Page 73 - The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss and Enhance Memory Power

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CHAPTER 6

Train Your Brain to Remember

Never Stop Learning

In the mid-1990s, a professor at one of my alma maters, the National Institute of Mental Health and
Neurosciences in Bangalore, India, planted himself at my doorstep in New York. He was on a trip to
Rio de Janeiro for an international conference and had arranged an “essential, educational” detour in
North America before proceeding south. During his stay with me, he observed various facets of our
department at Columbia University in action. Before he left for Rio, he summarized his New York
experience.

“Here in America, you people keep learning all the time. From your interns and residents all the
way to your senior faculty at the top. In India, we are just as good as the people in the United States
at the stage when we finish residency training, but we tend to stop learning after we get a permanent
faculty position. Your learning curve is a straight line that keeps going up, whereas ours climbs early
on but then slows down and completely levels off. That is why you have accomplished so much
more than your former classmates, who were just as good as you were, until you left and came to the
States.”

I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing what he said to make his gruff and curt utterances more
reader-friendly. But the kernel of truth in his brief monologue, which I must confess had escaped me