Page 49 - The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss and Enhance Memory Power

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a third seventy-one, and so on. Each time he flashed the card in front of her, she would immediately
blurt out the right number of dots. For the life of me, I couldn't make out the differences between the
number of red dots on these cards, and neither could Anil. I was impressed, because clearly his three-
year-old daughter wasn't familiar with the concept of numbers, let alone the meaning of sixty-nine or
seventy-one. Anil explained to me that his daughter wasn't really unique— very young children
normally possess a nearly perfect visual photographic memory. This ability is lost when they grow
older, perhaps because it is displaced by the development of language.

This experience increased my awareness of the fact that there are many untapped resources within
each one of us. Cultivating these skills is essential to developing and maintaining our intellectual
faculties, including memory. Even though prime time for learning is when you are young, learning
and memory can still be enhanced in middle age and beyond, provided you undertake the right steps.

What Is Senility?: Esther's Story

Esther Erickson, an eighty-three-year-old retired bookkeeper living alone, came with a long-standing
friend and neighbor who had persuaded Esther that her memory needed to be checked. Esther had
begun to forget names, locked herself out of her apartment a couple of times, and had accidentally
left the stove on once. Other than a slight slowness in walking, there wasn't anything unusual in her
neurological examination, and her psychiatric assessment was completely normal. The rest of my
diagnostic workup was notable for only two findings. Her memory was slightly below par, but
otherwise she scored in the normal range for someone her age on the neuropsychological tests. Her
MRI scan revealed a very small stroke in the basal ganglia, which is a brain center that controls
motor movements. This helped explain her slowness in walking but not her memory lapses.

Before I complete her story, put on your diagnostic hat for a moment. Is this normal aging? Is this
mild memory loss? Or is this early Alzheimer's disease? And where does “senility’’ fit into the
picture?

Esther Erickson does not fit well into any diagnostic category. She is precisely the kind of patient
if
who would have been rated as being on the way to “senility” she had come to see a doctor fifty
years ago. Nowadays, we don't like to use the term senility because it blurs the distinctions between
mild memory loss and dementia. Also, the