My opinion is that my own memory is insufferably lousy. My mate’s is a little better, but not much. He can remember what he ate in a particular restaurant in 1982, but not what we discussed at breakfast. We are in perfect agreement about this, and most of our check-in conversations start with “Did you remember…” Recently, he came downstairs with the mortgage payment envelope stuck in the front of his pants. Don’t ask.

- R.T., a female, 49-year-old travel agent with two teenage kids and a husband.

I feel incredibly crappy when I forget. I take it very hard, and very personally. I imagine that somewhere in my haunted past, I got the idea that my role in life was to be responsible. Memory glitches make me feel worthless. In the past, big mistakes have affected my self-confidence. More recently, I have learned to go a little easier on myself. I see that I have great company in this. I am fully aware, however, that my profession doesn’t allow for memory loss, and that you tend to be sued if you make mistakes, so I am obsessively careful in regard to work.

- J.L., a male, 48-year-old attorney, general counsel for a large corporation and father of two pre-teens.

Can’t tell just one. Once I left my two year old at Gymboree with a babysitter who spoke no English – just forgot about him for about 90 minutes. Mortifying. I have left a carpool at school. I have screwed up on “short days” and received mournful calls from the school office. Horrifying. I have very poor facial recognition. People usually recognize me, and I sometimes search desperately for clues as to who they might be. I have “forgotten” to look at my Palm Pilot, while it beeped an alarm in my purse, and missed appointments. I have shown up at the airport on the wrong day, family and dog in tow. I have gotten lost in relatively familiar places, like San Francisco’s Mission District, because I have very poor spatial memory. In these circumstances, I feel horrible, but I find that people are actually very forgiving. So many people make these errors

- R.G., a female, 55-year-old advertising executive and mother of 3 pre-teens.

It’s a deep secret, but basically, I cannot multi-task. Every time I try it – even answering an email at work and talking on the phone at the same time, I totally forget what I am doing and screw up. I also am not very good at getting oral directions, like at a gas station. Sometimes I forget what the guy said before I’m a block down. It’s gotten so I’d rather not stop and ask.

- J.D., 56-year-old male financial executive, divorced, no kids.

There is certainly too much stuff to remember, but it is not necessarily just my stuff. We are bombarded by newscasts from all over the world; we know everything about everyone instantly, respond instantly and somehow, we are expected to maintain it all and have access to it. Our daily tasks and issues are not more difficult, complex or stressful than those of say, a farmer in 1920, or a starving Irish peasant during the potato famine. Comparatively, we have it extremely easy. So “too much stuff” must relate to the bombardment of information that we feel we have to “own.”

- R.L., male, 48-year old real estate developer with an at-home wife and one 10-year-old daughter.

I never thought for one second about keeping my brain in shape until I started writing this book. I regarded my memory as a philosophical entity, something like my soul. Now I see that memory is a chemical response in a piece of organ meat. I am embarrassingly bad at math games, crossword puzzles, etc. I am thinking of taking up ballroom dancing or possibly bridge, both of which are very good for the brain. In past years, whenever I mentioned my memory to a doctor, I was told that it was simply part of aging. That is like being told to stop reading because you are getting farsighted.

- CJR, a muddle-headed female author, age 47, with two sons, ages 10 and 14, who is writing a book on memory.

Among them are anti-anxiety drugs, sedatives, analgesics, older antidepressants and antihistamines, anesthesia in the dentist’s office or on the operating table, beta-blockers, drugs for over-active bladders, diuretics, anti-ulcer drugs and scopalamine, the drug you take to prevent motion sickness – all are implicated in various studies. Chemotherapy also takes it toll on cognition, as does any surgery that requires you to be on a heart pump.

If you take these drugs – including, for instance, Tylenol PM, were you aware of this effect? Have you noticed that your memory is affected by drugs?
 

I probably have more problems in the domestic department. I think that women who are full-time moms have the hardest time, because their lives are extremely fragmented. There is no ready relationship between the thing you need for dinner, the pants that are at the dry cleaner, and the musical instrument you need to bring to carpool, or for that matter, the carpool itself. Now that I’m working full-time again, after being at home for 10 years, I find it a little easier, in that I have eliminated a great many of the fragmented tasks, which either don’t get done, or are done by other people. I still forget a lot of things at work:, but it’s a little easier, because everything I forget is in now in one office cubicle – on my desk, in my briefcase, or in my computer or Palm. By no means is it fail-safe. Today, my 50ish assistant and I spent all day trying to collect ourselves after I returned from a weeklong business trip. It was painful.

- Y.D., a 54-year-old female whose two sons are in high school, and who has recently returned to work full-time.

My father has Alzheimer’s disease. He was diagnosed two years ago, at 70. At this point, he’s entering stage two – he still knows who I am, but may not within a few months. This winter I went to Florida to spend some time with him, fully aware of the fact that this could be the last time that I would call him Dad, and he would respond. It is very frightening to watch, horrible for my mother, and of course, I wonder what it means for my siblings and me. I don’t know anything about early intervention – that’s not something that the doctors talk about when the patient is obviously past that point. I’m anxious to find out.

- S.L., 47, divorced female attorney with two kids, 13 and 16.

I hope to be very sharp, and still enjoying my work as a psychoanalyst into my latest years. Without that, my life would be empty, and besides, I think that at 85, I might finally have something worthwhile to say. I hate the idea of losing my edge, ‘though I suspect that some softening of edges is necessary to allow us to move on to wisdom. From an evolutionary perspective, I can see why our memories fade as we age, to allow the elders in a community to see the forest, rather than the trees. Part of the difficulty, it seems to me, is that our bodies are biologically designed to “become” elderly at 50 or 60. We’ve chosen to battle that biology and stay “young” well past our 40s -- working, raising families, etc., taking care of the true elders, who are 90. Once again, a major disconnect.

- A.S., a married 65-year-old male psychoanalyst with children in their thirties.

Wine loosens the tongue, that’s for sure — and my wife and I have had some pretty good arguments while drinking a bottle with dinner. Recently we realized that we couldn’t remember what we’d been arguing about — all we knew is that there’d been a “frank exchange of views,” and some hurt feelings.

- J.W., a married 50-year-old internist with two young children

I’ve always assumed – and so have my friends – that menopause was the reason for my memory problems, the same way it caused hot flashes. I figured that estrogen loss was the culprit. But lately, it occurred to me that men also suffer from forgetfulness, especially when their mid-life wives and assistants forget to remind them. Is it possible that menopause is not the cause?

- J.S., a married 53-year-old woman with a husband who’s ten years older.

It used to be that I could spin a half-dozen plates at once – in fact, I loved doing that. I found it exciting. In the past few years, I’ve come to find it really uncomfortable. The more plates, the more likely I am to “blank” on something really important. It just disappears from my mind. I think stress in mid-life can be defined this way: Something you could once do with relative ease, that has inexplicably become much more difficult.

- B.R., a 52-year-old male graphic designer who is the primary caregiver of three children.

The physiological basis for this is interesting: the depressed brain appears to produce fewer axons and dendrites (the structures that allow for communication), and possibly fewer new brain cells.

Have you had experience with either mild or clinical depression? Did you find that your memory was affected? If you took them, did you find that antidepressants helped or harmed your memory?

In the last year, I hit a tree branch while skiing in the backcountry. Two months later, I fell out of my kayak in a rapid and smacked my forehead on a rock. I paid very little attention to these injuries – frankly, I was more concerned about body parts that were obviously bleeding and/or broken. I figured that you couldn’t have a head injury unless you were out for awhile – that a concussion meant that you were unconscious. It turns out that I was wrong – and that concussions pile up exponentially, each one doing far more damage than the last.

- J.D., 55-year old single male, who has trouble recalling the names of the office mates he sees every day.

I have never been a great sleeper, but childbirth really did me in – my babies eventually learned to sleep all night, but I wake up constantly. I’ve tried everything to sleep – diet, exercise, pills, warm milk, hot baths – but I’m just jazzed when I should be sleeping, and sleepy when I should be working. I notice that my memory is much worse when I haven’t slept – the “holes” are greater, and more frequent. Now that the kids are gone, I try to compensate by sleeping in.

- Y. T., a 58-year-old woman who claims that she hasn’t had a solid night sleep in 20 years.

This explains why we’re mistaken so often – we think remember an event, but what we’re remembering is the last time we recalled it. It is one reason why you and your brother do not have the same recollections from childhood. Acknowledging this unpredictability can lead to a feeling of uncertainty. Failing to acknowledge it can lead to fights.

Can you describe, in detail, an experience you’ve had where you were sure you were right about something that happened in the distant past – but you weren’t? What were the repercussions?

Is nostalgia part of your life? Do you consider yourself sentimental? Do you dislike people who try to hang on to the past? Is there perhaps one member of your family who is entrusted with being "the memory bank?"

To start you off, I'll tell you what happened last month. I used the last of a booklet of checks for my personal account and opened a brand new box I had in my drawer. Wrote several -- including one to the credit card company. Ten days later, I learned that this particular box was extinct – when one of the checks was returned to the payee, with “no such account” stamped on it. Although the name and address on the check was correct, the number was slightly different -- and this book of checks belonged to an account I had closed. Do I remember closing a checking account in the past eight years? No, I do not.

Age doesn't get much respect in our culture -- and it seems to me that part of our fear is that there is nothing waiting on the other side of midlife. Whom do you consider to be wise? (Living or dead, relative, friend or total stranger...) What are the cognitive requirements for wisdom? Expertise? Emotional intelligence? Ample on-the-ground experience?