Healthy Brain, Happy Life (11 page)

Well, the only way to find out was to ask. One Sunday night I gathered up all my courage before I made my regular call. Obviously, this was no ordinary Sunday night. This was going to be the night of “The Big Ask.” How these Sunday-night calls worked was that I would first talk to my mom and share all my news of the week, and then she would hand the phone off to my dad and I would share all over again with him. I was starting to get scared that I would chicken out and not ask my question, so I decided my theme for the phone call would be “Keep it light.” I would treat my request like any other request, like “Hey, Mom, what if we start talking on Monday nights instead of Sunday nights?” This was my strategy. It seemed better than “Hey, Mom, how about we try to change thousands of years of stoic and deeply ingrained Japanese culture in one fell swoop and start to say I love you to each other?”

The first part of the call was like any other Sunday phone call. I asked her how her week was, and I told her about mine. I was especially upbeat and cheerful that night and somewhere in the middle of the conversation I launched in.

“Hey, Mom, I realized we never say I love you on our phone calls. What do you think if we start saying that?”

There was a pause in the conversation.

A really long pause.

I think I was holding my breath. But when she finally answered she said, “I think that’s a great idea!”

I gulped air and breathed a huge, silent sigh of relief.

Sticking to my theme of keeping it light, I replied, “That’s
great
!”

We finished up our conversation about what we did that week, and I could feel a tension growing in our voices. We were like a couple of wild cougars warily circling each other. Why the tension? Because I think we both knew that it’s one thing to
agree
to say I love you and a very different thing to actually
say
I love you for the very first time.

But it was my idea, so I took the bull by the horns and said, “Okayyeeeee” (in other words, get ready for it, Mom!).

“
I love you
,” I said in a big, overexaggerated Disney-like voice to hide my discomfort.

She replied “
I love you too,
” in an equally exaggerated voice.

I won’t lie, it was very difficult and very awkward, but we did it! Thank goodness that was over!

I knew that once my mom agreed my dad would agree too. During my conversation with him that night, I asked permission, he said yes, and we said our awkward I love you’s to each other, and the historic night of The Big Ask was over.

I should have been so proud and happy when I hung up from that call. And I was, but I also burst out crying when I got off the phone. The fact was, nothing about what had happened was light. I had said I love you to my parents for the first time that night as an adult, and they had said it right back to me. With that, we had shifted the culture of my family—forever. It was moving, and my tears were mostly tears of joy.

The following week, I was happy to see that saying I love you had already become much less awkward with my mom.

Then it was Dad’s turn. I realized that there was a chance that he might not remember our conversation from the week before, so I was ready to remind him about our agreement.

But that night, Dad surprised me.

You see, that night, and every Sunday night conversation since, my dad has said I love you first. He remembered.

You have 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 symptoms that are severe enough to affect a person’s everyday life. These symptoms most commonly include a decline in memory function, planning ability, decision making, and other thinking skills. The term alone does not describe a specific disease.
Alzheimer’s disease
is the most common form of dementia. It is estimated that 60 to 80 percent of people with signs of dementia have Alzheimer’s disease. The most common symptom of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty remembering names and recent events. It is associated with deposits of protein fragments called beta-amyloid (referred to as plaque) and twisted strands of another protein called tau (referred to as tangles). These plaques and tangles are found all over the brain in late stages of the disease. To find out more information see the Alzheimer’s Association’s website (www.alz.org).

MARRIED TO SCIENCE

Yes, I was trying to strengthen my relationship with my family, but my career was still the major focus of my life. My new appreciation of how precious our memories are was making me realize how few precious personal memories I had. Don’t get me wrong. I had many great colleagues and work friends. Over the years I had established strong and productive collaborations for my work. I was considered an energetic and productive colleague to many but dear friend to few. Not to mention the fact that I was perpetually single. Was being married to science enough for me?

My focus on work and more specifically on succeeding in science was not new. It started when I was an undergraduate with my determination to become a neuroscientist and teacher like Professor Diamond. The irony here is that Diamond was more than a science role model. She was a wonderful role model for a balanced life in science that included not only an active research lab and spectacular teaching reputation but also a husband (another scientist), children, and an active social life that included her weekly undergraduate tennis matches. But for some reason, I didn’t feel the need to model myself after those other features of her identity. All I focused on was her passion for research and professional success.

My focus on work was amped up even more once I started my postdoctoral position at NIH. Every day, typically seven days a week, I had a forty-minute commute from my apartment in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in D.C. to my small office in the basement of Building 49 on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to work, work, work. Yes, I did socialize with the great group of post-doc colleagues in the lab at the time, and even dated two of my colleagues (at different times), which was when I learned firsthand all the reasons people warn you
not
to date your coworkers. But these were momentary blips in the scheme of my life. I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend since François.

I had developed a theory about myself that started to define how I lived my life. My theory was that my self-worth was measured only by how many papers I published and grants and prizes I won. It made a lot of sense at the time; certainly this was the area of my life where I got the most attention and recognition. It was also an easy formula to follow. It was easier just to work all the time. There were no messy emotional attachments to deal with—just doing the work to the best of my ability. Yes, I could do that,
and
I was really good at it.

But there were a couple of corollaries too. One was the idea that I was not good in purely nonscience social situations. I felt confident about how I handled social situations revolving around science. If I could talk about my passion for my work, I was in my element. The problem was I didn’t know how to talk about anything else, which made my social conversation both awkward and boring. I had also decided during this time that men were just not interested in me. I had lots of great evidence for this theory. Just consider my graduate school experience. Six whole years and just one real date during all of that time. Actually someone else asked me out, but the first date went so badly, I said I was too busy and couldn’t go out again. The men I dated from my own lab left me feeling alienated from my own work environment and even less enthusiastic about my dating ability. Yup, my theory was clearly correct: Men simply were not interested in me, and it was not worth the bother.

The first year I got to NYU, amazingly, I was asked to be photographed for Annie Leibovitz’s photo-essay book about women called, appropriately,
Women
. And it was because of my teaching. I had been asked by my department to organize a day-long set of lectures for talented thirteen-year-olds who got great scores on their PSAT tests. Being very comfortable with human neuroanatomy after all my coursework with Marian Diamond, I decided to teach a section on human brain anatomy. The NYU newspaper had printed a photo of me holding a preserved human brain (just like the one Diamond first showed me) with a group of mesmerized teens looking on. Susan Sontag saw that picture (she was an adjunct teacher at the college), thought that I was an excellent example of an intellectual woman, and suggested that Leibovitz ask me to be in the book!