"What a great faculty memory is, how awesome a mystery! It is the mind, and this is nothing other than my very self," said the medieval philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo. According to Augustine, memory faculties are constitutive of personality. Without them, people would be nothing other than a breathing chunk of meat. People use their memory faculties when they keep information in their heads for cognitive manipulation, when they convey knowledge of geography or when they tie their shoes. Because memory is so important to personality, impairments to short- or long-term memory can change who a person is.
Menopause and Dementia?
Women who approach menopause often report memory problems. They will say that they forget things and are worried they might be suffering from dementia. According to University of Rochester neurologist Mark Mapstone, in by far the most cases, this is an illusion. Mapstone and colleagues tested the memory capacities of 800 menopausal women complaining about memory problems and found that only one had signs of dementia. These women did have problems that relate to memory, says Mapstone, but not of the dementia type. As a result of hormonal changes and a hectic lifestyle, the women suffered from anxiety. Anxiety has an inhibiting effect on how much information is stored in memory. Mapstone compares it to being told that you suffer from a serious illness while also receiving a lot information. You will be unlikely to remember the information later because the state of anxiety prevents you from storing the information properly, says Mapstone.
Alzheimer's Disease
According to Alzheimer's Organization, 5.1 million Americans aged 65 and older have Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia. The neurological cause of Alzheimer's is the formation of plaque in the hippocampus, the brain's main memory center. The earliest symptom of Alzheimer's is subjective memory loss, which includes forgetting things like the location of the car keys, a colleague's name or a child's birthday, reports a research team in the January 11, 2010, issue of Alzheimer's & Dementia. The researchers looked at seven-year-old medical records and found that 54 percent of the people with subjective memory loss developed Alzheimer's compared to only 15 percent of people without subjective memory loss.
Distractions and Working Memory
Working memory, the ability to keep information active in your head, is crucial to performance, reports a University of Oregon research team in the July 8, 2009 issue of Journal of Neuroscience. The researchers found that that good working memory is significantly correlated with a good "distraction gatekeeper" in the intrapatietal sulcus, an area of the brain regulating eye coordination and reaching behavior. The distraction gatekeeper subconsciously keeps distractions from interfering with the task you are performing. The researchers speculate that people who have good distraction gatekeepers are more productive and fare better on achievement tests than people who get easily distracted.
Navigation Skills
Difficulties navigating can be a result of a micro-disorganization of the right hippocampus, which makes it difficult for people incorporating landmarks into a cognitive map, reports a research team led by University of British Columbia neuroscientist Giuseppe Iaria in a 2008 issue of Hippocampus. The researchers used a new brain scanning technique known as diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI, to look at the brains of subjects navigating a virtual environment. They found greater structural integrity of the right hippocampus at the microscopic level in people with good navigation skills. In 2007, Columbia University neuroscientist Michael Saxe and colleagues proposed that greater activity in the brain's memory areas can impair structural integrity. Together, the two findings indicate that difficulties navigating may turn on an overactive brain.
References
- Science Daily: Memory Problems At Menopause: Nothing To Forget About
- Alzheimer's & Dementia; Outcome over seven years of healthy adults with and without subjective cognitive impairment; Reisberg, et al.; January 2010
- The Journal of Neuroscience; Human Variation in Overriding Attentional Capture; Fukuda and Vogen; July 2009
- Hippocampus; Navigational Skills Correlate With Hippocampal Fractional Anisotropy in Humans; Iaria, et al.; vol. 18 2008
- "PNAS"; Paradoxical influence of hippocampal neurogenesis on working memory; Saxe et al; March 2007
