DISCOVERIES
Can’t Remember What I Forgot
The Good News From the Front Lines of Memory Research
Sue Halpern
Harmony Books: 272 pp., $24
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SPEAKING OF forgetting, have you noticed that good writing is memorable? Bad writing gets lost in the brain’s labyrinth; good writing is clear. Sue Halpern has a remarkable ability to illuminate her complicated subject -- in this case, the human brain and memory. It’s her secret blend of personal story, fact, anecdote and description, a mix that fits snugly into a reader’s store of usable knowledge. She walks us through her learning curve as she wrote the book, describing her anxiety as she experienced the brain scans and neurological tests an Alzheimer’s patient might undergo, observing the mannerisms of the doctors and patients she interviewed, noticing when she was being persuaded by confidence, charm and snake oil and when she was in the presence of creativity, innovation and genius.
She begins with the importance of memory and the anxiety surrounding it: “We rely on memory not only to remember but to walk and dream and talk and smell and plan and fear and love and think and learn and more and more and more,” she writes. “Memory is how we know the world -- that is a tree, this is a sentence -- and know ourselves -- I like chocolate ice cream, I am a singer -- and know ourselves in the world.”
A 2006 MetLife Foundation survey revealed that Alzheimer’s is the disease people under 55 fear most, except for cancer. After 55, they fear Alzheimer’s more. Not remembering names, misplacing car keys, forgetting phone numbers -- all are harbingers of deeper fears: losing one’s personality, losing one’s control, not knowing what one’s future holds in store. Alzheimer’s threatens the most vital aspects of our existence. Halpern warns that as the population ages, “Alzheimer’s will mutate into a public health emergency, with an estimated 16 million Americans, 16.5 million Europeans and residents of the United Kingdom, and 62.8 million Asians with the disease by 2050.” Halpern talks to scientists and doctors engaged in memory research -- in academia, in the corporate world and on the bestseller lists. In one beautifully drawn scene, she sits in on a visit by a sophisticated couple to their doctor; it takes her almost an hour to decide whether it’s the husband or the wife who been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
The preventive power of blueberries, the shrinking hippocampus, the vital diagnostic role of the entorhinal cortex -- Halpern weaves all of the discoveries and efforts to combat dementia and memory loss into something graspable. Doctors still don’t have a reliable way of treating Alzheimer’s, but the toolbox is growing. “We are really getting at the core defects of both Alzheimer’s and age-related memory loss,” Scott Small, a doctor at Columbia University whom Halpern comes to admire, tells her. “To understand something to the point of being able to fix it you have to get down to the molecular level. And that’s where we’re at. The goal is to take a person with mild forgetfulness and prevent him or her from developing dementia. . . . We’ve entered into the era where that’s plausible to predict.”
