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while the final product will be extremely beautiful, you are likely to meet a few thorns along the
way. In this book, I have reviewed our current knowledge base and laid out a comprehensive
program to help you prevent memory loss due to the aging process, or to identify and treat mild
memory loss if it has already set in. But all this is based on current knowledge, which is clearly
limited in many ways. Given the various research directions that the field is taking, what does the
future hold?

Research in molecular genetics, neuroscience, and clinical trials is growing at a blinding pace and
is likely to accelerate. Part of this pressure comes from the worldwide exponential increase in
knowledge, and part of it comes from you. You comprise the largest segment of the population with
the most political clout, and at least when it comes to funding medical research, the politicians are
responding.

If things pan out the way that some experts hope, every Kodak moment will literally be inside
your head in a perfect image, and cameras will become obsolete. But I do not entirely subscribe to
this view, because the fact is that human memory is finite. We all have to wipe out old, useless
memories to make way for the new, important ones. We do this daily, as our hippocampi and frontal
lobes deliberately forget what we ate for lunch yesterday, two days ago, a week ago, and so forth.
Therefore, at least for the foreseeable future, I expect that new treatments will be able to completely
block memory loss, but they will not be able to give us total recall. Total recall would mean
cluttering up our brains with sundry, often worthless information, and life would become impossible
to manage.

Larger societal questions will spring forth as memory enhancement becomes a universal tool. Will
people in high-precision jobs that do not permit error, such as highfliers on Wall Street or surgeons
in the operating room, be required to take memory enhancers as a matter of course? And the courts,
which are already nightmarish in their complexity— what will they do about witnesses who do or
don't take promemory agents? And what about the opposite end of the age spectrum: will children be
made to take memory enhancers to perform well in school the way they now use computers and the
Internet to boost academic performance?

These possibilities lie well into the future. For now, I urge you to begin, and then maintain, the
Memory Program to prevent memory loss, and to directly tackle mild memory loss if it has already
begun to affect your life. I predict that as time goes on, you are likely to look back with satisfaction
at the results that you have achieved.