Elizabeth Pope

By Elizabeth Pope, Special Advertising Sections Writer
Picture a couple of bees buzzing around the hood of your car.

That’s how Nancy Levitt of Beverly Hills remembers parking her car in slot 2B at the airport.
Levitt, a retired nurse, practices what she teaches her students in a memory training class at the UCLA Center on Aging. She takes brain fitness seriously because of a high family incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.
“ I’m always trying to learn new things and challenge my brain,” she said. “I’ll leave my grocery list in the car on purpose and try to remember what I need using the class techniques.”
Scientists once believed aging brains were destined to decline, but new research suggests that staying physically, socially and mentally active may help build reserves of brain cells to protect against disease. The Alzheimer’s Assn.’s recent “Maintain the Brain” campaign promotes this use-it-or-lose-it message: take courses, attend lectures, study a foreign language, match wits with Jeopardy contestants, because it’s never to late to exercise the brain.
That message is registering: Local senior centers, adult education departments and lifelong learning institutes are adding memory-improvement classes to meet student demand.
“I just went to a meeting of 10 Southern California community colleges, and almost all of them have memory-enhancement classes,” said Maggie Hall, associate dean of Santa Monica College’s Emeritus College, which provides classes geared to the interests of older students. “Our students are asking for them.”
Levitt took the five-week UCLA memory class before she volunteered to teach it. The course is based on research conducted by Dr. Gary Small at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Small is the author of “The Memory Prescription, a 14-day Plan to Improve the Mind and Body” (Hyperion, 2004).
“The single biggest reason people don’t remember is that they don’t pay attention in the first place,” Small said.
He developed the Look, Snap, Connect technique of creating visual images or making up stories to remember lists, faces, names and numbers. Students actively observe and take a mental snapshot of information they want to remember and then create ways to link the images in their mind.
Introduced to a Mr. Weinberger? Your mental image could be a bottle of wine falling on a burger.
“The more whimsical and silly and stupid, the more apt you are to remember it,” Levitt said.

She’ll visualize a chicken tied with shoelaces and topped with whipped cream to remember to pick up those items at the store.
Levitt also offers such common-sense tips as reviewing people’s names and photos before a party or reunion and having a specific spot for keys, glasses and other commonly used items.
For homework, her students might describe a scene from a recently viewed movie, including the main character’s name, face and clothing.
Specific techniques to enhance memory for learning lists or remembering faces and names work very well, said Dr. Linda Ercoli, a UCLA clinical psychologist who helped develop the UCLA memory training curriculum. “They have been shown to have benefits that last six months to 3 1/2 years, depending on the study.”
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