I’m okay…but am I?

I couldn’t stop raving about this book. I kept obnoxiously reading sentences from this book to my friends--lookie lookie lookie! Like a little kid at show and tell. But when I got to scary stuff (Alzheimer’s), I shut my mouth. It wasn’t such a fun read anymore. Turns out I am doing very bad things: sleeping too little, exercising too little, stressing too much—could I be leading myself to Alzheimer’s?

So it’s funny that I gave this book 5 stars, given that it wasn’t a nice read by the end. Understatement—it freaked me out! I ended up deciding that just because the book scared the bejesus out of me, I shouldn’t dole out fewer points. It’s a great book, whether it made me squirm or not.

Genova is a neuroscientist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, but she’s not stuffy or abstract or distant. She has an amazing ability to simplify hard concepts without talking down to us mortals, and she makes the information so accessible. The tone is conversational, and she gives lots of personal examples, which drew me in.
Going in, I didn’t realize it was a self-help book. I thought it was a book about memory. Well, it’s both. Genova tells us a lot about what’s happening in your brain, but she also gives us tips on how to remember stuff and how to help prevent dementia. I learned so much about how we remember things, about all the sections of the brain that chime in.

Fascinating stuff:

- You have to pay attention if you want your brain to be able to create memories. Think of parking. If you don’t pay attention when you park your car—by noting which level you’re on, e.g.—you could forget where you parked and go crazy trying to find your car later.

-You can train yourself to remember to-do or grocery lists. Genova tells you how to do this. (I tried, and it worked!)

-Forgetting stuff isn’t always bad. Seriously. The author gives great examples. (Oh, she was making me feel like I was so okay!)

-It’s natural that your memory gets worse with age. (Oh, such good news!)

-Sorry, doing crossword puzzles does not help your memory. (Not fair!)

-Every time you tell a story, you edit it. Then that edited version becomes the right one, the real one—until you tell the story again and accidentally edit it more. The story morphs every time you tell it. It’s like the game of telephone. I thought of stories I have told—quite sure I was telling the absolute truth, and then realizing when I told it again, I remembered something differently. Fascinating!

-Marilu Henner from the (old) TV show Taxi has a condition called hyperthymesia, or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, where she remembers every single thing that happened to her on every single day of her life. You could ask her what she was doing on June 17, 2002, and she’ll be able to tell you. Total recall. The condition is extremely rare; only 60 people in the world are known to have it.

-People with Alzheimer’s are still able to feel love, so don’t think they’re a complete blank. Genova shows so much compassion for people afflicted with the disease, it’s touching.

Scary stuff (as in, “I’m screwed”):

-1 in 3 people over age 75 will get Alzheimer’s. OMG OMG OMG!

-Think you’re cool because you can multi-task? The more things you can juggle the better? Take that smile right off your face: multi-tasking is not good for your brain.

-You must get 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night. Period. This helps with memory and helps prevent Alzheimer’s. Genova spends a LOT of time talking about sleep—stop it already! I’ve always bragged about needing less sleep than others (Genova talks about this stupid bragging), but come to find out, I’m fooling myself. Less than 7 hours of sleep is a very bad thing. (Tell that to my cat who screams and wakes me up too early. Will I be the first person in the world to blame a cat for Alzheimer’s?)

-You’ve gotta exercise! Now who knew exercise was good for memory? Tell me it’s not so! Though I must admit, reading this book DID get me exercising more! (5 stars for me.)

-Don’t stress! Because stress is really bad for your memory. Oh, great, telling me that only stresses me out more!

-Every time you recall a bad memory, it becomes stronger—because reliving any memory reinforces it. So try to think of the good times, not the bad. Ha, easier said than done!

Final thoughts:

I’ve read most of Genova’s fiction and with the exception of one book, I liked it all. Still Alice is one of my favorite books, in fact. Nice to know I like her other books, too—it’s my kind of non-fiction; mainly, easy to understand. I’m a fiction reader through and through, so it’s a big deal for me to like a book of nonfiction.

Some might say this book is on the light side, as many self-help books are. I disagree; I’m in awe of how well Genova can distill complex ideas and make them understandable. And although I read Remember a while ago, I still remember a lot. (In fact, I wish I could forget the parts that traumatized me!) Despite my freakout, I highly recommend this book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

This book is so well written. There is so much interesting information that can be applied to every day life. We all have that fear when we forget something - is this a sign of dementia or Alzheimer's? Lisa Genova lays those thoughts to rest as she explains why we forget.

Lisa Genova, author of Still Alice, Left Behind and a few other novels writes this non-fiction look into how the mind works. Genova always has a fascinating story with her background in neuroscience and ability to weave together a narrative with science. In this nonfiction book about memory, Genova offers up many techniques for remembering and the science behind it. As someone who is terrible with names and remembering small details, there are definitely some techniques I will be implementing in my everyday life.

I love Lisa Genova's books. This one was different of course since it is non fiction, but so incredibly interesting it was very hard to put down.

Lisa Genova incorporates her neuroscience expertise with her writing ability to create one stunning book after another. This one is no exception. It is different from her previous books that are fictional stories told with a neurologic theme, usually a specific illness or category of illness. This one is more of an exploration of why we remember things and why we do not. It is a quick read and well worth the time.
Highly recommend!
#Remember #NetGalley #RodaleInc #Harmony

Known from her fictional work focusing on mental disorders and diseases, Lisa Genova gives us an easy to read practical guide to our memories. She delves into how our memory works, why we remember some thing and not others, and ultimately that it is normal and healthy for your brain to forget some things. A refreshing change of pace and interesting read that even those not familiar with neuroscience will find easy and relatable.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Lisa Genova does not disappoint. For a subject that could be difficult to explain and understand based on the biological and scientific nature of memory; Lisa does it with ease, The book provides great examples to assist the reader. Hopefully, I’ll remember all “Remember “ had to teach me.

Remember where you were when the Challenger exploded? I was home with my kids who had a snow day off from school. Recently, a guy who was in the same school with my son mentioned he was at school when it happened. Huh? Who is right?

Lisa Genova also mentions the Challenger in her book Remember and how she and other people remember that day. But they were wrong! Fascinating.

She gives us some little tests and tells us her experiences in trying to remember what’s on the tip of her tongue (who played Tony Soprano?). I frequently have ToT problems, whew—not Alzheimer’s. She says it is perfectly fine to google what I’m trying to remember.

Speaking of Alzheimer’s, Genova devotes a chapter to this disease. She adds more chapters to help your memories.

I have loved Geneva’s fiction books and highly recommend this one. Thanks, Netgalley and Rodale Publishers, for this read!

4 stars.*

I leapt at the opportunity to read this digital ARC from NetGalley when I saw Lisa Genova. I am a huge fan of Still Alice-having read it for book club back in 2013. I assumed this was another novel about memory and/or Alzheimer's Disease.

However, Remember is not a novel. It is a really engrossing non-fiction deep-dive into the science of remembering (and forgetting). It covers a wide array of common memory failures as well as tips and tricks for improving memory and how to work through memory issues.

I enjoyed this book and will definitely read more (both fiction and non-fiction) by Lisa Genova.

*with thanks to NetGalley for this honest review in exchange for the digital ARC

5★
“Putting any sensory experience into words distorts and narrows the original memory of the experience. As a writer, I find this phenomenon more than a little disheartening.”

Whoa! So writing it down, making notes, distorts your memory? Yes, it does. Lisa Genova is a neuroscientist who is fascinated by how the brain works and how dementia affects us (most of us eventually!) and has done the research necessary to explain it to us everyday readers.

Personally, I find this an endlessly fascinating subject. I didn’t learn a lot that was new to me in this book, but I think that’s more from my reading many articles from New Scientist and similar publications over the years. I don’t mean I KNOW it all – I just mean that a lot sounds familiar. It was still a good read, and I’ve given her the full five stars for her research and the accessibility of her writing.

There are anecdotes throughout about her grandmother (severe dementia at the end), and how age is the biggest risk factor for dementia.

“Memory loss due to Alzheimer’s is rare under the age of sixty-five, but after that, the numbers change quickly. In the United States, one in ten people at age sixty-five has Alzheimer’s. At eighty-five, it’s one in three, fast approaching one in two. Half of us.”

YIKES!

However, Greg, now her best friend, was diagnosed with dementia when he was only 59. He has maintained his sense of humour, and I enjoyed this anecdote.

“Back when he was still driving and I was lovingly pestering him to give up driving, he unexpectedly saw a deer in the middle of the road, swerved, and flipped his Jeep. As he was upside down, moments before what could have been his death, he said he thought, “Lisa Genova is going to kill me.’”

I got such a chuckle out of it because it’s exactly the sort of thing a youngster would think if they’d disobeyed their parents and gone for a wander in the woods and narrowly escaped being kidnapped! It’s not the kidnapping they are as afraid of as the wrath of their mother and father.

But seriously, there are so many tips and tricks to help us stave off dementia as much as we can but also accept that our memories are not what we think they are, so don’t argue with each other about them. We are highly suggestible.

“In the process of consolidating an episodic memory, your brain is like a sticky-fingered, madcap chef. While it stirs together the ingredients of what you noticed for any particular memory, the recipe can change, often dramatically, with additions and subtractions supplied by imagination, opinion, or assumptions. The recipe can also be warped by a dream, something you read or heard, a movie, a photograph, an association, your emotional state, someone else’s memory, or even mere suggestion.”

She doesn’t mention it, but I have often had the experience, as have other people I know, of remembering something interesting from my own life and thinking “Did I really do that, or is that from some movie I saw?” I mean, I know it was me and my life, but sometimes it feels almost unreal.

There is plenty of medical discussion about the physiology of the brain, the neural circuits, the connections and the amyloid plaques of dementia. I never get tired of this stuff. She talks about the man who can’t remember anything for more than a few seconds and people who can’t forget anything, which can be a terrible burden.

But her focus is dementia. Famous for her novel Still Alice and the Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore, Genova is often asked for advice and opinions about people’s mental worries.

She reminds us that if you want to remember where you put something, you have to PAY ATTENTION. I have learned to do that – to an extent – with a few things I don’t want to misplace. (A lot of things don’t matter that much.) Many drivers have experienced the disturbing realisation that they have driven a long distance without being aware of how they got there.

I often say my auto-pilot needs recalibrating.

Here’s an illustration of how easily our memories are distorted.

“In another study, researchers asked subjects to share any memories they had of the video of the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. People were interviewed and then given a questionnaire to test what they remembered. Thirteen percent offered detailed memories of the video during the interview, and 33 percent reported specific memories in the questionnaire. But 100 percent of these memories were false. We have footage of the planes that crashed in New York City and Washington, D.C., on 9/11, but there is no video of the crash in the field in Pennsylvania. These folks believed they remembered details from a video that doesn’t exist.”

But fear not.

“Our memories can hold information that is deeply meaningful or nonsensical, simple or complex, and its capacity appears to be limitless. We can ask it to remember anything. And under the right conditions, it will.”

Yes, it’s those right conditions that are critical. Read the book and learn what some of them are. She includes a bibliography you can use to learn more yourself. This is written for a ‘mainstream’ American family audience with references to dropping kids off at school, having teens in college, Trump’s election, how to calculate a 20% tip in your head, etc., but anyone will understand it.

Don’t trust your memory. It can play tricks on you.

“Memory, especially for what happened last year or what you intend to do later today, is notoriously incomplete, inaccurate, confabulated, and fallible, its performance often better if externalized, outsourced to Google or your calendar.”

Meanwhile, be kind to each other.

“Your spouse insists that you left your family vacation at the cottage in Maine three days early two years ago because it rained every day. You remember it being sunny all week, and you left only one day early because your son sprained his ankle and you wanted his doctor to look at it before soccer started. Who’s right? Who knows? Who cares? You’re probably both wrong.

Let it go.”

Lots to enjoy and absorb and read aloud to others. It’s hard to sit on this kind of information and not want to share it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Rodale/Harmony for the review copy from which I’ve quoted.

I love the light conversational writing style of this book - the author packs a lot of information - anecdotes, observations and research summaries into this book using a light style that is engaging - she neither talks down to the reader nor does she talk over the reader's head. I was absolutely fascinated by the process of remembering - creating types of memory and why we remember some things and forget others. It is comforting, in that she explains why everyone forgets things and how most of this is perfectly normal. She offers advice to the reader to help them create stronger memories (or how to pay sufficient attention to find your car in a big parking lot or your keys when you are heading out in the morning). She has chapters on people with extraordinary memories and how there are times that you may want to actively forget. She does address age-related memory issues and dementia. Mostly upbeat and always fascinating this is an awesome book.

This was a very interesting book. I decided to read it because, yes, I am worried about losing my memory.
Also, I am worried about the day-to-day forgetting (where are my glasses?)
Lisa Genova addresses these concerns very well.
I was engaged by her writing style; it felt like she was speaking directly to me.
I learned a great deal from this book. Many things she talked about at length, I already knew but I learned more about them.
I cannot encapsulate this book. Being non-fiction, it presents a great deal of information.
You'd have to read it yourself to really get something out of it.

And I recommend you do.

More technical than the stories I am used to from this author so it was a bit dryer read. It was fascinating and I learned something, which is always good. I just prefer the fiction stories centered around a diagnosis.

Interesting information that so many of us are curious about. My mother is suffering from Dementia, a woman who was always active, and I was curious about how this disease is affecting so many people. This book does a great job of dissecting the parts of our brain, different areas of our memory banks, and what will and won't work to help improve our memory.
The author is very educated in this subject and does well explaining things in a way the reader will understand.
A very interesting book that helps shed light in what's going on in our brain!
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a copy of this book.

Really good information in Lisa Genova's book. I loved her fiction (all of it!) and while I'm not a lover of NF this is so good. Not finished it yet but it's the kind of book I want to 'study'. So far, it's a 5* book!

Lisa Genova 'Remember' brings the connection between mind, heart and brain to a brilliant level of understanding their connectivity. And why what we remember does not define who we are. Thank you "NetGalley for the advanced copy. #Remember

OK, this was a cool book. The whole time I was reading it I was thinking about my husband who can't remember a thing! So many people claim they are suffering from memory loss, Alzheimer or some form of memory impairment when truthfully you just need to pay attention! As it's said many times throughout the book.....
We need to pay attention.
We need to practice perception and attention. Visually looking and paying attention to what we want to remember. Lisa explains that your brain forgets something within 15-30 seconds unless it's committed to memory. Maybe you need to keep repeating it to yourself to get it to stick.
I liked one of her analogies of driving down the street and all of a sudden "waking up". Meaning you were awake and driving but you realize you spent the last few minutes driving and were in a fog. Maybe because it's a route you take often, maybe your deep in thought and disengaged from the world. All of a sudden you realize, Hey I'm driving!
If you want to remember something you need to pay attention.
I always think it's interesting that I can remember a face. I can see you once and then a month will go by and I'm like, Hey do you remember so and so from you know where? My husband on the other hand can walk right past me and not even notice me.
I really enjoyed this book and if you want a better memory or tips on how to use your noggin!

This book had me interested - & involved – from the first page. I actually hadn’t realised what I was getting into, as I expected it to be another of the writer’s excellent fiction books. Instead it is a readable explanation of the memory, & how the brain is involved. (It is very reassuring to know that memory lapses do not have to mean the onset of dementia!) I’m quite sure I have learned a lot through reading this book : now – if only I could remember it...

I find Neuroscience so fascinating. There is so much new information that has come out. It is especially helpful to have Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist to explain so many ways our brain functions. It was a lot to take in, but if you actively pay attention, and make the effort to want to retain information, your brain responds to that.

The beginning of the book was fun. It had 7 different pennies. We think we know what a Penny looks like, but do we? Is our memory fallible? I took the test and I was certain of some things on the Penny, but uncertain if Lincoln’s head went right or left. So, I picked the wrong answer. Don’t sweat it too much Lisa Genova says. 50% of people get it wrong. Why though? The answer is yes we use the Penny and see it, but do not actively study it. It is not that important to have each exact fact in place to use it.

Most of our memory is related to the hippocampus. It was interesting to understand how memory works. Our brain is bombarded with information every second. It does not absorb everything. Our memory has more to do with what we are actively paying attention to and often the emotional context surrounding it. She discusses different types of memory process, but found muscle memory really good. With muscle memory, you always remember to ride a bicycle. The reason is because initially you brain worked hard to put the steps together, but now it automatically knows. The same with driving a car, reading her book, eating dinner. With practice, our brain can learn new tasks and eventually those will become much easier. Our brain will remember what we are going to do.

So, the context of the time a memory occurs matters a lot. Do you remember 9/11/01, The OJ Verdict, Princess Diana dying? Most of us can. Some of these events we recall much more vividly b/c there was a personal context to the situation. I lived 30 miles from the Twin Towers, so that had a much deeper and lasting impression on my mind forever. Certainly, other events occurred, but that felt so much more personal and was close to home. Wonderful events like having a child, are so intimate, your mind hold those memories much more.

Speaks about Tip of your tongue syndrome. Your mind races around trying to remember someone’s name. You associate things about the person, but you just can’t come up with it. She says, just google it. This is not a sign of Alzheimer’s Disease. This is typical and normal. Well, that’s good to know.

Really liked part about ability to remember over time and sometimes how that ability is on overdrive, such as with PTSD. When our mind remembers, it alters the facts each time, and then solidifies the memory. With PTSD, the mind is bringing up unwanted memories and the more this happens, the more solidly it stays in your brain. Talks about new approach where you revisit the memory, but each time a memory is brought up, our brain alters facts, so it may bring promise to alter the memory to remember the fear and anxiety differently. It could become remembered, but more neutral recall. That sounded very promising.

Our brains are fallible. One person sees the same event as another, yet each give different descriptions and details. Neither is necessarily wrong. Your brain focuses on what interests it and discards other details. So, often when describing an event you will say in incorrectly. That is an important area to study since juries listen to witnesses to decide a person’s guilt or innocence. It is not as solid as we’d like to think.

Great was explaining that Alzheimer’s is not a natural part of aging. There is things to do to stay mentally sharp. The most important things are sleep and reducing chronic stress. These are highly destructive and it is necessary to learn coping mechanisms to live better. Eating well, exercising, doing meditation, mentally engaging in learning new activities immediately help us and help prevent Alzheimer’s disease. So, that was nice to read, how being positive and taking care of ourselves is essential.

Lisa Genova is so smart and sharp herself. It was a pleasure to learn so much from her book. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you NetGalley, Lisa Genova, and Harmony Publishing for a copy of this book.

Remember, by Lisa Genova, is an accessible, easy to follow, and informative boon on the basics of memory. Written in popular science mode that leans more toward conversational than academic and containing a number of self-help segments that lean even more strongly that way, it serves as a good introduction, sufficient for those who want a decent grounding and a broad overview and a good first step for those who want to learn more via more specific and/or more “science-y” types of texts (though still popular science ones).

Genova divides the books into several general sections: How We remember, which explores how memories are formed and stored; Why We Forget, which covers the obvious but also makes distinctions amongst different types of forgetting — the everyday, the more-due-to-aging, and Alzheimers; and a final section titled Improve or Impair, which gives guidance on how to better one’s memory and what to avoid so it doesn’t decline.

Genova doesn’t go too deep into the weeds on the details, mostly avoiding obscure/arcane terminology or studies. That isn’t to say she won’t use specialized terms or point to specific anatomies: she’ll toss out “hippocampus” or “prefrontal cortex” or “phonological loop”, but her usage is always clear, it’s always in context, the terms are generally more basic ones, and she doesn’t pile them up, so the book never reads overly dense in any given passage. Explanations are always lucid, concise — but never at the expense of clarity — and methodical. She also employs easy to connect metaphors, as when she notes that “your memory isn’t a video camera, recording a constant stream of every sight and sound you’re exposed to. You can only capture and retain what you pay attention to. And since you can’t pay attention to everything, you’ll be able to remember some aspects . . . but not others.”

This is part of the explanation of how our memories are not anywhere near as accurate as we like to think/hope they are, a point she makes via a number of studies. And a point more people should be aware of (not to mention our judicial system). Genova makes clear distinctions amongst memory-related categories, short-term and long-term of course, but other types as well (semantic, “muscle memory”), as well as different types of forgetting. One of the more comforting sections for some readers will be the difference between normal run-of-the-mill age-related memory changes (those not to be concerned about) and those changes that are more ominous.

Honestly, having read on the topic via articles and chapters in books on the brain, there wasn’t a lot here that was new, but it was still good to have it all laid out so clearly, easily, and concisely. I was less enamored of the self-help sections, which felt a bit padded and didn’t add a lot that was either not obvious or new. I’m not sure anyone needs to be told that lack of sleep, for instance, has a negative effect on memory. Some might be surprised by exercise’s impact, but if you read about physical or mental health even casually, you’re well aware of that as well.

In terms of style, Genova is a smooth writer and has an engaging voice throughout, and that combined with the aforementioned conversational tone and consistent clarity, makes for good popular science.