More than a "Senior Moment"

[LongTomH]

Guardian UK columnist Phil Hogan has done a really good article on memory loss associated with aging:

Phil Hogan finds out what the truth is behind memory loss and if you can avoid it

Now where was I? Ah, yes. I'm reading a book. It's about memory but of course I've already lost my thread. Neurons are involved, I know that much - involved, that is, not just in remembering what you've just read, for example, but also in the amazing way things can go in one ear and out of the other. I must try harder. I'm on chapter five but I'm also on a plane heading for San Francisco, where I have an appointment to see a memory expert at the university. After that, I'm whizzing off to New York to watch the 2008 US Memory Championships, where I'm expecting to get some tips on how to remember all the names in a telephone directory. A trip down memory lane, then, an odyssey of self-improvement.

My powers of recall are less than astonishing these days. For weeks, I've been racking my so-called brain, trying to put a name to the little town in southern Italy, on the cliff tops above Ischia and Capri. In 1983, my wife and I got off an island ferry there, stopped for a beer, then took a bus down the coast. It's a nice place. Odysseus (speaking of odysseys) stopped to listen to the Sirens there. Not Amalfi, not Positano. The other one. Full of Brits. You probably know it. I know it. But what is it called? Every now and then, I try to conjure it out of the remembered glare and bustle and sea and sky of that summer. I can see it but I'm damned if I can say it. I'm determined not to look it up. I keep thinking it's bound to come back but it hasn't.

All of this is familiar to those of us "of a certain age;" but, Phil done a wonderful job of exploring all the ramifications, including possibilities of treating memory loss. from memory training games to medicine.

So I'm not the world's only 52-year-old with a mind like a colander. We worried baby boomers are a burgeoning market. Just ask Dr Kawashima, the Japanese boffin-entrepreneur whose Nintendo handheld Brain Training game has sold in staggering numbers (17 million worldwide, 1.5m in the UK, where it was the biggest-selling game last year) to people in their late summer years who can't find their car keys and live in dread of creeping insanity. The game is pleasantly addictive, with its mental arithmetic and lists of random words and a laughably impossible caper where you have to keep track of partygoers dashing in and out of a little house. And how gratifying after two days to be told by an animated cartoon of a laughing Dr Kawashima that you have the mental agility of a 23-year-old! Nicole Kidman was hired to advertise it on TV (followed by Julie Walters, Zoe Ball and Star Trek's Patrick Stewart), to reassure us that celebrities are as scatterbrained as the rest of us. I got stuck on it for weeks, 20 minutes a day, driving myself bonkers trying in vain to improve my score on the disappearing-numbers task.

<snip>

But what about those of us who just want a better memory? 'Obviously it's frustrating,' he says. 'And we probably fear memory loss because that's the cardinal feature of Alzheimer's. But this is one of the big ethical issues - whether people are going to be able to buy better memories. The other concern, though, is will treating normal people actually make their memory worse? It may be that pushing in more chemicals may not help.'

Now you know you're not in the good old U.S.of A. Over here they would just be talking about the size of the market and the possible profits.

By the way, when you saw the title of this post, you were thinking about...uh, what was that guy's name? Uhhhh, you know the Republican candidate. McSomething or other?
:think: