How To Improve It: The Battle To Save Your Memory

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It was the day I froze a household pet that I began to worry about my memory. Technically, it was not a real household pet I froze but a bag of tropical fish, which on the scale of beloved members of any home rank somewhere below the family cat and above an attractive set of coasters. And technically, I didn't completely freeze my fish. Rather, I absentmindedly tossed them into the refrigerator with a bag of other things I had bought and fortunately retrieved them just before my highly sensitive aquarium fish could turn into lightly breaded dinner fish.

Nonetheless, that near-death experience--for the fish, if not for me--woke me up to the fact that my memory might not be all it once was. At the outset, I should say that when it comes to incipient memory loss, I've got good reason to worry. I'm in my mid-40s, the age at which most no-longer-babyish boomers begin to notice that many of the faculties they used to take for granted--eyesight, stamina, the ability to fit into slim-cut khakis--are starting to go. If those things fade, why shouldn't memory? Then there's genetics. While the members of my extended family often live deep into their 90s, by the time they hit their 70s, a lot of their cognitive lights have typically begun to flicker, and memory is the first bulb to blow.

With the odds thus stacked against me, I couldn't help being concerned. What does it mean when I'm introduced to three people as I enter a party and find that all their names have flown out of my head before I even reach the bean dip? What does it mean if I walk into a room on an errand of some kind and discover that I can't remember if I came in for a dictionary, a soup spoon or a socket wrench? After a certain age, does everyone's cranial zip disc start to fill up? Or worse, can mundane, mid-life memory glitches actually be warning signs of such later-life dementia as Alzheimer's disease?

"That's the focus of a lot of recent research," says Richard Mayeux, a professor of neurology at Columbia University medical school, "trying to identify firm biological markers to tell us who's crossing the line into something pathological and who's having simple age-related decline."

Even without hard answers from the labs, boomers--and the people who market to them--have begun taking matters into their own hands. Bookstores bulge with memory-improvement guides. The Web is awash in memory sites, and numerous hospitals and private therapists teach memory courses. There are even over-the-counter memory nostrums available in health-food stores. To find out whether any of these work, I decided to spend a couple of weeks talking to the memory savants and sampling the memory cures. Total recall might be too much to ask, but total immersion was the only way to find out.