Dr. Barry Gordon Show Segment

I'm Dr. Barry Gordon or Barry Gordon MD Ph.D. I'm Associate Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland and I head up what's called the Cognitive Neurology Division which includes a memory clinic.

Q: Doctor, could you tell us why did you write a book on memory?

A: I wanted to explain to people how a lot of what they think of is wrong with their memories or just quirky about their memories like the way they forget their car keys, they way they block on peoples names, the way they can remember everything but the thing they're trying to remember, is actually very normal. It's because of the way our memory's work. It's because of the way we cram things into them or don't cram things into them as the case may be and those have been questions that medical science and psychological science has been answering over the years so that if people understood a few basic principles about how our memory worked, they would understand how their memory doesn't work sometimes and that was important also because a lot of people are very worried about diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease and while it's true that Alzheimer's is a common and very terrifying disease, most of the people who have memory problems as they get older, won't have Alzheimer's Disease. They'll have normal aging, they'll have overworked, they'll have over-cramming things into their head but they won't have Alzheimer's Disease. So I wrote the book to try to explain normal memory, to try to explain what goes wrong with normal memory or normal memories if you like. And then to talk about memory diseases and finally, I wrote the book to also tell people what's known about how you can improve your memory because there are some basic principles that have been known for a long time and your mother could have told you if you listened to her about how to make your memory work better. So I wanted to get all of that in.

Q: Isn't memory kind of like a database where you have all of this information up there and grab it when we need it?

A: Our memory is like a database but it's not like a database of the kind that's in a computer. It, our memories are not one single box where everything gets put. Our memories have lots of little boxes that correspond to different types of memories. For example, vision. The pictures or shape of things. Or sound, or the meaning of things are all in different boxes inside of our head and they all interconnect. Some people have better boxes than others and some people make their boxes better than other people have and the other thing to know about memory that makes it different than a computer is memories get linked automatically in people so a name Evelyn may bring out other peoples names all right. For Barry, people are often mistaking me for Barry, all right. Don't ask me why. Nobody's, you know, or Barry Gordy or somebody like that and that's automatic in memory unlike a computer memory and what that does is it gives us part of the creative power of our memories but it also means our memories are faded to make mistakes.

Q: Now when disease strikes like with Alzheimer's, or Dementia, these are physical things that are actually affecting our memory, correct?

A: Correct. Dementia is generally defined as a physical problem affecting the brain that causes a number of different problems. Alzheimer's Disease is a form of Dementia. There are many different forms of Dementia and part of the trick today is to define when a person who has a memory problem or whatever other kinds of problems they have, has a particular type of Dementia and what it might be due to. There's even probably several different kinds of Alzheimer's Disease. There are some that are more hereditary than others for example. Some that run in families and are very obviously running in families. Others that are less obviously running in families. Typically Alzheimer's Disease is both a memory problem and several other problems. People with Alzheimer's Disease don't have good judgment for example or may not have good judgment. They may have problems getting words out. They may have problems dressing themselves and they also typically don't know about these problems very well so that they'll either minimize them or deny them completely. At the same time, the family knows the person with Alzheimer's Disease can't remember who their spouse is. The person with Alzheimer's Disease will say, "No, there's no problem. You, you, whatever, what's your name." and they won't even know it's a problem. So that's how Alzheimer's Disease looks in its typical form.

Q: So because to truly diagnose Alzheimer's, you really need to do an autopsy, isn't that correct?

A: The current standard is to examine the brain. To, to currently diagnose Alzheimer's during life, you rely on a combination of, of test. Actually not test, you rely on what the person in their family tells you. You rely on an examination and you rely on tests as well and it's possible to be, with that, about 90 to 95% accurate or 85 to 99% accurate depending on diagnosing what Alzheimer's will look like, that, and that person will have Alzheimer's in their brain. It's important to realize though that, that even in the brain level, what looks like Alzheimer's in one person may not look like quite the same Alzheimer's in another and we don't know the reason for those differences. What people look at in the brain are something called plaques and tangles. But some people will have a lot of plaques and tangles and some people will have relatively few and some people will have plaques and tangles without ever having obviously Alzheimer's Disease. So it's very obvious the plaques and tangles must be something happening in addition to whatever fundamental is going wrong and that fundamental, what is fundamentally going wrong is the focus of a great deal of research today.

Q: Is it true that they, you're able to take a test, you know, through the generations to find out if you're carrying....

A: Well, there's no test for carrying Alzheimer's yet except in a very few families where the disease has been localized to a specific gene or a specific chromosome. For most people, the test, the blood test to look at what are called these markers, we look at this compound, will raise or lower the odds that what you have is Alzheimer's Disease if you have a memory or Dementia problem but they won't prove that you're going to get it. So even the one most known now which is called Apoprotein E, and the E4 Variety, even if a person has two of them which gives the highest risk for Alzheimer's, there are very well known people who've lived very full lives and never had any Alzheimer's Disease at all and we don't actually know the reasons for that. It may be that the E4 is not completely connected with the cause of Alzheimer's. It may be you need something else in addition to it to bring out the disease.

Q: How about a brain injury person. We have a 60 year old lady was in an accident, you know, what happened, what happened to her memories, can she get them back?

A: Well, let me tell you, typical scenario would be, somebody who's in a car accident and has what's called a mild head injury which means they may lose consciousness for a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes or a little longer and when they wake up they frequently discover that they can't learn anything new so the people are coming by their bedside can talk to them and they walk away and the person doesn't remember that anybody's been there and they also have problems remembering from before the accident. Yes those memories can come back. Typically the memories from before the accident gradually come back and gradually the persons ability to learn what's new increases or improves day after day so gradually they'll remember more and more of what's happening. They'll remember who came by. Now, it's easier to come back when the person's younger. So a child would never notice it. Somebody who's 60 will have a slower recovery.

Q: But they will....

A: But they typically recover. Most of those head injuries, even though they may seem terrible when they happen and the person's knocked out, the person seems to recover fully from most of them.

Q: What about if a person has a stroke they have their memories lost?

A: Well, it depends on where the stroke is. Some strokes directly affect memory. They damage the circuitry required for making memories hard, hardening them up and that means that a person will not be able to learn anything new from that kind of stroke. After that a stroke happens. But more, more often, the strokes damage other functions that the person uses for memory such as speech and the person will appear to have a memory problem but what they may actually have is a speech problem. They can't hear as quickly, they can't understand as well, they can't say it as well. So some people may call it a memory problem but it's not really a memory problem.

Q: Are memories also associated then with all of the senses. If I smell something will it bring back a memory. I hear a song.

A: Well, memories are very much associated with senses.

A: Memories are associated with, we use all of our senses and different people use them in different combinations to bring back memories to have clues to memories. For some people these are stronger than others. So for some people a scent really will be a very powerful clue, for other people, they'll, no, I don't recognize it. It doesn't do anything for me. Other people vision or a sound, a sight or a sound will bring it out. But that's because of those little boxes I mentioned in inner connections. Something happening here can spread its memories to other boxes and trigger them and then in turn they can go back and trigger others. So just the way you remember, you know, who you sat next to in third grade, you may not be on the tip of your tongue but you begin to think, "Wait a minute. I was in the class, it was Mrs. So-and-so, I sat...." you know, and then you gradually reconstruct it.

Q: Mad Cow Disease in England. I mean, does that mean if I eat a piece of beef I'm going to go insane and have Alzheimer's or...

A: No. It's obviously a disease to be concerned about. There is, we already know about that equivalent disease in humans. There's two of them that are known at least. One's called Kruitsfeld Yakov Disease and the other is called Kooroo. Kooroo only happens in New Guinea but Kruitsfeld Yakov happens in the United States and about one in a million people are affected by it. What happens apparently is, a strange, not quite virus, but some kind of substance or protein or what have you just begins destroying parts of the brain and the problem is that it can take a long long time from the time it first, you get infected, to when the actual problems appear which is the problem that happens with Mad Cow Disease. Mad Cow Disease may be an example of where this strange, we'll call it a virus-like sub, material, has gone from one animal to another. One kind of animal to another. From sheep into cows. That raises the danger that it might come from cows to humans. Now, as with many other things, the risks are very very low, but people are appropriately worried about that possibility and so England has taken steps to, of course, slaughter its cattle that may or may not be affected and other countries have taken steps to make sure that such diseases aren't present in their beef herds.

Q: It's kind of scary. How about, I think I, I can't remember where my keys are. I can't find, you know, the phone number I know is there. I think I have Alzheimer's.

A: Well, one of the reasons I wrote the book was so that if I forget, if I forget my keys there's something wrong with my brain and there's actually a chapter in the book that describes normal people who took diaries so they found out how often they were forgetting different things. You can go through it and if you think you're abnormal you can check against these other people whether they did it more often or less often than you did and some of them are pretty astounding. And also there's a big variation too so that some person, one person may never forget his car keys, and another person may forget their car keys two or three times a day but one important clue is the more you worry about your memory, the less likely it is that something serious like Alzheimer's is affecting your memory because people are actually not very good judges of their own memory ability up to a point and in diseases like Alzheimer's especially, it also robs people of their judgment about their own memories. So it's not just the memory problem but their judgment about their memory. So if you're really worried, you can be reassured. You may still worry because obviously, if you're really worried nothing I'm going to say is going to help you but, and, but for most people, there's an aging related memory problem but it's not the same as Alzheimer's Disease.

Q: Am I really losing a lot of brain cells and am I losing more when I take a little sip?

A: Well, it's a myth that you lose lots of brain cells. It's, that's based on old numbers that are probably not true. We do lose probably some brain cells from some areas of the brain but remember you have a hundred billion at least so if you lose ten thousand a day which is probably not true, you still have plenty to go. What happens when you take a little sip of alcohol? Probably that doesn't hurt you at all. It's those people who get tipsy routinely and know that they're getting tipsy like, on a daily basis, those are people at much higher risk for having problems from alcohol and we know that alcohol, for lots of reasons, probably does damage either the brain or body. The net result is, people are less sharp and their memory's may not be as good. One good news there is that if people stop drinking, their memory and their mental sharpness may improve but they have to know the warning signs.

Q: So there can be things which cause us to lose memory but the brain has the ability given time or away from what's causing this to actually heal and get better?

A: There's actually, it's now, one of the important results of modern science and neuroscience is that the brain can recover a great deal. There's more recovery power built in the brain than people wanted to assume and if you insult the brain, if you damage it, it can bounce back. It may not bounce back completely though and you're better off not having damaged it in the first place, and alcohol is an example, if you can avoid it, do. But for things such as strokes, for instance, the brain can do some healing. It can find other ways around the problem. Alternate routes if you like and it may even be able to improve the brain cells that are only partly damaged. So that's encouraging hope. The other part there is that we now know that people can learn throughout their life. It's not that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, the old dog may have refused to learn new tricks, but you could teach it to and you too can learn new things. And people do that all the time. Peoples vocabulary increases throughout their lives. They can also keep their mental flexibility, their mentally, they can keep themselves mentally flexible as well and they can help improve their memory and mental power throughout their life.

Q: Wasn't it one time that, you know, by age 17 that was your greatest, that was supposed to be a peak point. Your supposed to be able to take in the most information ever, I mean that.....

A: Well, the problem is it didn't take into account, that was what people were told. I think it was 18. I can't remember if when I was 19 I thought I was one year or two years over the hill. But, but actually there are certain things that clearly are best when you're younger, OK. Physical abilities clearly peak very early and any Olympic contender, any boxer, anybody can tell you that but different mental abilities are not quite the same thing. Speed goes down as people get older on the average. Not everybody but on the average. But some of their mental ability is improved and things such as wisdom and judgment which we find it hard to measure, but which are obvious to people in a sense definitely increase with age. I mean you wouldn't trust an 18 year old to make judgments about 5 billion dollar financial institutions. They just don't have the judgment and the experience and that's something that definitely comes with age. I think it was Plato who commented that there were no boy philosophers. It's just not the kind of thing you can be a genius at. A prodigy. You have to have experience.

Q: Right. Can you give us an example of some kind of little memory enhancer that our audience could try at home?

A: The easiest memory enhancer and the one that's most obvious is to pay attention. There's actually two or three I can tell you about. One is, pay attention. The biggest problem with everyday memory is we're so rushed or we're so worried about what we're going to say next that we don't pay attention to what's happening now. So I don't learn your name because I'm already thinking of the next persons name. That's one. The second tip is to repeat things to yourself. Repetition locks things into memory. And the third is to be interested in what you're trying to learn. If you're not interested it doesn't matter how often you repeat it, it'll sink in but only a little tiny bit. Be interested and you can change it from 10% to 90% right off the bat.

Q: How about telling us about the Dana Alliance.

A: The Dana Alliance is a group of 140 neuroscientists who are dedicated to educating the public about brain research and advances in brain research and also in letting the public understand what kind of research is necessary to help advances in brain and brain studies and they range from people who work at the gene level, to people who, like me, work at the whole person level and, and others besides. Different dimensions scattered in there. The Dane Alliance was funded through a grant from the Dana Foundation, a non-profit organization in New York City dedicated to publicizing neuro-science information to people. Because one of the things the Dana Foundation and the Dana Alliance realized was our brains are one of our most important organs but many people didn't think about them very much and didn't realize how many diseases and ills and just annoyances of everyday life came from peoples brains. From everyday forgetting on the one hand, to stumbling our words, to serious conditions such as Depression, Schizophrenia, Stroke, Alzheimer's Disease. And the Dana Alliance and the Dana Foundation are dedicated to working on those.

Q: Can you tell me the difference between what, the Cerebrum and the Cerebellum. Isn't the Cerebellum sometimes referred to as the Reptilian Brain?

A: Well, that's a bit of a, actually there's other parts of the brain that are more typically referred to as the Reptilian Brain. If you look at animals, very, what we consider more primitive animals, they have a Cerebellum. They have areas that go up to the point where our eyes basically go because, after all, they have eyes. And those might be more typically considered the Reptilian Brain. The Cerebellum controls motor movements both in lower animals and in humans and it may also be involved with mental timing and mental abilities but we don't know that yet. The Cerebrum is the part above the Cerebellum. It's the big cerebral hemispheres. It's what we're proudest of as humans so we, we take great pride in our giant foreheads with giant frontal lobes and those are undoubtedly important but lots of different functions are packed into our Cerebrum and Cerebellum and actually the brain functions as more of a whole than people actually realize. Everybody's heard about right brain, left brain, reptilian brain, mammalian brain or what have you, but actually the brain functions as a single thing and it bounces information around a great, great deal and very rapidly. So it's often hard for any one thing to tease apart where it's coming from. We can do it, but sometimes it's not even meaningful to tease a part where it's coming from. So I'm undoubtedly using my Cerebellum right now, Reptilian or not, to talk about a very lofty topic which is brain and mind.

Q: Well thank you for taking this time.

A: Thank you.

Q: What about the use of computers?

A: Well computers are wonderful aides. People just shouldn't forget the fact that they're just aides and whatever it takes people to learn or whatever they're most comfortable with is what they should try and sometimes you have to use things that are other than computers. For example, it's probably better to write things down, you know, for some things than to put them on computer but computers can be very helpful. You just have to appreciate that some people may not adapt to them well. So the person that finds it hard to get into computers shouldn't feel ashamed of his self or herself. They should realize that reading, doing crossword puzzles, you don't need to do, be computer literate to expand your mind and improve yourself.

Q: So the biggest thing is just to keep on doing things. Is this visual stimuli, is it, is it all of it?

A: Anything, my general advice to people is for them to do something that they enjoy and that they want to do because it's a lot like having a exercise set up in your house. It doesn't matter how elaborate it is or how many thousands of dollars it cost you, if you don't have the interest to get on it, it's not going to do you any good unless the initial carrying it in helped you a lot. So people should realize while the computer is a great aid and the Internet is a great aid, and I use them myself extensively, they're only additional tools and if you find it better to go into a library and browse through old magazines, you know, or read the book so you can open up the big folio of volumes and look at the pictures in high detail and not have to wait for it painfully appear on your screen, that's probably better.

Q: I'm not, I can't think of the terminology about when people have had brain injuries they tend to sometimes, everything is to one side.

A: It's called an inattention defect.

Q: OK, and is it possible then maybe a computer that's set up for them might work better?

A: Well actually, in this inattention defect, typically people ignore things to their left side and it's actually, you don't need a computer to help rehabilitate such people, there's a doctor at UCSD whose been doing it with relatively simple equipment to try to help force peoples attention over to the left side. Computers are tools and they're better computer, better tools than other tools and they're, not every tool is right for any given job. So the computer is a great aide, it can move things along much faster, it can bring up pictures and sound that we couldn't access before but it doesn't do everything and if a person's not comfortable, for example, if they're not very comfortable using a keyboard, or if they're not comfortable using a mouse, they don't have to feel guilty. After all, the keyboard isn't exactly designed for people and the mouse isn't exactly what our hands were built to use.

Q: Why is the study of the brain important? Why is what you guys do so important for us?

A: Well the study of the brain is important because so much of what we are really is our brains. It's only three pounds but it's one of the more important three pounds in our body. I mean, you know, the heart, but even the heart can be replaced right now. That three pounds inside of our head is responsible for all our personality, our wishes, our hopes, our dreams, our goals and how to do them and the problems of the brain, whether you call them diseases or whether you just call them problems, whether you, however they come from, are very important to people cause they're, they get at the core of what they are and what they want to be and what they want their children to be. It's also very important right now to study the brain because there are periods in science when you are poised to make great discoveries and in the brain, people are poised to make fantastic discoveries. We're prepared to do now in the brain what happened in Physics in the early years of the century when there was a complete revolution in how people understood Physics and some of it came out bad, most of it came out good. In the brain we're similarly poised because the knowledge has been building up and now it's set to explode and it's set to explode in ways that'll be good and ways that'll be unforeseen but it's important to know that it's happening and can happen. So I fully anticipate that in 20 years brain science, which means the science of dealing with the way we are, will look totally different than what it is right now and that's only 20 years and I can remember 20 years back. So 20 years forward is a little scary but that's, in fact, what's happening.

Q: Is that due to the advancements in the technology plus the fact that now you probably have all kinds of history that you, you know, have been keeping and....

A: It's due to everything coming together so that we now understand, for example, more about how people think at a mind level. I can tell you the process involved in trying to remember the name of a watch, for instance. We now know more about how people think at the brain level. We now know how more, more about how people will name a watch at the nerve cell level and we now know how primitive animals work with their nervous systems and the reason that that's relevant is because most of our brains are built out of the same elements that these primitive animals have so that, actually they're not so primitive, some of these animals, so that a lot of the genes, a lot of the basic machinery, if you discover it in a worm, turns out to be relevant to a human and if you find it in a mouse, it's almost certainly relevant to the human. And one of the great discoveries of recent years has been discovering how much is the same so that if you prove it in a little tiny worm, it's got a good chance of being true in people which means now you can experiment on worms and do something of relevance to people so that......

A: ....and actually, I mean these worms are microscopic. You almost can't see them and they live nine days. There was just, well I'll give you an example, all right, of relevance which isn't quite neuroscience. It was just reported this week that by changing a gene in one of these worms which is called C Elegance, it can make it live five times longer than the normal life span of a worm. So how would you like to live to 300, you know.

Q: It's like Nanotechnology all over.

A: The only problem with that is the worms are fairly sluggish. But that may mean that that gene makes the life longer but makes it slower. Maybe there's another gene that only makes it longer. So the worms don't seem to be enjoying it very much, but it's the kind of thing we can try on us. Even more importantly for the brain science, there now are genes being discovered for memory and various aspects of memory and they seem to be the same genes in mice that work in these worms and in these sea slugs that people have studied. So now we have a chance to actually find genes that control these very basic processes and that bodes very well for us being able to boost the memory of people who have poor memories and who've lost their memory because of a stroke or Alzheimer's Disease and maybe even improve normal people.

Q: Wow.

A: How would you like to be able to learn overnight what it took you a whole semester to learn.

Q: I'd love it. I'd love it.

A: And then spend your time doing other things.

Q: Are you running.

JW: Yeah. So, so you are saying, is there, there's been a lot of science fiction about super IQ, you know drugs, sudden, is it possible that people, there might be the day that there are super genius' based on, on brain research.

A: We know that there have already been super genius' based on nature which is trial and error and accident. So I don't know why we shouldn't anticipate that based on experimentation and knowledge there won't be super genius'. The problem is going to be, what else are we giving up? Because it's not always clear that you can get without giving up something.

Q: Right. Right. What about a learning disabled child.

A: Well that might be an example where if learning, if some learning disabilities are due to poor memory, then by giving those children a memory boosting agent, we may be able to convey them from poor readers into super readers. The possibilities are endless. We don't know how many of them are going to come true, but we'll never know unless we try.

Q: Right. Sounds wonderful. Thank you very much.

A: Thank you very much.