Excerpt: 'Carved in Sand'

April 5, 2007 — -- Memory loss: It's a problem that plagues nearly everyone who reaches middle age, yet few people want to talk about it.

Now acclaimed journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin is lifting the veil off memory loss with her new book, "Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife." She takes readers through the brain changes that happen in middle life, mixing scientific findings with humorous anecdotes to paint a better picture of what's going on inside the middle-aged mind.

For anyone who's ever had a bout of forgetfulness, "Carved in Sand" is an indispensible read.

Chapter 1

Your Unreliable Brain

Midlife Forgetfulness Is Embarrassing and Frustrating, but What Does It Mean for the Future'

On the drive from the suburbs to the city, we'd experienced a disturbing number of memory lapses. Actually, the first bout with forgetfulness had occurred earlier that afternoon, when our friend Sam, who was three hours away in Reno judging a barbecue contest, forgot that we had dinner plans. After a not-so-gentle phone reminder from his wife, he made the drive home in record time, still carrying a whiff of slow-smoked baby back ribs on his person. That mistake was in the past, but other canyons loomed before us. Where was our restaurant, again' (I had printed out the address, as I'd promised -- and left it on the kitchen counter.) Had my husband made the reservation for seven, or seven-fifteen' Which way did Post Street go' Was the nearest parking lot on the corner, or midway up the block' I made the error of mentioning that the little bistro we'd chosen had a great young chef, fresh out of the kitchen of some hotshot who had a restaurant in the Napa Valley, and another in Los Angeles. Or maybe it was Las Vegas. I'd read about it somewhere.

That's what set my husband off.

'Oh, I know exactly who you mean,' he said, ready to educate us. Then, he drew a blank. I watched him become increasingly preoccupied as he explored every shadowy cognitive pathway, searching for the name he was after.

I whispered that he ought to give it a rest -- he'd think of it later.

'But it's driving me crazy,' he said.

An hour into this hard-earned evening out with friends, more information was missing than present. Among our peers, this state of affairs was so common I'd started to call it 'the content-less conversation.' When the words 'Ken Frank, La Toque, Fenix -- and that is in L.A.' finally tumbled from his lips, we cheered. We could move on to other things, like whether any of us had ever tasted the nice bottle of wine we were ordering, and if we had, whether we'd liked it. Maybe we'd only heard about it. Or read about it. Or seen it on the supermarket shelf. No one could say for sure.

'I guess this is normal,' Julia sighed, 'but I swear, no one we know can remember a thing.'

'It may be normal,' Sam said darkly, 'but it isn't acceptable. Maybe thirty years ago, when life was slower and you could depend on a gold watch for thirty years of dedicated service and a pension, it would have been okay.'

He was right: What was making us nuts hadn't flustered our parents in their forties and fifties. But their lives were different, and so were their expectations. They weren't changing careers or inventing new ones. At the age of fifty-two, they definitely weren't trying to remember to show up for back-to-school night for three kids at two different schools.

Normal -- But Not Acceptable

Nearly every time the subject of forgetfulness arose, people asked me if what they were experiencing was 'normal.' If they defined that word as the dictionary does -- 'conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level or type,' the answer was yes -- perfectly.

Everybody asked, but in truth, few people were content with the implications of 'normal.' What they really wanted to know was whether they were just a little (or a lot) better off than their peers. This was important: If they slipped below the mean, chances were good that they would not be able to keep up.

What was normal had changed considerably over the centuries: Two hundred years ago, if we aged 'normally' -- that is, according to our biological destiny -- forgetfulness wouldn't be an issue at forty-five or fifty: Most of us would be in our graves. Medicine constantly redefines what is normal in terms of physiological aging. We get new knees and new hips. We take drugs to control our blood pressure. We don't give up reading when our fading vision demands that we hold the newspaper at arm's length. Instead, we build ourselves an arsenal of reading glasses and scatter them all over the house and office, in case we forget where they are. When the New York Times Magazine began to run a Sunday cartoon series with wording in a font so small that I couldn't manage it even while wearing my reading glasses, I suffered no damage to my self-esteem. And yet, when it comes to what scientists call 'age-associated cognitive changes,' we take it personally and refuse to do anything about it, mostly because we're not sure what we can do.

This sheeplike complacency occurs because the brain is our most intimidating organ. Your brain, with you from the start, has demanded remarkably little attention. Like me, you've probably spent more time worrying about the condition of your abdominal muscles. We assume that what is going on in there is as mysterious as the universe, involving such concepts as consciousness, being and soul, surely best left to the philosophers and the clerics. Here's the news: From a purely biochemical perspective, your brain --