier life style, at age35. Now, as I sit here working on this page for yet another time, I turned 80. Happy birthday to me! And it is happy. I reflect over my many years and the fact that I am still mentally competent enough to function successfully as a Tier 1 university professor and scientist. I have not been ravaged with a failing memory. True, I sometimes forget to buy something I meant to get at the grocery store. True, I sometimes open the refrigerator and have to ask myself, What was it I was looking for? But young people have such lapses too.

There are three principles about memory to support my contention in this book's title, Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. I learned these principles over many decades, beginning as a boy of ordinary IQ excelling in school, a young man acquiring two doctor's degrees, and over 50 years of experience teaching and publishing research in neuroscience, which is the interdisciplinary science of the brain and nervous system.

The three principles are:

1. Forcing yourself to memorize, even for short-term memory, trains your brain to be more efficient and effective in memorizing.

2. Long-term stored information exists in memory only because the brain has been stimulated to create new micro circuitry. New circuitry can only be created because there are lasting changes in the brain, biochemistry, gene expression, and microanatomy.

3. We think with what is in our working memory, that low-capacity virtual scratchpad on which is written as succession of thought representations. The scratchpad content comes from a combination of real-time and remembered experience. Thus, the more information on the scratchpad, the richer our thoughts and problem solving skills can become. The capacity of this scratchpad is limited and easily erased before it can become lasting memory. In this book I will describe ways to train the scratchpad to become larger and to more reliably form lasting memories.

The corollary of these principles inspires the book's subtitle, Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine. A brain in the process of degenerating with age will not have full functional capacity. Memory ability is an index of how well the brain is working. More than that, we should think of memory like the canary in the proverbial coal mine. When the canary shows signs of sickness, it signals that the mine has become hazardous. When memory failures indicate diminishing brain function, it is time to act. Maybe past time—it may be too late. Prevention is the better strategy. This book provides the strategy and tactics to help protect your brain.

Unlike real canaries in real coal mines, improving the health of the canary improves the health of the coal mine. That is, building up memory capability when you are younger is a mental tonic. Everything you learn and remember long term exists in the brain because new connections have grown among the neurons. Learning new things invigorates the brain, stimulating it to stay young. Bennett, Buffet, and Murdoch are young in brain and mind because they have been keeping their brains active as they age.

When I look back on my days as a teenager, I think my memory then was substantially worse than it is now. I do remember my dad was always bugging me about Why did you forget? this or that. He even enrolled me in a Dale Carnegie course where they taught some memory athlete gimmicks (more about that in Chapter 3). Despite their vaunted ability to learn, young people today generally have poor memories. Nobody has taught them much about how to learn: teachers are forced to focus on teaching them what to learn to pass high-stakes tests. Besides, young people today are so overwhelmed with information, stimulation, and distractions, it is a wonder they learn anything.

What are they going to be like when they turn 80? And you, what will your mental function be like at that age? The time to start developing brain capability is decades earlier. It is never too late to improve brain function, but obviously the sooner you start the better the results will be.

As we age, the brains of most people age too, just like joints, arteries, sex drive, and other bodily functions. Though bodily signs of aging assault our vanity, nothing evokes anxiety like the realization of failing mental function. When a senior realizes that memory is slipping, the great existential question arises: am I going to become senile?

Working to maintain brain health is a lot like working in a coal mine. The longer you stay in a coal mine, the more dangerous the build-up of toxic gases becomes. As for brain health, the longer you live the more likely you are to suffer brain degeneration. There is a huge opportunity cost in living decade after decade without taking heed for your brain fitness. Such neglect can limit your job success, your pay grade, and most importantly your mental capability.

The early-warning signs in a coal mine today are detected by electronic sensors. But in earlier times, canaries were put in the coal mine to serve as early-warning detectors because they were especially sensitive to the gases. When the canary keeled over, it was time to get out.

In the case of brain health, the early warning indicator is memory. When memory starts to fail it means that your brain has already started to fail. Research clearly shows that whatever affects the brain affects the ability to remember. There is good news, however. Whatever improves your memory ability improves brain function.

This book has a focus on preventing and improving faulty memory. Memory decline