Good Old Days

Good Old Days

      Again the other night, we were thrilled to have some friends over for dinner, the three other couples all meshing together nicely, something that one always hopes to see when friends gather (especially when there's eight of you).  Laughs were many, and as the conversation came around to a few health issues (after all, none of us were exactly spring chickens), it was mentioned that fifty years from now we (at the dinner table) would not likely recognize the medical changes to come (for one thing, we would have all broken the record books for longevity); but it was also pointed out that looking back to 50 years ago, people then also wouldn't have anticipated such changes.  Things were once a bit simpler, someone added, a touch of good old days nostalgia creeping in; but I added that it's likely that every generation reflects back to earlier times, to more familiar times, to good times.  For many, as Carly Simon once sang, "these are the good old days."  Or at least it might probably seem to our memories...

      But for psychologist Elizabeth Phelps, past president of the Association for Psychological Science and a psychologist at New York University, we often can't really trust our memories.  In a Discover interview by Kat McGowan, Dr. Phelps said: The biggest misconception is that the strong feelings we have for highly emotional memories indicate they are more accurate.  We’ve known this since cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser studied memories of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger...For example, people think they have totally accurate memories about 9/11.  I wouldn’t be able to convince you that you don’t.  But like any other memory, you actually forget most of the details...At a crime scene, if someone has a gun, people are so focused on the weapon, they don’t remember the face of the criminal...Maybe what’s happening is that for highly emotional situations, you’re getting really strong memory for a few details, but worse memory for a lot of other details.  The fact that the memory for these few details is really strong leads you to believe you have strong memory for all the details.

     So what does this say for those memories of our meeting our first true love, or seeing our first glimpse of the Grand Canyon, or first getting robbed or humiliated or applauded?  How much of this "accurate" memory of the moment is real and how much has been turned into the so-called "flexible" memory?  Sit with your spouse or close friend of 20 years and recall some event from decades ago, and likely more than a few discrepancies will emerge.  I discovered this with a girlfriend from my post-college days, my memories of our breakup as clear as yesterday, only to have her look at me quite puzzled and say, "that's not the way it happened at all."  I've mentioned this before, wondering whether she was right or if I was right, or had we both altered our memories of how things happened?  When dealing with our brains' 85 billion neural cells and those cells branching off to form 150 trillion synapses, a few lost signals here and there would be understandable.  As Discover put it in a piece from 2014: To count them at the rate of one a second would require 3,200 years.  But the brain’s synapses, or electrical connections, are beyond belief.  Those 150 trillion could be counted in 3 million years.  And that’s still not the end of the matter.  What’s relevant is how many ways each cell can connect with the others.  For this we must use factorials.  Let’s say we want to know how many ways we can arrange four books on a shelf.  It’s easy: You find the possibilities by multiplying 4×3×2 — called “4 factorial” and written as 4! — which is 24.  But what if you have 10 books?  Easy again: It’s 10! or 10×9×8×7×6×5×4×3×2, which is — ready? — 3,628,800 different ways.  Imagine:  Going from four items to 10 increases the possible arrangements from 24 to 3.6 million.  Bottom line: Possibilities are always wildly, insanely greater than the number of things around us.  If each neuron, or brain cell, could connect with any other in your skull, the number of combinations would be 85 billion factorial.  This winds up being a number with more zeroes than would fit in all the books on Earth.  And that’s just the zeroes after the 1, the mere representation of the number, not the actual count.  The brain’s connection possibilities lie beyond that same brain’s ability to comprehend it...Each neuron functions on about 100 millivolts.  A tenth of a volt is darned efficient.  Even if you add up the brain’s entire energy consumption, it’s a mere 23 watts...

    “Research has shown that there are steady declines in a number of different cognitive functions, such as memory and speed of processing, from young adulthood to older age,” says Molly Wagster, the chief of the Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience Branch in the NIA’s Division of Neuroscience (this from an article in Discover).  “However at the same time, there is an improvement in cognitive function as we age in some domains, including vocabulary and semantic understanding...It was once believed that we lose significant numbers of nerve cells as we age, particularly in the areas important for learning and memory,” she says. “But data now shows we lose less than previously thought, that in fact, our brains are capable of neurogenesis both in adulthood and even into older age.” 

     All of this has led to a new industry, an industry expected to become a $6 billion market segment...brain training.  Luminosity (70 million users), Thync, Halo, Melomind and others aim to boost your brain power (or at least keep what brain power you have) said Fortune:  “It’s a little bit of the Wild West right now,” says Rex Jung, a neuropsychologist and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico. “The science just isn’t there to warrant efficacy.”  The good news is that the field is expanding because new technology has vastly improved our understanding of how the brain works and EEG equipment is growing less cumbersome and much cheaper.  Much of the excitement centers on neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new connections between cells, and neurogenesis, its ability to create new neurons long into life...Yet no one yet understands exactly how and why (or why not) the devices work, where to apply currents, and what kind of strength to use.  So says Daofen Chen, a clinical neurophysiologist and program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).  “The bottom line is that we don’t know how the brain works,” he says.  “We don’t know the principal of how the current is moving around in the pathways.”

     We know what you’re thinking: ESP is a scientific certainty.  Extrasensory perception (ESP), the so-called sixth sense, can be traced back to an experiment in the 1930s.  Joseph Banks Rhine, a botanist at Duke University, claimed that individuals who were shown the blank face of a card could correctly guess a shape printed on the back (supposedly by reading the mind of the person administering the test).  Although no other type of test has produced evidence for ESP, the myth lives on—thanks in part to the CIA, which employed psychic spies during the Cold War.  The spy­masters shut down their psychic network in 1995, when they finally concluded ESP isn’t a weapon—or even a thing.  

     Some people are left-brained (logical) and some are right-brained (creative).  In the 1960s, Roger Sperry, a neuropsychologist at the California Institute of Technology, cut fibers connecting the brain’s two hemispheres in a handful of epilepsy patients to reduce or eliminate their seizures.  He then ran an experiment, flashing images --of letters, lights, and other stimuli-- into either the left or right eye of the patients.  Sperry found that the brain’s left hemisphere better processed verbal information and the right hemisphere, visual and spatial.  Over decades, those findings became misinterpreted as dominance, particularly in self-help books.  There is no evidence to support personality types based on dominant hemispheres, but there’s plenty of evidence to refute it:  In 2012, for example, psychologists at the University of British Columbia found that creative thinking activates a widespread neural network without favoring either side of the brain.  We use only a fraction of our brains.  In 1907, famed psychologist William James claimed, “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”  A journalist later misquoted him as saying the average person develops only 10 percent of his mental capacity.  Scans, however, show that we use every part of our brain, though not all regions are active at once. (Sorry, Morgan.)  That’s why damage to any area of the brain --such as the aftermath of a stroke-- usually results in mental and behavioral effects.

     Two neuroscience graduate students at Western University, Ramina Adam and Jason Chen, were a bit more blunt in a piece titled "Brain Myths Busted" which appeared in Popular Science.  Among their myths to be busted: Doing crossword puzzles improves memory...If you’ve ever despaired at the Sunday crossword, here’s good news: Neuro­scientists have found that doing crossword puzzles makes you very good at—drumroll, please—doing crossword puzzles.  A 2011 study, led by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, found that solving crossword puzzles initially delayed the onset of memory decline in individuals between the ages of 75 and 85, but sped the decline (for reasons unknown) once a person showed signs of dementia.  Today, most neuroscientists agree there is no harm in the activity.  But don’t expect it to make you any better at finding your keys come Monday morning.  As for drinking alcohol and that woozy feeling you get after three or four glasses of wine...it isn’t from brain cells expiring?  When scientists at the Bartholin Institute in Denmark compared the brains of deceased alcoholics and nonalcoholics, they found the total number of neurons to be the same.  Alcohol, like other substances, can kill brain cells at high doses (especially the sensitive brain cells of developing fetuses), but moderate alcohol use does not.  It does interfere with how neurons communicate, affecting one’s ability to perform tasks like walking, speaking, and making decisions.  But you already knew that.

     Our brains, our perceptions, our memories, are all amazing things.  In my local neighborhood newsletter, one councilman remarked (on the city's new administrative building now under construction), "It has surprised me to go back and see how my perception of the size of a space changes as construction progresses.  I will admit that when I first went to the site and looked at the footings and rough layout of the rooms, I was surprised that everything looked so small.  Now that I've been inside the walls...that same space now looks much larger...I'm told that this is a common perception with laypeople such as myself."  Likely you've done the same, watched a house being built and seeing the foundation being laid, then later surprised at how large the actual house becomes once construction framing is complete.  Perhaps that is how our memories --accurate or not-- evolve.  A small moment, large and etched in our brains at the time, is actually that, rather small.  And perhaps it is only later that we ourselves are surprised that that memory has grown, the framing of the years  building and expanding it without our realization.  

     For the eight of us the other night, none of that mattered.  We would each remember the evening in our own way.  It was a night of friends laughing and sharing good food and wine.  We were making new memories.  And twenty years hence, perhaps each of us would have a different take on that evening, a different memory of what was said or what was eaten...but likely it would still be one of good times.  Those are important, those memories.  Much is going on in all of our lives, from health to finances to whatever.  But it is moments such as what happened the other night, a gathering of friends to just enjoy one another and the night, that makes our lives memorable; and one day not too far from now, those memories will help us add our own "good old days."