Molly had always been the one everyone relied on. She remembered every birthday in the family, kept track of her grandchildren's allergies, knew exactly how her husband liked his coffee. Then, almost imperceptibly, things started to slip.
First it was small things. Then it was the grandchildren's names. Then it was whether she had taken her medication that morning. Her husband, Dr. Joshua Carr — a neuroscientist with 30 years of research — watched in disbelief as the woman he had known for decades quietly began to disappear. He tried every medication the field had to offer. Nothing worked. Some things got worse.
Then came the night that neither of them will ever forget. Molly left to do simple errands. She never came back on her own. Hours later, there was a knock at the door — two police officers and, between them, Molly: pale, trembling, a bandage on her forehead, her purse gone. She had walked miles in the wrong direction. She had been robbed. She could not remember her own name.
That night changed everything for Joshua. He took a sabbatical from his university position and spent months going through every study he could find. Then, in a small article buried in an obscure scientific journal, he found something that made him question everything medicine had told him about the aging brain.
What he discovered — and what he later found in the daily habits of a 70-year-old Korean woman with extraordinary memory — pointed to a cause of cognitive decline that almost no doctor in America has ever discussed with a patient...