Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki Page A

to understand that sometimes he can’t quite remember whether I’m visiting for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but he remembers to say I love you at the end of every phone call without fail.
    As a neuroscientist, I immediately recognized why this happened. This is a beautiful example of the power of emotion to strengthen memory. The love and maybe even the pride my dad felt the week before when his daughter asked if she could tell him she loved him—that emotion beat dementia and allowed him to form a new long-term memory that has lasted to this day. When events or information arouses us emotionally, our amygdala gets activated; that brain area, we now know, is critical for processing emotion and helps boost the memory processed by the hippocampus. This shows just how interdependent emotion and cognition, or feeling and learning, truly are.
    That night, my dad formed a new long-term memory despite his dementia. And you can be sure, the memory of that phone call will be locked into my brain for the rest of my life.
    WHAT MAKES SOMETHING MEMORABLE?
    The fact that my father always remembers to say I love you at the end of our phone calls is an example of how emotional resonance can make memories stronger. But emotional resonance that kicks the amygdala into gear is not the only thing that can boost memory. For example, my request to my dad was also very novel relative to our other conversations in the more than forty years he has known me, and novelty is another key factor that can enhance memory. You see, our brains are naturally tuned in to novelty. It’s actually a safety issue because we want to be vigilant of new things in our environment that might be dangerous. Our brains tend to respond strongest (in terms of action potentials) to new stimuli so that a bigger response will be seen when we are looking at a completely novel face, for example, instead of the face of our office mate whom we see every day. It turns out that novel information is also easier to remember.
    But there are a few other key factors that improve our memory, which I notice in my dad every week during the football and baseball seasons. You see, he can often tell me what football or baseball game he watched—especially if it was an exciting one. Just a few days ago, he told me he really enjoyed watching his San Francisco Giants win the 2014 World Series against Kansas City and that it was especially exciting because the Giants won in game seven. To tell the truth, I don’t follow baseball and I had to google it to be sure he got his facts right. Now, that’s pretty darn good memory for someone with dementia! The trick there is that my father loves baseball, especially the Giants, and has essentially a lifetime of memories and associations with Giants baseball that make it easier for him to remember the details of the World Series. All those associations that he has with the Giants provided a framework for remembering this new but associated piece of information: The Giants won the World Series (again) in 2014! We know that one of the major functions of the hippocampus is to help link or associate initially unrelated items in memory. The larger associative network is stored in the cortex, but when the hippocampus can link a new item (like the Giants winning the Series) to a much larger network of other Giants baseball–related information, it becomes easier both to learn and to remember that information. This is part of what makes my dad still my dad, even if his ability to form new memories is weaker now. He has a foundation of strong memory networks, which he has built up throughout his life, of the things he loves, thinks, and cares about: his family, food, Broadway, baseball, and football, to give a few examples. I am so thankful that this aspect of memory allows Dad to retain all the things he enjoys most.

    DEFINING DEMENTIA AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
    How are dementia and Alzheimer’s related? Dementia is a general term that describes a set of