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Part of our job as doctors is to tell you things straight up, because when we don’t tell the truth, people get hurt. No sugarcoating. No BS (that really stands for no bad science). When it comes to your brain, here’s a fact that’s harsher than an Arctic winter: the research shows that, eventually, everyone in America will either get Alzheimer’s or care for someone who has it.

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When trying to determine if a family member is having serious memory trouble, ask him what he had for dinner or to describe current events, or give him three objects to remember and five minutes later ask him what they are. If he has trouble with any of those questions, it’s an indication that something’s going wrong with his short-term memory – one of the signs of a serious cognitive dysfunction.

In some way or another, we’re all going to be affected by serious change-your-life memory problems. But the other side of that statistic is this: memory disorders aren’t as uncontrollable as they seem, and the way to attack potential brain problems is by using your brain to understand them. For starters, here are some things you should know about your noggin:

We actually experience a mental decline a lot earlier than we realize. Memory loss starts at the age of sixteen and is relatively common by forty. One way you can see this is through research done on video game players. People start losing their hand-eye coordination and the ability to perform exceptionally well on video games after the age of twenty-five. The fascinating part of this research isn’t that you’ll rarely beat your kid in Mario Kart: Double Dash; it’s that even if your brain knows what to do when presented with an animated hairpin turn at 135 mph, your brain can’t fire those messages fast enough to your trigger-happy thumbs. There’s a natural slowing of the connection – the power line – between your brain and your body.

Men and women differ not only when comes to movie tastes and erogenous zones, but also when it comes to mental decline. Men usually lose their ability to solve complex problems as they age, while women often lose their ability to process information quickly. That split shows us a couple of things. One, that there’s certainly a strong genetic component to memory loss. And, two, that there are specific actions you should be taking to combat that genetic disposition. While there are some places where you’re naturally going to decline because of your sex, there are other areas where you’re going to have an advantage. That means your job isn’t only to try to rebuild the area that’s breaking down but also to preserve the areas that excel. But across the board, both genders lose competency in the areas in which they are weak to begin with. So women lose spatial cognition, and men suffer verbal losses. Though it’s certainly not true for everyone, it may give you clues as to what areas of your brain to concentrate on as you age – or it may help you play to your strengths. (Those with poor memory recall can use organizational skills to compensate, for example.)

You don’t have to have an elite brain to know that your three-pound organ has more power than a rocket booster. It controls everything from your emotions to your decision making, and it gives you the ability to understand why the baseball in Figure 11.1 is pretty damn funny. But when we discuss memory loss, we’re essentially focusing on three specific brain functions: sensory information (your ability to determine what information is important), short-term memory loss (quick, what’s the title of this chapter?), and long-term memory loss (that’s your bank of recipes, trivia, names, and every piece of information you’ve known, read and stored during your life).

Whether you’ve seen it on the news, on TV shows or within your own family, you know how dementia looks from the outside: people forget faces, names, where they live and information that seems – to the rest of the world – so easy to remember. The most frequently seen problem: getting lost on a walk home. To really control your own genetic destiny, you need to take a look at what memory loss looks like on the inside. For the record, age-related memory loss is classified in several ways. Conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and mild cognitive impairment are all technically different. For our purposes, we’re tackling them all together as age-related memory problems because of the similarities in how they change people’s lives.