KEY POINTS:
Now where was I? Ah, yes. I'm reading a book. It's about memory but, of course, I've already lost my thread. Neurons are involved, I know that much - involved not just in remembering what you've just read, for example, but also in the amazing way things can go in one ear and out of the other. I must try harder.
I'm on chapter five but I'm also on a plane heading for San Francisco, where I have an appointment to see a memory expert at the university. After that, I'm going to New York to watch the 2008 US Memory Championships, where I'm expecting to get some tips on how to remember all the names in a telephone directory. A trip down memory lane, then, an odyssey of self-improvement.
My powers of recall are less than astonishing these days. For weeks I've been racking my so-called brain, trying to put a name to the little town in southern Italy, on the clifftops above Ischia and Capri. In 1983, my wife and I got off an island ferry there, stopped for a beer, then took a bus down the coast. It's a nice place. Odysseus (speaking of odysseys) stopped to listen to the Sirens there. Not Amalfi, not Positano. The other one. Full of tourists. You probably know it. I know it. But what is it called?
Every now and then, I try to conjure it out of the remembered glare and bustle and sea and sky of that summer. I can see it but I'm damned if I can say it. I'm determined not to look it up. I keep thinking it's bound to come back, but it hasn't.
Words fail me. They used to be my friends but now they can't be bothered. They're happy to just leave me in the middle of a thought with a gaping hole where the end of the sentence is supposed to be, thrashing around in my own ridiculous frontal lobes, searching (as I was last week) for the name of the, the, you know ... the twirly thing, the wine thing, you know, the chrome, tugging, grunting thing - the popping thing. Come on, man, come on! Corkscrew. Yes.
It was only a few seconds of gormlessness but how can you forget a word that so brilliantly goes to the trouble of describing itself? Suffice it to say, I have also become familiar with the comedy of dashing all the way upstairs for something whose precise whatness I have forgotten by the time I get there. And then there's the terrible quandary of names - the slippery identities of movie actors, pop stars, world leaders and even people of long acquaintance - that drain out of my head mid-conversation or, worse, when I have to introduce someone to someone else.
Forgetting has taken over from hearing impairment and male-pattern baldness as my principal midlife worry. It's more than the inconvenience or social embarrassment. The prospect of having to cope with losing my mind and livelihood before I've ushered all my children through education and into full employment with houses and corkscrews of their own sends a shudder through my limbic system.
Memory isn't just something, it's everything - the sum of who we are, the glue, page and spine of our story, the repository of our identity. It's no more than a handful of sludge but it's also vast - a great galaxy of all we have experienced and known, constantly updating, drawing meaning from the absurd blizzard of life to make and shape and sharpen our personalities and intellects and gut feelings.
Memory commands not only our past, but provides us with the gift of forward planning. The hard-learnt nous that stopped low-forehead man from going near the hole where the sabre-toothed tiger lived is today behind our impulse to take out pensions and pet insurance.
Bad things, even those that happen to others, arm us with wariness and doubt. It is only because we prepare for tomorrow using everything we know so far that the imagination can so call up the spectre of Alzheimer's, raising terrors that we might slowly vanish too, our brain gummy with what scientists call "senile plaques", and "neurofibrillary tangles". Memory maketh man. And it can be taken away. So I'm not the world's only 52-year-old with a mind like a colander. Just ask Dr Kawashima, the Japanese boffin-entrepreneur whose Nintendo handheld Brain Training game has sold in staggering numbers (17 million worldwide) to people who can't find their car keys and live in dread of creeping insanity.
The game is pleasantly addictive, with its mental arithmetic and lists of random words and a laughably impossible caper where you have to keep track of partygoers dashing in and out of a little house. And how gratifying after two days to be told by an animated cartoon of a laughing Dr Kawashima that you have the mental agility of a 23-year-old! Nicole Kidman was hired to advertise it on TV to reassure us that celebrities are as scatterbrained as the rest of us. I got stuck on it for weeks, 20 minutes a day, trying in vain to improve my score.
Amazon is full of brain workouts. Last year, British scientist Baroness Susan Greenfield launched a PC-based programme of exercises - MindFit - whose online "personal coach" evaluates your results and adjusts tasks depending on how badly you've done. It says it can boost memory recall by 14 per cent. I don't know about that, but I did get noticeably better at predicting the course of a hot-air balloon sailing from one cloud to another.
Our appetite for better brains is an obsession reflected in the worldwide expansion over the past decade of neuroscience studies. These come on the heels of neuroimaging techniques that have brought together the disciplines of psychology (mind) and neurobiology (matter) to produce a new breed of "cognitive" neuroscientist who looks at behaviour in the context of wiring and chemicals.
Cue the concomitant explosion of media interest, with hopeful stories about treatments for dementia or the benefits of eating sardines. A quick trawl through the archives throws up a score of press articles this year alone. Among the things thought to be "good" for brains in the absence of a Nintendo DS are: brisk walking, getting pregnant (rather counterintuitive, that one), meditation, hypnosis, listening to Mozart (for epilepsy), HRT (for Alzheimer's), neuron implants (for Parkinson's). In March, a report claimed: "Scientists are recruiting The Beatles in an effort to increase the understanding of human memory." Another article cited "mind mapping" as a way of boosting your memory by linking words to images. Anyway, we can't get enough of brains.
Now, where was I? Ah, the book, The Accidental Mind by David J Linden. It's brilliant, I'm sure, though the more I read, the less I know. I gather from his general thesis that brains are not as brilliantly engineered as we like to think. We might have a hundred billion cells going at it round the clock but they're constantly misfiring or getting the wrong end of the stick.
Brains are more Heath Robinson than Bill Gates, having evolved over the aeons simply by growing new pipes and cables on top of the crappy old ones. Worms have the same neurons as us.
And while ordinary electrical signals happily travel down copper wire at almost the speed of light (more than 1 million kph), brain signals go as fast as a family runabout car. Not only that, but you have to imagine a runabout car with stuff falling out of the boot. And - this is the best bit - to get from one cell to the next you have to jump out of your car and swim with your message across a synaptic channel of neurological gloop before getting in another hopeless car at the other side, air hissing out of tyres, wing mirrors hanging off. That's how high-tech it is. It's a wonder we can find our way to the bus stop.
The next day I see my memory expert, Dr Adam Gazzaley, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. He's a trim, youthful, un-Einstein-like figure in black shirt, jeans and boots.
His particular interest is "the interface between attention and memory", the area they call "working memory". This, he tells me, is where you hold bits of information for short periods of time, the classical example being a telephone number - hearing it, holding it, then dialling it.
The trouble is, working memory is one of the first things not to work. It's what's not working when you dash upstairs to get something and when you get there can't remember what it is. Or when you're reading a book, not necessarily about brains, and have to start the same sentence eight times.
"A lot of adults feel that the incidence of that failure increases as they get older," Gazzaley says. "Have you noticed that?"
"Actually, yes," I say. These are the sorts of problems he's recreating under lab conditions here, putting volunteers under a brain scanner and giving them mental tasks. "You have a goal, then a time delay, then a test phase in which you have to remember it." The enemy of working memory is distraction. A 2005 study showed that older people find it more difficult to screen out what's irrelevant. Gazzaley's findings suggest that how good you are at remembering things is influenced not so much by how well you keep your eye on the ball but how well you ignore the crowd.
But why do brains get worse with age? Do the cells just die off? Not exactly, he says. "Historically, we thought that was the case. The brain does decrease in size but a lot of that is water. The impression in the field now is that it's more of a functional and chemical change than cell loss, which is good because those things are more amenable to intervention. Maybe we can manipulate it back, perhaps with some combination of medications and training."
I like the sound of that. I ask what he thinks about video games like Nintendo. "I haven't seen much empirical evidence that they do what they say they do." The problem with games, he says, is that everyone improves with practice.
I tell him about trying to remember the name of my little town where the sirens sang. Names can be tricky, he agrees. They are harder to find via other routes.
The trouble is that memory isn't in just one place, Gazzaley says. "The brain works as a network. The network that encodes it has to reactivate it and your ability to do that changes with age and causes a delay in activating memory. The most common finding in ageing is the decreased speed of processing."
He says it's no different to the way all our responses get slower as we get older - hand-eye co-ordination, taking a beat more to adjust our minds to oncoming hazards.
"Our brains don't have the evolutionary pressure to live for ever. Muscles, bones, eyes, ears - they all go." He's racing against the clock, himself, he says cheerfully, though he's barely 39.
One of the great things in the past decade, though, he says, has been the advent of new neuroimaging technology (fMRI scanners) which has enabled researchers to watch the brain "lighting up" as it carries out tasks and to gather new data in the battle to remember better and - lest we forget - the bigger battle against dementia. Excitingly, Gazzaley has arranged for me to have my head examined in one of these things. The scanner is a huge magnetic tube, which means you have to remove your watch, pacemaker and nipple rings. A periscope thing is attached to my head so I can see the computer screen and then I'm bombarded with photographs of faces and landscapes to take a mental note of. Sometimes I am instructed to focus on the faces and ignore the scenes, sometimes vice versa.
Then secondary images are flashed up and I have to press buttons to indicate whether I recognise them or not. The landscapes, cold-looking and unpopulated, with trees, rocks and waterways, don't remind me of anything. I am concentrating hard but also ignoring hard. There's an interlude in which I have to ignore all the pictures and then decide which way an arrow is pointing. Gazzaley's assistant is slightly anxious about my scores: "Have you been asleep?" she asks.
I'm in there keeping still for an hour and three-quarters, but at last we're done. The assistant says my scores were fine and that I must have been pressing the buttons too vigorously, which the computer understandably misread as the work of a chimpanzee. But now we can look at my scan on the screen. It's weird seeing the top of your own head chopped off, with your brain in there, like a boiled egg. I ask whether they'd be able to tell from this if I had dementia, as opposed to normal wear and tear. She replies by talking about "flare" and "white matter" and "myelination", but I think the answer is yes.
I have another book to read on the plane to New York - The Seven Sins of Memory, by Daniel L. Schacter. I discover that working memory was only invented - or "postulated" - in the 1950s by the brilliant British psychologist Alan Baddeley, who coined the term "phonological loop" to describe the link between perception and the laying down of permanent memories. The loop wasn't just for phone numbers, it turned out, but the gateway for learning new sounds. People with this bit of their brain missing (it runs from the parietal lobe at the back of the head to the prefrontal cortex) cannot learn foreign vocabulary or, for that matter, remember more than one digit at a time.
Amazing, though it doesn't help with my Italian town, now in the depths of my long-term memory, wearing concrete boots. And it's not even as if your long-term memory is anywhere in particular. Memories (semantic, like this one, or episodic, which deal with experienced events) are initially laid in the hippocampus but after a while - a month, a year or more - they migrate to other parts of the brain, typically to the bits where the original perceptions first registered. What we think of as a single memory is actually made up of all manner of stuff - visuals, smells, music, what people said, sensations of pain and pleasure, as well as names of things. The more elements a memory has, the better chance we have of reaching it via one of its constituent parts. Not so names, which often lack the conceptual associations that might otherwise act as cues.
Sometimes I think I have my Italian town on the tip of my tongue. Does it begin with L? Dozens of countries use the "tip of the tongue" analogy. The Italians themselves call it "sulla punta della lingua".
I'm in New York for the Memory Championships. They call it the Olympics of the Mind. I meet up with last year's winner - David Thomas, an ex-fireman. He hasn't entered this year, he says, because he's busy with a TV project. Random numbers are his thing. He is in the Guinness World Records for being able to recite Pi to 22,500 decimal points. I can't even begin to imagine that many numbers but I scribble down 20 or so now in my notebook and get him to remember those. It takes him about three seconds.
The secret is, he says, is to convert the digits into the initials of famous people (e.g., 23 is BC for Bill Clinton) and then imagine these personages dotted along a route familiar to him - the route through a house, perhaps, with Clinton at the door and British politician Harriet Harman (88) making tea and actor David Frost (46) using the stair lift and so on.
It seems complicated, I say. How can you imagine 22,500 people in one house? He laughs. "You have to imagine a big house. Or your route to work. Anyone can do it," he says and he's living proof. There are different techniques for different things, he says. In all cases, you just need a conduit to get from A to B and then of course B to C. With lists of words, you string them together visually, preferably in some outlandish and interactive way, enabling you to recall them exactly where they appear in the sequence.
The secret to memory is imagination and organisation, he says. We think in images, not in words. You can turn words that don't intrinsically mean anything - like names - into things you can see.
We're in a function room on the ninth floor of an office building near Union Square, watching the morning heats of the championships. There are about 40 contestants or "mental athletes". Some of them are still at school. Two of them are about 12. There's hardly anyone over 30. They are busy perusing 99 names and faces with a view to matching them up in 15 minutes. And what a long 15 minutes. Watching people remember things is not much of a spectator sport though, to be fair, there are only six spectators.
A young woman distributes free bottles of vapour-distilled "smart water", which she says has electrolytes and therefore hydrates the body faster. Now we're into speed numbers, in which the athletes have to recall reams of computer-generated digits.
Later, crowds arrive for the afternoon session, which is the sudden-death, interesting phase. We're down to the finalists - seven, then five, then two battling it out under the TV lights, reciting lists of random words ("pastry", "flaunt", "cavity", "abrasion" ... ) or remembering bio- graphical details of "party guests" who come on stage and give us their phone numbers, dates of birth and lists of their favourite things. At last we're done, with Chester, a 30-year-old software engineer from San Francisco, the last man standing. He wins the glass vase and tickets to Bahrain for the world champs in October.
Maybe this is the way to go. I immediately resolve to go through everyone and everything I've ever known and systematically encode it anew using vibrant imagery, initials, locations, visual links. It's very good for lists. Who knows, maybe I, too, could be one of those people who, when all around are losing their heads, can name the Magnificent Seven and all the Bond films - with dates.
Back home, I speak to Alan Baddeley, inventor of the "phonological loop", now in his 70s and professor of psychology at York University, England. He thinks our brains hold up pretty well on the whole. For example, studies have shown, he says, that we continue to add new vocabulary into our 60s and 70s, even though it might be harder to find a word when we need it.
"Typically you get at things by a series of links - retrieval queues. As we get older the system works less well, that's all. The glue gets weaker."
I ask him about names. "Names are basically arbitrary. But experiments have shown that if you get a first-letter clue - or if you go through the alphabet - that sometimes works."
I ask if he knows my Italian town where the sirens lived (he kindly has a stab at it with Capri), then tell him about the Memory Championships in New York. What does he think of those strategies? "Well, they're good for lists of words and numbers but not easy to apply to everyday life. They also tend to be quite hard work."
Maybe in the future, I say, we'll all just take a pill. "I suspect it's not too far ahead that treatments will be developed to help with Alzheimer's disease. In gene therapy, too, we are getting a better understanding of what turns memory genes off and on."
But what about those of us who just want a better memory?
"Obviously it's frustrating," he says. "And we probably fear memory loss because that's the cardinal feature of Alzheimer's. But this is one of the big ethical issues - whether people are going to be able to buy better memories. The other concern, though, is will treating normal people actually make their memory worse? It may be that pushing in more chemicals may not help."
So we should be careful what we wish for? "Forgetting is very useful. You'd be in a mess without it, like being without the garbage man. The memory encodes things so that, on the whole, you can get hold of what's important and the things you need most often. Forgetting is a very well-designed aspect of that."
He cheerfully recommends his book, Your Memory - A User's Guide, and we say goodbye. What he's trying to tell me is that middle age isn't a sickness, so why look for a cure? Forget it.
My odyssey having reached a not-quite-satisfying conclusion, I pop upstairs, where my computer plucks a map of the Amalfi coast from its own vast memory, and there it is, of course, bloody Sorrento.
It's not quite a "corkscrew" moment. But it's definitely a "doh!" moment, unexpectedly diverting my delayed train of thought now to that other famous Homer - the cartoon, yellow one - thereby "enriching" my old defective memory of this and theoretically making it more retrievable next time.
Though next time, it will probably be Herculaneum. Or, worse, Hogan ... You must remember this. Well, actually ...
- OBSERVER
