Neuroscientist Reveals The Truth About Memory & How We Can Remember Better | Charan Ranganath

I wanted to start with a quote from your book. Okay,

memory

is the prism through which we see ourselves, others, and the world. What does that mean? Well, what it means is that I think we have an understanding of who we are, we have an understanding. of the world around us and we have an understanding of other people and all that understanding the connective tissue around the way we understand the world and ourselves and others is

memory

we basically interpret the actions of others and their goals through our own memories. of how people have treated us and our own memories of how we have behaved and our understanding of ourselves, although you may think that you are a very static entity, the self really develops over time and someone with a memory disorder does.

What you discover is that it ends Frozen in Time and their personality doesn't develop as much Rel relative to when they suffered brain damage, so it's an interesting contrast to how the typical brain works over time, one of the The reasons I really like that quote and why I enjoyed winning your book so much is because one of the central cases you make is that who we are today, how we act today is in many ways influenced by the past, by the memories we We've saved from the past and I was thinking about that. Through the lens of, say, dementia or age-related cognitive decline, many people around the world are experiencing this or know parents or family members or loved ones who are experiencing that, so let's say it's a mother or a father who is now forgetting him. things compared to when they were younger for some people that is actually very difficult, like for your children, it can be very difficult to interact with them and it makes me think that there is a much broader philosophical point for me which is who we are without our memories Yes, there is a sense of who you are without memory, but it is a very impoverished sense.

I think to some extent, if you reflect on who you are, you have to go back to who you were, who you've been, what you've done, although what's fascinating is that you look back through the lens of the beliefs you have about who you are. and very often we draw on an incomplete past to construct our sense of who we are, but at the same time you're still drawing on those memories and I think in the early stages of dementia, what you see in the MCI stage of Alzheimer's, so For example, which is very early, people have a very clear idea of ​​who they are, but as the disease progresses towards its more insidious forms, people lose a lot of that sense of who they are, interestingly in some cases, they can actually be more peaceful because sometimes I think people actually their memories allow them to get stuck in loops of rumination and worry about the future and, to some extent, someone.

Someone who has a memory problem may be happier because they are in the present, but on the other hand, what happens, of course, is that for those of us who are close to someone who suffers from dementia it could be extraordinarily disturbing. My own grandfather had been a brilliant filmmaker and U him. In fact, he made the first Technicolor films in Thelu and I think maybe Canada and some other languages, oh wow, yeah, so he was a brilliant, brilliant man, he wrote and directed films and you composed and sang and um uh, but yeah , he had vascular dementia and he died too young, um, but, then, I saw this and it's really moving, when I mean, in a difficult way, to see someone lose consciousness of everyone around them.

What is the evolutionary case for memory? I mean, why do we

remember

anything? mhm. Well, this is the point why I wrote the book, in fact, is that essentially if you think about it from the perspective of evolution, the past is the past, it's over, so if we survive the past, why should we carry it? with us, but the case? The thing to do is that memories give us an advantage in understanding the present in the future, so memories allow us to say, "Hey, I was in this cave and I was attacked by a bear." I

better

not go back there, but the memories also give us a feeling of hey, I tried this orange thing, I peeled it, I ate it and it was very tasty, let me go back and get more nutrients from this orange thing, it's a kind from memory, there is a memory of I thought this fellow caveman was my ally now I realize he is my enemy, so we often have to stop and pause in a moment, sometimes mentally, and change based on our experiences recent events, according to what I call episodic memory in the book, which is only based on one event and this is I think it's very different than how we say, for example, that in AI you have this kind of slow tracing generalization from many, many data, a human being can take an instance and simply extract from it and change the way they understand the present and change the way they anticipate what may happen in the future, many of us think that when we think about memory we think about how we can improve it, how we can improve it and of course I want to cover that with you, but there are also cases in the book where memory gets in the way of how you've already touched that MH in the sense of negative past experiences or, let's say , traumatic traumatic events that we can't let explode in those cases, not that we're looking for more. memory, we are, we are actually looking to downregulate the memory that has been stored.

I mean, how do you look at that memory? Yeah, it's really interesting because having worked when I did my clinical training, I put in about half of my time. testing people who were worried about memory loss and then the other half was working in the clinic with people who were processing their traumatic memories that they couldn't let go and, uh, I would say we don't want to let go of the memories. of the traumas we have experienced but want to be able to experience in a way that is tolerable, manageable and limited. I think the problem that happens when traumatic memories take on a life of their own is that it really has a negative impact on us in a day-to-day format, but one of the things I talk about in the book is the idea that our memories of What happened are very different from the stories we make up about it and the physical emotions we experience in the moment. to

remember

and that can be helpful in terms of treatment and growth, that part of the book, chapter 5, was one of my favorites actually and I reread it several times because maybe because it had a personal resonance for me, but I think many We think that when we store a memory from the past, good or bad, we store emotions with that memory, which is an entity, that event happened, it was a negative event for which I felt sad, fearful and anxious, so when I remember that event, I also see those emotions.

I feel those emotions too, but in that chapter you wrote that the brain mechanisms for remembering what happened are different from the brain mechanisms responsible for feelings. Now, first of all, that's true and secondly, why is it important to us? We know that they are stored almost in different places, so when people remember an emotional experience, what happens is that you understand the content of what happened, but sometimes it also feels viscerally right, like you've been in a car accident. For example, remembering it can probably increase your heart rate and let you know that your eyes may dilate a little bit and that feeling of remembering is what people associate with a vivid memory, so we've done studies where we give people people memories randomly. images, but they could be a picture of a car accident, for example, or a nicer picture of a person holding a baby, say, and what you find is that people will report that they remember the car accident pictures more vividly. , but curiously they don't.

I don't necessarily remember the details of that car accident picture

better

than the baby picture, so in others, and when we look at brain activity, what we find is that there's an area of ​​the brain called the hippocampus that's important for pulling out all of these details. . of this past memory linking everything to that context, but the amydala is another area of ​​the brain that you probably talked about. I imagine that in your program it is very important for emotional responses of many types, not only fear but also positive emotions and, um, rewarding attachments. and that circuit is what drives the most physiological response we have to remember that that is the root of many of our emotions.

Now, when we experience them, they are often all together, especially because the amygdala and hippocampus work together, but they are different. in the sense that you can look at people who have memory problems and still feel the emotions from past experiences, and in fact, you can look at people who have damage to the amydala and they don't feel it but they remember it, and when we look at the brain activity brain activity in the amydala is more correlated with emotional experience and feeling of vividness, but HP cample activity is more correlated with actual memory for details, so how is that useful if someone suffers from, say , post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD? and you talk a little bit about this in the book, how is it useful then to know that they are stored in different places?

Does that have a therapeutic benefit? I think so and I think so for several reasons, first of all, uh. Cognitive behavioral therapy has two different components, one is behavioral therapy and the other is cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy is literally about reprogramming these more physiological aspects of emotional memory processing, which means it's like you just the brain repeated itself over and over again. Basically learn to override that fear response or that feeling of threat that you have when you remember saying something very traumatic like an abuse experience or an assault or a fight and then the second part is the cognitive element and I think and this speaks to other issues. where we can safely address, which is that we often remember these experiences in ways that are deeply rooted in our interpretation of what happened, so if you feel the sensation of this visceral feeling of fear and remember I heard many instances of U, the event that occurred, and then you can put all of this together into a very negative and very damaging story, but it is possible, and many people have experiences from the past that are very negative, but they learn from them in some way.

Sometimes they learn not to make mistakes that they made before, sometimes they learn that they are resilient and that they have the ability to overcome these things and I think that is the cognitive piece which is to reframe the interpretation that you have around this experience and so it comes into play. this principle that memories have this interpretive almost imaginative component, but also these memories can be revised and updated and in fact we do this all the time, yes, this is a very interesting point. I think if you ask most people what they think about a memory.

It's, I think a lot of them would say, well, yeah, something happened in the past and I have a memory of that incident. I have a precise memory. I have a precise memory of that incident, but actually one of the most important things I have learned from your book is that a memory involves imagination, but also every time we revisit a memory we almost update it and change it subtly. Yes, it is that precise. I think it's very accurate. I love it. I should take you on a trip with me. It's going to be a Great, no, I mean, that's absolutely the right way to think about it.

I don't like to talk about it in my field, sometimes we talk about false memories and we talk about a memory, but in reality memory is much more flexible and dynamic than that and that's why I say that memory is much more like a painting than to a photograph and what I mean by this is that if I were trying to paint a picture of the scene now and assuming I were a competent artist, I would probably capture some aspects of the scene very well. right, maybe the color of your eyes, maybe your facial expressions, etc., and I could certainly make mistakes in my um uh image that I could draw, uh, but I would also have some interpretive problems that really reflect my perspective as I look. you or my beliefs and those are used to fill in the blanks that provide this connective tissue and that's how I think memory works is that we have some elements of Truth in our experiences and then we have some errors sometimes that are details that are wrong uh but we also have an interpretation that's not necessarily true or false, it's just our interpretation and that's based on our perspective and the way we look at the world, but the interesting thing is that we can go back and review events from different perspectives that we don't know I don't have to look at it exactly the same way, and in fact I would say we usually do.

I talk in the book about a case where I had a near-death experience and over time it became a funny story that I love to share. with the people,so I think actually what I say in life is that it's no use having a horrible experience unless you get a great story out of it, okay, so let's take that because I think maybe that illustrates really well this point, right? a near-death experience that could be stored in your body as something negative and scary. Are you saying B Bas L redating it and modifying it by sharing a different perspective looking at it in a different light however you want to describe it?

Now you have turned a scary experience into a fun one. I do this all the time and I'm sure many of your listeners do too. In fact, obviously, there are certain types of trauma that are very difficult to take lightly, so. I don't want to tell people, oh yeah, just laugh and you'll be cool, but I think we do this all the time and in fact, just sharing a memory can change it and what I mean by this is if I'm telling you a story about something. that happened to me, I am shaping it into a narrative, but this narrative is no longer something that just sits and regurgitates in my head, yes, it is a narrative that is designed to communicate something to you and that it changes my perspective immediately, so now you tell me your perspective in real time and you share these ideas and now I'm changing them.

I'm rotating my frame of reference and I'm literally looking through a new lens at these same experiences and sometimes that can lead to real growth. I think that's the special sauce in therapy, is this idea of ​​seeing things from one point. from a very different point of view because often the memories that traumatize people the most are those that are associated with shame and guilt and are things that they rarely talk about. and those are the experiences that I think people need to share more, not because simply indulging in a traumatic memory will make it better.

I'm not of the opinion that just wallowing in a negative memory will somehow cure you, eh, or you'll just get a little catharsis and everything will be fine, but through the process of having someone else look at it, being empathetic and sharing your goal with you to progress and see things in a new way. and finding growth because every experience has a different way of looking at it, it's really powerful, not just for severe trauma, for all kinds of experiences that we initially perceive as negative and those words are pretty key, we initially perceive our perception as negative, I mean to one.

Instinct for me and this relates to therapy so I did a form of therapy called internal family systems so in one of those sessions I was doing with a therapist we reviewed an incident from when I was about 8 years old. my house when I was 8 years old and revisiting it as my 40 year old self, I think at that time I was able to tell a new story about that same incident, so the incident happened. Rongan, age 8, developed a certain interpretation of that which then led me to have certain behaviors and reactions throughout my life, but it was absolutely profound because by analyzing that incident, updating it and changing the narrative, I discovered almost instantly in some days when my behavior was different, now some people say yes.

It is one of the types of therapy that goes to the root cause and addresses it right there. I'm not necessarily asking to talk about that, but more about this idea that you can go in and change a memory and then also Thinking about it, why does that change my behavior? It's because when we sleep, you know things start to change with our memory, so if I've told a different story during the day, well, when I go to sleep, my brain updates. That memory, I think it's called reconsolidation or something, so is there any

truth

to what I just said?

Do you see it that way after having studied memory for decades, so you can start with the actual therapy experience you have? and if you look at some of the work in Emotion Regulation, you know, my friend Ethan Cross wrote this book called Talk, which is about the stories we tell ourselves in our heads and one of the things he talks about in terms. of the negative stories, the ruminations that we have, that have to do with rumination, it's always about memory, it's really thinking about things that you regret or things that other people did to you and traumas and stuff, it's really looking at it from a third person.

Perspective, look at it from an outside perspective, and the topic of perspective is quite powerful because there are basic studies that show that you can give people, let's say, even a boring story, but this experiment that I love to talk about over and over again is It's like people hear a story about these kids walking around this house and playing hooky from school and in one case they ask you to look at this from the perspective of one I think is a real estate agent and the other was either that or the potential home buyer, one of the two my memory is imperfect uh and the other was the perspective of a thief and what you find is naturally the one looking from the perspective of a thief, they remember all the valuables in the house and the The other is that if you look at it from the perspective of the house buyer, the real estate agent, you remember all the things that determine the value of the house, but then what they did was they changed people's perspective and they said: "Okay, now change it if you were thinking." About this as a thief, think about it as a home buyer and people remember all these parts of memory that they couldn't access before just by changing their perspective, so now you mentioned this idea of ​​sleep and let's get to that. um, sleep has a lot of effects on memory that we're still trying to figure out, it's pretty complex, so one idea is consolidation, which is that you strengthen individual memories, uh, but there's another line of compelling evidence that gives me I like it quite a bit, which is, uh. and we found some evidence for this in my own lab, which is that sleep allows the brain to find connections between different experiences that we've had, so this ability to find connections means that you can now take an experience if you had it now. and I say, wait a minute, a week ago I had an episodic memory that connects to this and a month ago we had information that connects to this and therefore we can begin to develop some wisdom and knowledge from what happened.

It can also allow you to take in information that is inconsistent with your beliefs, inconsistent with what you used to think, and that allows you to be more flexible and change and grow exactly along the lines that you're talking about, so I think sleep can play this role. It plays a very important role and I think we don't know enough about these things, but I think it's very important that in PTSD sleep is profoundly affected and these night terrors are part of it and I think what happens can be that traumatic memory takes hold and is just constantly reprocessed, so you mentioned the term reconsolidation and this is a phenomenon that has been studied extensively in non-human animals and the idea is that if I'm afraid of driving and I drive repeatedly and over and over again , what can happen is that the brain learns to basically suppress the fear response that you have when driving, it learns in this particular context, I'm safe to drive and then it learns in that particular context, I'm safe to drive and gradually you can overcome that fear saying: here's a safe zone, here's a safe zone, but the idea of ​​reconsolidation is that when I retrieve a memory like a fear memory, I can open that memory to change it and it works.

It's a kind of partial activation of the memory, like this that you just give a little spark and then the memory appears, but then it opens up to change and we don't know much about when and how that works in the human brain. Sleep could play a role. uh, but uh, I'm actually thinking that some of the new psychedelic psychotherapies like MDMA for PTSD may be a mechanism for retrieving these memories and seeing them from a deeply altered perspective, where you can be more dispassionate. or maybe compassionate, I don't know and revisit these memories because psychedelics can enhance plasticity in the brain.

I mean something you just said, maybe you think about comfort zones and the benefit of, within reason, stepping outside of our comfort zones, so, for example, I don't know. I know you take anything in life where you feel a little fearful, let's say public speaking, so let's say the first time you have to get up and speak in front of 500 people, for whatever reason, you may feel afraid. MH, right, your amydala could be out of control and uh, you kind of override the rational part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, and you might not perform well because you're so nervous.

MH, is it that accurate based on what you just said? If you do that, of course, not everyone will be the same. Same thing, but let's say someone does that 20 times right, the first time they're really scared, the second time they're like oh, it actually wasn't that bad the first time, it was a little better, but they're still like 90% scared. Yeah, compared to 100% the first time and you know by the 20th time they've learned that actually this is okay, no one's going to laugh at me or throw their phone or their pen or whatever. Yes, this is anywhere. of that consolidation, reconsolidation, you know in relation to what you just said, so technically it's probably more Extinction, the difference between Extinction and reconsolidation.

I apologize if viewers feel like we're getting into the weeds here, this is great, I love it, okay, so basically if Going back to Pavlov and the older studies on learning, then Extinction, the idea is that you're basically learning something new, so reconsolidation, the idea is that you are erasing some part of a memory, you are actually erasing the fear, so in The example I gave of a reconsolidation incident from my childhood is that I erase the fear of that negative situation at an early age in life. It's that true, it could be or it could be that you are reframing it in a way that reduces the cycle. of the fear you have when you remember it, as an aside, speaking of memory, one of the fascinating things about writing this book that I really love is that people feel compelled to tell me their memories and I have heard so many moving memories. from so many positive and negative people is just amazing, so it's been a real gift to have the opportunity to interact with people about the memory.

I can imagine, so this idea of ​​Extinction is basically the brain learning. This is a safe environment. It's like you get used to it, you get like we used to do this with people with panic disorder who have panic attacks in various places. You would actually make people hyperventilate and then you would make them breathe into a paper bag very quickly until they hyperventilate and it wasn't because we were trying to be sadistic, it's because basically people would go into a state of panic and then that response eventually goes away and you learn Hey, I can have this, the brain is basically adjusting itself to say I made a mistake in this environment, I did this and I didn't have a heart attack, everything is fine and just going through this experience over and over again, the brain starts to suppress that fear response, so it's a new way of learning, now technically reconsolidation is more of a draft of the original Fear Association in the first place and we still don't know how well it can be harnessed in the clinic because it's like if it had been studied more effectively in animals given these intense, wipe-like drugs.

There is plasticity in the timing of retrieval, but I think that whether or not we call it reconsolidation, or whether or not we call it extinction, or whether or not we call it memory updating, we have an enormous degree of flexibility in the way that we feel. about our MH Memories and I think that can happen simply through trial and error over and over again. I mean, I know for a fact that, like my fear of entering the freeway when driving, it has diminished since my first few times on it. Driving I've been here a long time and I've seen people when I was early in my career, some professors whose research really caught on and you'd watch them give talks and it was like watching an accident in slow motion.

I feel miserable, I feel this gut-wrenching fear just watching them like they're going to collapse at any moment and then I watch them give their 100th guest talk and they're fine and I've seen it myself with teaching. I mean this has been one of the cool things about teaching, you get thrown into the baptism of fire and the students can smell that they're like sharks, sometimes they can actually feel the blood in the water if you're afraid and you just have to dig into it. until at the end of the term you're just a different person, yeah, it's fascinating this idea that we refresh a memory every time we go and revisit it.

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All you need to do is go to Vivo barfoot.co.nz where maybe with a friend you were both at the same event, the same gig, the same night, whatever but you remember it differently mhm and I think There's something really compassionate behind that idea that we update our memories because a lot of times people argue about a different memory no, that's not what happened this is what happened, but reading your book makes you think more and more, wait a minute , perhaps both perspectives are true. People simply see a different angle of the same event, but of course sometimes people remember differently.

It was a pretty compassionate view, it makes me think, well, you know, in terms of what the

truth

is, yeah, it's like, there are multiple truths in any event, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh exactly, I mean, I used the quote from Ben Kenobi's book that a lot of the truths we hold on to depend on our own perspective uh what's one of my favorite lines from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker says like you're lying to me and it's like a lot of the truths to The ones we hold on to depend on our own perspective and it's very true because we literally have a very limited perception of reality, even in the moment where I can feel like I'm seeing this entire room, but in fact, you could have all kinds of things. if we lived in some magical world where books were literally. changing deep down I wouldn't realize it because I'm not literally seeing it at the moment I'm constructing this image of the world that is based on my beliefs and my memories and, in the same way, you can make these people have realized these studies. of people who are in two political parties who watch the same debate and walk away with completely different memories of that debate because they are making instances of that debate based on their beliefs.

There are studies of football fans who see the same thing. The match is like a championship game and one team wins and one team loses, but one team is one. The fan of the winning team remembers all these great plays and the fan of the losing team remembers the times the opponents cheated and the referees cheated. he made the wrong decision and all these other parts that are based on his beliefs and that even I think applies to disagreements within relationships. I often use this example, but I really like it because two romantic couples have a disagreement discussion, you know?

What really happened depends somewhat on who you ask. Everyone has been in that situation. I think that within the couple two people have a different memory of the same event and that doesn't necessarily mean that someone is wrong, it's just that they are remembering. Different things, yes, one of which you can extend this even further: you get into a fight with your spouse, not only are you thinking about what just happened that caused the fight and you remember all these things they did to you to make you angry, but then you also You're remembering all the other things they've done in the recent past to make you angry and that makes you even angrier, so you eventually recover.

A week goes by and you just can't remember all those things they did. to make you angry, but you can't even remember why you fought, so you're literally Chang looking at the past from a different perspective than you were at the time of that fight, so I think we underestimate even our own flexibility and the dynamic way. where if I'm feeling excited and positive and optimistic, I have a very different lens through which I view the past than if I'm feeling miserable and, you know, depressed or if I'm feeling angry. And really much of our vision of the past is intensely colored by the present.

Yes, one of the things that has had a profound impact on the quality of my life and how content and peaceful I feel these days is choosing to adopt the belief that if I were that other person, I would be doing exactly the same thing as them. Now, why I think that's really relevant to memory and the things we're talking about is the idea that we can change our perception with enough repetition. I think it can change the way we see people and the world around us, so my default reaction to almost anything and anyone now is that if I were them, I'd be doing the same thing, so what What happens to their lives in their education? past that has led them to think about the world in a way that they cannot think about it.

You can talk about this in politics or negative comments on social media or you know the interactions within a family. Why does that person think the way they think? I think and I think at least for me, that speaks to these key concepts in your book, which is memories are not arranged correctly, so maybe I'm not talking about memory, I'm talking in the present about how I interact with a situation, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that just as you can update your memory and change it, you can also update and change the way you see the world and the people around you, you don't have to be a victim of your past. and the way you used to think about the world when you were 10 or 15 or even when you were 25 you have agency because of neuroplasticity because of the fact that the brain can change, you can also change the way you see the world, oh absolutely .

Absolutely, this is a fundamental part of the book. I mean, I really believe that we all have this ability to change, no matter what age we are, it can be very difficult that once we get into this, we get into these routines, it can be very difficult to get out of them, but you know, I would encourage people to think about whether you see yourself as someone who, you know, generally makes good decisions and, as you said about this, with empathy, I think this is, actually, there's quite a literature on this of what It's called the empathy gap where if we don't think about what others are doing and why they are doing it, we also can't think about what we would do in that situation at that moment, so for example, I think many of us have had these moments. where we think you're extremely scared and defensive and you're going to behave a certain way, but if you don't feel scared right now, if you don't have that visceral sense of immediacy, it's probably difficult. imagine how you would feel and people do these things where you know they'll say oh I had this bad breakup, I'll never talk to this person again and then they see them again and they just get over it. with desire and they make the same mistake as before again, so I really think that we often don't appreciate what we can do in the moment and there are huge positive things you can do with this if you are prepared.

For a job interview, thinking about times when you've been successful can really help you feel better in the moment. Also think about whether you are trying to be more compassionate. Thinking about times when you have been altruistic can make you feel more altruistic. in the moment to make you more likely to engage in altruistic behavior, so there is enormous power in the past if you can be flexible enough to achieve it, that makes me think about the power of reflective practices, so if the premise initial is that the way to see that the past is changeable, that we can change our memories and that we change our memories whether we want to or not, so you know what I talk a lot about self-reflective practices like journaling or maybe once a week on Sundays when you have a quiet day you can reflect on your week what was good that week you know this is the good thing this is what I learned how does that work in memory?

If we actively reflect on the positive aspects, let's say that even the gratitude practices many gratitude practices that are actually being carried out. I am not going to be held hostage to the negativity bias of humans that exists for a very good reason. I'm going to proactively take charge and know that I choose to remember the good things. What I am grateful for and therefore I am going to start seeing more things in everyday life that I am grateful for. How does your research on memory influence these types of self-reflective practices? Well, it's funny that you mentioned this because after writing In the Book I started saying, well, how can I incorporate a lot of this stuff into my own life and I'm pretty bad at doing it?

I'll be pretty honest, but one of the things I started doing is when I have a moment to really reflect, since the book tour hasn't been good for that, but when I have a moment to reflect, I try to make a practice of gratitude and I used to feel like I'm terrible at gratitude. um which is a very negative belief and then one day I decided to try something a little different instead of saying try to focus on the big things in life that I'm grateful for and just take the very small things that happen during the day. .

It could be an email I got from a friend, it could be like something nice someone said to me in the hallway, but just these little random episodic memories and I found that it would have a snowball effect of thinking about the most mundane positive thing I ever had. . during the day it made it easier to access other positive things and initially it was a lot of work because sometimes I can get tired at the end of the day and feel quite negative, but then I would take one little thing and that made it easier. pick up something else and then the next thing you know I had access, it's like these doors just opened to all these different memories and memories, you know, I didn't have to work to feel grateful because the memories did the work for me.

Yes, why do we remember certain events more than others? Well, first of all, our brains are designed to absorb a small amount of information that we know through a century of memory research that basically absorbs the overwhelming majority of the details of the things we remember. Experiences are going to disappear, so thinking about what determines the fate of a memory is very important. There are a number of factors, so one is literally important and what I mean by this is what is biologically important, that is, the experiences that are associated with emotions. um uh like fear or desire or love these are biologically important events that are associated with those experiences right for survival for survival right attachment is very important for survival and obtaining rewards uh avoiding threats all of these are very important anxiety is even important true is like If you are worried that a predator will come out at any second, you must have an increase in stress hormones that will allow you to mobilize very quickly and you may not want to have too much planning and reflection.

You want to be reactive rather than overthinking things that could happen, but really being aware of the threats and mobilizing, so these are things, like I said, that are biologically important and if you look at the major chemicals in the brain that are associated with these states things like dopamine and norepinephrine serotonin I'm sure you've talked about some of these chemicals in your program these are stress hormones like glucocorticoids like cortisol for example these are chemicals that promote plasticity What does plasticity mean? So we think that a memory itself is driven by a change in the connections between neurons, so neurons are the basic individual cells in the brain that are the most granular computational unit, right?

But a particular conscious experience we have is not driven by just one. neuron, but rather a complete collection or set of neurons that are active at a moment, but to remember that event you need to access some subset of those neuroNeons that were active during the original event, so there is a kind of re-experience, so say it. In the original event we never get everything and we never get everything to play out in time, but we do get little bits and pieces and the reason why.we can do is that there is a change in the connections between the neurons, the synapses, if you will. and that's what we now call synaptic plasticity for listeners who don't care about these terms, what it boils down to is that the brain is literally remodeling itself, the structure is literally changing in such a way that if I activate some of the neurons that were active during a past experience, if I can go in there and activate some of them, you get this chain reaction where other neurons in that network also come to life and as a result the memory can appear again, but it really depends on these changes in the connections between neurons, but those connections can be quite labile and can come undone, so what happens is that when these neuromodulators are released as dopamine, serotonin or neuroadrenaline, they actually stabilize the changes that occur, they stabilize the plasticity so that the connections may be more durable. and as a result, the memory can be longer lasting, you can retain it longer, so basically events that have happened in our life that, through an evolutionary lens, would have been very important to the rival, we are absolutely going to remember, that those neurochemicals are going to be released, that will help solidify those memories in our brains, so we're going to remember, you know, when we almost got mugged when we were walking home when we were 17 from a bar, whatever it is, we're going to remember that. and instead of seeing that as something negative, that makes sense, doesn't it?

We want to remember Absol absolutely and it's not just the negative things or even the positive things, but also the things that are surprising or the things. that are novel and new, like you know, the first time I walked into your house, my first time exploring this region of England, you know, this is like I feel more alive, it's a little bit, you know, and that feeling of being more alive is like that. Sometimes it can be unpleasant for people to experience new and surprising things, but that's your brain basically saying, "Hey, let's do something with this experience because it will be important for me to carry it with me in the future." There's a good one in the book. where you talk about neuromodulators and what I remember is that this idea that during these intense events, let's say a stressful event, we are inundated with these neuromodulators that change the way we remember the things that you wrote, they influence how and what we remember, but also what The effect of something, for example, like norepinephrine, lasts for hours after something has happened. has been emotionally intense, it doesn't just come and go during that event, but it lasts for a long time afterwards and I think you're arguing that that helps us remember these events in a different way than much more neutral events, yeah, um.

I think the passage of time is a bit controversial as to whether it will last for hours after the emotional event, but the memory will last for hours. What type of event are we talking about? Know? It's like an extreme event where a gun was pointed at you. or you were, I don't know, you were at a red light in your car and someone was really upset and started getting out of their car and coming towards your car. I mean, that's a situation that many people have experienced before, right? pretty common, not uncommon, I should say, maybe through that lens, talk to us about what's going on, what are these hormones that come up and what's the point of them, yeah, so these chemicals, some of them would be considered neurotransmitters. , some of them would be hormones, uh, even things. like uh um, estrogen, testosterone can affect plasticity, wow, uh, but you can take, let's say, something like stress hormones, stress hormones, glucocorticoids, and these have a very slow time course and the interesting thing is that, when you're in a stress phase, let's say you're, um, you're fighting, let's say with someone that you really care about, and that's why this fight is happening.

Now the interesting thing is that these chemicals can improve the plasticity of not only the things that happen during the fight, but also a little bit. A little before and a little after, the effects can extend in time to events that preceded and followed the experience that caused the stress in the first place and again biologically, this is what you want if you go back to the proverbial cave I mentioned. before and you are attacked by a bear, not only do you want to remember that you were attacked by a bear, but you also want to remember all the circumstances that led up to being attacked by the bear and what followed because all of that is valuable information, so you can It may be this broader time course of things surrounding the event, but I think one thing we can also appreciate is that it's not a question of stronger or weaker.

I think in neuroscience they sometimes try to reduce it to a strong memory and a weak memory. but in reality emotions can change and can color the perception of the experience and the memory of the experience, so I will particularly remember the things that are most emotionally significant. I will particularly remember the parts of the memory that are associated with the threat, such as the fact that the person pulled a knife on me, but not necessarily the color of their socks, yes, there is a much bigger idea, not that in any interaction In any situation in life there are multiple things that are always happening, but we don't remember them all, we remember the things that are necessary to remember, probably or most commonly, for our survival, so if it was a really worrying stressful incident, I find it fascinating. that the norepinephrine that is released also helps us establish a Memory not only of what happened but of what preceded it happening and let's say that if so much adrenaline were not released, we would remember the event but we would not remember the steps that happened just before and That, of course, makes evolutionary sense.

It makes me think of something you said earlier, where I think it was kids playing hooky at school and depending on what lens you looked at it through, you would remember different things, so the broader point for me is that we are constantly exposed. to all kinds of MH inputs, but we can only consciously remember the inputs that we decided were important to remember, but what happens then, if that's true? What happens then? I think you mentioned if from a thief's perspective they are looking at the house and they are seeing all the valuable things correctly so that is in their memory but then you ask the same person to imagine they are a real estate agent and they remember different things , so I guess to me that means we're storing all the stuff.

That happened or many of them and depending on the perspective we take, that opens up like certain neurological pathways so that we can remember certain things that are relevant to that perspective. Makes sense? It totally makes sense. It totally makes sense because it's wild, yeah, because that. it means that it means that there are, rather, hidden memories, like there are memories that our brain does not bring to our Consciousness because it does not feel that they are relevant at that moment, well, you could call it uh sleeper or lat and the reason I say it is because, and this is one of the fascinating things about memories, people often think that memories are strong or weak, but often we have these memories that we don't even know are there and then you hear a song from your childhood.

You smell something or you're in a place you haven't been in years and it just pops into your head and what that shows is that sometimes you can have a memory that is capable of being strong, it's there, it's asleep but without the correct sign you cannot access it is like this closed door and you need the key to enter and a mental context the feelings we have the places we are in, the smells we are experiencing or the sounds we are hearing can create this window or this erm, it may give you the key, so to speak, to unlocking those memories that you normally wouldn't even know existed.

You mention music and of course I think many of us have experienced that moment where we hear a song that we haven't heard in a long time from a particular moment in our life mhm and we start to feel those feelings it could be the death of a being loved could be a breakup could be fresh this week at college whatever it is but that music can unlock things you can't consciously think about or bring to your awareness MH and you know why, I mean do we know? We know from science and your research why this might be the case.

There are a few reasons. So, I think we've already touched on this and that is that music tends to evoke emotional responses in us and these emotional responses can be very formative for memory, but there is another part which is that music tends to be part of what is called For context, the hippocampus basically forms memories that aren't based on your knowledge of the world or anything like that, it just says that this whole experience that we're having, that we're sharing right now, is happening in a particular place. at a particular moment and then I have all these areas of the brain that are basically processing what you're doing, processing the sights and sounds around me, but then the hippocampus is creating this big picture of how it all comes together and that's what we would do.

Call the context the context can include emotions but also smells, sights and sounds, and music is a very powerful contextual factor, it is like sound. I know you really like music and for me it is something deeply personal and it is the soundtrack. for our lives and there are particular songs that we listen to during particular phases of our lives and again if Unique then a key to memory is the distinction if so if there is a cue that is uniquely associated with a particular moment of your life, it can be a vehicle to mentally travel back in time, it can be a vehicle to take you back to other things because memory is about cues and context, so if there is something that brings you back to that past context and activates that ET mind, then that mindset is now a signal to get more information and what happens is you can get these chain reactions where you mentally go back to a moment and remember one thing, remembering one thing now generates another memory and therefore you can have the snowball effect where you now feel that you are back in that time and place we are seeing that with certain studies I think of patients with dementia and in certain homes I have read recar showing that if they play music from that individual's youth or their 20s or At 30 you almost evoke different behaviors, different facial expressions, like things that people couldn't access before without that music.

I mean, that's pretty incredible. First of all, are you familiar with that research? and secondly, I don't know when, when you hear things like. This I simply believe makes us or should make us more humble. How much? How much is our brain capturing? We just have no idea, you know what I mean? It's like we just don't know what is being stored. inside us, but then something strange, a bit of music or maybe a smell, MH, maybe the scent of a candle that can do exactly the same thing or be in a particular place like, eh, I did my gap year in Cambridge and on Sunday I had a day of uh, a book tour is interrupted and I went to Cambridge to visit my old friends there and just seeing certain landmarks brought me back, it wasn't just a memory of something What happened, it was the feeling of being back in the past and it's just It's remarkable when this happens and places are also a very powerful part of that and if we want to go back to a previous topic, fear and stress can have this effect which not only helps you remember the things that evoked that fear response or whatever, but also the things that happened before and after and people have found this as well with other factors like novelty, so Richard Morris from Edinburgh in actually, so, you're alma mater, yes, he did these famous studies where he basically had a rat learn the locations of foods, but he would find that in this particular experiment it was very forgettable and the rat would soon forget where these were. food places, but if you put the animal in a new box that it had never been in before and if you were a labat being put in a new box it is a very stimulating experience, kind of like what it might be like if you had to go to somewhere new after a long week of tedious work in the office, huh, and what happened is that that would actually rescue otherwise forgettable memories for things that happened right before and that was associated with dopamine, which again is thought to be this neurotransmitter that's associated with reward, but it's really just kind of a surprise novelty thing and energizing you to get information or get rewards.

I know it's a bit hesitant in the past, but I was also very interested because we've been talking a lot about trauma, but there are also very positive elements of memory that can be improved and this also applies to music when dopamine is Higher up in our bodies we remember more. One of the things you see with a lot of neuromodulators is that more is not necessarily better. we used to seeThis in our stress studies, where you get what's called an inverted U response, so if you imagine the letter U and put it upside down like a graph.

The left side would be if you have low levels of stress hormones for example, it can actually be bad for your memory, if you have medium levels it can be very high. memory, but once you get too high, you hit the limit and it actually becomes bad for your memory again, so I wouldn't necessarily say dopamine. I mean, I don't know for sure if more is better, but in general, increase dopamine. Activity can improve plasticity and certainly the kinds of experiences you can have on a day-to-day basis, like just being in a new place doing something new, trying a new activity, meeting new people, can give you a little bit of that response and it's so I really recommend that for older people, I think as we get older we tend to become more set in our ways and we can be a little bit more rigid, but it's really a beautiful and easy way to tap into the brain's natural capabilities.

Plasticity is going out and looking for novelty, yes, plasticity in that environment when you say when there is high dopamine there, it is a new experience, it is novel, how is plasticity useful in that situation? Do you know why someone should listen to that and say? Yes, okay, novel experiences are G. increase dopamine, which will increase plasticity, why is that so important for that individual? Well, I think we all complain about our memory and often try to improve it, and in that sense, taking advantage of that plasticity can be a good thing by just incorporating a little newness into our days, um, but I also think there's something to be said. about allowing ourselves to incorporate new information into what we believe and what we experience, and this is something that is a latent theme throughout my book.

I think we tend to see memory as something that should be effortless and if you remember easily that's ideal, but you actually learn more when there's a little bit of discomfort, when there's a little bit of struggle, that's something that I think you mentioned. briefly at the beginning of our conversation, this act of knowing that being in a new place or being around people who are different from us can be a little unpleasant in the sense that it's new and our brain can feel it struggling a little. It's a little difficult to adapt, but it's a huge opportunity to expand your knowledge and give you more, more, more raw material in imagination, for example, and in creativity, and if you look at people who are extraordinarily creative artists and musicians, they are looking for constantly newness and trying to incorporate that ability to find connections between things that shouldn't. otherwise go together, yeah, I really love that section of the book about creativity and, uh, what really drives it and how memory plays into that and it reminded me that I imagine you've had this experience when you're writing too. but I just turned in last week the last version, hopefully, of my manuscript for my next book, hey, high five, yeah, it sure doesn't feel real to say that, and you know, for the last few months, like I've been .

I was really trying to finish it. I felt like I needed news and wanted to travel. I wanted to go to different cities, different cafes, walks in different areas and it really helped me. I mean, look, I'm telling myself a story that helped me, but honestly. Having been here before with previous books, I really find that it's actually the way it is, since you're suggesting that it's like you unlock a different part of your brain that you can't access when you're in the same rhythm and routine every day. days. Does that make plausible biological neuroscientific sense?

Yes, yes, because one of the things that many researchers have shown is that the brain is constantly changing and you can see this in every part of the brain that, as far as I know, has been studied. is that if you do something repeatedly in a very predictable way, the brain adjusts to optimize it and do that very well, so when you have big deviations, things that are unpredictable or points where things are very novel, there has to be a big change and a big reconfiguration in the networks of the brain to accommodate this new experience and, in fact, there is a school of thought that says that what the brain is trying to do is take in the most informative information, the things that violate our prediction, the things that don't fit with what we already knew and we prioritize that for new learning, so instead of trying to learn everything, the brain focuses on the most essential because if you already know a lot you only have to encode the information that doesn't corresponds. what's happening right now sorry to interrupt to make sure you are taking action after watching this video.

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I don't think many of us have very rich memories of that time period, it's almost like this Collective Amnesia that's in and of itself, it's a little scary, does that speak to this concept called event boundaries about which you write? Yes, in fact, that was the example where event boundaries came into play for me in my own experience, so the concept of event boundaries is related to the fact that our episodic memories are related to the context, so, the place it happened, the types of goals we had, etc., although our life is very continuous, just after I leave here, you will continue with some other activity. in some other activity and everything is a continuum in time and space when we remember these things we tend to remember in a more discrete way we tend to remember here was the moment we were having this conversation and once you walk out that door you your mindset will change to something completely different, you will be on a new goal, a new task and you will feel like you are in a different place and what happens is we discovered in our studies on brain activity that when people engage in a very predictable event For example, the brain actually encodes memories in these moments when you go from one event to another, what are the points that are sometimes more surprising or newer or just a shift to the right and those changes are what we call event . limits now one of the interesting things is that you can see this when people just change rooms because suddenly what happens is your mindset changes as you go from room to room, that's why sometimes we end up in the kitchen and you say, why?

May here again, so if we went to the kitchen right now to, say, get something we showed up in the kitchen, we might say oh wait, why did we come in here again? So we might say, well, while we're here, why? Shouldn't we have some cookies? We eat and we come back and then we come back to this room and we remember that we were supposed to get your phone or something, so that's because of the limits of the event, because what happens is that when your thinking changes, your contact Mental changes and now it is more difficult to remember things that happened beyond the context.

Now the problem with lockdowns is that we stay in the same place doing the same things, talking to the same people all day and all night, etc. As a result, you didn't have these big events, boundaries, you didn't have these big context shifts, and so instead of having a very distinctive set of memories, you just had a big blob, a blob of experience, yeah, it's so Fascinating because there are so many people in me. included will catch up with someone you haven't seen since 2019, for example, right, and we're filming this in 2024, so technically it was 5 years ago, but it seems like yeah, I only saw you about a year ago, it's like No, wait a minute.

It was five years ago, that was because of the limits of the event, right, that's because depending on what country you were in and what the restrictions were, but you know for the better part of two or maybe three years, the The way you lived was very different and quite monotonous, so instead of it being a three-year period, I guess maybe your brain almost perceived that, as a three-month period does, that's what it's happening. Well, our sense of time itself and the passage of time is very strong. related to our mental context and changes in mental context, so for example, if I think of it as almost like space, then if something is 100 feet away, for example, compared to 110 feet away, those Things will actually look very close together if something is 10 feet away. away versus 20 feet apart, they're actually going to look very far apart, so a lot of our perception of space and time depends on our perspective as an observer, yeah, so if we go back to this idea of ​​context as a crucial part of time, what can happen?

What happens is that more context changes can lead to a greater perception of the passage of time, so the boundaries of events can have a very distorting effect on our sense of the passage of time and therefore, just as an example , yes when I was in lockdown, I was experiencing this and we had to do these surveys, uh, when we taught classes just to keep students interested and for the fun of it, I said, do you feel like time is moving faster? , slower or more or less the same throughout the course? of a day and almost all of the students said that time moved more slowly over the course of a day, so I would say okay, if you look back on the past week, do you feel like the weeks are passing slower or more fast and I said well the weeks go by very quickly and I don't know if that was your experience but it certainly was mine but the math doesn't work well if the days go by more slowly, in theory the weeks should too but what What happened was that people had a sense of enormous monotony during the day, and as a result, without that sense of boundaries of events, time seemed to move at this glacial pace, but then at the end of a week you look back and say : well, what happened during the last week, I don't even remember what happened, so it felt like time was slipping away and we were wasting time, you know, so I guess the feeling of what happened five years ago is really slippery because it depends on how many changes occurred during that time, why it is easier to learn languages ​​as a child than as an adult, because the brain is more plastic, so we have talked a lot about the hippocampus, but a lot of it is believed that many of the Higher level calculations that occur in the brain occur in the neocortex, so if someone thinks only of the prototypical image of a brain, if everyone mentally imagines a brain or if they have an image in front of them, we will see all this gray matter convoluted, yes, and that little wrinkled blob of gray matter is the neocortex, so in all of these areas we have some of these areas that we've been talking about, like the prefrontal cortex which is part of the neocortex.

Now, in the adult brain, those connections changed quite slowly, which means that learning in the neocortex is somewhat gradual, but in the early stages of development the connections between neurons and the neocortex can be quite labile, that is, they become you can get a pretty dramatic configuration of connections in the neocortex. And that allows us to actually latch on to new things much faster because the connections between areas of the brain are very labile. And what does labile mean? Laile means that it is as if they can be changed very quickly. So it is true that children choose.

They learn things faster than adults yes, definitely and it's true with music too and in fact there are some interesting jobs. I wish I was a little afraid to tell you this because I may not remember it precisely, but there is interesting work that suggests children learning a musical. An instrument from a very early age can develop perfect pitch or is more likely to develop it in adulthood, meaning they can hear notes more effectively in music and, in fact, their entire auditory system is modified for that. purpose. Languages ​​are like that. Also, as adults we are totally capable, we have all the plasticity to learn a new language.I want to be clear about this, but as children we can learn it faster and are more likely to develop a native accent.

Interestingly, you are more likely to develop a native accent. You see, right? When people move countries when they're in their 20s and 30s and they don't always adopt the accent of their new country, let's say, compared to when they move when they were kids, so that's really, really interesting, in your book you wrote that when you turned 50 you said you were going to write a book, which you already did, but secondly, that you were going to start surfing, how are you doing? Terrible, terrible, Davis, where I live, no. very close to the coast, so I haven't had much practice.

I had a period right after I turned 50 where I was trying and, you know, it was touch and go, but I had moments where I was able to stand up for people who haven't tried surfing is an exceptionally brutal learning curve. because you think it's just writing standing up, but that's part of it and it's very difficult, especially at the age of 50, when you're in bad shape like me, but it's physically very demanding, you're using all these muscles that you didn't know that you had, but one of the fascinating skills of surfing is reading the waves, which is also one of the beautiful parts.

You sit on a surfboard and look at the ocean and see the waves coming and anticipate when that moment will be when I start paddling like hell and an expert surfer will calculate the time, they will get into the correct spatial position and I don't get there. far away on that because I need more time in surfable places so maybe the book will help me with this second one. Yeah, well, I guess the reason I ask that is relative to what we just said is that it's easier to learn things when we're kids. I think your message is yes, it may be harder for you to learn to surf when you're 50, but it's not impossible.

Oh, absolutely not, it's not at all impossible and really, really. I hope older people take this into account because I think we often get frustrated by obstacles in learning, but the interesting thing is that when we face those obstacles is when we learn the most, as long as you have some kind of feedback that tells you that. that's how it's done, that feeling of struggle is when we learn the most and if you feel like something is effortless, you're probably not learning much, not only because I've talked to a

neuroscientist

, Dr. Tommy Wood, on this show several times, but Last time you were there we talked about an article you published hypothesizing that one of the main causes of age-related cognitive decline is the fact that we stop learning new things and we stop giving our brains that novel information that you have already touched on the right it says like you know you learn a lot in school, you're constantly exposed to new information, but then it starts to stop and if you retire, say at 60 or 65, and you stop learning new things, well, your brain doesn't. it's right to keep growing and you know neuroplasticity and all that stuff so I think there's another benefit there too, right, yeah, and we can think of it as the opposite as well, the more predictable your daily experiences are, the more it starts to work. your brain.

You adapt too much to that predictability and become less open to things that are different, so I was talking to someone very recently who was doing some experiments where he gave people movies to watch and had surprise endings in some of the movies. movies and people tended to have a bias to remember it as if the movies ended more predictably than they actually did, so I think there's something to be said about exposing yourself to novelty and exposing your brain to the struggle, at least, for developing a greater openness to things that violate the predictive nature of our daily lives, yes, and I guess that speaks to people, let's say I don't know, who struggle in social settings, the more fearful they become, the more they stay in home and don't go to yoga class with other people or not.

You go to the cafe because you have to interact with the barista or other customers, whatever it is, the harder it becomes to get it right because your brain then down-regulates and what you thought was complicated actually becomes complicated because you're avoiding it. more, yeah, yeah, and there are all kinds of reasons why that can happen, I mean one is just the discomfort of new learning as you get older, you might not want it anymore, some of that could be too sensory issues, one of the things we know is that uh hearing aids actually for people with hearing impairments can be very good at promoting uh um uh at stopping cognitive decline and we don't know why, but my suspicion is that you have a lot less noise in the brain, you can use your attention Resources to focus on what is around you, you will be more confident unless you know that it allows you to engage more with the world.

Let's talk about some of the common perceptions about memory. Memory is something that no one wants to lose. Everyone listens. these stories about cognitive decline related to Agee or his parents or, in his case, his grandparents, and I think a lot of us, most of us, think I hope that doesn't happen to me, so what? What is normal as we age? You mentioned earlier the situation where you end up in your kitchen and forget why you went to the kitchen in the first place, is that normal or is it a sign of dementia? Oh, that's absolutely normal, um and what it is, it's usually not a sign of dementia because if you go into the kitchen and you don't remember why you went there and you go back to the room where you came from, you'll often go oh, that's what I need it, so it's not like you didn't have memory for what you were supposed to do, but rather you didn't have the memory accessible when you needed it and that's exceptionally common as you get older and is related to changes in prefrontal function, uh this area of ​​the brain that we talked about that allows you to focus on what we need at any given moment and so as we lose that functioning, you're a little bit more reactive than proactive and it's harder to change your mental context. to remember things, so is it a sign of age?

Basically, I understand that it is common, let me tell you. If we were doing what we needed to do to take the best care of our memories, that would still be happening. You would have enormous abilities to reduce the changes that occur with age, particularly the frontal effects, and I believe that I. I'm sure you've talked about this with many of your listeners, things like aerobic exercise, things like maintaining a healthy diet, can reduce chronic stress and having ways to mitigate the chronic stress of everyday life, all of this can be very important. One of the things we found is that people, for example, with cerebrovascular diseases like hypertension, which cause alterations in blood flow in the brain, have changes in white matter that are really long-range connections, like highways. the brain and as a result the prefrontal cortex becomes disconnected from a lot of other areas and you're less likely to activate it, you have more of these distracted memory gaps that happen, okay, this is really interesting, let's get back to that, um. kitchen situation the reason I want to go back there is that I just want to understand or understand this point clearly.

You said this is common. You said a lot of us and I think I'm pretty sure almost everyone hears this. Now you have experienced this at some point you end up somewhere and you can't remember why you were there in the first place. Now you say it's not a sign of dementia, but you're implying that it doesn't happen when we're younger. So I guess what I'm really trying to understand is whether we are accepting a degradation in our ability to remember because of the way we live today. Should that happen when you're 30 or really if things were more optimal?

I start to have that situation where we show up at a place and forget about it when we're 60 or 70, yeah. I would say that he probably wasn't being accurate in the way he talked about all of this because, in fact, everyone forgets. These types of effects can be documented in young adults. I mean, some of these event limit effects have been documented primarily in college students who are supposedly at peak memory functioning, so it's definitely not the case that it's something that happens with so many. It's not a problem, it's not a problem and in fact forgetting happens to everyone, we often have so many memories that even in optimally functioning people they should forget most of what they experience, that It's a key point, right, and that's one of the big ones. points in your book too, which is that you know we don't remember everything, in fact, much of what happens today I will forget and that's exactly what you want, in fact, if the human brain remembered every single thing that happened to us and in our lives every day would be overwhelming, right?

Well, yeah, an analogy I give is like I can look around the studio and it's pretty clean and organized, but I could look at this and say why aren't you a hoarder, why don't you throw away as many things as you can and You never throw anything away and just fill the space? You've got all the space here that's not being used, why don't you just accumulate and accumulate and accumulate and say? Well that's ridiculous, why would I want to do that? I want to be able to find what I want when I want it right and just so you know, there's a Marie condo approach which would be to say I'm going to let go of the things that don't matter and organize and hold on to these things that matter and I think that's how the human brain is optimal when we basically hold on to the things that matter and that's why I say in the book not to remember more but to remember better So the problem with aging is not that we can't remember, but that we often remember things that they're innate at the expense of the things that are important and definitely what you're talking about in terms of modern life.

Modern life often takes us away from what is important and gives us these more blurred and fragmented memories. What role do electronic media play here? Electronic media does not have to have negative effects on memory and in fact some studies can show that it can have good effects, but the way we interact with it and the habits we develop can actually cause problems and e.g. , if you can see, you might see this, especially through kids, there's been this proliferation of Instagram walls, so go to Instagram. Instagram walls, have you heard of this? No no. Okay, maybe this is more of a us thing, but definitely if you go or maybe I'm not in contact with the kids, I can join you at that place, so basically this is like if you go to a cafe or a restaurant and they'll have a wall that has all this like, you know, plants and stuff, flowers and things and it has the name of this place and big letters on it, so the idea is that you go there and take a photo of it and post it immediately on social media and I think this is kind of indicative of a way that we interact with technology where we just mindlessly document things and assume that because we're documenting it we'll remember the experience, but actually the form.

We are interacting with the world through the lens of the camera or through the lens of our phone, so to speak, it is changing the experience itself, that is, we are no longer there, but rather we see it through the lens of simply taking without thinking. photographs, so there are studies that show that if I go somewhere and take photographs, I will feel like I will be more likely to retain memories, but in fact it might be less likely and I can go further and just say that. It does not have to be this way. You can use photos more selectively in ways that allow you to really focus on the sites that are here, focus on the exact moments you want to capture, and that can improve your memory and give you better access.

These events happen later on, but that's not usually how things happen and I think Snapchat, for example, where your posts literally disappear after a couple of days, is like a metaphor for how we remember in the modern world, this is a modern phenomenon that is people going to concerts. and recording large amounts of that concert while watching through their phone now look my bias is I have my own bias here I grew up in an era where this didn't exist I don't understand it I don't understand it personally I also don't want to judge other people who choose to do it and Of course, a lot of kids are growing up in an era where that's the norm and it almost doesn't exist if I don't record it and post about it, so let's take a concert, for example, where there's a band playing and a certain individual, say , they're going to a band that they really like, they're really there, they're enjoying it, they're dancing. with their friends and they're also recording a lot of it, so seeing it through their screen a lot, how does that affect the way they store it?

So 5 or 10 years later, your ability to remember that concert, how does it change when you do it like that, compared to when you don't, depends somewhat on how well you do it, so I thinkThat the idea of ​​documenting the concert is that you want to remember what happened, but when we really remember, we remember our experience. of what happened and our experience is not what's happening on stage but what's happening in our heads, what we're seeing and hearing and feeling, so part of, I mean, I don't know about you, but part of being at a concert it's the place where it happens and the feeling of interacting in this communal exchange with other people, so if the camera takes you away from that and puts it in your head about how can I get as much as possible out of this concert, it will You are depriving the memory of what that experience was like, which I would say, is much more valuable than the live performance itself.

What would happen if you took a photo when you were there? What would happen if that individual took a photo of them and their friends with big smiles on their faces? so they're not recording the music, which I would say never sounds as good when you play it back compared to when you're in the arena, but they're just trying to talk about the concepts in your book if you're documenting the music. The emotions and the people you were there with would think that might be better because then when you look back you remember, oh God, I was with these really good friends of mine and we caught up with each other and we were smiling, we were laughing.

That is, is the way we store memories different if we do it this way? Yes, because what is happening is that you are orienting yourself, you are actually planting cues in memory, no matter what you are doing, memorize, it is about planting correct cues, so what is it? the queue will be something that is happening on stage or the queue will be the experience of being with your friends, so that photo is a potential sign, a path towards an experience like you said before when you listen to music, you are unlocking a memory that was always there but that you can't access without the key, that's, that's exactly the right thing to do, and if you're documenting what's happening on stage, it can potentially give you more memory to see what happened. on stage but without a photo or two of you hanging out with your friends and enjoying it, you won't necessarily have access to that part of the memory.

What would happen if you went to the concert without a phone or camera? Don't get distracted by your phone, camera, emails, Instagram or anything else that may be on your phone, which of course is very common for most of us these days, but you are literally there now, of course you could. Don't make sense while you're there MH, but in theory, with all your decades of research into memory, do you think having nothing with you to capture the experience means your brain captures it in a much deeper way? I think so. I think if you are not mentally there you are not even having the experience so there is nothing to remember other than taking the photo and taking the video and conversely if you are mentally there you will have a memory of the experience but I would also say that Images have a very valuable value, there is a lot of potential in images and one is that if you document selectively and you go back to the images, you revisit them, that act of remembering the memory, as we have talked about, can change the memory but it can also strengthen it. the memory, so sometimes that change can make it stronger, so you, you and I probably remember that when we were kids we had photo albums, yeah, and we actually looked at our photos and I don't know about you, but in my case, I rarely look at my photos. photos now, but if you are very selective you have a better chance of being able to revisit those photos and then use them as triggers for memory recovery.

You talked about journaling. That's another way to do it as well, but these forms of documentation to the extent that they are reminders that allow us a window back into that past and the more we go back the more we can solidify that memory, okay, here's a real life scenario. , today Thursday on Monday of next week. I'm going to see John Mayer in London. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen John play. he lived for a few years, he's one of my favorite artists, a great guitarist for me, he has it all, playing guitar, writing songs, vocal lyrics, everything like, he looks good too, I think he's amazing, he's still one of the artists I would still travel to go to.

Look, so I'm going to learn next Monday to observe it, so if I want that experience to lodge in my brain and be remembered, what could I do that night to increase my chances of that being the case? It's a very good question, I mean, part of it, I would say, would be to really engage with the place, engage with the emotions, engage with it and what it is, it's hard for me to describe, but I often think that for people who They are very intellectual we get stuck in our heads and the problem is that the memory of a thought is not that different from something you just imagined, so if you are going to go all the way to London to see this concert you are probably paying. a lot of money to get tickets to this concert and you want to make the most of it you have to be there and part of being there is the sights and the sounds and not necessarily the uh and the feelings that are happening at that moment.

They are evoked by being there, being with the friends or family you go with, being the food you are eating, the sights and sounds you have, so it is very important to get out of your head, we probably also say, don't get drunk , which happens a lot at concerts, so, you know, let's talk about alcohol and what it does to your memory because, of course, alcohol is something that a lot of people consume, which happens when we experience something and alcohol is present in terms. of our ability to remember it, alcohol has several effects on memory, but the most important is that it blocks plasticity and, as a result, what happens is that people who consume too much alcohol, for example, can suffer from fainting when they do not consume it. do.

You don't remember the entire time you were drunk because what's happening is you're blocking the changes and connections you need between neurons to allow you to reactivate those memories, even if you don't get drunk we often have blurry memories. These experiences are and again you know plasticity is part of it, part of it is that it closes your prefrontal cortex and then you're picking up memories of whatever is around you, but they're very blurry memories, uh, and then part of that. What's really fascinating is that it's part of the context, so episodic memory, a big part of it is the feeling of being drunk, if that makes any sense, there's a very particular mindset that you're in after a couple of beers and you're not there. every now and then you don't have that couple of beers and in fact there are some studies that suggest and I say this with I want people to be very clear about what I'm saying and what I'm not saying but there are studies that show that If you have an experience When you are a little drunk, you will have an easier time remembering that experience later, when you are in a drunken state again.

I'm not saying that now the best memory will be if you don't do it. you're drunk and then you're completely sober when you try to remember later, but if you have this experience when you're drunk, one of the weird things that happens is remembering will be easier if you go back to being in a slightly drunk state, it's the However, the same principle is not where you said that music can unlock memories that you can't access without music or that is harder to access. It's that context around an event that's so important and I guess if you were somewhere you were Tipsy.

It makes sense that you can hardly be there and remember it when you're sober, but if you're at the same level of drunk, your state is different and then you can remember, yeah, it's super interesting, right? Yes, and emotions are like that too. Emotional states that we can have when we feel angry. You can remember things that happen when you are angry. When you are happy. You can remember things that happen when you are happy. These physical sensations there is even a great study by psychologist Alan Battley that showed that divers who memorized words while underwater found it easier to remember those words when they were underwater.

I mean, it's just that the context can be so rich and multi-dimensional the sights the sounds the smells the emotions the thoughts the physical states everything is there I'm interested in knowing where we store memory in the body. You just mentioned that sometimes we can get stuck in our heads and not pay attention. to the smell, to the sound, to the environment, whatever it is in a particular situation, but what about this idea that emotions and memories can maybe be stored in the body? So many body workers, massage therapists, therapists of all kinds, will often tell you that when a certain part of the body that was tense, let's say mhm is released, people can start to cry, they can start to remember things in a different part of their life.

I've had that experience myself that has to do with my bone muscle, so I guess it's emotions more than memory. I'm just wondering, from your perspective, if there's something in your work that can explain that or speak well of it. I've heard from several people you know who have read things about how trauma is stored in the body. and I think you know I can't talk about every part of this, but I do think that people neglect the idea that the brain is a part of the body, the mind is a product of the brain, and that's why when people tell me that trauma is stored in the body, well, I say the brain is a part of the body, and so it is, but that's not necessarily surprising, so these memories of painful experiences, for example, are stored in my opinion in the brain, but the brain interacts with the body at all times.

I mean there are all kinds of hormones that drive our physical responses in the body they also modulate memories. You can even see waves of activity in the brain that parallel people's breathing cycles and you probably talked about heart rate variability as a thing and there's a whole fascinating line of work on this topic and in relation to cognition, so I guess I would encourage people not to get caught up in the idea that memories are necessarily locked up in the body, but rather in this idea that the brain and other parts of the body are everything. connected in this way so that our brains are registering part of the context of an event is our internal context or bodily context we are embodied we are embodied the other way, I think about it sometimes is that sometimes we have adopted a posture or certain patterns in our body that means we can't access certain thoughts and when that part of the body is released our posture can change and we become different people, we can access different parts of our brain because everything is connected so actually in some ways we could I argue that it's a bit reductionist to say that trauma is stored in the body, the brain, the mind or whatever, because in reality these things are not separate, they all interact coherently, so whatever the point of view that you adopt.

I don't think you need to take many leaps to achieve this. Yes, it is totally believable that you can release a part of the body and generate a very deep visceral emotional reaction. Yes Yes. I mean, you've been right, so you know you can get the emotional reaction and that doesn't necessarily mean that the memory of a trauma is stored there maybe, but when you manipulate the body it has effects on your mind and that can have effects on the memory, so that's how we've been talking. about everything being well-connected and so many things that affect your physical states can affect your mental context, which can open you up to memories that wouldn't normally be accessible to make sure you're taking action after watching this video.

I've created a free guide to help you develop healthy habits. We can all make short-term changes, but is it possible for those changes to become a fundamental part of our lives? Many times this is not the case and that is why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps you need to do. They are really very effective, if you want to get that free guide right now, all you have to do is click the link in the description box below. CH and I talk about these four pillars of the healthy food movement, sleep and relaxation.

You touch on them briefly, but let's go through each of them and think about how making changes in that area can affect our memory, so you mentioned food, a good quality diet and I mean, that's another topic in itself and it's enough that that means, but in general terms. a good quality diet can help our memory, yes, and one of the things that we're still learning is the gut microbiome, so we know that the gut microbiome interacts with the brain and there's a fascinating study that I saw and it's one of those. things that you hear about a study and it blows your mind, so I was at this conference talking to someone who studies the effects of nutrition on thebrain and told me about the study where these rats were given this. high sugar content the equivalent of a rat's equivalent of a can of Coca-Cola a day and what they found was that when they became adults these rats had memory problems and changes in the hippocampus compared to a rat that ate a healthy shower of rat anything but the trick was that they took the gut microbiome from the Coca-Cola rat and put it into a rat that had a healthy diet and they developed memory problems and they also had changes in their brain structure, so this is so relevant. for this idea of ​​how things are connected because things like stress, for example, interact with the gut microbiome.

The disease can interact with the gut microbiome. It's so frustrating sometimes as a scientist that you have to isolate and reduce things to study them. Does it sometimes bother you when you think so? I've studied this thing in this part of the body but oh my goodness everything is connected so that matters but this and this and this also matters it really is one of those things that gives you some humility because you know there is a long, just as an example, there is a lot of work on the neuroscience of addiction and tracking the pathways in the brain that are related to addiction, but I recently saw a really compelling paper by a

neuroscientist

who had been working on this.

This research presented this misleading image of addiction as a disease of the brain that reflects brain damage or strange brain function as opposed to part of the social context in which people live. are affecting the brain and poverty and the challenges of, you know, prejudice, for example, and all of these factors that are basically seeping into the brain and, again, it's very difficult to translate any of these little things into big things. What happens in the real world is challenging, that doesn't mean there isn't relevance, but it does mean we need to think more holistically about the brain.

I think I heard you in an interview or a presentation you gave say that there is some research. that blueberries may have an impact on memory is that there is some research on blueberries and as antioxidants that may have some positive effects on maintaining cognitive health as we age, there is some new data on multivitamins, for example, so, There are these indicators that I would say, though, you have to focus more on the big picture, so for example, being able to maintain heart health is huge for memory and maintaining cognition, what does that mean for heart health?

Well, things like avoiding hypertension aren't cardiac per se either, but um. diabetes, for example, control diabetes or never go there in the first place since you know it dramatically increases your risk of Alzheimer's, etc., so maintain blood sugar levels that are healthy for heart health, such as avoiding hypertension, avoid cerebrovascular disease, cholesterol, maintain cholesterol. below and these are big picture effects that are part of things related to a holis diet and I think sometimes people want, oh, can I take gko? That will help me remember and I think that's an easy solution. There's probably some statistical benefit to some of these things, eh, but that doesn't mean that everyone who takes a particular supplement will benefit, some will probably get worse, yeah, I completely agree and I think one of the dangers of focusing on, say , on blueberries is that people might conclude well, you know, I'll stick with my junk food as long as I have a blue p like Daya, I'll be fine, it's like, well, I don't know what research paper we're talking about. so far, but I think you'll get more benefit from actually cutting out the blueberries and eating an overall healthier diet seven days a week than if you think it's going to mitigate other bad food choices, for example, yeah, yeah, that's it. exactly. right, that's exactly right, you mentioned aerobic exercise and its positive effects on the brain and memory.

Why do we know some of the mechanisms? Is it just blood flow and oxygenation or is it more complex than that? It's uh um, it's many things, it's more. more complex than that, although blood flow and oxygenation are important, this speaks to the principle that everything is connected, which is why some of these lifestyle changes you make can be so powerful, so let's talk about the blood flow, for example, so your brain depends on being able to process energy as quickly as possible and that requires good blood flow and aerobic exercise. May improve blood flow. It can also improve glucose metabolism.

I mean, you probably know more about this stuff than I do, but there is research in animal models that suggests that exercise can increase neurogenesis, which is the creation of new cells. in the hippocampus that can also be a factor, but then there are the indirect factors, which we know that aerobic exercise with stress can dramatically reduce the negative aspect of stress, it can reduce inflammation, it can affect sleep and improve sleep, it can improve the regulation of emotions. I mean, the benefits are everywhere, but I think it also depends on people having the right attitude about it.

If you're exercising and you're stressed about doing the exercise, that's probably counterproductive and I think you want to benefit from it. the holistic impact rather than focusing again in a very narrow way on if I do, since we talked about this, if I do 45 minutes a day and I hate every minute of it, that's probably not going to be so good for you, let's just talk about stress, it's well, you mentioned the inverted U curve earlier. I think it is a very relevant topic. Many people are concerned about their memory, worried that it is getting worse at a younger age.

Do you think that throughout society we are struggling with our memories at younger ages? Now because of the way we live, I as a scientist can't say it, I just don't know and I know it's a disappointing answer. I appreciate the honesty, yes, yes, it's like me, but I think we can look into that question. However, and we say, can we do better in terms of memory as we age? We know for a fact that if you track people, even people who are older, like 60 or something, you track that person for 10 years. The finding is that in a large study, if you look at the average, the average will show a decline in memory over that 10-year period, but now you start to separate it and look at individuals, some people are declining dramatically in those 10 years. and some people are fine and keep functioning well into old age and we, you and I, know people like this, and I felt very compelled to watch that Netflix special in the blue zones.

I think you probably know that. about this about places where people have a lifestyle that allows them to live hundreds of times or I mean over 100 years and um so there's a lot of research right now on these superfoods and flipping the script on thinking about aging. in this negative light. thinking about how we can preserve our functions and thrive into old age, maybe that doesn't address this topic about our 30s and the way we live, but we can also get back to that, that's fascinating, it makes me think about the social vision broader view of aging, which is largely negative in a country like the United Kingdom or a country like the United States, almost an expectation that you're going to decline as you get older, of course, your memory will be poorer, of course. , your cognition is going to get worse. be less than it was and I don't agree with that, so I guess I would love your comments on that, but also what aspects of our memory could improve as we get older, we know semantic memory or knowledge about the world.

It can be preserved or improved as we age, plus it turns out that people tend to have a more optimistic view of the world, which leads them to have a greater tendency to recall positive memories, which can actually be a very good thing. so these kinds of aspects of memory are preserved, it's actually episodic memory that changes, but I would like your listeners to pause for a moment on this question and instead of thinking about how we can remember as much as possible , think about what it means to have a better memory first of all and this is something that I really enjoyed writing about in the book, I mean, let's pause and think about what humans are like, what human lifespan is like, we have this long period of time when the brain is developing and episodic memory, at least as the people in the lab will tell you, is actually not that good until you reach adulthood, maybe in your 20s or 30s, and then works at its peak, so to speak, that's why we have a hard time remembering episodes from childhood, yes, in or one of the reasons, one of the reasons, yes, the context is another because we don't remember what it was like to be a child, but that's definitely part of it, sure, um, but then as we pass 30 on average memory starts to decline, so I looked at this and I was like, God, this is such a horrible thing, why were we designed to have this narrow window of time and we are cognitively optimal?

But if you really look at it, human lifespan is very strange. They have this long period of development, many animals are not born many animals and they are maybe a couple of months old and then they are at the adult level of the brain, then they are no longer able to reproduce and they die. Humans are a really strange species in the sense that we have so much time that we have the ability to live well beyond reproduction and there just aren't many species that have menopause, so one of the things you have to think about is why, from an evolutionary perspective, do we have this. long period of time in which we are alive but cannot reproduce and yet we are losing our cognitive function and an idea that I really lashed out at and I love it because especially you, you and I come from Indian cultures where Attitudes about aging are very different and if we focus only on the end of the aging spectrum, one of the things we see is that in many traditional cultures older people do not try to live like younger people, there is a change in the function of aging. the elders in relation to the young the young go out, hunt, gather, look for food, blah, blah, blah, but the older people are passing on the wisdom they have accumulated, they are teaching the children, they are passing on the traditions. language, cultural tradition and it's not about me, it's not about forming new memories for me, it's about sharing what I've learned with younger people, yes, and what I find so valuable about that perspective.

It just fits with the way the brain changes as we age and it's not about being at an optimal level, it's actually about this cultural context and what we are, what we should be doing in the first place, and other species that lives far beyond reproduction are the orcas. I love it. I just went down a deep rabbit hole about this. because orcas experience menopause and guess who runs a hatchery of postmenopausal female orcas? I was amazed when I read that and they are the ones who teach this orca farm that you are going to hunt sharks because you can grab the liver and it is very tasty or they teach the language and cultural influences to orchestral PODS.

I love, I'm fascinated by orcas and I think this is a very important takeaway for people: we need to change the way we think about aging and Cognition, not to a perspective of more, more, more, more or how can I be the person I was at 20. Think about how I can be the person I want to be when I'm older and embrace these stages of life, because in Hinduism, for example. and other religious traditions, there are stages in life and we do not see it as a bad thing. I love it, I just love what you just said and I think it's so appropriate that they're not trying to be who they were when they were 20 years old.

When you are 80 years old it is not about Can I continue living the same way as when I was 20? Can I keep running so fast? No, of course, you probably can't. Alright. It doesn't mean you're rejecting. You are changing. Changing exactly. and that's why we have plastic brains even in old age, yes, no, I love it, let's get back to stress, cover food, uh, movement, touch a little on sleep and how important sleep is for memory, you write in the book about naps. I think and how the nap can help us improve memories. I just want to take a break from the stress because I think a lot of people feel like their lives are very, very stressful.

I've also seen those inverted U charts where a little stress is good for our memory. um and then too much and you start getting these diminishing returns until it's downright toxic you know it's worse than actually in the first place do you know what's happening? You know, the example I often use is you know again if you're giving a speaking audience and you're feeling a little nervous and a little stressed, it's not a bad thing, your brain will work better, you'll get different bits of information and you'll be able to articulate these.ideas thanks to that little bit of stress, but if it's too much, you freeze, you can't think of anything, you don't know what to say and, of course, chronic stress over time we know kills the nerve cells in the hippocampus, for example, one of the key memory centers of the brain, so how do you view stress and its impacts on memory?

Well, I'm not an expert on stress and memory, but we've definitely studied this topic and your summary was spot on in terms of chronic stress being especially the most problematic for you. the brain is bad for the hippocampus it is also bad for the prefrontal cortex and when we are under stress the other part is even in the moment of stress the prefrontal cortex is downregulated what does that mean for people? Basically, it's harder to try to control memory, so in other words, retrieving memories under stress can often be quite poor because essentially our brains are in a mode of reacting to the environment, it's not necessarily about planning and selecting. , is responding at the moment, is that so, Let's say a parent is trying to get their kids out the front door of school, they know they're late and they can't find their car keys.

He had never been in that situation before, but I can imagine if a friend asked for that. for friends, so at that moment, if we apply what you just said because there is stress, it will be even more difficult to remember where your khaki pants are, it's like that, absolutely yes, absolutely, and try harder and harder and get more and more nervous It's in many ways the worst thing you can do, yes, absolutely, on the other hand, breathing deeply and just grounding yourself for a moment, taking that pause can be a much better thing to do, and one of the things that I think people really need to do.

What I think with chronic stress is that our brains didn't necessarily evolve for the lifestyles we live now. I'm very moved by the books of Robert Spolski, for example, who studied the effects of stress and baboons and one of the things you see. The thing is, social status has such a big effect on stress and I think especially if you're in a precarious state that can drive a lot of these stress systems. I mean, in my clinical work you learn all about this. that stress and anxiety, which is basically another form of label for stress, the two key predictors are, uh, unpredictability and uncontrollability, yeah, so if you're being chased, if you're a mouse and a cat is chasing you, there's no, you know. exactly what to do, run like hell, you're not going to think about it while doing it, but if you're a mouse and you're running and you don't know where the cat is and somewhere except you I don't know where it is, so it's a unpredictable threat and once it comes, if you can't do anything about it, that's stress, so I think a lot of people are in environments that have this kind of chaos.

For them, children, for example, in very abusive homes, suffer from this type of thing where it is as if the parents are unpredictable and you never know what can happen at any moment, they have very little control of their environment, uh, and that's horrible, but so are grown people. in abusive relationships they can also have this um and I think to some extent people don't know this and this is where we get into the realm of speculation, but I don't think it's hard to imagine that people who are particularly sensitive can be in an environment of unstable work where they never know what can happen at any moment and feel that feeling of unpredictability and uncontrollability.

Now ultimately our perceptions of our experience are based on our beliefs and how we frame experiences and other things. To some extent, two people can have exactly the same experience and for one it is stress and for another it is not. I mean, I actually saw a very recent article about this from someone who studied rats in the neuroscience of stress and what he said is, you know. What is true is that stress hormones can have these negative effects on memory, etc., at chronic levels, but when the cortisol levels in an animal's mating increase, there are all kinds of things that we would consider positive for the People, my friend Andy. who did a study on stress and memory, he studied skydivers, so they're people who get on a plane and they're about to jump out of the plane on their own and yet you see this dramatic increase in levels. of cortisol right in front of you.

Salt, so some of the body's stress responds. The brain's stress responses won't necessarily have the same effects if your way of thinking is different. Of course, or whatever, those two things will generate many of the same neuroadrenergic responses, but psychologically they are very different and will have different effects on brain function and, in the long term, yes, that is. In fact, I think one of the most empowering things, of course, being chased by a knife is a real threat, I understand that and you know it requires you to take certain steps to make sure you're safe, but most things. that we experience in life, we can change whether they are really stressful or not, according to our perception, by training ourselves to see it from a different point of view.

The things we were talking about differently, right, you know, updating that experience and putting a different spin on it, I think. these are really empowering things that you mentioned or we mentioned hidden memories or this kind of word that you used, you didn't use hidden, latent or inactive memory, yeah, I remember the story that Dr. Gabel M shared, I think, last week. about an individual of hers being an indigenous community, I think in Canada, and she said that until she was five years old she could speak Hider fluently and that it is a moment in her life.

I think later in childhood they put her in mainstream schools and If I remember correctly he was saying that if she ever spoke a haer word she would be beaten so she had to learn English basically and when she was in her 20s and 30s she said like she couldn't remember a word of hia and even in situations where people talk it's like she knows and is gone MH from what you know about memory can some like that really be gone or because of the strong trauma that you have somewhere in your brain has it been decided that we should suppress it because it is dangerous?

It's dangerous to say a Hider word, so maybe in the right situation, with the right key, you can unlock it. I mean, how would you see? I would say that it is unlikely that those memories are repressed per se in the sense that the brain is just subconsciously trying to hide it, but what I would say is that it is very possible that you learn to suppress memories consciously and I am sure that someone in that situation you would learn to suppress them, so my friend Mike Anderson, who's at uh Cambridge has actually studied this and shown that, in fact, people can lose access to memories simply by repressing them over and over again, but that It does not necessarily mean that they have disappeared.

One thing I talk about in my book. which is a happier version of this is flying back to India to visit my relatives there and talk about the experience of getting off the plane and have you been to India? Funnily enough, that part of the book resonated with me so much because I went last time. year just over 12 months ago for the first time in quite a few years and it was like I had never been away, yeah it just reminded me of my childhood, we used to go every other summer, basically during the entire summer holidays, yeah and I was like yes, it just felt very, very familiar, yes, yes, there are certain sights, sounds and smells that only happen there.

The colors are brighter, the smells are more intense, sometimes terrible, sometimes brilliant, you know, and just intoxicating, um, the sound of birds. It sounds like a broken speaker producing prayers in a mosque or something. I am each of the guys who sell the newspaper and it's like that context brings up memories that were dormant before, so it's certainly possible for someone to return to a community they've been away from and access that kind of memories. We also see that for some reason people will report that they are more likely to engage in their first language as they get older and maybe it happens because you start to lose access to the especially as you get older, you lose access to some of those memories that , for example, are not as important from recent years, and the memories that stay with you and that you return to again and again are more of the formative ones. years and that could also be a factor that people can do, as you revisit those periods of your life more, it's easier to pull parts of yourself out of those periods of time, yes, Charon, look, I've really enjoyed this conversation, It's been addressed in so many different things. areas as I mentioned to you when you came to my house first thing this morning the book is just fabulous why we remember the science of memory and how it shapes us there are so many new and fresh ideas in there on a topic that I think we all care deeply about, we have We've covered a lot, of course, there's a lot we haven't covered, we've spent years studying memory, we've spent years writing this book, what are some of the key messages at the end that you want to leave with my audience?

Remember better, not more, so if you look at the brain, it's always a principle of less is more Cas, uh, less is more, which means you get the most out of the least possible, so I would encourage people to Really focus on not trying to take it all in. with them but actually taking their experiences saying what do I want to take with me what are the memories that I want to take with me if it's like sitting at a concert and deciding whether to spend it watching a movie or if it's deciding if I want to spend my time outside of work watching TV on Instead of taking a vacation with my family, you know, I mean, these are, you never know, when the opportunity is to create a great memory of something and I think the other thing that I really like The people that we should take with us is the idea of that memory is an incredible resource, it can be something we can turn to to be better people, it can be something we can turn to for more happiness or something that can help us in times when you know, we're not sure, eh, but it could also be that you don't want him in the driver's seat, you want him as a co-pilot, you don't want your memory to lead you to make bad decisions because you don't stop or take your time. evaluate influence because I think one of the things we often do is we get so busy and we move so fast that we miss those moments of pause where we can control the memory and use it to achieve our goals instead of having it. feeding our prejudices and habits and that they are bad and counterproductive behaviors yes, I love it, it has been a real pleasure talking to you, thank you for writing such a wonderful book and thank you for taking the time to come to the program, thank you very much for inviting me. and I hope we can do this again at some point, yeah me too, if you enjoyed that conversation then I think you'll really enjoy this one, it depends on what we mean by real.

I think the experiences themselves are real, they are real to the people who have done it. They have the experiences they say they have, but that does not mean that their interpretations of these experiences are true.