It's okay. I don't remember your name either.

By Sandra Parshall

I have forgotten most of the multiplication table.

I know what 6x5 and 6x7 are, and I can add another 6 to get 6x8=48, but 6x9... wait a sec, let me work it out. All of the 9x results are a little out of ready reach these days.

But why should I bother anyway? I have calculators for that sort of thing – several of them, so one is always handy.

Same goes for a lot of information I use to store in my memory. I don’t have to do that anymore because I always have a gadget – right now my favorite is my iPad – to look things up quickly. I don’t even own a smartphone, so I haven’t become dependent on one the way many people have, but I am dependent on my iPad and my computer.

Those don’t help, though, when I’m face to face with somebody whose name I can’t dredge up from the ooze that serves as my memory. I’m not alone in this. Sister writer Lorraine Bartlett (Lorna Barrett) has a big button that says, “It’s okay. I don’t remember your name either.” A lot of us should wear such a pin when we attend a conference with a couple thousand people.

Names bedevil most of it. You might think politicians have phenomenal memories for names, but what they actually have are aides whispering in their ears. Even the Pope has assistants to fill him in on the names of people he’s receiving, together with little details about their lives if they’ve met the Pope before. Having the Pope ask, “How is your mother’s health now?” or tell you, “I was saddened to hear of your mother’s passing” might make you feel important, but don’t get carried away.

Why do humans have so much trouble matching names to faces – and why does the problem get worse as we age?

The obvious answer is that everything gets worse as we age. The brain is just another organ of the body, and it ages along with our knees and hips and skin. And memory is a primary function of the brain.

Until a few years ago, neuroscientists believed that once the memory of an event was physically implanted in the brain, there it stayed in its original form unless destroyed by disease or injury. This theory was so widely accepted that one scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize for “proving” it.

Neuroscientists now know that instead of being hardwired into the brain, unchangeable, a memory is dynamic and can be altered by current experiences. There may be no such thing as a totally accurate memory.

Many experiments and studies have led to the same conclusion: memories are highly malleable, they have a lot in common with imagination, and we are constantly revising them. We frequently haul out our memories, handle them, share them, expose them to our current experiences, and every time we access them we may change them slightly. Our emotional state today can alter our memories of what happened years ago. The more often we recall an event, the more likely we are to embroider it with imagined details, but because it’s so clear in our memories, we’re certain it happened exactly that way.

Furthermore, science has recently learned more about the role of sleep in forming memories. Every living creature on Earth sleeps. That alone is proof that sleep is essential to life. The brain demands peace and quiet, a disconnect from the external world, in which to carry out functions that remain largely mysterious to us. (Dolphins, which spend their lives in water but must surface frequently to breathe air, meet this demand by turning off one side of their brains at a time.) While we slumber, our brains are busy doing... what?

Making memories, for one thing. Scientists have believed for a century that sleep is vital to memory, and in recent years they’ve found proof of that theory. Our memories tend to be better if we get adequate sleep. (All-nighters are not a student’s best route to high test scores.) One current hypothesis is that the sleeping brain sorts through the day’s experiences, emotions, and intake of information, clips away extraneous material to make it all manageable, and stores everything that made a strong impression or fits best with previously formed memories. Small wonder we have weird dreams when all that clipping and filing is going on in our heads.

But back to names. Why do we have trouble remembering them?

Paul Reber, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, answered the question in the November/December 2012 issue of Scientific American Mind. The problem, he said, is that names are arbitrary. Most of them don’t mean anything, so our brains can’t carry out the process of association that it uses to form other memories. What does “John” mean, after all? What does “Sandra” mean? Most names are just sounds. If you meet someone named Summer or Four-Wheel Drive, you’ll have a better chance of remembering what to call that person next time you meet. But with most names, our brain has nothing concrete to associate the sound with, so the name doesn’t stick as a memory.

You can use various tricks to remember a name, such as rhyming it with another word – but be careful that you don’t address Sally as Dally or Cass as Ass next time you meet.

And, yes, it gets harder as we, and our brains, age.

Maybe someone will invent a little gadget that will let us surreptitiously record the face and name of everyone we meet and magically retrieve that information next time.

How would you rate your memory for names? Has your memory in general grown worse as you've aged?

Reading and Memory

by Sheila Connolly

As I read my newspaper at dawn this morning (I'm trying to avoid the heat—five a.m. can be very pleasant, I've found, and yes, I still read a paper made of paper), my eye was caught by a short article in the "Be Well" section, with the headline "Reading and writing preserves memory, researchers say."

Briefly: Researchers at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, where there is a Memory and Aging Project (per their website, still recruiting participants, if you're interested) announced this week that a multi-year study they have conducted strongly suggests that "participants who reported reading and writing throughout their life, especially in old age, were 32 percent less likely to show deterioration in brain regions involved in memory," and "those who reported infrequently reading and writing into old age experienced a 48 percent faster rate of memory loss."

I feel so much better.  Okay, the study involved only three hundred octogenarians and depended upon answers to a survey (and we all know they aren't always accurate) as well as physical observations upon autopsy, but it's encouraging nonetheless.  The old adage "use it or lose it" still applies.

I've been reading before I can remember, and I've never slowed down, as my overflowing bookshelves can attest.  I've been writing for over a decade now (longer if you want to count academic papers in my younger days, as well as grant proposals and reports a decade or two later).  But who knew that I was preserving brain cells all the while?

Carl Sagan is reported to have said, "The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous." How rare is it that something that feels good is also good for us?  And even better, we as writers are performing a valuable service to our readers, by providing them with books that will help sustain their brain function for years.

And now I have another justification for all those books in my To-Be-Read pile:  I'm stockpiling therapeutic tools.  I'm not sure how well that rationale (rationalization?) applies to the thousands of books I've saved over the years, but I might want to reread them.  Would it be a sign of aging if I can't remember whodunnit in some of them?

Memory is a tricky thing.  Sometimes we rewrite our own, or we selectively mask or erase certain parts.  I had an odd conversation with my husband this weekend, when I described in detail a wonderful O'Keefe and Merritt gas stove we had in the first house we owned, and he had no memory of it at all.  (For the record, he used it as much as I did.) Wiped from his databanks.

In return, he accuses me of blotting out the second car we bought together.  Maybe.  I think he drove it a lot more than I did, commuting to work. I had a different car at the same time, and I can tell you a lot more about that one.

Sometimes these days I feel the need to document everything in the house, particularly items I've inherited from four generations of my family, because I'm the only one who knows what they are and where and who they came from, and my daughter won't know what each piece means, when she comes to inherit it.  I haven't done it yet.  But this weekend I sorted through my t-shirt collection, and I can still tell you when I acquired each one, and where and why. Maybe I'm just practicing. (I have a lot of t-shirts.)

But reading is something else.  It seems to be using a different part of our brain.  I'll be happy to sacrifice my memories of my t-shirts if I can continue to enjoy reading and writing.

Getting Rid of Bad Memories

Sandra Parshall

If you could get a simple injection or pill that would erase your worst memories and leave everything else intact, would you do it?

Few things interest me more than the mystery of human memory, and I've dwelled on it a good bit in my writing. So I was fascinated by Jonah Lehrer’s article in Wired magazine about the latest efforts to find a cure for post-traumatic stress disorder.

War veterans aren’t the only people who are crippled by PTSD. Survivors of rape, child molestation, violent muggings, fires, and natural disasters will never lead normal lives again if they can’t find a way to stop the past from poisoning the present. Few effective treatments exist to help these people, and at least one widely used approach, called critical incident stress debriefing (CISD), may have done more harm than good.

CISD has been endorsed and used for years by the Department of Defense, FEMA, the Red Cross, the United Nations, and the Israeli Army. The basic premise is that forcing a victim or survivor to recall the trauma in deep detail as soon as possible after the experience will prevent the memory from festering into PTSD. This “treatment” has been used on thousands of people, including some affected by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, as Lehrer reports in his article, it rarely helps, and studies show it often increases emotional suffering by reinforcing the trauma. Now psychologists have begun recommending that CISD be discontinued.

The real answer to PTSD probably lies in the neurochemistry of our brains. Scitentists have established that memories, those snapshots of the past that we either cherish or fear, are nothing more than a collection of chemicals and neurons. They aren’t cemented in place, unchangeable, waiting for our consciousness to shine a light on them. Our brains have to reconstruct a memory each time it’s called up, a process called memory reconsolidation. Our present mood or circumstances can alter our memories and our reactions to them.

In most cases, as a person’s emotions settle down after a loss or a stressful event, the memories become less heartwrenching or frightening. They can also become less accurate, as our brains change details or do a wholesale rewrite. We’re not aware this is happening, so an eyewitness to a crime may give false testimony while sincerely believing that he or she is remembering things correctly. Two people with wildly different memories of the same event can have a heated argument over whose account is accurate, when it’s likely that neither is.

But back to PTSD. In the late 1990s, a young neuroscientist named Karim Nader began examining the chemistry of memory recall. If a memory must be reconstructed each time it is called up, would blocking the chemical rebuilding process during recall destroy the memory itself? His experiments with rats proved that it would, without affecting any other memories.

Nader’s discovery, like other breakthroughs in the history of science, was greeted with scorn by his colleagues. Nobody would listen. He was shunned at conferences and couldn’t get his findings published in journals. Infuriated by this cold reception, Nader pushed on, and by 2005 his work was being taken seriously. During the same period, neuroscientist Todd Sacktor of Columbia University discovered that a neuro protein called PKMzeta plays the key role in memory formation, and without it the brain loses its ability to reconstruct long-term memories. If the production of PKMzeta is blocked while a specific memory is recalled, the memory itself may vanish.

Although treatment of PTSD seems the logical use of this breakthrough, Sacktor believes the first to benefit will be people suffering from persistent, unexplained physical pain and drug addiction. In one case, the body’s memory of pain will be erased and the cycle broken. In the other, erasing the memory of pleasure associated with drugs may take away the desire for them.

How much farther will we go with it, though, when this treatment is available beyond the testing lab? We already edit and rewrite our memories, and all of us have probably suppressed a few bad memories. But what about the big, ugly one that won’t go away, the one that invades your dreams and makes you miserable each time it intrudes on the present? Would you pay to have that memory removed forever from your brain?

Can you trust your memory?

Sandra Parshall

Forget everything you ever believed about memory.

Neuroscientists have decided they got it wrong the first time around – instead of being hardwired into the brain, unchangeable, a memory is dynamic and can be distorted or drastically altered by current experiences. There may be no such thing as a totally accurate memory.

Of course, ordinary people have always known that we have gaps in our memories, that we sometimes “misremember” things, but we don't seem to doubt the accuracy of the memory itself; we just assume our conscious minds are having trouble accessing it. Police and prosecutors have always known that eyewitness testimony is unreliable – question 20 witnesses to a crime and you’ll probably get 20 different accounts of what happened and what the perpetrator looked like. Yet the human faith in the rock-solid truth of memory is so strong that juries send people to prison solely because eyewitnesses have identified them, and we argue to the point of blows over “what really happened” during a pivotal event.

Until a few years ago, neuroscientists believed that once a memory was physically implanted in the brain, there it stayed in its original form unless destroyed by disease or injury.

The flaw in the old theory of unchanging memory became obvious in the early 1990s when a startling number of people began recalling “repressed memories” of childhood sexual abuse. After a while the situation resembled the Salem witch hunt, which is now considered a sort of group hallucination. Families were torn apart. Innocent people were branded as pedophiles. Some of those memories of abuse may have been real. Some may have been knowingly fabricated. But many were apparently planted in vulnerable minds, however unintentionally, by therapists. A few people heard and read so much about repressed memories that they started believing they’d been abused as kids too. If the false memory of horrifying events could be created by suggestion, what other manipulations of memory were possible?

My own fascination with that question resulted in my first published novel, The Heat of the Moon. Until the final title popped up while I was writing Chapter 11, the book’s working title was Memory. It’s interesting to note that one editor who rejected the book said she simply didn’t believe that anyone’s memory could be manipulated.

That editor’s opinion aside, hundreds of experiments and studies in the past decade have led to the same conclusion: memories are highly malleable, they have a lot in common with imagination, and we are constantly revising them. The more often we recall an event, the more likely we are to embroider it with imagined details, and because it’s so clear in our memories, we’re certain it happened exactly that way. (Hillary Clinton’s account of leaving a plane under nonexistent sniper fire, a story she obviously believed, is a perfect example.)

A memory is a chemical reaction in the brain, involving more than a hundred proteins. Electrical impulses (aka sensory information – sights, tastes, smells, etc.) set the process in motion, and the thing we call a memory ends up in the amygdala, which is the size of an almond, and the tiny, banana-shaped hippocampus. Everything we have ever experienced, thought, desired, feared – everything that makes us who we are – resides in these astonishingly small storage spaces inside our skulls. But we frequently haul out our memories, handle them, share them, expose them to our current experiences, and every time we access them we may change them slightly. Our emotional state today can alter our memories of what happened years ago.

All this may create problems for a prosecutor who needs reliable eyewitnesses, but it may offer a way back to peace of mind for combat veterans, rape victims, and others tormented by post-traumatic stress disorder. Every recall of a frightening memory sets off a chemical reaction in the brain that can reinforce or magnify the original terror. But what would happen if the mind were prevented from making all the chemical connections that produce fear?

A few psychiatrists and psychologists who treat patients with PTSD are taking a new approach based on a better understanding of how the brain processes memories. They give a patient propranolol, a common, safe medication for high blood pressure that also happens to block some of the chemical reactions in the brain that reinforce frightening memories. While the patient is on propranolol, he deliberately calls up the traumatic memory, but because propranolol prevents his brain chemistry from going haywire, he is able to remember the entire experience more calmly. After a series of such “treatments” most patients are no longer at the mercy of their past traumas. Will the benefit last? At this point, no one knows, but if it does, it may lead to new ways of treating anxiety disorders, phobias, even addictions.

Our memories tell us who we are and where we came from. An amnesiac – or a victim of Alzheimer’s – has no identity. Because our memories are essential to our sense of who we are, it’s more than a little scary to admit that they aren’t totally reliable. It’s always disconcerting to find that someone who shared an experience with us remembers it in a radically different way, with details we don’t recognize. With so much scientific evidence of the memory’s malleability accumulating, though, we may have to admit that each of us sees the past through a distorted filter. If researchers could give us a foolproof way to remember where we put our car keys, all the rest might be easier to swallow.

How would you rate your memory? Have you ever argued with your spouse or a friend or a sibling about your differing accounts of an event or a place? Have you ever been shocked to find proof that something you remember vividly didn’t actually happen?

Have we met?

Sandra Parshall

I’ve spent most of my life as the person nobody remembers.

Forgettable face, painfully shy, too-soft voice, last name that a lot of people can’t even pronounce. (It’s Parshall-rhymes-with-Marshall, in case you’re interested. Not par-SHALL or Pershell or Purcell or Pars-hall.) I was used to not being remembered. In a way, that was a good thing, because I have the world’s worst memory for names and faces. If I couldn’t remember them, and they couldn’t remember me, we were always starting fresh on equal terms.

Then I published a mystery novel and started doing signings, library programs, conference panels, ABA and ALA conventions. Now a disturbing number of people do recognize me, but I still can’t remember them. Someone will come up to me and say, “I really enjoyed your talk at our library last year!” And I'll smile and say, “Oh, thank you! That’s nice to hear.” But silently, I’m frantically scouring my mental databank. Which library? Where? Is this the librarian – oh, heaven forbid I should ever offend a librarian! – or someone who attended and, bless her, bought a book? It helps enormously if we’re at an event where everyone wears a name tag. At least I’ve got the name and can fake the memory.

What’s really embarrassing is being on a panel with another writer, then not recognizing her later in the day. A close runnerup for most embarrassing is chatting with somebody for five minutes, only to have the person say, “You don’t remember me, do you?” Busted!

I don’t mean to imply that I’ve become a celebrity or anything close to one. I never have to fear being mobbed by admirers when I walk down the street. (How do movie stars and Stephen King live with that sort of thing?) No, my recognizability is limited to certain venues, and those are the places where it’s most important and gratifying. They’re also the settings in which my own lousy memory is most embarrassing.

I have to say, though, that I’ve been comforted by the knowledge that much better writers than I can’t recall faces and names either. Around Big Name writers, I’m still The Forgotten One. I can meet a well-known writer, have a conversation, even do an interview for this blog and exchange multiple e-mails, but the next time I stand in a line to have that writer sign a book, I can count on it: neither my face nor my name rings a bell. I’m just another anonymous fan.

Sometimes being forgotten is a good thing. There’s a certain writer whose work I admire so much that when I had a chance to talk one-on-one with him, I gushed and blushed and made a complete fool of myself. He was quite amused, I’m sure, and he was so kind that he kissed me on the cheek. When we attended the same conference recently, I wanted him to sign his latest book for me, but the whole time I was standing in line I was silently praying, “Please don’t remember me, please don’t remember me, please don’t remember me.” Guess what? He didn’t. For one cringe-inducing second he looked at me with what might have been recognition, but he apparently decided we hadn’t met before, and he signed the book without comment. I slunk away, enormously relieved.

Dear reader, if you and I have met before, and we meet in the future, I beg you to take my terrible memory for names and faces into account and try to be forgiving. Tell me who you are and where and when we met. It will be a pleasure to see you again.