Have you ever noticed that some people have much better memories than others? As we age, some of us begin to have a hard time remembering things that would have been easy to remember only a few years before. As we all know, there are diseases connected with aging that effect some people's memories to the point where they lose all their short term memory and can only remember things from many years ago. Many times their personalities are also changed, but it is not clear if it is caused by the memory loss directly or the disease that causes the memory loss. When people get this type of disease, their brains look different under a scan than the normal brain. Many jokes have been made about diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, such as, don't worry, if you get it you will never know, but in actuality this is one of the saddest diseases to get. You no longer recognize or remember your dearest friends and relations and sometimes even fight them off when they come to visit you. I knew two gentlemen that worked together for over thirty years and both got the disease and as fate would have it, they were both put into the same hospital in adjoining rooms. Neither knew who the other was.

Some people seem to be whizzes at remembering test material. Every time a test is given they are at the top of the list of high marks. The question here is whether they actually have better memories or they have figured out a way to remember things better. Our memories are like cubby holes. They start out empty and it is up to us to fill these holes. It has been demonstrated that repetition is one way to remember things, especially test material. If you keep going over the material, it will begin to fill these holes and be there for you when you take a test. You can even speed up the process of memorizing, by taking out all info that you don't need from what you are reading. An example of this is creating flash cards with just a question on one side and the answer on the other. I have used this method myself, but be ready to put in a lot of time creating the cards. When the cards are finished you will have a very condensed version of what you are reading, so as you study the cards you are not going through as much material as you would be by reading it out of a book, for example. There are other tricks to help you memorize material. One of the most famous is making up poems about what you are studying. In the old days when railway mail workers had to take mail routing tests, they would use the names of towns that they had to memorize to create poems. These poems would contain all the info need to route the mail. Most of these poems were what is known as off color. If you have a particularly import thing to memorize you can make up a word, even if it means nothing to most people. An example of this is a law test question that is remembered this way. by the word PUDA DAPA. During a trial the People mUst open and the Defense mAy open. At the end of the trial the Defense mAy close then the People mAy close. Not only do we know what each side may do in a criminal trial, as far as opening and closing, but we also now know the order in which it happens, thus the word PUDA DAPA. This law question is state specific so please don't write me with corrections, because things may be different in your state. It is only used as an example of creating words.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about pills and medicines that will improve memory. There are different type. If you have a disease such as Alzheimers, there are pills coming out that are supposed to improve your memory and help prevent memory loss. With this, people begin to ask the question, hey if it helps sick people improve their memories, will it improve a healthy person's memory even more? That is just a natural question that will always arise in this type of situation. So the question is, is there any proof that normal people taking drugs that were developed for Alzheimer's patients, have had their memories improved? As of yet the answer is a resounding NO. There was a test given to some middle aged pilots in a flight simulator. They had taken Aricept or a placebo. The ones on Aricept performed better than the ones on a placebo. There is no way to know if this was due to better memory or not, or perhaps decreased reaction times or whatever.The human mind is very hard to understand and there are some theories that state that there is not one intelligence in the mind but many that work together.

As scientists discover more about the process of memory, they are able to develop new memory drugs. We are studying the brain on the molecular level and this helps with the development of these new drugs. These drugs are typically tested on animals like mice. If a mouse is allowed to explore a room for fifteen minutes or more, it will know right away when a new object is put into the room. When scientists take a mouse that was only given 3 1/2 minutes to explore a room, not enough time to know every object in the room, but was given a memory enhancing drug first, it will know right away when a new object is put into a room and go over to the object to examine it. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies are saying that the great memory drug is only right over the horizon, but they have been saying this for well over ten years now. The great memory revolution may not even rest with drugs, but with electronics.

There has been much talk of a smart chip that will be inserted into the brain of the recipient. The idea is to have all the data that one would learn right through a PhD program, right on a chip in your head that you could easily access. This means no more studying, sitting in classes, etc. There are many questions about this idea however. First of all, when we go to school we not only learn data. Man is a social animal and whether he realizes it or not, school teaches him how to interact with others, outside of his family. Who knows what social damage would be caused with the addition of chips? Secondly, would the rich be willing to share this status with everyone else? It has been said that there is a danger that a rich or well connected person would get a PhD chip while others, not rich or well connected might only get some sort of chip that has all the data on it for some low position in the work place. Could this be a possibility? Think about it, what good would a world be if it only had PhDs? Who would fix your toilet or repair damage to your house, or even repair you electronics? It is necessary to have an assortment of trades along with those top positions that such a chip would make possible.

Will memory enhanced drugs improve our memories or will computer chips be inserted into our brains? No one can tell what the future will bring, but it is almost certain that there will be some improvement in memory and it will be soon, within the next 50 years, if not sooner. Will it be for the best of mankind or will it cause even more separation between the haves and have not's? We will just have to wait and see how things turn out.