Free Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki Page A

deficits that occur in Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and normal aging. We must understand how the normal brain works to form new memories before we can fix what goes wrong with them in these neurological conditions.

    TAKE-AWAYS: FORMING NEW MEMORIES
    •  Parts of the temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices (one on each side) are critical for a fundamental form of memory called declarative memory.
    •  Declarative memory is named for its ability to be consciously declared and includes memory for our life experiences (episodic memory) as well as memory for facts (semantic memory).
    •  For a new declarative memory to be laid down, these key temporal lobe regions must be working. These regions are also required as this new memory is repeatedly recalled and possibly associated with other information on its way to becoming a long-term memory.
    •  Once these temporal lobe areas do their job of forming a long-term memory, the areas are no longer required. The memories are then thought to reside in complex networks of cells in the cortex.
    •  If you damage your hippocampus as an adult, there are no other brain areas that can take over. So there is no plasticity left if you lose this area of the brain.
    •  We now know that cells in the hippocampus can signal the formation of new associative memories by changing their firing rate in response to particular learned associations. Learn someone’s name and there will be a group of cells in the hippocampus that are firing specifically to that newly learned name–face association.

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    THE MYSTERY OF MEMORY HITS HOME:
Memories Mean More Than Neurons
    I t was a beautiful clear Wednesday morning in New York City. I had been a faculty member at NYU for a while by that time. That morning I was eager to dig into the Wednesday food section of the New York Times —my favorite section of the week. I was excited to see an article about the world-renowned chef Thomas Keller. With my parents, I had been to both of Keller’s five-star restaurants, the French Laundry in Yountville, California, in the Napa Valley and the equally amazing Per Se, overlooking Central Park. I was looking forward to a fun article about specialty butter or rare wild mushrooms, so I was surprised when I found that the article was about Keller’s later-in-life revived relationship with his father, who left the family when Keller was five years old.
    Since that time, Keller had had only sporadic contact with his father. It was not until the chef was in his forties that son and father had established a real relationship. They enjoyed each other’s company so much that the elder Keller moved to Yountville to live near his son. Both loved their new relationship, eating and enjoying life to its fullest—no doubt the wonderful food and the beautiful surroundings of the Napa Valley only added to the joyful intensity of their reunion. But a tragic car accident left Keller’s father a paraplegic, requiring constant care and monitoring. Keller threw himself and all of his resources into helping his father heal and begin a new life from his now ubiquitous wheelchair. Under the careful watch of his son, the elder Keller survived with at least some of his old gusto intact for another year, before passing away.
    It was a moving article. I could feel the pain that Keller experienced in losing the father whom he had only just gotten to know so late in life.
    But the kicker was a quote by Keller who summed it all up when he said, “At the end of the day when we think about what we have, it’s memories.” I actually started to cry.
    I cried not just because the story was moving. I cried because the story made me realize something important about myself. I had spent the last sixteen plus years studying the mechanics of memory, without truly thinking about what memories mean to me. Yes, I thought about patient H.M. and all that he lost without his