The author is concerned about her apparent loss of memory in middle age. She seeks scientific (and other) experts for advice, and tries some of the recommendations.
Interesting discussion of using diet and dietary supplements, but what stands out here is how so many things are recommended by various individual studies, but when studies are repeated, results seldom are.
There is a good discussion about how chronic stress severely hampers memory in the perfectly titled "Bathing in Battery Acid: Elevated Cortisol Associated with Chronic Stress Is No Friend to Your Hippocampus."
This section really rang true for me:
P 75-76, Chapter 7; Mental Aerobics.
Using All Five Senses.
Lawrence Katz, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University shares... skepticism about the value of mnemonics and other "tricks" that promise to improve your memory. In his book Keep Your Brain Alive, he takes a different approach., "I looked through all the books on memory," he explained, "and they all focused on the same thing-- learn the rules for mnemonics. The thing is, I can't remember those rules. They involve very complex associations."
Memory and attention are suffering, Katz believes, because sometime in the last couple of decades, we've ceased to engage several of our senses. The world has gone flat, brought to us through a computer monitor or a TV screen. "All television and movies are now designed to activate your attentional mechanism," he remarked. "People are developing a kind of massive attentional disorder, because this stimulation keys into the coarse triggers of your brain. I call it the pornographying of sensation. It makes real life seem pale and timid by association, and we quit paying attention. When it's constant, your brain habituates to it and shuts it off. And, imagine, if it has shut out all the loud, dramatic stuff, how easy it is for it to ignore smaller things.
"There are no smells," he announced. "You don't know what anything feels like or tastes like. It's all visual now. Think of a supermarket. Nothing has an odor. We don't like odors. You're supposed to choose your fish or your chicken based solely on the visuals. You're not even supposed to pick up the vegetables to squeeze and sniff them. That's frowned upon. So you miss things like texture, smell and heft. We've become sensorily deprived. It has to do with the ubiqutiy of visual images-- on the Internet, on television, in the movies. We're so saturated with visual images, we quit paying attention to how things smell or sound or feel."
