Page 75 - The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss and Enhance Memory Power

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because the tests are culturally biased against someone who did not grow up in the United States.
However, tests of memory are more immune from cultural effects, and her below normal
performance on the test requiring recall of a list of common nouns suggested a real deficit. Rosa
Gonzalez supposedly had eight years of education, but on further discussion with her daughter it
became clear that she'd had only four years of formal schooling.

Education is well known to have a major impact on performance for most cognitive tests, though
less so for memory. I thought that this was probably age-related memory loss and not early dementia
but wasn't sure. During the next four years, Rosa Gonzalez did not worsen in her neuropsychological
test performance, confirming that she indeed did have memory loss due to aging and not a dementing
process like Alzheimer's disease.

If You're Highly Educated, Subtle Memory Loss Is a Red Flag

This example shows that the impact of education (and culture) on cognitive test performance is
almost as large as the effect of age itself. Education increases brain reserve capacity and thus
decreases the likelihood of memory loss and intellectual decline. My colleague Dr. Yaakov Stern
published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association demonstrating that highly
educated people can mask memory loss by “talking around the problem’’ in the early stages of
Alzheimer's disease. Presumably, their association cortex around the hippocampus is better
developed, giving them a “cognitive reserve” that can be brought into play when the brain's frontline
attempt at recall fails. So if you're highly educated, even subtle memory loss may be more serious
than it seems, because it says that your strong cognitive reserve is breaking down.

The Kentucky Nuns Controversy

In a study of nuns residing in a convent, David Snowdon and his colleagues from the University of
Lexington in Kentucky examined the autobiographical essays that all the candidate nuns were
required to write when they joined the convent. The young nuns who had low “idea
density” (number of ideas per every ten words) were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with
Alzheimer's disease (diag-