nt Remembers Every Day and Almost Every Detail of Her Life 

From ABC NEWS.com

James McGaugh is one of the world’s leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he’s stumped.

 

McGaugh’s journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

 

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

 

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

 

“This is real,” he says.

 

Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren’t a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started.

 

“We are trying to find out, but we haven’t hit ‘bingo’ yet,” says McGaugh.

 

His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong — or at least incomplete.

 

McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ’s memories were of such emotional power that she couldn’t forget them.

 

But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that “the woman who can’t forget” remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

 

“Here’s a woman who has very strong memories, but she has very strong memories of things for which I have no memory at all,” McGaugh says.

 

That became particularly clear one day when he asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.

 

“I wasn’t sure she would know, because she’s 40 and wasn’t of the Bing Crosby era,” he says.

 

But she did.

 

“Do you know where he died?” McGaugh asked.

 

“Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain,” she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.

 

When the researchers asked her to list the dates when they had interviewed her, she “just reeled them off, bang, bang, bang.”

 

She also told McGaugh that on the day after a particular interview, which took place several years ago, he flew to Germany.

 

“I said what? I went to Germany? I couldn’t even remember what year I had gone to Germany,” he says.

 

That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That’s a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience.

 

AJ does have “some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life,” McGaugh says. “As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place.

 

“So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn’t explain why she remembers it.”

 

Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person’s in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.

 

She is also quite different from savants who have surfaced from time to time with extraordinary abilities in music, art or memory.

 

“Some of them can remember every single detail about the particular hobby that they have, such as baseball or calendars or art, but they are very narrow,” he says. McGaugh described one person who could memorize a piece of music instantly, and not forget it, but who “couldn’t make change or couldn’t take a bus because he didn’t know where he was.”

 

By contrast, AJ is a ” fully functioning person,” McGaugh says.

 

The researchers are preparing to take their work in a new direction in hopes of understanding what is going on here. It’s possible AJ’s brain is wired differently, and that may show up through magnetic resonance imaging. Testing is expected to begin within six months.

 

“We will be looking at her brain, using brain scanning techniques, to see if there’s anything that is dramatically different that we can point to,” McGaugh says.

 

Those of us with normal, very fallible memories function somewhat like a computer in that different areas of our brains are interconnected and thus better-suited for general memories. We know where we live and how to get to work, but we may not know what the weather was like on this date four years ago.

 

It’s possible that AJ’s brain has some “disconnections” that help her recall past events from her memory bank without interference from the parts of her brain that act as general processors. But the problem is that even if they find some interesting wiring through brain scans, the researchers will be limited in their conclusions by the fact that AJ seems to be unique.

 

So unique, in fact, that the Irvine team has given her condition a new name. They call it hyperthymestic syndrome, based on the Greek word thymesis for “remembering” and hyper, meaning “more than normal.”

 

Some day, the researchers say, they hope to know what’s different about AJ’s brain, but they are still a ways off.

 

“In order to explain a phenomenon you have to first understand the phenomenon,” McGaugh says. “We’re at the beginning.”

From News - Revolution Health

Previous studies of a link between statins, a cholesterol lowering medication, and cognitive decline have produced mixed results. New research suggests that the relationship between statin use and cognitive decline appears even more complex than originally thought.

The study involved 1,146 African Americans aged 70 and older living in Indianapolis whose cognitive status was assessed in 2001 and again in 2004.

The Indianapolis-based researchers found that cognitive decline in people who took statins was less than in those who did not take statins.

However, those who continued to take statins from 2001 to 2004 had greater cognitive decline than those who were taking statins in 2001 but were no longer taking them in 2004. If statin use were directly associated with a reduction in cognitive decline, continuously taking statins would presumably produce the greatest effect.

“The relationship between statin use and cognitive decline is complex and subjected to unknown confounders,” Dr. Stanley Szwast, of Indiana University School of Medicine, and colleagues note in a report in the journal Neurology. “This effect may not be associated with the cholesterol lowering or anti-inflammatory action of statins.”

“We know that taking statin medication can protect against cardiovascular events such as heart attacks by lowering blood cholesterol. The question at hand is what effects do these medications have on brain function. Our study along with others shows promising results but larger controlled studies are needed,” Szwast noted in a statement.

SOURCE: Neurology, November 6, 2007

Getting shut-eye before tests boosted performance, study found

From HealthDay

Besides helping you feel well-rested, getting your zzz’s may also sharpen your memory, a new study shows.

Researchers found that sleep not only protects memories from outside interferences, it also helps strengthen them.

“There was a very large benefit of sleep for memory consolidation, even larger than we were anticipating,” said study author Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, an associate neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and a postdoctoral fellow in sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The research is scheduled to be presented May 2 at the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting in Boston.

In the study, the researchers focused on sleep’s impact on “declarative” memories, which are related to specific facts, episodes and events.

“We sought to explore whether sleep has any impact on memory consolidation, specifically the type of memory for facts and events and time,” Ellenbogen said. “We know that sleep helps boost memory for procedural tests, such as learning a new piano sequence, but we’re not sure, even though it’s been debated for 100 years, whether sleep impacts declarative memory.”

The study involved 48 people between the ages of 18 and 30. These participants had normal, healthy sleep routines and were not taking any medications. They were all taught 20 pairs of words and asked to recall them 12 hours later. However, the participants were divided evenly into four groups with different circumstances for testing: sleep before testing, wake before testing, sleep before testing with interference, or wake before testing with interference.

Two of the groups (the wake groups) were taught the words at 9 a.m. and then tested on the pairings at 9 p.m., after being awake all day. The other two groups (the sleep groups) learned the words at 9 p.m., went to sleep, and were then tested at 9 a.m.

Also, prior to testing, one of the sleep groups and one of the wake groups were given a second list of 20 word pairs to remember. These groups were then tested on both lists to help determine memory recall with interference (competing information).

The result: Sleep appeared to help particpants recall their learned declarative memories, even when they were given competing information.

According to the researchers, people who slept after learning the information performed best, successfully recalling more words whether or not there was interference. Those in the sleep group without interference were able to recall 12 percent more word pairings from the first list than the wake group without interference (94 percent recall for the sleep group vs. 82 percent for the wake group).

When presented with interference, those who slept before testing did significantly better at remembering the words (76 percent for the sleep group vs. 32 percent for the wake group).

“We were surprised to find the order of magnitude by which the data demonstrated our effects,” Ellenbogen said.

Jan Born, a professor of neuroendocrinology at the University of Lbeck in Germany, said the study offers more proof of the importance of sleep for memory consolidation.

“Considering that learning in every educational setting (schools, colleges, etc.), is centrally based on hippocampus-dependent memory function [declarative memories], people should realize that optimal learning conditions require proper sleep,” he said.

Proper sleep may have other benefits, too, added Michael Perlis, director of the Sleep Research Laboratory at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. Research has shown that in addition to memory, sleep may be related to physical functioning, good immune function, physical and cognitive performance, and mood regulation, he said.

“These are all theories. The only thing we know is that when we’re deprived of sleep, we do less well. Is that a lack of sleep or sustained wakefulness? It’s very difficult to figure out how to crack that nut,” he said. “We spend 30 percent of our time on sleep. What is sleep for? This is a riddle we’re still working on.”

Older women who consume 3 cups a day have sharper cognitive skills, study says

From HealthDay

Coffee may jolt more than just the nervous system. A new French study found that caffeine seemed to help preserve the cognitive skills of older women.

Women who drank three or more cups of coffee a day were 30 percent less likely to have memory decline at age 65 than whose who drank one cup or less daily.

And the benefit increased with age. Women over age 80 who drank three or more cups of coffee a day were about 70 percent less likely to have memory decline than those who drank one cup or less, the researchers said.

Caffeinated tea had the same effect in the women, the study found, although more was needed to get the same caffeine boost. “Count roughly two cups of tea for a cup of coffee,” said study leader Karen Ritchie of INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

But the researchers didn’t find a similarly protective effect in men, although other studies have found a benefit to males.

How might caffeine help ward off cognitive decline? “It is a cognitive stimulant,” said Ritchie. It also helps to reduce levels of the protein called beta amyloid in the brain, she said, “whose accumulation is responsible for Alzheimer’s disease but which also occurs in normal aging.”

Ritchie said she wasn’t sure why men in the study didn’t benefit from caffeine. “Our hypothesis is that either women metabolize caffeine differently than men, or there may be an interaction [of the caffeine] with the sex hormones, the estrogen-progesterone balance,” she said.

Ritchie and her colleagues recruited more than 7,000 women and men from three French cities. All were dementia-free at the start of the study. The researchers evaluated cognitive performance with a series of tests, such as verbal recall, asking people to demonstrate how many words they could repeat back after hearing them in 30 seconds. The evaluations were done at the start of the study and then two and four years later.

The researchers also asked about caffeine consumption at each evaluation.

Ritchie’s team did not find that caffeine reduced the rate of dementia that developed within the four-year follow-up period. But the follow-up may not have been long enough to determine for sure if caffeine protected not just thinking skills but helped to ward off dementia. More research is needed to find out if caffeine may actually prolong the period of mild cognitive impairment in women before they receive a diagnosis of dementia, she said.

The study results are published in the Aug. 7 issue of the journal Neurology.

The French study confirms previous research, said William Scott, professor of medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, who has researched caffeine’s beneficial effects against Parkinson’s disease, also a neurodegenerative disorder.

The Ritchie research “is another piece of the puzzle,” Scott said. “The next step is to figure out what that mechanism is.”

As for caffeine only protecting women, Scott noted that just 2,800 of the 7,000 study participants were men, and the results might have differed if more men were included.

A study published in February in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at 676 healthy men and found that regular coffee drinkers had a lower rate of cognitive decline over a 10-year follow-up than those who didn’t drink coffee. Those who drank three cups daily had the least signs of decline.

Both Scott and Ritchie agreed that more study is needed. Ritchie’s research will next look at the relationship between caffeine and Alzheimer’s.

Meanwhile, Scott concluded: “What I would say to people over 65 is that there seems to be a consistent, inverse association between caffeine consumption and some of these neurodegenerative diseases.” Unless a physician advised against it, he added, daily coffee drinking “doesn’t seem to hurt.”

Anxieties or early dementia might be to blame, researchers say

From HealthDay

Older women with memory problems are more likely to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep than those without memory loss, a U.S. study finds.

The study included almost 2,500 women, average age 69, with no signs of memory problems at the start of the study. They underwent cognitive tests over a period of 15 years and, at the end of the study, were assessed for sleep problems.

Women who showed signs of mental decline on the tests “were nearly twice as likely to have difficulty staying asleep and one-and-a-half times as likely to have problems falling asleep and being awake for more than 90 minutes during their sleep cycle,” study author Dr. Kristine Yaffe, of the University of California, San Francisco, said in a prepared statement.

“Women who declined on one of the tests were also nearly twice as likely to nap more than two hours a day,” Yaffe said.

There was no association between cognitive decline and total sleep time, said the study, which is published in the July 17 issue of the journal Neurology.

“Perhaps the most likely reason why memory loss may increase the risk of sleep disturbances is that they share a common underlying cause, such as brain changes seen in Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias that could increase risk of both memory loss and sleep problems,” Yaffe said.

“Another reason could be that women with memory problems may also have anxiety or depression that could affect their sleep. While we attempted to adjust for these measures in our study, it’s possible that this effect remains,” she said.