Age-Related Memory Loss and Alzheimer's

In the previous series on stereotypes, I wrote a post about how old people "have" poor memory issues only because they subconsciously reinforce that generalization imposed by society. From what I researched, it seemed that the idea that old people and poor memory are closely related should be considered specious, but I recently stumbled upon an article in the Scientific American about a particular gene in the human brain called RbAp48, whose decrease in amount apparently corresponds, according to Columbia University neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel, with atrophied memories in aged people. While this seems to be somewhat of a contradiction, the article has many valuable points on what implications that the discovery of this memory-related gene may have in the future for aged people.

To first describe the research, Kandel’s intention in his study was to search for a method that effectively differentiates between age-related memory loss and Alzheimer’s Disease, which both materialize in the hippocampus--the human brain’s memory factory and storage facility--and share numerous early symptoms. The similarities sometimes causes people to not consider the two afflictions as separate. However, one clear difference that Kandel and other researchers discovered was that RbAp48 levels in people with age-related memory loss changed noticeably while people with Alzheimer’s experienced almost no alterations in those levels. This seems to be correlated with the fact that brain cells affected by age-related memory loss are just “sick” or “offline” and therefore have less RbAp48 levels than normal.

Kandel’s research partner, director of Alzheimer’s research at Columbia named Scott Small, posits that the reintroduction of RbAp48 at specific loci in the human brain may lead to the reversal of age-related memory loss. With more tests and research, pharmaceuticals containing the gene may be distributed for aging people with poor memory levels in the future. However, as wonderful as curing age-related memory loss seems, one main issue still remains: how to cure Alzheimer’s Disease. Unlike memory loss, Alzheimer’s permanently eliminates brain cells rather than make them “sick,” and the RbAp48 “treatment” would not work simply because the disease does not seem to be related to amounts of the gene. Another question that leaves from the Columbia researchers’ work is why the RbAp48 levels decrease in age-related memory loss and not in Alzheimer’s. It’s hard to note whether the knowledge of this gene’s role in natural memory loss may be a key step in perhaps understanding Alzheimer’s more or may be a red herring that distracts researchers from looking for other explanations.

Shakespeare, Memory, and the 21st Century

For the past several posts, I have examined many topics in memory that relate mainly to psychology and brain science, but as my class nears the end of the masterpiece Hamlet by Shakespeare, I believe it is important to note that the study of memory is also an extremely hot topic in the humanities, especially in literary analysis. To write this post, I tried to learn about the relationship between memory and specifically the role of Shakespearean literature in society today, but I was surprised to discover that my research was nearly fruitless; after all, memory seems to be an important theme in Shakespeare’s works. Even in Hamlet alone, the concepts of memory and remembrance are discussed quite often, notably when Hamlet felt that Gertrude and other people’s commemoration of his father’s death was only pretended and ephemeral. Nevertheless, I was lucky to locate one incredible anthology, named Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance by Peter Holland--described by one reviewer as the “first of its kind”--that explore the relationship. Here are some of the ideas that I was able to parse out.

While the book is divided thematically into five sections, I want to focus primarily on the last one, which is about the incorporation of memory and modern technologies into Shakespearean performances. In one (page 281) of the articles, “Fond Records: Remembering Theater in the Digital Age,” the author W. B. Worthen entertains the question, “How are Shakespeare’s masterpieces relevant today?” He claims that whether or not Shakespeare’s readers believe characters such as Hamlet are apt representations of ourselves is irrelevant; the beauty of the plays is that they discuss a “slice of human experience in some way.” That seems to be the principal explanation for the ability of Shakespeare’s works to remain insightful even in today’s society--so much different from the Elizabethan era. As a result, the medium for performing Shakespeare may be subject to change. On this point, Worthen focuses on how contemporary Shakespeare dramatizes the impact of new technologies on the “performance of human experience.”

One such notable example that Worthen discusses is Michael Almereyda's Hamlet. Here's the film's version of the famous "Mousetrap" scene:

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Your reactions? When I first watched that scene in class, I was immediately struck by how anachronistic it seemed in comparison to other versions that are much more in line with the original context of Hamlet. While the fact that the “Mousetrap” is a combination of film segments rather than a theatrical performance was pretty novel, I felt that Almereyda’s version was just a confusing juxtaposition of modern society and Shakespeare’s language. However, I realized that the version still retained major aspects of the original Hamlet, most importantly the overall themes of the masterpiece. As Worthen noted, while the version ironically made no reference to theater performance, it proved itself to be a very different yet effective way of capturing and preserving, through “recording,” the “human action” in Hamlet. Almereyda’s focus on the “recording experience” may shed some light on how memory can play in Shakespeare in the 21st Century. Worthen lists numerous examples from the entire film: Hamlet’s video diary, the Ghost stuck in an elevator on a security monitor, and Ophelia’s photographs all suggest different ways that people and objects are preserved in memory.

Another bent to this memory concept is how actors and editors collaborate to produce performances of Shakespeare’s works. Also included in the collection with Worthen’s article, the essays of Michael Cordner and Margaret Kidnie, according to this review by Alexander Huang, how the intersection of performances and editorial practices is affected by cultural memory. The authors state that actors face a “clash” while performing between speaking their authentic feelings and reciting their actual parts. This problem results partly from the fact that editors can be excessively prescriptive in their interpretation of Shakespeare. This seems somewhat counterintuitive because certain limits on how to perform Shakespeare’s plays, whose fictional worlds are very disparate from today’s society, should be implemented so that the overarching meaning and themes are not distorted. However, the authors state that actors should not be told definitively what and what not to do; in actuality, the act of memorizing specific aspects of the play contributes, according to Kidnie, to performance disruptions. The freedom of the actors to play Shakespearean roles naturally allows the audience to understand society’s cultural memory. All of the actions and props that today’s Shakespearean actors make and use have their own narratives that contribute to their unique interpretation of the plays. 

In all, because the significance of Shakespeare’s works today is due to their representation of the timeless human experience, how Shakespeare plays in the 21st Century is not defined by how disparate they are, but how the editors and actors collaborate to perform Shakespeare with their cultural memory.

Stereotypes: Part 2

As I claimed in the first post of this series, stereotypes are so embedded in our everyday vernacular that people use them very liberally in daily conversations and on social media. While I believe that it is hard to explain the so-called “dehumanization” behind a seemingly harmless joke such as “He’s so athletic because he’s African American,” the main problem here is that society condones such generalizations that impose particular identities on individuals, with negative consequences such as the lack of confidence in memory performance for older adults. The prevalence of stereotypes, whether used jokingly or hurtfully, in our daily lives as well as society’s lack of action to stop generalizing are a bit disconcerting. What’s even worse is the existence of pathological stereotypes, which an article in Psychology Today by a professor named Monnica Williams states are “ideas that exist to explain and justify inequalities.”

To me, these types of stereotypes are the worst items that our society can offer because, especially in the case of race, they affect the criminal justice system. The article notes that the people believe in the stereotype that typical drug dealers and “junkies” are African American; this “truth” apparently explains how come African Americans are disproportionately arrested and targeted for drug-related crimes. However, a study by the National Comorbidity Survey Replication showed that African Americans are less likely to consume alcohol and use drugs than white Americans. Of course, the evident discrimination against African Americans is clearly reprehensible, but as Williams continues to state, the biggest problem is that our society is under the impression that our justice system is completely fair and that the disproportionately large representation of African Americans in jail can be explained by their “problems.”

In tandem to that research, a fairly old but still pertinent study by Pennsylvania State University found that what people remember about crime stories is affected by racial stereotypes. The researchers asked over 150 undergraduate students to one out of four stories about a fictitious man. One of the four stories focused on violent crime, and most of the people who received that piece reconstructed a photograph using certain facial features that were strikingly characteristic of African Americans. The catch: the people used in the study seemed to be unaware of their “associations of violent crime with the physical characteristics of African Americans.” This showed the researchers that these racial stereotypes were embedded in the subjects’ unconscious. This reminds me of a post that I wrote in the past about how the malleability of memory can lead to faulty court decisions. Likewise, in this case, the influence of racial stereotypes may influence a victim of some violent attack to choose an innocent African American person over another person of another race.

As with the last post, I think concluding with some solutions to the racial, pathological stereotype would be ideal, but as one researcher in the Penn State study stated, “The idea that this type of stereotyping may occur largely outside of viewers' awareness will make it particularly challenging to curb these kinds of responses." In other words, I think that reversing the effects of the obviously harmful racial stereotype on the criminal justice system and other parts of our society will be extremely difficult. It seems that the only real solution is to increase awareness of the faultiness of such stereotypes and actively work to eliminate them. But in the near future, that unfortunately doesn’t seem like an attainable reality.

Stereotypes: Introduction and Part 1

You and I have heard the narrative that stereotypes over-generalize and even dehumanize fundamentally unique individuals a countless number of times; however, they are deeply ingrained in the everyday vernacular. I rarely spend a day without reading a crude racial or gender comment on my Facebook newsfeed or hearing a similar statement casually dropped in regular conversations with my friends.

As an Asian-American male living in the North Shore, I have had my fair share of being the “victim” of certain stereotypes, but I would be lying if I stated that I had never spewed any hurtful misconceptions about particular groups of people, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Because stereotypes are so common in society, I previously believed that they were not as harmful as the aforementioned “narrative” suggested. However, in a recent New York Times article, the author cited the research of a NYU professor named Mr. Aronson, who found that members of groups thought to be academically inferior, such as Latinos and African Americans, scored much lower than they actually do on tests when reminded of their race, fueling a vicious cycle of “affirming” the stereotype.

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In order to start off this series on stereotypes, I want to direct your attention to the relatively unacknowledged age stereotype, which posits that one’s age influences that person’s overall capability. Senior citizens are usually the victim of this unfair categorizing: many people know them to be physically slow and have poor memory. However, in tandem with Mr. Aronson’s research, William Klemm, a neuroscience professor at Texas A&M University, claims in his Psychology Today article that accepting the judgment of others impairs one’s development and “performance capability.” He cited the research of a Yale professor named Becca Levy, who found that the memory performance of senior citizens improves substantially when they believe in a “positive self-stereotype.” When a sample group of old people were reminded of negative words associated with aging, each individual’s memory suddenly dropped. The main issue here is that senior citizens “have” poor memory skills only because they are unconfident about their capability to remember. As a side note, it seems that the confidence-memory relationship is a common theme that appears in society, especially regarding the truthfulness of testimony in court. As with any generalizations, the age stereotype fuels the lack of confidence that people have in their memory as they grow older.

When I first read Klemm’s article, I was wholly surprised to learn that stereotypes, especially the age label, work on a positive-feedback mechanism. When reminded of “bad memory” and other phrases associated with the age stereotype, old people actually exhibit those generalized qualities. I previously believed that the age stereotype exists partly because it does hold some truth (e.g., old people are really slow drivers). However, as Becca Levy’s research shows, the generalizations distort old people’s actual memory performance with an unjustified social definition about them. This cleared up a huge misconception about stereotypes for me, and now I see the truth in the “stereotypes de-humanize” narrative.       

This post cannot end without a discussion on solutions to overcome this vicious cycle that targets of stereotypes find themselves in. A study by another Texas A&M professor named Lisa Geraci showed that subjective age is malleable. In other words, older adults can reverse the “bad-memory” stereotype associated with old age by adopting a more positive perception of their memory capacity. William Klemm adds that actively using established learning principles to improve memory may not necessarily boost old people’s ability to remember but rather reinforce their confidence. At the end of the day, it seems that if you believe in your memory performance, then it becomes true, and this in turn becomes a positive-feedback mechanism in itself, adding in more confidence for senior adults to respond to the age stereotype that society holds.