MEMORY
I rarely ask a patient directly: "How's your memory?" because almost nobody is happy with their memory, everybody has complaints.
In fact, it is one hallmark of true dementia that the patient does NOT complain, though family members certainly do.
On impulse, I broke my own rule with a chipper octogenarian who seemed to have minimal problems and was enjoying life.
"How's your memory?"
"Oh, just fine," said he.
Surprised, I asked the next question:
"You don't forget things?"
"Of course I do. But I just send the dog out for them."
By which I took it to mean he accepted the processing time, the latency, involved in the retrieval process.
For example, I'll bet it takes you a good 3 seconds to remember what you had for dinner last night. And if you can't remember at all, send for the dog.
Alexander Luria's classic study of memory in which he quotes his famous mnemonist: "I can only understand what I can visualize."
That's what Wilder Penfield entitled his landmark 1958 publication. Penfield was a neurosurgeon who enlisted his patients cooperation in a remarkable series of operations reporting the effects of tiny electrical stimuli to different parts of the cortex. The patient's were being operated on for brain tumors or severe epilepsy and were awake during the surgery (altogether reasonable in the case of the brain which has no pain detecting mechanisms, no palace guard past the pia).
When area labelled 8 was stimulated patient said: "I suddenly could not hear" clearly related to the auditory sensory cortex. When area 11 was stimulated the patient reported: "Yes sir, I think I heard a mother calling her little boy somewhere. It seemed something that happened years ago." Area 11 is related to the hippocampal cortex, the source of "déja vu" and "olfactory auras" and disturbances of memory.
Yves Tanguy had a surrealist's preoccupation
with painting "oneiric" memories
directly from dreams
directly from the "subconscious"
Neuroanatomically, memory has been localized to the old "smell brain," the limbic system including the hippocampal formations and amygdala, all related closely to the olfactory system.
It is likely that when our forebears stood upright, parts of the "smell brain" were re-allocated to memory which is why smell, our weakest sense in some ways, is the most evocative of the past.
When it comes to improving our memories, the "tricks" were established years ago by students of rhetoric in the middle ages - make your memories visual, make them big, make them ridiculous and link them in a story. I recommend a book by Harry Lorayne, a marvelous stage mnemonist. The book is called simply "MEMORY." He believes that memorizing things is for the brain what sit-ups are for the body and encourages people to do"mental situps" like riddles: e.g. Many months have have 31 days - how many months have 28? Answer: all of them. For more of a workup go to
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