Five Questions for Cathryn Jakobson Ramin

EXPLAINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND MEMORY LOSS

For a journalist, memory loss can be a terrifying experience.

Unexplained lapses in memory and her quest to find the root of the
problem motivated Cathryn Jakobson Ramin to write "Carved in Sand:
When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife" (HarperCollins).

Ramin, who has written extensively about psychology, religion,
business, sociology and travel for publications including The
Chronicle, the New York Times and O, The Oprah Magazine, spent four
years researching and writing "Carved in Sand." She interviewed more
than 300 people in midlife, as well as psychologists,
endocrinologists, sleep medicine and head trauma specialists,
nutritionists and psychiatrists. She also traveled the country
collecting data, attending an eight-week mindfulness meditation
stress-reduction class and two weeks of intensive neurofeedback --
what she describes as a lot of "hands-on, here-I-am-put-me-in
your-chair" research.

"The book is my story. It's my journey," said Ramin. "It's a
first-person narrative. People tell me that it reads like a novel."

Ramin, 50, was born in New York City. She currently lives in Mill
Valley with her husband, Ron Ramin, a composer for television, and
their sons, Oliver, 13, and Avery, 17.

Q: What inspired you to write "Carved in Sand"?

A: I realized that something had definitely occurred in my brain. I
simply was not the same person that I had been before, in terms of my
ability to do research, take a huge pile of documents, read them,
understand them, develop a new concept and churn out a story. I had
never realized it was taxing. I just thought it was how everybody did
it. I don't think I had a photographic memory; actually there is no
such thing as a photographic memory. I just had the ability to absorb
a gigantic amount of information and hang on to it long enough to
turn it into an article, at which point I would forget it completely
when I was finished.

So what was going on? This was not something I wanted to share with
the world. It seemed that I would be permanently unemployed if I
mentioned this to an editor. How could they possibly respond to a
journalist having memory issues? I kept it to myself for quite a
while. Eventually, I looked around and wondered, "Why are all these
people not remembering the names of books and the titles of movies?"
Why is there more information missing than present in half of our
conversations, which I came to call the contentless conversation. We
all seem to know what we're talking about, but there are no proper nouns.

I thought, "This is not just my problem." It's a general problem many
people are having and they all seem to be my contemporaries, given a
decade or two, in their 40s, 50s and 60s. They're embracing their
lives; they want to live them fully. Sometimes they are still in a
position of raising children. They're working and maybe they're
considering retiring from what they're doing and starting to do
something else. These are all very memory-intensive requirements.

It's not like it used to be 20 years ago, when, by the time you're in
your 40s, your kids have gone on to college. We're having the
lifestyle people used to have in their 30s in our early 50s. It's the
result of delayed everything -- delayed adolescence, marriage and
child-rearing. You end up with menopause and adolescence meeting each
other. That's probably something that should never happen, but it
happens all the time now. I was 33 when my first child was born and
36 when my second was born.

Q: What was it like writing the book?

A: It was an enormous mental challenge. Studies now show that the
most important thing that you can do for yourself is to give yourself
a mental challenge. That means taking on something that is extremely
unfamiliar and fairly difficult. That's how you build and resurrect
neuropathways that would otherwise not be available to you.

Q: What kind of mental exercises do you recommend?

A: For me, the mental challenge began by actually needing to write
the book, and the end result was the cure. For a lot of people, these
mental challenges cover a wide range. Everyone's always talking about
doing crossword puzzles and Sudoku. But what the studies really show
is that once you're accomplished at something, you've worn out its
benefits. So it's important to take on new challenges. People play
Scrabble and they play bridge and chess and take up competitive
tennis. I know a lot of women who've done it in their early 40s and
are apparently addicted to it. The competitive aspect, the strategic
aspect is what makes it a mental exercise.

Q: Tell us about the chapter "Recreational Drugs, Alcohol and Other
Neurotoxins" and their effect on memory.

A: That addresses all the things that we do in our lives
intentionally or by accident that can have an effect on our cognitive
abilities later in life. There are a lot of misconceptions about
alcohol. When you drink alcohol, even a small amount, you develop
what they call cocktail party deficit. Say you get to a party right
after work and you haven't eaten and you have a drink. There's a very
good chance that you will not remember anything that anyone told you
that evening. You are pouring it into an empty stomach, and it is
making its way very quickly to the brain.

Substantial alcohol use has a terrible effect on the brain.
Alcoholics suffer substantial shrinkage in the gray and the white
matter in the brain. People want to know if the drugs that they did
in college could be responsible for the situation. The jury is
somewhat out on that. There are definitely consequences, in terms of
working memory, to smoking marijuana. Numerous studies have come out
showing that even a brief short-term experience with marijuana will
affect short-term memory for several days or even a week. Studies of
people who smoked marijuana 20 or 30 years ago showed no significant
brain changes; it's really the ongoing or current use of the drug.

Other drugs have much more severe repercussions. I have a picture of
what Ecstasy does to your brain. Basically, it destroys large chunks
of it. Ecstasy throws your serotonin into overdrive and burns your
neurons out; it murders them. Maybe Timothy Leary thought it was
good, but, from the perspective of cognitive function, the brain does
not need to be put into overdrive.

Q: What is your earliest childhood memory?

A: I'm not very good on childhood memories. If you've had a fairly
traumatic childhood -- and I did, because my parents went through an
extremely messy divorce when I was 9 -- the trauma and the stress can
pretty much obliterate childhood memories. I met people on my book
tour who have come to tell me that they don't remember their
childhoods because some big terrible thing occurred. There were
deaths, or some act of God that swept away a village -- terrible
things far worse than anything that I went through. People have told
me about sexual abuse. People who experienced early childhood trauma
have dealt with parents who, for one reason or another, were too
distracted to bond.

I have vague memories, but I think they emerged from a photo album
that I found about 10 years ago that had a lot of pictures of me as a
child. I don't think I really remembered any of those things, but
they've sort of come back.

For more information about Cathryn Jakobson Ramin's work, visit
www.carvedinsand.com.