The Memory Thing

Getting old means a lot of things, like aching muscles, forgetting things, and medical exams you never had to do when you were younger.

The memory thing always gets me. I worry about it because of family members that had Alzheimer. If I forget something I get the worried feeling. The poor memory seems to happen more when I don’t pay attention. But I take a deep breath and think about if I actually paid attention to what I was doing at the time.

Like anyone who likes to self-diagnose, I took to the internet and looked up memory issues.

I came across a memory expert that said almost all memories are an illusion. Dr. Julia Shaw said, “This is because our perception of the world is deeply imperfect, our brains only bother to remember a tiny piece of what we actually experience, and every time we remember something we have a potential to change the memory we are accessing.”

She also mentioned that we can create false memories, and these memories might feel like they really happened but they never did occur.  

She felt so strongly about memory and our ability to believe false memories that she wrote a book called “The Memory Illusion” to help us faulty memory people understand why we can’t remember things the way we used to remember or thought we used to remember.

But that isn’t the only thing that I learned about memory, because I found that eating too much sugar is bad for the brain too.

UCLA did an experiment on rats that examined what sugar does to the memory. They gave two groups of rats a solution of high-fructose corn syrup, but they also gave one group an omega-3 fatty acid supplement. But before they started the experiment the rats learned a complicated maze.

The rats' brains of the high sugar only group showed signs of insulin resistance, and that can interfere with brain function.

“Because insulin can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, the hormone may signal neurons to trigger reactions that disrupt learning and cause memory loss,” Gomez-Pinilla said. She ran the experiment at UCLA

What does that mean for my memory?

It means that extra sugar is probably not good for my memory and that not paying attention is also bad for my memory.

I shouldn’t feel bad about forgetting a thing. It is natural. It is probably just a false memory telling me that I once could remember everything I read and recall everything I once did in my youth. That pesky false memory probably happened because I enjoyed one too many sugary drinks in my youth. Had I listened to my grandmother when she told me not to drink that many sodas, well, I probably wouldn’t have so many false memories? Man, another thing my grandma was right about.

It amazes me what we don’t know about the mind and memory. There are a lot of books out there promising the brain fix, but in reality, nothing can replace a healthy diet that isn’t high in sugar and a focused mind. It isn’t easy being told to put down the Snickers bar because that sugar feels so good but remember that sugar won’t help you remember the password for your email account.