Transdermal nicotine may improve cognitive performance in
patients with age-associated memory impairment (AAMI), according to the
results of a preliminary, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in
Psychopharmacology and published online

“In folks with relatively minor changes in their memory and thinking, there
was some improvement with nicotine skin patches in the areas of attention
and their general perception of their own memory,” lead author Heidi White,
MD, from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, says in a
news release. “We hope that will translate into treatments that allow people
to actually function better in their daily lives.”

Previous studies suggest that chronic transdermal nicotine may improve
attentional performance in Alzheimer’s disease. In this crossover-design
study, 11 subjects older than 60 years diagnosed with AAMI each wore a
nicotine patch for four weeks and a placebo patch for four weeks separated
by a two-week washout period. The nicotine patch was worn for 16 hours daily
and delivered 5 mg/day during week 1, 10 mg/day during week 2 and week 3,
and 5 mg/day during week 4. Mild adverse effects reported during nicotine
patching were skin irritation and nausea.

On eight occasions during the 10-week study, subjects rated their own
perception of memory improvement or decline on the Clinical Global
Impression (CGI) scale, and clinicians evaluated their medical condition and
performance on the Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics battery
and the Conners’ Continuous Performance Test (CPT).

Compared with the placebo patch, more subjects using the nicotine patch
reported a minimal improvement on the CGI. The average CGI score was
unchanged during use of the placebo patch. Decision times decreased from
approximately 200 milliseconds to less than 100 milliseconds during nicotine
treatment, and the consistency of performance on tests of reaction time also
improved significantly, suggesting that nicotine heightened attention in
individuals with AAMI.

Nicotine did not significantly affect delayed matching to sample and
Sternberg memory tests, errors on the CPT, Stroop task performance, and
mental rotation processing speed, nor was any dose-effect relationship
noted.

The authors warned that these findings should not in any way justify
smoking, and that nicotine patches had not been approved for long-term use
because of associated health risks, including nausea, dizziness, and
increases in blood pressure and heart rate.

“While the results are encouraging, seniors should not try nicotine skin
patches until larger studies testing the efficacy and safety of their use
have been conducted,” says coauthor Edward Levin, PhD, also from Duke. “The
results of this study suggest that when used appropriately and under the
right conditions, nicotine may alleviate the symptoms of mild forms of
memory loss. In addition, such treatment may even attenuate the decline in
memory function as people age.”

Pharmacia, Inc., donated the nicotine and placebo patches used in this
study. The National Institute on Aging is funding additional research on the
efficacy and safety of nicotine patches for the treatment of mild cognitive
impairment.

It may be that you are taking Lithium because of manic depression, and
the manic depression is probably from using aspartame, marketed in this country as NutraSweet/Equal/Spoonful.  Phenylalanine in aspartame lowers the seizure threshold in the brain and blocks serotonin production.
Researchers attribute depression, anxiety and rage to serotonin depletion. NutraSweet is a neurotoxin and its most common problem is memory loss.

In fact, Dr. H. J. Roberts, diabetic specialist, has just written a book
on his 30 years of research on Alzheimers disease.  It’s called DAAD;
DEFENSE AGAINST ALZHEIMERS DISEASE.  In fact, he is having a seminar July
29 at the Doubletree Hotel here in Atlanta on this.  He says when
NutraSweet was approved he saw a big difference in his diabetic patients
- they were confused and had memory loss and vision loss.  He says the
single amino acids in aspartame without the other amino acids in protein
can pass the blood brain barrier and deteriorate neurons of the brain.
He says this has accelerated Alzheimers Disease which in this country is
the 4th leading cause of death and 50% of all patients in nursing homes
have this disease.  You can get the book at the same place you register
for the seminar  1 800-814-9800.

If you’re on NutraSweet this may be your problem.  We say take the “no
aspartame” test and see if your problems are not due from daily dosing of
a poison.  I’ll forward you instructions to the auto-responder and you
can read up on this problem.  Usually depression disappears when you
eliminate NutraSweet and with it the memory loss.

We just completed a lot of work optimizing a 3MB Java app for Windows NT 4.0 both for speed and memory usage. We got the most speed improvements by changing our algorithms to be more efficient.

As far as memory usage goes, we learned that Java apps just use a lot of memory. We turned on verbose garbage collection and we found that just bytyping into a JTextField that an average of 40K was being used and then discarded PER CHARACTER! Since we have to use Swing, there’s nothing we can do about that. However, for code we wrote ourselves, we found that there are two main options for reducing memory usage:

1) Create fewer objects.

2) Use the Microsoft VM.

If you are manipulating a lot of Strings, you might want to use
StringBuffers instead, since they are more efficient in terms of speed and
memory usage. Creating Swing GUI components is especially expensive, so you
might want to create as few as possible and “multiplex” them a la the JList
renderer mechanism.

I know a lot of people hate Microsoft, but we ran the application under both
VMs and the memory usage under Microsoft was less than half of that under
the Sun VM. Of course, some people here speculate that the Microsoft VM is
hiding some (or most) of its memory in system processes or zones, but who
knows? The program also ran faster under Microsoft. BTW, there were
compatibility differences between the two VMs and we had to do some
significant work to run properly under Microsoft, but the speed and memory
improvements were worth it.

There are many books, articles, letters and word-of-mouth stories
about improving memory after TBI.  However, there are no good research studies that validate any claims for effective therapy for memory.

That’s the bad news.  The good news is that if you can teach your
daughter to utilize compensatory memory techniques such as keeping a daily journal, entering appointments in a small appointment book, or
following lists posted in some appropriate place, studies have shown that your daughter can learn to use this type of memory aid.

Thank you for your suggestions they have already been implemented several
years ago, inlcuding sticky notes near her computer or bathroom mirror, a
Casio Databank wrist watch with telephone numbers, five alarms programmed
to ring for important events such as when to take her medicines, when,
what, & where to go to a college class, when &where to go to physical
therapy, swimming, etc.
We are now looking al PDPs (Palmtop C omputers) for scheduling, notes,
addresses & phone numbers, etc. I am looking at Light & Sound Machines as
well for possible memory improvement. The world is vast with a lot of very
smart professionals, lay people, academics, scientists, etc. who have had
some experience in this area. I just have to tap into it. Any ideas,
thoughts, leads, Internet addresses, newsgroups, mailing lists,
listservers, etc. would be greatly appreciated. God bless you!

Performance definitely can be improved, but there are a lot of related
issues which relate to swapping performance.  Hopefully, these swap IO optimisations will reach some future version of the kswap patches.

Apollo’s Domain/OS had an interesting way of allowing programs some control over paging, though it was never documented for end users, as far as I know.

Memeory was divided into pages of 1K or 4K depending on the processor, and segments of length 64K or 256K.  The address space was still linear, but a
segment was the smallest boundary on which an object could be mapped into
the address space.  All file system I/O was essentially done through the
paging system, even across the network, since demand paging of objects
across the network was one of the low level capabilities of the operating
system.

Associated with each segment was a value called the “touch-ahead count”.
When a page fault occurred, not only was the nonresident page fetched, but
touch-ahead-count additional pages were requested as well if they were
nonresident, up until the end of the current segment.  For sequential file
I/O, the touch ahead count was usually set to the maximum.  In the
Domain/CommonLisp port I did for the Apollo, I separately controlled the
touch-ahead-count for the various types of code and data objects the system
would contain, and this led to a substantial performance improvement,
especially on machines with insufficient memory.

Another optimization that can be useful in certain cases is to have an
efficient way of “invalidating memory”.  When a region of virtual memory is
invalidated, any physical pages were freed without writing them to backing
store, and then freshly zeroed pages were allocated when the process next
touched that portion of memory.  With a two-space stop-and-copy garbage
collector, this optimization sped up large Lisp compiles by 40%.  Anyone
know if using mmap with /dev/zero is capable of doing this on Linux?

I was in a major depression and screwed around with the wrong street
drugs and caused some brain damadge(concentration,memory,attension are
significantly reduced).

I was hoping I could get some opinions from you guys on what methods I
could use to permanently return my cognition near what it was.

May I ask what recreational drugs you used?  You may not have suffered any
damage.  It could be that you have depleted certain chemicals in your brain.

After quiting my job I was at a point where I felt depressed and had
anxiety about life and the future.  I did some coke(very stupid) and
it made the bad feelings worse. After this I just wanted to sleep
things off and made a bigger mistake of doing about 6 grams of ghb.
(I had stoppped taking St. John’s Wort about 4 days prior so this may
have played a role in what happened) I remember lying down and after
about an hour I was awoken by the sound of footsteps from my roommate.
When I awoke I couldnt figure out what the hell was going on almost if
one were on a bad acid trip. I was scared as hell! There was a loud
ringing noise in my head and I couldnt remember much of anything. It
almost felt as if my brain was swelling inside my head. I then drank
about 7 beers and was finally getting tired and was able to fall
asleep.
That night has changed my life and future so much because the present
loss of intelect + cognition. Just to give an example before I could
always remember names,faces, voices so easily it was fun to be able to
spout out a particular actors name and movies they had perforem in
before while watching tv around friends and such. Now its like there’s
a 1-5 second gap before I can be able to remember names that are very
familiar and sometimes they just stay onthe tip of my tongue forever
Reading Comprehension is seriosly affected too! This is the most
important thing I’d like if possible to get back so I can return to
school someday.
Anyway, sorry for unloading such a long message but any experiences in
improving cognition would be appreciated.

I have a really poor short term memory.  My long term memory is pretty solid, but I often forget whether or not I toked a dealer after
winning a pot.  I often forget whether or not I’ve washed my hair in
the shower.  I’m serious.  Don’t even talk to me about keeping track
of the discards in stud.

Has anyone had any success with herbal suppliments or memory
improvement courses?

I have an excellent memory. Actually, kind of amazing in some respects, but you can develop your memory by understanding exactly how it works.

First, it takes PAYING ATTENTION. This is like the force with which things are
written on the media. Paying close attention and noting everything, and
remembering to note everything, pays big dividends.

You have to actually develop the habit of consciously looking for whether or
not you toked the dealer. And then repeat to yourself in your mind: “i did toke
the dealer” or for photographic memory to take a snapshot of it in your mind.

Then you have to be confident that this is not something you’ll lose. You know
you have it, it cannot be taken from you. Then you’ll be fine.

As for herbal supplements, gingko biloba is the best one for mental function,
but I would start with excercising my memory if I were you.

If you’re existing in a distracted state, and don’t care enough to get out of
it, you could be heading for alzheimer’s.