HOW COMMON ARE MEMORY WORRIES? There are many reasons to care about your memory. Consider these: the development of a superpower memory enhances attention, focus, abstraction, naming, spatial visualization, verbal facility, language, and word acquisition. In a phrase, memory is the key to brain enhancement. In America today, anyone over fifty lives in dread of the Big A--Alzheimer's disease. Small social gatherings (dinner, cocktail parties, etc.) take on the atmosphere of a segment from NPR's weekly quiz show "Wait Wait . Don't Tell Me." That's the one where guests vie with each other in intense competitions to be the first to come up with the names of such things as the actor playing a role in the latest mini-series everybody is binging on.

Almost inevitably, someone will pull out a cellphone to check the accuracy of the person who responded first. Quick, quicker, quickest lest others suspect you of coming down with the initial symptoms of the Big A. Although Alzheimer's disease is not nearly as common as many people fear, nevertheless worries about perceived memory lapses are increasingly expressed to friends. They are also the most common complaint that persons over fifty-five years of age bring to their doctors. Such memory concerns are often unjustified and arouse needless anxiety. This widespread anxiety has helped create a national pre-occupation with memory and signs of memory failure. One of the reasons for this panic is the confusion in many people's minds about how we form memories. Try to remember something that happened to you earlier today.

It doesn't have to be anything special--any ordinary event will do just fine. Now consider how that memory came about. At my request, you recovered a memory for something that you probably would have not thought about, if I hadn't prompted you to recall it, and you hadn't made the effort to retrieve it. Reduced to its essentials, memory involves re-experiencing something from the past in the form of a recollection. Operationally, memories are the end products of our efforts in the present to recover information that is stored in our brain. Memories--like dreams and acts of the imagination--vary from one person to another. My memories are distinctly different from your memories based on our personal life experiences. Memory also differs from pictures or videos of events from the past.

While these technologically based versions of the past can serve as memory stimulators, they are not themselves memories.