September is World Alzheimer’s Month — a great time to learn more about how your amazing brain creates, stores and retrieves memories. Bestselling author and neuroscientist Lisa Genova teaches how to boost brain health in her four-week TED Course. Our brains are truly breathtaking–and perhaps their most astonishing ability is the capacity to create, store and retrieve a lifetime of memories. In this course you’ll learn how memory works, why we forget and how to keep your brain in great shape. Lisa Genova, bestselling author and neuroscientist, will also challenge you to develop a healthier relationship with your memory: “Take it seriously. Hold it lightly”.

Here is a cautionary story about how a medication that should not have been subscribed led to the death a vibrant 88 year old woman. Always ask your primary doctor about the current and new prescriptions that you or a love one is taking or might be asked to take. Aging affects how medications can cause unforeseen negative reactions.

Health innovators Dr. Didi Ray of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Dr. Micky Tripathi of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Claire-Cecile Pierre of Brigham and Women's Hospital convened for a compelling discussion on how data can be used in the best interest of health equity. 'Health Equity and Data' Key Takeaways: 1. Data needs to be collected in meaningful and actionable ways. This means including data elements relating directly to health equity such as social determinants of health, race, gender, and sexual orientation. 2. Collecting data from communities who have been historically excluded from collections requires investing in communication to build trust. It starts with acknowledging the historical exclusion and being transparent on the reasons why data is being collected. 3. Patients can experience hesitations in sharing data because of historical exclusions. To mediate these hesitations, we envision a future of data collection that empowers medical care patients to provide data information themselves and have it be shared in advance of their medical center visit. 4. Advocating on the community-level means seeing communities as experts and understanding how diverse perspectives improve medical experiences. We should be building solutions not just for communities, but with them. View the recording here.