Research Methodology Overview   When I began writing Carved In Sand, many people asked me—bluntly or tactfully—what in heck made me think I could do it. After all, I was experiencing all kinds of midlife forgetfulness. Wasn't it brazen and misguided to take on subjects like neuroscience and cognitive psychology? And what about the technical difficulties of dealing with thousands of pages of research and interviews? The confidence of my agent and my editor inspired me to think I could write this book. I could not let them down, and that meant that I had to find strategies that would allow me to move forward. These were endless. There was the regular Monday morning meeting—just me, in my lounge chair, equipped with a legal pad and a wide assortment of colored pens. I'd ask myself a question: How could I manage these files so that I avoid the "out of sight, out of mind" conundrum? How did I plan to deal chunks of text that hopped from one chapter to another, until I forgot where I left them, or indeed that I had ever written them? I'd wander the aisles of Staples, considering different methods of filing. I'm pretty sure I cornered the market on Post-it Notes of all sizes, shapes and colors. There were many, many interviews to be done. I prefer to do interviews in person, which meant that I was on the road a great deal, usually in two-week stints, during which I'd hit university after university. Before I could do a single interview, I had to read voluminously, from professional journals that are definitely not geared to the average person. The learning curve was extremely steep, and I started somewhere below the bottom. But reading everything a researcher had published was the only way I could hope to have a worthwhile discussion. At first, this was impossibly taxing—I had to look up every third word, and even that didn't help very much. But slowly, sleeping neurons came back to life. I could speed read. I could remember. Arcane terminology started to be familiar. I imagined I felt the snap and crackle of new synaptic connections. I loved the hours I spent with those researchers. They were immensely generous and willing, possibly because I was passionate about their subject matter. If you're a neuroscientist, it isn't every day that a woman shows up to hang on your every word. But equally important were the many hours I spent in the company of members of the Memory-Hungry Crowd. After a few months of collecting surveys, I realized that I needed to get up close and personal with some of my more loquacious correspondents. Individual interviews didn't make a great deal of sense—I'd only hear more of what they'd already written. I decided to launch a series of memory discussion groups. In various cities and suburbs around the country, I invited survey respondents (and sometimes interested friends) to join me for refreshments and honest conversation. Groups varied in size—sometimes there were six, sometimes there were twelve, and once I hosted a whopping fourteen individuals— but the chatter began immediately and didn't end until the last bottle was empty and the final crumb of Brie was gone. People were extremely honest in these groups, sharing stories of their own forgetfulness that they'd never dreamed of mentioning before. Many of the tales I recount in Carved in Sand come from those discussion groups, and I owe the participants an enormous debt of gratitude. In the end, my agent and editor found that their confidence in my cognitive abilities was not misplaced. And I found that my belief in myself had returned. There's a lesson in there somewhere: If enough people tell you that you can do this impossible thing, then it's probably true, even if you feel, in the process, as if you are likely to drown in the sucking quicksand of your own mind. Upon receiving the news that the book was finished, and in production, the same people who asked me early on, why I thought I could do it, told me that they were gratified, if astonished, to see that I had. It gave them hope. What I'd written about—as honestly as I could—was the opportunity we all have in middle age, to alter our cognitive destiny.