– By Jan Wong – Globe and Mail, March 12, 2005

Are memory lapses the result of stressful family lives or multi-tasking?
Or maybe the simple aging process? Boomers have managed to resist wrinkles, grey hair and bifocals. But now they’re panicking as they start forgetting what they were just talking about.

As JAN WONG writes, they are also creating a growing memory industry.

It’s snowing at Pearson International airport, and my flight is delayed. Suddenly, I spot Jim Munson, a friend from he days when we were both China correspondents covering the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

When CTV dumped him a few years back, I called with condolences. I was pleased when he later laded on his feet, becoming Jean Chrétien’s chief spokesman. And while I disapprove of sinecures. I was happy when Mr. Chrétien appointed him to the Senate in December, 2003

It turns out we’re on the same delayed flight, so we head for a snack bar. We chat about our families. Then I ask what he had done between CTV and the Senate.

“I was director of communications,” he says, giving me an odd look. “For. The Prime. Minister. Jean. Chrétien.”

Senior moments are becoming boomer moments. So what? Well, this generation is the first in history to try to beat back the mental ravages of aging. (And if we aren’t the first, we think we are.)

Boomers, after all, never resigned themselves to grey hair, wrinkles and bifocals. Instead, we embrace Botox, hair dye and laser-eye surgery, even if we have to get one eye done for reading, the other for distance.

 

Now, we want to fight the invisible. We want to stave off the inevitable winter of the mind. We want Viagra for the brain.

 

“Perhaps boomers are more self-conscious, literally. They don’t like to reveal imperfection,” says Fergus Craik, 69, a research psychologist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto.

His colleague, Morris Moscovitch, says that in the 1990s, reporters would interview him for memory stories once every three years. Now, he gets a call every three months. “I was thinking it was because I was becoming more prominent, but it may be because more editors are boomers,” jokes Dr. Moscovitch, 59, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a Rotman senior scientist.

Indeed, the memory industry is booming. There are workshops, self-help books, flash cards, board games, video games and dietary supplements. On-line sites vie to remind forgetful customers of important dates. The hottest trend is mental-gymnastics software, even though it hasn’t been shown conclusively to limber up the brain.

Marketing to boomers is a no-brainer. Experts say there is a marked increase in boomer anxiety, especially when they forget where they left their cars keys, even as they watch their parents succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.

Take Senator Munson, 58. (At least I remembered to ask him about forgetting for this story.) He said he sometimes has to go back inside his house to fetch his BlackBerry or cellphone. “You know what I forgot yesterday?” He had showered, toweled dry, but forgot to rinse the shampoo from his hair.

He has learned the hard way to write down a good thought or risk losing it forever. When being interviewed, he sometimes loses track of the question, as he had done with Peter Mansbridge an hour before arriving at the airport. “I just keep moving on. And then the person interviewing you says: “ ‘This is what I was talking about.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are racing to create the first brain boosters to prevent or treat memory loss. Ostensibly, the target group is patients with Alzheimer’s disease. No drug company will admit this, but with half of all Canadians today 35 to 74, the real market is the average, non-impaired adult who is getting forgetful. This despite the lack of any evidence that smart pills will do anything for normal aging, let alone torque a teen’s brain cells before a calculus exam.

In the meantime, people such as Toronto violin teacher Robert Spadafora rely on primitive, but effective, techniques. Whenever he leaves a student’s home, he gives himself a pat-down: wallet, cellphone, car keys, day book.

Philippe Delacroix, consul-general de France in Toronto, simply blames his job whenever he can’t remember a name. “For a diplomat, you have an excuse – you go to so many receptions, ”Mr. Delacroix, 55, says.

Montreal ad executive Jan Lafleur has had so many memory lapses at the Gomery inquiry into the federal sponsorship program that pundits are calling it the Alzheimer’s Commission. Mr. Lafleur’s business exploded from $53,000 in one year to $9-million the next, but he blithely maintains that he can’t remember much of anything.

For others, a brain freeze is humiliating, like the first step to mental oblivion. Frank Tikasz, an airport limousine driver, was taking a client to the Sheraton Gateway Hotel at Terminal 3. On the way, Mr. Tikasz, 62, blanked out on where the hotel was. “I go by it a dozen times a day,” he said later, mortified. “I fell so stupid.”

 

Like me.

 

Back in Toronto, I confessed my airport lapse to Angela Troyer and Kelly Murphy, two psychologists at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.

“So when he told you, you said, ‘ Of course, I know that,’ ”. Dr. Troyer, 38, soothingly said. “You’re at an airport, waiting for a flight. You’re at an airport, waiting for a flight. You’re stressed out.”

“You want to make witty conversation, but you didn’t know what to say,” Dr. Murphy, 37, added.

Contrary to impressions, memory doesn’t drop off a cliff in your 40s or 50s. Every starts with 100 billion brain cells. From birth on, you lose 500 cells an hour. “Memory peaks in your late teens and early 20s, then gradually declines,” Dr. Troyer said.

“There is no sudden drop, but it’s cumulative,” Dr Murphy agreed. “When people reach middle age, they tend to over-interpret common memory mistakes. That’s why folks are so worried.”

To put in perspective, dementias affect only 2 per cent of Canadians 64 to 74 – but 35 per cent of those over 85. So as people live longer, the incidence rises. A 2001 study by the Alzheimer Society of Canada, found that 364,000 Canadians older than 65 had dementia. But the number will hit 750,000 by 2032 – when boomers reach their 80s.

Dr. Troyer notes that memory lapses are quite different from dementia. It’s normal to call your spouse by your dog’s name. It’s not normal to forget who you spouse is. It’s normal to forget which parking level you left your car. It’s not normal to forget how to drive.

Stress affects memory. Boomers face university bills for their children, nursing-home decisions for their parents and downsizing at work. When stressed, the body releases cortisol, a hormone, which negatively affects the hippocampus, both the input point for new information to your brain and the storage facility for long-term memory.

Brain overload is also to blame for faltering memories. Nowadays, there’s voice mail and e-mail at work and home, not to mention keeping straight which downtown intersections allow left turns after 9 a.m. Or is that after 9:30 a.m.? If only you could see that tiny traffic sign butter.

You need PINs to access your voice mail, chequing account and that frequent-flier website, where you can never book a flight anywhere, ever. You need separate passwords for your laptop and your computers at home and work, where they’ve just announced your password has to be case sensitive, have both numbers and letters, and beat least eight digits long. Oh, and it expires every three months.

 

The human brain can’t cope. Experts say seven is the average number of things, plus or minus two, anyone can remember at one time. The luckiest people can remember nine things at once, the unluckiest just five.

 

I began writing down everything I forgot, at least whenever I remembered.

Saturday: Forgot to use free breakfast coupons at McDonald’s, the reason I am having an Egg McMuffin there in the first place.

Sunday: Forgot to call journalist in Thailand, the last day he can speak freely before heading into Myanmar on Monday.

Monday: Phoned to set up interview. Her assistant points out I already set up an appointment by e-mail three days earlier.

Tuesday: Peeved that a source hasn’t called back. In fact, she had. I realize when I stumble across a note I wrote to myself two days earlier after listening to her message on my voice mail.

Wednesday: Pester my son, Ben, for National Geographic, which has cover story on the brain. He searches his room repeatedly. I order photocopy from Toronto Reference Library. An hour later, find the magazine, carefully tucked it in the file folder for this story, labelled: forgetting.

Thursday: Ask Ben why classmate isn’t staying for supper. He answers. Five minutes later, I ask again. He answers again, at which point I remember I already asked him.

On Friday, I take my list of shame to Bob Gottfried PhD, a Toronto expert specializing in memory. His first piece of advice is to stop multi-tasking. “One of my favourite sayings is: no attention, no retention,” he says.

Then he gives me a simple test for dementia – drawing a clock with hands set at 2:43. “Good for you,” he says when I finish. “You’re most probably not demented.”

Bob Gottfried’s memory patients are mainly in their 40s and 50s. “Boomers,” he says,” the first time they have an episode of bad memory, they get so frightened they look for solutions.”

He tests me on a Brain Training program. I have to hit a button whenever a virtual bouncing ball changes colour. I perform well. But my score plummets when I get distracted trying to think what to ask Gottfried next.

In Ottawa, I bump into Jim Munson at a memorial service for Senator Philippe Deane Gigantes, whom I once worked with at the Gazette in Montreal. Mr Chrétien is there, too, to pay his last respects.

Afterward, I’m standing with Jim when Mr. Chrétien approaches. I assume he wants to talk to Jim, who helped to orchestrate his golf-ball antics at the Gomery inquiry. But when Senator Munson introduces me, Mr. Chrétien cuts him off.

“I know who you are,” he says. “You are Jan Wong. You were a Maoist. You’re from Montreal. You grew up in Notre-Dame de Grace. You were at Tienanmen Square. Your father had a restaurant. I’ve been there. Bill Wong’s. On Decarie Boulevard”

Mr. Chrétien sips his white wine and smiles. I’m taken aback. I have never met him before. It turns out he had watched a documentary about me the night before.

Silently, I chide myself: Get a grip, think of a question. Something had been bothering me all week. The former prime minister got a laugh when he held up the golf balls from the private law firm, but it didn’t seem fair.

“Ogilvy Renault didn’t pay for the golf balls with taxpayers’ money,” I said.

“Why should I spend my own money on golf balls?” said Mr. Chrétien, less friendly now. “I give them out when I travel.”

“But what did they have to do with unity and Quebec,” I persisted.

“You don’t like golf,” he says, finishing his glass of wine.

Six hours later, I realize I forgot to ask the former prime minister about forgetting. But then, he didn’t seem to have a problem. He’s a man who remembers every detail from a television documentary, not to mention old scores.

 

Fighting Forgetting

 

You can write lists, which you’ll forget to look at. You can add to the clutter by e-mailing yourself reminders. You can even tie a string around your finger, then spend the rest of the day wondering what you were trying to remember.

In the end, it turns out mom was right. What’s good for you is good for your brain.

So quit the drugs and booze, which diminish your quota of neurons. Exercise, but wear a helmet during impact sports. Concussions, even mild ones, cause the brain to bounce off the interior of the skull, damaging the myelin sheath in a way that can cause cognitive problems.

Get lots of sleep. Eat a vitamin-rich, low-fat diet. People who consume lots of saturated fats are twice as likely to have memory problems. Stay in school because people with formal education have significantly diminished memory problems.