Dr. Charan Ranganath: How to Improve Memory & Focus Using Science Protocols

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Char rangano Dr Char rangano is a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California Davis he is one of the world's leading researchers in the topic of human memory and memory of course is an essential component to our entire lives memory isn't just important for remembering things that we learn it's also vitally important for setting the context

of our entire life meaning only by understanding where we come from who we were and who we are currently can we frame what we want to do in the next moments the next day the next years and indeed for the rest of our life this is why for instance that people who have deficits in memory either due to brain damage or due to age related cognitive decline or diseases like Al aler dementia suffer so much not just in terms of not being able to remember things for sake of daily tasks but also for sake of

placing themselves in the larger context of their life recognizing family members isn't just about being able to relate to those family members on a day-to-day basis it's also about understanding the full context of all one's memories with those people and what meaning a given interaction brings to any of life's experiences so today you're going to learn how memory Works you're going to learn about things like deja vu you're going to learn ways to offset age related cognitive decline what the research really says about that and ways to prevent things like Alzheimer's dementia we also talk

about ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Dr rangan shares his own experience with ADHD how it relates to memory and the tools that he has used in order to combat his own ADHD Dr rangano has an Exquisite ability to describe research studies in clear terms and to combine that with his own narrative and life experience in a way that really frames for you practical tools that you can apply in your daily life before you begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however

part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is David David makes a protein bar unlike any other it has 28 grams of protein only 150 calories and 0 gam of sugar that's right 28 gram of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein this is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar These Bars from David also taste incredible my favorite bar is the

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docomo today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor now one of the most important factors in both your short and long-term health and your energy levels each day is your body's ability to manage blood glucose to maintain energy and focus throughout the day you want to keep your blood glucose level steady without big spikes or crashes now I first started using levels about 3 years ago as a way

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I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life and by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our Focus managing stress and anxiety improving our mood and much more in recent years I started using the waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits but many people also have challenges keeping up with

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meditate if you'd like to try the waking up app please go to waking up.com huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial and now for my discussion with Dr charin ranganath Dr Charon ranganath welcome thank you speaking of memory we go way back we do we do I was a graduate student when you were first hired as an assistant professor which for those that aren't familiar with the academic nomenclature and trajectories assistant professors are professors that have not yet received tenure but now of

course you're a full professor and you are a world expert in memory something that I think occupies the minds of uh all of us even if we're not trying um so that's actually the segue to my first question which is as we move through our day how much of our cognition our perception is focused on things that are happening in the present as opposed to being driven by prior memories um you know studies ever been done that evaluate how often our brain you know switches to thoughts about the past of course we learn about things

that are in our present I know this is a cup because I was taught that um at some point but what I'm referring to is how much of our thinking on a day-to-day basis is literally in the past well it's interesting that I mean it's first of all it's a great question to start off with and it's interesting because I actually don't think memory is about the past I think memory is about the present and the future it's about taking selectively what you need from the past to make sense of the present and to project

to the future I know you're a vision guy right and so if you look at people's just eye movements right the first time I came into this room I'm sure I wasn't aware of it but I'm sure my eyes were going all over the place now if I came back to visit you say if you're like oh that was an awesome interview or whatever right um hopefully but maybe not but let's say I do right chances are yeah so I go and my eyes will probably go right to the Rick Rubin photo then I'll go

right to you know something else to the espresso machine and so my memory allows me to make predictions about where things are and it's almost preconscious so that it's happening without our awareness and it's like confirmatory we're grabbing the important stuff and making sure everything is where it's supposed to be and you can see this play out in phenomena also like change blindness it's a little bit of a different phenomena but basically in change blindness there's a famous example where they show a video of people playing basketball and they're passing the ball back and forth

and then this guy in a gorilla costume just walks behind them and about I think it's 40% of the people who watch this video don't see the gorilla and the reason is is that you're generating these serious expectations about what's in front of you and so you're not literally seeing what's in front of you you are creating an internal model a simulation really of what the outside world is and memory whether it's semantic memory which we'll talk about I'm sure uh your knowledge about the world like the cup thing if it's episodic memory which is

your memory of what happened let's say just a minute ago it's all coming into play and terms of your sense of where you are right if I just ask you what day is it you will use episodic memory for that tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up in a hotel room if I don't have episodic memory I will freak out because I'll be like where am I did I get kidnapped why am I here and that's really the experience of people with memory disorders I mean they have to be in really familiar environments because it's

frightening otherwise right so even I wouldn't necessarily say that we were never seeing the present of course we are right but our understanding of the present is so informed by the past that it allows us both to focus on what's important what's non-redundant with what we already know and it also allows us to detect surprises and find out the things that are unexpected and grab the most informative stuff as well yesterday I took a brief nap in the afternoon I do this practice of non-sleep deep rest oh yeah um in the afternoon I got have

you teach this to me sometime um yeah it's very restorative for mental and physical energy I find um but I fell asleep uh toward the end of it and when I woke up I was in a dark room um but I didn't know where I was for about felt like 10 15 seconds somewhat scary but I I'd forgotten that I was in my solo Studio I turn turned the room lights down um what is it when we have these lapses in memory as we emerge from sleep or sometimes um if one has been severely jetlagged

um you can experience this disorientation of of place do we know what that is well a lot of your sense of where you are comes from episodic memory now there's a school of thought that says that episodic memory which is your ability to remember past events is comes from your ability to understand where you are and we we have some interesting data from sea liines actually that's speaks to this issue sea lions sea lions yeah okay we'll get back to that we'll get back to the sea lions but um I would argue that to remember

like where you are when you first get up you have to engage in an active episodic memory retrieval that is you have to figure out well how did I get here and that takes a moment orienting yourself takes a moment and that because it's it's a little bit of a controlled memory search right it's not something that's in front of you that reminds you of where you are initially and you're also in this little bit of a fog when you wake up um I don't know enough about sleep to say but I would suspect that

people probably are in some kind of a stage oneish or just high alpha um these brain waves that are like very much associated with kind of grogginess as you're getting up neuromodulators are probably super low so you know so basically not much epinephrine not much adrenaline yeah yeah exactly and so that's going to lead you to really be slow ining that memory retrieval that you need to orient yourself so like in the clinic if you want to ask if you want to understand whether someone has a memory disorder one of the simplest things is to

ask him what day of the week is it what month is it um who's the president who's the president yeah right now that's a loaded question well depends on what time of year relative to the election you ask right um very interesting uh I'm curious also why it is that most all of us have a stable representation of who we are so my understanding is that even people with very severe memory deficits don't wake up in the morning and wonder you know who am I or who is this person in this body that somehow um

we remember that we have a self that we are separate from other selves that that kind of knowledge U might be innate we might be born with it um and that the representation of Self in memory is very stable is that true well here's what I'll say there it's a real really interesting and complex question everything's you always talk to a scientist you get it's complicated but um I'll give you a simple of a thing as I can which is so if you look at patients with amnesia so they have a memory disorder where they

can't form new memories they have a sense of who they are as you mentioned right they it's not like they don't know who they are and I mean like they know their names they know their biographies and so forth but what happens is at the time let's say if you had gone swimming and you nearly drowned you had a hypoxia incident or a cardiac arrest or um you know you had like a traumatic brain injury severe memory deficit right your sense of self doesn't update it gets kind of stuck and so there is kind of

a sense of looking and not expecting yourself to be as old as you used to be uh as you are because like you're you're stuck in your sense of who you were and I do think I talk my good friend Rick Robbins at at Davis is a personality psychologist and he studies the development of personality and it does develop you know it kind of stabilizes in these adolescent years and that's actually also interestingly related to memory but it does change people do change in really interesting ways so one thing is that people grow more optimistic

on average as they get older um and right yeah yeah that's true so Laura Carstensen your colleague at Stanford actually has done some really cool work on that topic they become more uh optimistic and yet I would argue that we become more quote unquote set in our ways because neuroplasticity the ability to re reshape our neur neural circuits diminishes with age well you know so I think that's overdone a little bit I think you're right you know you definitely see less dopamine activity for instance as people get older and um uh but what I'll say

is that people have gobs if you have a healthy aging person they gobs of neural plasticity but often what happens is yeah you get stuck in your ways and that could be related to a few things one is that you get changes in the prefrontal cortex and that leads you to be less cognitively flexible um it can be also because people just build up so much prior knowledge about the world that it just becomes kind of ingrained that this is the way it is and it's harder to be surprised I mean you kind of see

this with old scientists right they go like nothing's new everything everything's been disced CED in 1960 and nothing new has happened since then and by the way for folks listening who are considering a career in science nothing could be further from the from the truth in fact prior to recording uh you told me a saying that I've never heard before I don't know if it's cynical or optimistic but if I recall the the quote uh that Dr ranganath passed along which does not come from him it descends from somebody else not to be named is

that quote science progresses one funeral at a time very very actually uh very interesting statement could be examined from a number of directions but I agree I agree I mean there's some wonderful let's call them aged scientists with tremendous knowledge and excitement I mean one only has to listen to like the noo Prize winner Richard Axel talk about his love of w faction and perception and you can sense his delight and he's getting up there sorry Richard but it's true you're in your he's in his 70s right hopefully he'll live a very long time but

um and certainly science progressed as a consequence of him being alive and work working on the old factory system but I think what you're referring to is really important neuroplasticity doesn't necessarily shut down as we age it might even stay open to the same degree as early adulthood but if I understand what you're saying correctly you believe that it's because people tend to seek out less new knowledge as opposed to lacking the ability to create new knowledge I believe that's true but that's kind of that's an opinion I don't have data on that per se

but someone's probably looked at this but that would be my sensus is that a lot of what happens with the way people's lives play out as they get older have to do with their environment and their experience and that's not to say that I mean yes neuroplasticity does change as you get older but it doesn't account for the degree to which sometimes people can get stuck and set in their ways and you know your example of the scientists is such a beautiful example because I look at the scientists who don't get stuck in their ways

right and they constantly challenge their beliefs they surround themselves with a diverse group of people who stimulate them and they're also open to prediction error that is they're open to saying something could be violating my knowledge of the world or my my understanding of the way World works so here's just an example and this is I know I'm going to be free associating all over the place we get into that but it's like what are the coolest studies that we ever did um and I totally credit my postto matius Gruber for this he came into

my lab uh originally German came in from University College London and he told me he wanted to study curiosity and its effect on memory I'm like this is just I am being totally closed-minded I said this is just a dumb topic you know it's everybody knows if you're curious about something you'll remember it better just because you're interested right so he said no no no this is really interesting and so he did this experiment and I got on board with and I you know we really kind of collectively it was just this beautiful thing where

I was exposed to something new and I got excited about it and so the idea was we would give people these trivia questions and so it's kind of like a pub quiz right you sit in a pub quiz sometimes you get a question and it's like I don't know the answer sometimes you get it you I know it sometimes you go I don't know but God I really need to know the answer to this and you get this itch right or sometimes your listeners I mean they're probably very curious people that's why they listen to

this and maybe some them go to your show notes afterwards because they want to learn more right so we actually scan people's brains using functional MRI and so we scan them when they get questions and sometimes they had said I'm really curious to find out the answer to these question sometimes they weren't curious and then we make them wait about 8 seconds and then or 10 seconds I think it was something like that and then we show them the answer so they're kind of in suspense it's kind of like you're watching like Breaking Bad or

something back in the day people at commercials and so you're like oh no I got to find out what's going to happen to Walt right so you're in suspense you need to know the answer to this or you don't care and sometimes you just don't care you're just sitting around so we show a little face and we say Hey How likely is it you think this person knows the answer to the question now this is a totally dumb thing to do because they don't know this person they're just looking at a face they're just making

some arbitrary decision but I'll get to why we did that because that was I think the coolest part of the experiment but let's first get back to the the trivia question so we found that when we looked at brain activity when we give people the question right afterwards there is a burst of activity throughout the so-called reward circuit of the brain there's this Ser it's not really a reward circuit as we've discussed offline it's really these areas of the brain that process the neurotransmitter dope mean and unlike many other neuromodulators this go all over the

place dopamine is much more restricted in its effects and so in the midbrain near the ventral tegmental area sorry I'm geeking out on this no we've talked about that in this podcast there a particular I think the key statement that you made that people should hold on to as we progress through this is that dopamine is not dumped everywhere it's not sprinklered all over the brain it's released in a fairly restricted sites in order to drive particular processes I think that's sufficient for now yeah yeah and so when we look at functional MRI we can't

measure dopamine but what we see is activity in the dopaminergic midbrain area meaning the area of the brain around the midbrain and you see it in the nucleus accumbens or What's called the ventral stratum which is another area that's super high dopamine reward processing area the more Curious people are like on a one to six scale the more activity you see it's just like this beautiful relationship right and it's not driven by the answer now there's a reason we probably didn't get it for the answer but it's driven by the question so it's not like

they're like oh I learned something new it's like I want to get this knowledge and so that's part one of the story part two of the story is we show that face right after the question and if people are curious to find the answer to the question they get a bump in memory for the faces relative to if they're not curious now the faces have nothing to do with the trivia question but it's being in that curious state that drives this dopaminergic activity in the mid brain so there's a whole lot lot of other studies

findings from that study but basically I think if God I gotta you know how sometimes you do a lot of studies me I published like 180 studies so it's like I'm trying to remember exact I think it was like functional connectivity between the hippocampus and the red brain during the face was predicting better memory for these faces in general something like that we can put a link to the paper of course and the show Capt so let me make sure I understand that the um when people are prompted with a question that drives release of

dopamine the amount of dopamine is proportional to how curious they are to get the answer to that particular question and then the dopamine itself if elevated because they are very curious can increase the probability that they will remember the answer it creates a millu an environment for better memory but that can confuse us and make us think that dopamine improves our memory but it's that Curiosity increases dopamine which increases the capacity to store information that comes subsequent to curiosity beautiful synopsis but I'll do two cheerful amendments so one is um technically we're not measuring dopamine

so I have to be very clear about that this is bold signal meaning it's you know metabolic activity but it's following all The Usual Suspects of where you'd expect it to be um the second thing is I do think that dopamine is playing a part and I mean it definitely facilitates plasticity so I do think it helps in learning the answer for sure and there's a whole Theory called synaptic tagging which basically says that if you just release a bunch of dopamine and then you have these potentiated synapses that you can dry plasticity in those

synapses even if it's not happening at the same time but what's really cool is the face has nothing to do with the trivia question the theory that we have is when you get that bump in dopamine activity You're motivated you're energized to get the answer and you're driven towards the state of plasticity and now I'm giving you something has nothing to do with this question and boom you got it you know so when people ask me and they ask me a lot yes how best to elevate their brain dopamine one reasonable answer based on this

study is curiosity to engage curiosity do you know the quote by Dorothy Parker the cure for boredom is curiosity there is no cure for curiosity um I believe is it was Dorothy Parker if it wasn't I'm sure we'll find out quickly in the uh uh in the comments on YouTube older people show the effect just as much as younger people do kids show it just as much as older people do um it's just something that sticks around so I mean speaking to your point if you are surrounding yourself with things that will stimulate your curiosity

and if you're open to that Curiosity and we could talk about knowledge gaps and all these things that stimulate curiosity novelty is another one um Richard Morris has some beautiful data on this with rats but um emerel and I too have some data with humans surprise all of these things I have a whole chapter in my book on this uh drive that system so the dopamine system the dopamine system so basically if you expose yourself to opportunities to be proven wrong you expose yourself to new people places situations and you allow yourself to be energized

by these things and not be scared and anxious not be like oh this person's saying something that I disagree with I can't deal with this you know or oh we figured this out 30 years ago we don't need nothing's new here if you can be open to that I would argue that you're going to be engaging lots of plasticity and that's something that's preserved in old age recently we had uh one of the world's experts on romantic relationships uh on this podcast um Esther Perell to be specific and we talked about a lot of things

related to romantic relationships but she said that one of the most um sustaining factors for romantic relationships over long periods of time is a sense of curiosity both about the other person but also about oneself and how one changes in the context of the relationship and also curiosity about where the relationship could eventually go where one to continue to invest in it so this word of curiosity seems to be a resounding theme um I'm struck by although it makes total sense that curiosity would drive dopamine release in these uh Pathways that novelty would drive dopamine

release in these Pathways and that also in the Physical Realm dopamine is so important for physical movement yes I don't think this is a a coincidence right some somehow Evolution organize this neuromodulator dopamine to be involved the way I think about it is in both a physical movement mhm it's required for it in fact as well as cognitive movement what we're really talking about is is cognitive forward movement if there is such a thing is there is there a a we're both neuroscientists but you're the memory researcher is there is there sort of a a

word or a framework for thinking about cognitive movement forward meaning um as opposed to just recycling past ideas and memories the notion of taking memories and actually putting them as you said earlier into the present to anticipate the future actually forward mental movement huh that's a really interesting question well first of all I want to be careful and not to say dopamine does this because it's kind you're it's a trap right it's like well to be clear you observed heightened activity in a in a dopaminergic circuit so the idea that it would not involve dopamine

is is a bit of a stretch but you didn't directly show that it was do I want to be exact and just say that assigning a single function to a chemical is you know risky but that said I do believe there's a link one of the things that you see is in Parkinson's disease dopaminergic neurotransmitter mission is shot and depression is also a symptom of Parkinson's disease it's it's quite a severe one in fact and uh so what I think one Theory goes is that dopamine energizes us to seek Rewards or to seek information right

so a big part of movement is you move to get something it's a approach right there they talk about approach and avoidance as basic kind of things that you want to program and so a person with Parkinson's disease have has a problem with willful movement Tremors and stuff too um but I think that dopamine is involved in this kind of energizing you to move I think it's involved in energizing you to seek information I think it's involved in energizing you to seek rewards and uh so I do think there's some kind kind of a common

pathway there and speaks to this issue of the difference which you've talked about and I talk about a lot as wanting versus liking and so Kent barage at Michigan is a great work on those Rec gobs and gobs of manipulations of dopamine activity and what he finds is an animal let's say that is deprived of dopamine it will go for rewards just fine it just won't work for them it won't do the work that you need to get a reward but if you just put it in front of them they'll take it so what dopamine

it is heavily involved with these opioid systems that does Drive um uh reward responses and it's heavily involved in learning about rewards and that's why you get a big dopaminergic bump when an animal gets a reward because you're learning about the reward and what predicted the reward there's a little bit of a credit assignment process that takes place what's interesting is you get this too with actually my colleague at at uh Davis Brian wilin some beautiful work where he's looked at Trace conditioning which is when you have like a let's say if you play a

tone and you wait a long time and then the animal gets a shock right and so what you uh what you find is is that the animal learns to be afraid of the tone but it's such a long time in his thing I think it's on the order of 10 seconds or above the animal has to be somehow doing something to be able to blame that tone for getting shocked right and so what he found was that there 's this burst of dopamine activity in the locus ruus which actually known for norp andrine but there's

really cool work on dope meaning the LC now modulating hippocampus sorry to get all nerdy here but no no this trust me this audience likes nerdy I think that's why part of why they're listening Locus Fus is just a area of the uh of the brain that um tends to sprinkler large Brain areas with epinephrine which is or norepinephrine nor adrenaline for alertness so somewhat distinct from the dopamine system but you're telling us it can also releasee dopamine yes that's right and sometimes they co-release from the same neurons from what I understand and so what

seems to be happening is and he's studying this now but what seems to be happening is it's not that the animal's going oh I just heard a tone I heard a tone and then they get shocked it may be more like they get a shock and then they get an immediate what just happened and then they get a memory retrieval of the tone and that allows them to put the two together to learn that this tone caused the shock right and dopamine seems to be playing a part in that learning process too so it's not

just about reward it's really kind of you know the next time you hear that tone you might if it were a real threat you could actually escape from it right and there's this whole active avoidance literature that you can look at with these approach circuits that are actually quite useful for avoiding threats and avoiding punishment so it's really to me I see this role for energizing and that's of rewards I mean you know I like rewards as much as the next guy right I mean look at how much coffee I drank when I got here

um so it's not that but it's just that it's mobilizing you I think I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 by now many of you have heard me say that if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 the reason for that is ag1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available what that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals but also probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a

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much more if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim their special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer one thing that we talked about just briefly earlier was this non-sleep deep rest protocol um that is in uh um yoga tradition is called Yoga Nidra or yoga sleep because you lie down it's self-directed relaxation long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate etc etc I called it not nsdr not

to appropriate it but because the language of Yoga Nidra is a little bit of a separator for people it sounds a little bit esoteric right and non-sleep deep rest tells you what it is right um there's a study at the University of Copenhagen I can provide a link to it in the show note captions and I'd love your thoughts on it that show that people who do this practice this is a pet um Imaging study so positron and tomography for those that don't know and they see significant increases in strial dopamine in the condition of

people that do this self-directed relaxation as opposed to a more traditional meditation and this is why I say that nsdr is useful for restoring mental and physical Vigor which translates to this idea that dopamine prepares us for or as a reservoir for potential movement typically toward rewards and I love that we're talking about some of the other facets of dopamine because all too often people think about it as pleasure or motivation and certainly it's involved in motivation um and uh I'm very happy um to learn that uh it's also involved in learning I think that's

that's a that's a that's a novel perspective on dopamine and we hear so much about dopamine do you think that when dopamine is released as a consequence of curiosity in a way that primes the memory system that um we become uh entrenched in particular particular behaviors or um routes of uh pursuing curiosity um to the exclusion of others what I'm thinking about here is a kid um we've seen these data um kids with ADHD um actually have terrific ability to focus if it's something that they're really excited about really curious about so you give a

kid with ADH who loves video games a video game and they're like a laser so it's not that they lack the capacity to focus it's that they have a harder time dropping into Focus but it seems that because of the learning ass um Dimension to dopamine that these circuits could potentially quote unquote learn that it's video games that provides that feeling of focus to the exclusion of other things meaning how does one keep a diversification of of um inputs to the dopamine system so that we're continually driving dopamine through lots of different things as opposed

to just social media or just video games or just pick your favorite yeah yeah thing um because a becoming a functional human being involves the requirement to focus on many things not just the things we were curious about yeah yeah yeah um I mean to me I talk about this a little bit in the book but um to me and and if you look at the literature too you can see this a big part of being curious is the appraisal process so to speak and what I mean by that is saying something happens right let's

say something in your environment happens if you're going to you have a decision to make is this interesting is this important is this scary and I think the thing is is that you need to be open to that possibility that it's interesting so like so let me just give you like an example that I um that I often give let's say you're walking in a neighborhood you're traveling like you do for many of your uh events and you walk into a new neighborhood you haven't been to it's nighttime kind of poorly lit and you hear

a loud noise right you could be like well that's a gunshot I better hide or I better run or you could be like oh maybe there's a club nearby and there is like a cool band playing I should go check this out that appraisal is really critical for how you respond and uh so it's not just a matter of curiosity happens it's a process of cultivation and it's a process of appraisal and so I mean this is I think you know I'm not a wellness Guru or anything but it's like I think this is one

of the cool things about mindfulness training is it forces you to take the mundane and be curious about it and when you start paying attention to your breathing uh my friend Mishi Jaws really kind of turned me on to this uh she wrote a book on on mindfulness and meditation and one of the things that happens is you're breathing you realize wait a minute this one isn't the same as the last one right or you can do these medit I'm sure you've done this right this uh part of like this sound is different I'll sit

in the backyard doing thanks to you I do this morning 10-minute thing and so I'll be out in the backyard and I'll be like hearing some sound and I'll be like oh that sound there's a bird there I didn't even notice that you know and then there's some other sound I'm hearing the freeway that's annoying but I heard it and so these it's really a matter of paying attention in some ways and being open to it and I think this speaks back to this thing about as you get older sometimes people find it scary to

be in a new place people find it scary to meet a person who's different from them or so forth I mean I love listening to music that's a little bit out of my comfort zone some people hate it you know so I I think some of it is sort of cultivating being comfortable with discomfort think it's such an important theme um I feel like nowadays in part because of the algorithms on social media we're we are fed things that um feed our U progressively greater and greater scrolling and um dwell time as it's called you

know to they algorithms are measuring clearly how long we dwell on a given image and what's in that image and Etc um but it would be nice to um cultivate uh an algorithm for curiosity surely it can be done I mean you got all these smart computer scientists and AI folks um uh and we come into this world naturally curious um all primates including humans um will visually fixate on anything that's novel right and study it mhm I'm try and make predictions and gain understanding um maybe now would be a good time for us to

discuss a little bit about the the circuitry involved in memory so that we have that as a template to to digest some other themes in memory um most people are probably familiar with the so-called hippocampus um which is uh mean seahorse it looks a little bit like a seahorse although the anatomist had a little bit of an imagination there in my opinion but um hippocampus um let's add to it prefrontal cortex which you've already mentioned and um and then these neuromodulatory systems so if we were going to assign a one sentence definition functional definition to

each of those areas um what would you say the hippocampus does all a whole lot of other neocortical areas let's add those in but I think if we can start with three I think then folks can digest the hippocampus is controversial I mean it's the most studied area of the brain arguably except for maybe V1 um visual cortex yeah and uh but I believe and my colleagues do I wrote a big paper with Howard I delate Howard ion bomb and andinus on this who um you know from Davis and uh we believe that it's about

linking various experiences to a context and what I mean by that is you've got information about smell high level Vision high level semantic knowledge information right and the hippocampus is wiring is really set up to not understand what's going on so the late David maru's Pioneer in computational Neuroscience proposed that what the hippocampus is about is what he called Simple memory it's basically saying I know Andy huberman sorry is okay us to call me Andy that's fine yeah long story it's a Davis thing you would understand so um uh so I know Andy huberman right

but to have a memory of this moment that's separate from let's say I saw you at some Neuroscience Retreat when we were in uh when you were in grad school I have to have some part of the brain that doesn't know who you are to some extent right because I got to keep them separate and so there are the hippocampus what it'll do is it'll form a memory that's not an Andy huberman memory it's an Andy in this place at this time in this context and that's what allows it to support what's called episodic memory

which is your ability to say I went to Washington DC once and I remember going to the Smithsonian as opposed to your knowledge about what generally happens in Washington DC oh the president's there oh that's where a lot of politics happen oh the Smithsonian is a place in DC it's a memory of your being there at a particular place and time now there's other parts of the brain that allow you to associate that information in a meaningful way and to be able to to actually expand on that context and create these narratives and these stories

about it and where the prefrontal cortex comes in and it's it's a huge area it's about onethird of the primate brain so it's just massive uh there are a lot of people who go well there's no real there's a bunch of different areas and all do different things and I subscribe to the view that that is very true and at the same time there's a global function of the prefrontal cortex which is what's called cognitive control it's this ability to say I'm going to regulate my movements and I'm going to regulate my perceptions and my

thoughts based on what's important to me in terms of this higher order goal right so um when I tested for instance patients with prefrontal lesions I'm sure Mark desposito talked to you about this it's like the Hallmark of them you know they used to say well the prefrontal cortex it's important for working memory and you could record from neurons in the prefrontal cortex or look at E from orai signal um and if a person or a animal is holding something in their mind like a phone number neurons or bold signal and MRI will be highly

elevated their activity will be elevated um throughout this period of time where they're holding in mind but it turns out if you just ask somebody with a major prefrontal asan here's a bunch of numbers five 2 7 8 you know I ask you to tell them back to me in right order they can do it just fine but now I start to distract them I move my hands around there's a plane going on you know flying outside the window I had that literally happen once now they start to bomb it because their attention is not

controlled by their goal it's controlled by the environment around them and so this is where things get really interesting so I once tested a patient and I'd heard about this but until you see it it like doesn't register really blew my mind so there's a a test called the Wisconsin card sorting test and we don't have to get into all the details of it but basically it's this test where people learn some rule about where to put a card on a table right and they don't get told the rule they just learn it and patients

learn this with prefrontal damage learn it just fine right is it that they get a a error signal or a correct signal if they're doing it in the right direction over time they just kind of the brain figures it out yeah yeah so maybe I'll give a little bit more background but I don't want to go in the weed no that's okay I I if I'm correct if I'm wrong I forget the Wisconsin card task details but you know like they they're told to just start swinging the cards and that the the um the AL

the correct algorithm will reveal itself by a series of error and um correct signals and so maybe I'm taking all the red cards and putting in one pile black cards and putting in another getting error signals so that maybe I go odds evens maybe I divide by suit if it depending on what kind of cards they are maybe I organized by even odd alteration and sooner or later the brain figures it out yeah exactly exactly and you don't need a prefrontal cortex to do that which is surprising but you don't you can do it and

so there's context dependent action and learning without the prefrontal cortex yes but let's let's unpack this context thing right so now you've been let's say putting all the diamonds in one pile you've been putting all the Spades in another pile right so now I Chang the rule but I don't tell you and you put the D Diamonds the Queen of Diamonds In The Diamond pile let's say and now I say nope that's wrong so now you have to wait a minute that was right all this time what's going on this is like life this is

like life right the thing that used to be used to work for you no longer works so you keep doing this and a person with an intact brain will eventually figure out okay that's not working I'll try another strategy and then they'll learn the new rule right it's not easy it's a pain but people will do it this in particular kept on using the old Rule and so you have to give a series of hints going like H what's your strategy here and they're like they'll tell you I'm putting it according to the color and

then you okay well does that appear to be working for you and they'll go no they'll just keep doing it they perseverate they perseverate but the interesting thing is he knows it's not working but he's can't help himself from doing it and so what the prefrontal cortex is it's not about this declarative knowledge about what you should do and I think this is very deep because I think often we get moralistic about people's actions especially for people who have head injuries or something like that and it's like you can have all of these beliefs that

you want to have but you need the prefrontal cortex to translate these high order beliefs things that are very abstract into actual concrete action otherwise what you do is not going to be dictated by that knowledge so how this relates to memory is we're constantly barraged by information I think it's it might have said something like 35 terabytes I don't know but it's a big number and the estimates get bigger and bigger every year so we're barged by information there's no way you can even pay attention to it all right so you really rely on

the prefrontal cortex to be able to say this is what I'm doing right now and everything else it's noise here's the signal that I need to focus on and that's super important for memory because one of the things you see in old age is older people are bad at most memory tests but it turns out in the in Labs we kind of overestimate that and the reason we overestimate it is we're giving them a test which is something hard it requires a lot of focus and it's not something they do every day but Karen Campbell

and Lynn hasher these great cognitive psychologists did this cool experiment where they had a bunch of other stuff that people were supposed to ignore in this memory task where they're studying a bunch of things they're trying to memorize a bunch of stuff but there's stuff going on they're supposed to ignore the older people were just as good as the younger people at remembering the stuff they were supposed to ignore they were just bad at the stuff that they were supposed to pay attention to that's so interesting maybe you could say that another time you said

it very clearly I got it but say it one more time because if anyone missed it this is super important older people can they were bad at remembering the stuff that they were supposed to remember but they were just as good as the older as the younger people maybe even better but definitely as good as the younger people at remembering the things that they weren't supposed to pay attention to gosh it it speaks to um almost two um parallel processing streams for memory if I'm not mistaken um or maybe so what's going on there is

it that um one form of memory involves the suppression of information and that circuit is actually uh quite active in these older people and young people whereas curiosity for um and the ability to remember and integrate new information is somehow diminished in older people earlier we um we were talking about how that's not the case that curios if curiosity is intact memory is intact and growing yeah well okay I should say the benefit of curiosity on memory is intact in older people I I got that wrong I don't know Matias could tell me if I

just email him in a break or something but but uh I don't know if curiosity itself is as high in older adults selfreported or I would guess no but this is why I asked about movement earlier it's also curiosity is also linked to your ability to access novel scenarios of course online you can just thumb scroll or click and access all sorts of novelty um is there any there must be data as to whether or not people in their 70s 80s and 90s are um scrolling social media uh to the same extent that um younger

people are I don't know but I can say two things to this one is is that definitely there's a lot of work on media multitasking and the short answer is bad for memory period okay so scroll scrolling is bad for memory well media multitasking is bad for memory scrolling we the tech thing is a super fascinating area in general it's really how we interact with the tech that's bad but if you're an older adult your frontal function is not going to be as good you will be more distractable you will be more likely to go

off course and so that scrolling is going to be more potent because as you pointed out the algorithms are all designed to suck up our attention so psychologist herb Simon came up with this beautiful term called the attention economy right and so the idea is that the more information that you have in front of you the more impoverished you are in terms of your attention so there's no such thing as free speech because it's like you have a limited supply of attention so everything has a cost and so the more information you have in front

of you the harder it is to pay attention to what's important and that's where I think the older adults really lose some of their their functioning because basically I I talk about in the book and it's not a Perfect Analogy is neurons are functioning kind of like a democracy in the sense that you know real democracies involve these political coalitions or alliances right I mean people talk about the right and the left but that's dumb because it's like there really just alliances between people who like different things and they just form these convenient alliances with

each other right but let's just imagine neurons kind of do this in the brain right and so you have in theory to be able to pay attention to something some Coalition of neurons has to be firing a lot that is corresponding to the thing that you're trying to pay attention to but if something is Salient bright shiny loud it's just grabbing your attention what's going to happen is is that those neurons start to shout down the neurons that are trying to keep you on what's not shiny but it's important right and so what happens is

with the prefrontal cortex you can bias that competition now that's the term that people have used in literature that allows you so what people have found for is just a really cool finding again is you can find in the visual cortex neurons that fire when you're see seeing something red and Ne on set fire when you see something blue let's say right kind of distorting the picture but you get the idea so if an animal is trying to hold in mind something I say hold on a mental picture of something that's blue what happens is

the blue neurons are firing in visual cortex even though the animal is not seeing blue right it's just they're thinking about blue you damage the prefrontal cortex nothing so you lose that selectivity so what's happening is the prefrontal cortex is biasing the competition and saying I know Blue's not shining in front of you there's no shiny blue thing in front of you right now but I need these neurons to stay active and so it's doing this modulation to help out the neurons that are keeping the information that's go relevant so what happens when that communication

goes let's say due to hypertension diabetes you get all this white matter damage that happens with old age and this is really a big thing that is very preventable with the right protocols so to speak I'll just bre white matter are the fiber tracks the wires that uh essentially that connect neurons across uh long and short distances exactly yeah and so if you damage those long range tracks the prefrontal cortex is not efficiently able to bias that competition and so now the inan gets Remembered at the expense of the important that's that's I think the

key thing and uh a lot of that's why why people talk about the prefrontal cortex as the central executive as anybody who's worked a job knows it's like the executives are useless right he trying to get an executive to do I mean except for some who are useful but then they don't really run companies very well there's some CEOs that are doing spectacular things but um yeah well okay we will go there um controversial shall we say but anyway so uh like a good executive their job isn't to micromanage their job is to say here's

the picture here's my vision for the company and I want everyone to be working towards this goal not you know sifting through the mail room not paying the bills right and so what happens is is that when you have certain kinds of things that happen with aging like damage to the white matter that happens uh through essentially tiny cerebrovascular events most likely and we've done some research on this um in our lab uh in collaboration with Bill jagus who's now Berkeley and Charlie dearly and you can measure this in MRIs with a A measure called

white matter hyperintensity you use a scan that shows up little bright spots where the white matter is probably damaged and what you find is is that these people with white matter hyperintensities actually have memory performance that's as poor as people who have hippocampal atrophy probably in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's and they're also bad at controlling information even when they don't have to remember something thing so it's like a double whammy and it's kind of like the executive is trapped in a in you know a remote place and they got no internet access and no

phone and so they can't communicate with the company as every just doing their own thing right and that's that's a little bit about what what can happen with aging it doesn't have to but that can happen and you see this to a really great extent in many disorders this is why so many disorders really affect control and frontal function multiple sclerosis um diabetes um uh many kinds of things we talked about brain fog many kinds of inflammatory conditions will affect it um uh depression clinical depressions I've seen people older adults with depression who are cognitively

more impaired than people in the MCI stage of Alzheimer's really yes so depression is dangerous for memory it's terrible for memory and it seems to be a risk factor for Alzheimer's as well do you think that depression is dangerous for memory and a risk factor for Alzheimer's because it is by definition anti- curiosity I would probably not say that and I I would say also I don't know what what I mean you know once you kind of get into these things in the epidemiological world everything interacts with each other right and there's genetics and there's

environment and blah blah depression means poor sleep which means poor learning which means I think that's a big part of it you know I think that's a big part but you do okay so let's go back to your question because I do think curiosity is affected by depression I don't know the research on this but I would be shocked if it isn't and I do think that dopamine activity is disrupted in depression and your motivation to get anhedonia is the hall one of the Hallmark symptoms of depression as is rumination by the way which is

memory retrieval of preferential negative retrieval of negative events and cogitating over them I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health my hormone status my immune system regulation my metabolic function my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and

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eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with Knack and cetal cysteine both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health and while I've been doing it for years I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive I've been so impressed by function both at the level of ease of use that is getting the tests done as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are that I recently

joined their Advisory Board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast if you'd like to try function go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 250,000 people but they're offering Early Access to hubman lab listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function you probably think a fair amount about age related cognitive decline and Alzheimer's and I'm just curious um at a personal level uh what are the sorts of things that you do to try and offset cognitive decline uh you seem to be a very vivacious and

curious person um I've known you a long time and I don't know whether or not you were caffeinated every time we met but you have a lot of energy you're a very curious person um you just wrote a book um we'll talk more about and you're going on podcast you're doing a lot of things besides running a you know worldclass research laboratory so clearly a lot of curiosity um what do the data say about ways to maintain or enhance one's memory capacity with the understanding that curiosity is probably involved as we talked about earlier but

at a at a really basic level um I mean a number of things leap to mind but I'm just curious what you're um if you had to pick like three to five things that are clearly substantiated in the data as supporting the maintenance or enhancement of memory as we get older what are those I mean as a memory researcher I almost find it myself like ashamed when I talk about these things because as you know so many of the most important factors are ones that are related to just health so for instance uh you mentioned

sleep that's a big one um we can actually there's a beautiful study that speaks to this that was done 29,000 subjects in China and they followed them up for 10 years now at the beginning of so they divided people into three groups they said okay here's well what they said is there's six lifestyle factors that we're going to investigate one was I think uh um engagement in cognitive activities I think one was social engagement one was uh um physical exercise uh not smoking I think no alcohol but they identify these lifestyle factors that were basically

just kind of good lifestyle factors right so they get people who have four to six of these lifestyle factors going versus uh zero to one of these lifestyle factors we'll just take the extremes when they start they're all the same 10 years later the people with four to six lifestyle factors going for for them are performing almost twice as high on memory tests as the people with zero to one Lifest wow so these are people exercising paying attention to their sleep um social engagement what are some of the other I believe I'm guessing low inflammatory

diet yeah yeah definitely not smoking and uh and smoking and alcohol um I think were big ones the smoking one is interesting because we know smoking can cause cancer and cardiovascular risk is is real there although there are some data as I understand that nicotine itself not smoking vaping dipping or snuffing but that nicotine can be proc cognition and maybe even Pro memory um and nowadays people are using nicotine more and more I'm not a big proponent of this because of the blood pressure increase and the typical routes of administration are dangerous but um nicotine

I've been told is protective for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's is that true well um Let Me by the way I just have to say forgot healthy diet healthy diet was a big one too which I Define as people wonder what is that and there are all these online debates about vegan vegetarian carnivore blah blah blah but I think most people in the world are omnivores most and I think it's very clear that the number one thing for healthy diet is to try and get most of one's food from nonprocessed or minimally processed sources that sort of

sets you in the right direction yeah yeah so I was actually emailing uh with Dean and Aisha sherai who really talk a lot about this yeah they do great work they do great work and so they were actually sending me some stuff and I had known about some of this but like Mediterranean diet has worked really well oil fruits vegetables fish eggs limited amounts of meat although I happen I'm half Argentine so I I'm yeah you like your steaks I do yeah which I think you know is let me come back to this point because

I think is super important but leafy greens were a big one they pointed out a rush Presbyterian study that I didn't know about that put people on I think it was called the DASH diet and it included leafy greens as a big part of it and that had a dramatic increase in cogn I mean dramatically preserved cognitive performance in people who were on that diet so the healthy diet is a big part now nicotine's interesting so if you notice a lot of people with schizophrenia smoke and uh one of the things that's been found is

is that nicotine does seem to improve functioning in people cognitive functioning in people with schizophrenia now I think the big thing to remember about any kind of drug and this goes for food effects probably too but especially drugs is there's huge individual differences huge and so I mean just to give you an example I could not function without that coffee that I had this morning and then coming in here but my daughter would not be functional after those cups of coffee some people really are affected by these different things differently and then of course there's

always a dose response curve and they often follow these inverted use so Marc desposito um who was my postdoc Mentor did a lot of work with dopaminergic drugs and a lot of people had done these drug studies early on on cognition and they would find no effects or sometimes would make people worse and what he found was was that if you looked more carefully there was an inverted U effect where some people and it depended on their working memory capacity were actually benefiting from the drug and then these other people who were let's say I

can't remember as higher or lower were doing worse and there's a genetic component to that unsurprisingly dopamine Transporters play a role and so forth and so now you start to get into all of these Gene environment drug interactions that are just I would really caution people against saying nicotine is good nicotine is bad I think it really really is a much more complex issue just like marijuana right so you can look at uh smoking weed in adolescence for people who are at high genetic risk for psychosis it dramatically increases your risk for psychosis that's my

understanding too although the times I've said that on the internet I caught a lot of uh push back from some of the Cannabis researchers but then having invited one of them on this podcast um I then got subsequent input from other researchers which counter their narrative which uh we can both say because we're both research scientists um that's what you call a field you know so maybe cut out any misinformation I might have said in the Ed no no no you didn't I you didn't I think the point is just that um it's very clear

that there are certain individuals for whom high THC consumption can trigger psychotic episodes yeah and we're seeing this but not everyone yeah I mean I I mean we're we're now interestingly seeing this with psychedelics where it's like all these positive effects of psychedelics were being are being brought up but you know a lot of people remember the negative effects on people like Rocky Ericson from the 13th floor elevators or like uh Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd who became psychotic after doing large amounts of LSD what was the first example uh Rocky Ericson from the 13th

floor elevators great psychedelic band oh psychedelic okay we'll talk more about Char is a is a himself a rock and roll musician and loves rock and roll hence the reference to Rick Rubin earlier um and there's a photo of Rick here in the studio that uh our photographer Mike bayback took um so we were looking at that together so yes psychedelics have claimed the minds of certain people made them uh helped contribute to their pre-existing presumably psychosis I should also say um In fairness to the other compounds out there methamphetamines have also significantly contributed to

um the progression of psychosis in many people so it's not just psychedelics right and and then of course there are those who um have somehow managed to take psychedelics and um become more sane yeah at least remain at least as sane as they were before yeah and of course sanity is in the eye of the beholder too but uh what I'll say is is that yeah and you can see this actually there's some new concern about Aderall and stimulants and uh if you're giving it to people who might be at high risk for schizophrenia it

might also promote psychosis that makes sense given the neag ergic dopaminergic um involvement in schizophrenia and those drugs are pro noradrenergic dopaminergic in general yeah yeah exactly exactly so it's really a much more complicated interaction and I think this is where this whole realm of personalized medicine will be super helpful um but there does seem to be a broad General effect for certain dietary intera interventions berries seem to be good leafy greens seem to be good eat healthy we talked about the exercise and my understanding I've been looking at this in detail lately but I'd

love your thoughts is that while everybody we now believe men women Etc should both uh should do both cardiovascular exercise so to speak Elevate heart rate for 12 to 60 Minutes kind of thing depending on the intensity as well as resistance training to maintain neuromuscular function offset sarcopenia Etc to me the really impressive effects of exercise on learning capacity and the Brain in terms of brain health seem to come from cardiovascular exercise and that could just be because that's what's been emphasized in the studies but even when one looks at some and compares the best

human studies um it really does seem like getting blood flow up to the brain yeah get getting a a nice um release of modulators into the brain facilitates learning and then of course people have to do something with that learning right so um do you make an effort to exercise for the specific purpose of maintaining or enhancing brain function yes yeah actually so I like when I finished my book I limped to the Finish Line I had all sorts of crazy stuff happen I won't depress the readers with all the crazy stuff sure people would

be curious what what does it take to finish a book and how much you mean you took a toll on your body it took probably I mean matter I probably lost some like biological years in that but it was really like I mean it was great I mean it was really an emotional roller coaster though but then I had a bunch of you know I'm trying to do science write this book basically in my spare time which doesn't really exist as you know how it goes sure and then I had life happen you know my

mom was in the hospital my cat died on my birthday I mean it was just like yeah see I didn't want to depress people with all this stuff it's real real life I'm just sorry to hear it yeah no no no it's okay so then I finished my book and uh I was like just thoroughly thrashed and I had a sabatical because I wanted to have time to promote the book and educate people about what's in the book and uh which I'd never gotten a chance to do before it's like doing this fantastic right I

get to talk to people so um I really wanted to make some changes and actually this gets something we were talking about before we started recording which is after I wrote the book it's all you know it's going in the proofing stage uh I was talking my daughter and just you know out of the blue she said we're talking about ADHD and she's like Dad you totally have ADHD and I'm like what you know and I'm like oh gen Z you know overdiagnosis of ADHD whatever right and then I remembered when I was a kid

my school contacted my parents and said you have ADHD he has ADHD and it was interesting because it was like I actually was ahead in school by a year and I got held back because I just was so socially bad I couldn't stop talking in class and I was just like really awkward and impulsive and uh um and so but the you know it was the 70s nobody did anything you know and and I had all sorts of behavior issues and so forth and there are other factors going on too but it really got me

thinking oh my God I got to make some changes I'm living this unsustainable life where I'm jumping from crisis to crisis to crisis and say I don't have time for blah blah blah and so um my again it's going to sound depressing but it's got a happier ending so my dog had died in 2019 of cancer and that was my first dog and so I thought I'm never getting a dog again and uh in 2020 in the pandemic I got another dog because yeah and what kind of dog uh she's a both of these were

shelter dogs so they're all mixes um I'm sure there's some pitol in her because that's every shelter dog either has pitol or um or Chihuahua exactly so but she's looks very Belgian malano and she moves like a Belgian malan beautiful dogs yeah and they're so smart and super athletic I mean she can like jump vertically you know just like it's so like which all come home she'll like jump up and then push herself off me which is like a very classic thing and so that's why they can jump like she can climb up like s

feet up a tree to chase a squirrel yeah they use these for military operations in tier one military yeah yeah yeah jump out of planes with parachutes yeah yeah and she's but she's a smaller dog so our big our older dog looked like kind of she wasn't she was actually a kelpy mix I think but she looked like a um a Rottweiler and so everyone was scared of her even though she's the sweetest dog this one she's like smaller even though she looks kind of Shepherd likee everyone's like oh your dog is so sweet she's

so cute you know you're like but this one's the ninja exactly yeah yeah um I mean all shelter dogs have a little bit of a crazy switch and them don't it's like it's it's tough for them they're they're like feral people feral dogs yeah but they have big hearts yeah they're eternally grateful you give them a home yeah yeah exactly and you know one of the things that I was thinking is I missed walking the dog I missed that activity and so I make sure to do that every morning and this is goes back to

some of the activity things that we're talking about I know I'm totally drifting away from which is ironic no I see I see I see where you're going with this yeah so but this is this is is a little bit different but it's related which is um having a sense of purpose is very important for healthy brain aging there's a trends of cognitive science article can send you it's one of these things that neuroscientists don't talk about because it's not we don't understand it but it's hugely important it's part of this whole phenomenon what they

call cognitive reserve and you know having this dog that I'm taking care of especially cuz you know my kid had gone to college just growing up living independently walking this dog every day it gives I mean obviously I'm married and I love my family and I've got lots I got love my students and so forth but it gave me more and I'm exercising in a way that's kind of fun I'm listening to podcasts and I'm moving and so that's something right there it's not just the exercise but it's the whole thing right I'm not doing

something that I hate so then I'm like I hate running I hate I have this inertia because i' my ADHD brain doesn't like to do stuff unless it's shiny fun right I could go into work I could write this book cuz it's fun for me you know but so I'm like how can I do this and so I I ended up shelling out for a personal trainer I blow my advance on a personal trainer who's great and I go to see her and I she tells me what to do so I don't have to think

about it and it's fun and you're in great shape you're a few years older than I am and I haven't seen you in a while and I I always have this like slight fear when I run into a colleague again after a while cuz there was this joke that we didn't tell professors until we became professors about the the so-called tenur look you see someone come in as a postto you see them as a junior professor and then you see them after tenure and tenure is a big milestone right it corresponds to academic freedom Etc

it's a it's a wonderful Milestone it's a wonderful thing that we both have this um but you see some people who got tenure you just go oh goodness they look like they're you know aged 25 years in five years yeah we also see this with former presidents not all of them but a lot of them and um and so to run into you I well I saw you on Le freedman's podcast but then to see you I'm like Char's taking great care of himself it makes me happy it's not a judgment it's it's it makes

me happy because I I love my colleagues and I want to see them live a very long time because I don't subscribe to the idea that science progresses uh one funeral time of my favorite scientists okay let's let's not attach that saying to me it was a joke I'm saying I'm saying that there's certain scientist my fellow scientists if you're out there anywhere don't H me there are certain scientists that you'd love to see live forever and you're one of them so um so you said walking the dog which presumably gets you some sunlight um

a lot of sunlight in Davis even in the winter cloud cover is bright up there it gets your own regular sleep Rhythm so but you said this um sense of purpose right so and I'm curious about how you now frame exercise you said you don't like working out you made an investment in your health by paying a trainer so now you you train regularly and that's also an investment in your brain health MH and and um if we were to go back to this notion of sense of purpose are you talking about a larger sense

of purpose like okay I I want to contribute to understanding of how the brain works you're a brain Explorer after all and therefore the exercise and the money you put towards the trainer is linked to the ability to do that are you linking these nodes or is this are these kind of separate entities like I want to be healthier and here's a way to be healthier and at Ergo um I'll be around longer to study the brain to me and again you know I'm not a social psychologist so this a little bit off out of

my wheelhouse but to me the sense of purpose is is kind of this existential thing of like you know I got to take care of this dog and I gota you know and I when I look at this dog and she's moping around in the corner I feel bad but I feel like it's my responsibility to do something with my students yeah with my students I have uh you know I had was very very fortunate to have many people leave my lab after the pandemic which destroyed so many careers and many people left my lab

and I got faculty positions I'm like so happy for them speaks to your mentoring as well well thank you I mean got you know you do well because you have good people in lab as you know true and so uh but what was interesting was IID finished the book and my lab was relatively empty and I did feel purposeless I felt that absence of that sense of this bigger thing and so part of the work is you know and this was like a thing that I felt doing the book promotion is I feel a sense

of purpose in explaining science to people I got an email this morning as I was getting on the plane from somebody who was asking me a question about memory and I was just like this is so cool you know after you spend years lecturing students and some of them are sleeping in class and you wonder is anybody really impacted by this and it's just been a beautiful thing so that gives me a sense of purpose I've come up with I've really rededicated myself to research and we're doing these huge computational models of learning and I'm

trying to get we're doing VR stuff and we're going to be doing all sorts of new things in the research and that gives me a sense of purpose but a lot of it to me about the connection thing that you bring up it's super important because often I find myself again because of the ADHD thing I for all of these things that I like there's things that you have to do that suck and for me that suckiness is utterly painful I mean and I know there's a lot of people like I know ADHD is over

diagnosed right now for reasons that are interesting um and I know a lot of people it's very kind of fashionable to say stuff something like that maybe I don't know people are can be judgy about the stuff but for me it really is painful I mean I I've actually found that it's hard for me to work with certain people if they talk slowly I it's that tough so I've really had to think about uh so I actually hooked up with an ADHD coach who has been phenomenal for me and I know coaches are another controversial

thing I don't know like I'm not in my world you want learn something you learn something from somebody who's sked in how to improve somebody at something yeah yeah well you know I mean I I didn't know what to expect because it's like a an unregulated world so to speak or minimally regulated but the person I found was just amazing and the first thing she had me do was she put down had me write down a sheet of all my values and order them and rank them and stuff I'm thinking this is such a waste

of sorry Lori but I was thinking initially this is such a waste of time why am I doing this I don't really value any I don't know I just do things I don't necessarily value them or whatever but then I started writing them down and and then later I was talking to her about like this you know some of my troubles with motivation and getting things done that I don't want to do and I'm kind of Infamous for having trouble getting things done that I don't want to do in terms of like administrative tasks and

so forth you're a real scientist well that's true I guess ADHD any scientist that likes administrative stuff I think uh I'm willing to call as uh you know what are they doing in science cuz that's like you're supposed to be focusing on experiments so Bravo so so values then motivation Yeah so basically it's like so I'm then I put the two together and I said I'm not giving myself credit for why I'm doing this so This goes back to the whole I mean in a way it goes back to the prefrontal cortex conversation is what's

my goal if I'm going to see someone and have a meeting and I don't feel like going to the meeting cuz I'm tired and I'm bored or I want to just look at this YouTube video or I want to go on social media whatever dumb thing that I would waste my time on right I say to myself why am I doing this and I remind myself of that motivation and it kicks everything in gear because now I have that goal in place because the goal just doesn't pop up for me automatically and so relating what

I do to values is a game Cher for me but it's a conscious thing that I have to work on to remind myself of those values and connect them and that's part of what I think people lose when they retire for instance I see this in people people I'm close to who have retired they feel like work is their only purpose and so afterwards they feel purposeless and then they're just doing things like you know Doom scrolling or you know being radicalized on on the Internet or like you know going into like but it's just

like whatever captures their attention and I think so a big part of that sense of purpose for me has really been to get in touch with what do I really want and I mean this goes back to another thing with memory and I know this a total ADHD free association thing but it's like um I can people often ask me okay fine giv me all the stuff for brain aging and we didn't even get into hearing aids and uh Vision testing and oral hygiene and so forth we'll talk about those three things but um what

I tell people is I can tell you lots of strategies for remembering names for remembering where you've been for trying to um remember like to do something in the future some of the hardest memory challenges we have but unless you do them do those strategies I can't help you and the problem is is that and this speaks to I I really liked what you said we do have to talk about some exceptions like retrieval induced forgetting and some interesting things like the pre-testing effect but your thing on study skills I listened to that podcast and

I was like the beautiful thing that you did with that one of them was that you said assume that you will forget because if you go back to the earliest research on memory by eing house he tested himself and he actually he created these weird words called trigrams that weren't really words he tried to memorize them and what he found was within 20 minutes he had forgotten about half of what he memorized within and I don't mean just forgotten like he couldn't bring it to mind it took him as long to rememorize them as it

was if he had never done it right so sometimes we have partial memory where we can't recall it but we get some savings and it's easier for us to learn he didn't even have that for a lot of the stuff so then he waited 24 hours and he had lost 2third of what he had memorized right so translate this into the real world there are some things that are caveats that we do better in the real world I would say at the big things the gist of what we encounter but the details we lose most

of them most of the details of your life will be gone and this is true for even I would argue this is even true for people with highly Superior autobiographical memory we don't know for sure but I can tell you more about that um this is true for everyone who's been studied as far as I know and so if that's the case the question is not like why am I so forgetful it's why do we remember in the first place why that titled it for the book and the question is what do you want to

remember what are the memories that you want to take with you whether it's memorizing things for a class like in study skills or whether it's your kid's birthday party which I talk about in chapter one um these are it's about intention is what I say it's the difference between attention which can be grabbed by anything versus intention which is saying this is what I want to take with me right let's let's um uh hover on that attention versus intention we hear these words all the time um attention is the directing of one's perception to particular

Sensations or things in one environment is the way Loosely defined um accurate but not exhaustive um intention is understanding why or having a a cognitive sense maybe a cognitive emotional sense of why I am directing my perception to particular things is that right yes it is directing your attention based on some reason that's an internal goal right and that's where the prefrontal cortex really comes inh so it's very easy in some ways to pay attention to me if I'm like gesticulating and I'm talking very loudly because it's grabbing your attention constantly I mean it's face

it I know lots of people in my life who hate this because I'm so loud and justicul you're not loud who are these people giving you this feedback send me their names and numbers I I I have words for them and and listen I would say given you run a world class lab labatory you're successful in your family life you're you're successfully raising your second dog you've written a a spectacular book you're going on um podcast you're educating the public I would say you're doing great so keep going um and whoever these people are we'll

have words with that um you know um I need I need like huberman's like words of encouragement on my phone that I could just open up plus I don't want to take us off track but you know I I spend a lot of time each morning I first do a non-sleep deep rest or some sort of meditation Rick Ruben taught me this to get into intention and there are other people who have come into my life recently um this notion of intention the reason I said let's hover on it is so important yeah because we

are in a world where things will grab our attention especially on social media yeah it's it's basically a war for attention I don't think it's an attention economy anymore or Simon's brilliant you know I'm not trying to take anything away from that but it's it's a war for attention and one of the ways that you rob your competitors is by taking their attention I used to Joo and I was in a very competitive area as a postto I was competing against a big Lab at Harvard and this and that we trying to find genetic markers

for retinal neurons Etc and I said if I could just get them excited about the wire remember that show The Wire because it'll suck like 15 hours of those post box time so I thought you know be really diabolical I didn't do it but you know telling people like you have to see the wire they you know this and that you know because you get someone on a really good Netflix program and and if they're a competitor you just got a competitive Advantage this being done all day attention is our ability to for our perception

to be um drawn to whatever is most uh moving most loudest most Salient um intention is different yeah and this is by the way this isn't a technical term this is just I like it because it Rhymes and a friend of mine came up with it so um but yes intention is your ability to say this is what's important to me right now and that's why I need to pay attention to it hence the values list hence the values list because if if I don't keep that in mind my so we tend to think of

control as being just like willpower or like you want to do the right thing or whatever it's not it's really a big there's so many parts of it really but a big part of it is motivation and motivation is not a trivial thing it's not simply wanting to do the right thing but being able to keep that value in mind and retrieve that value because everything has a value associated with right and sometimes things that are you you know I'm thirsty and there's water in front of me that has a big value and that should

grab my attention so it's not that having your attention shift you want it to be flexible but you want to keep these higher order goals in mind and so it's this balance between stability and flexibility now the key is or let's get to your specific example of like technology right so ever since I got a phone uh that is a smartphone my first iPhone when was mine was 2010 mine was well you did better than me I think maybe it was around the same it was iPhone 3 I think was my first okay we'll have

to look up I think I had the iPhone 3 which was whenever that came out yeah so until then I would check email when I was at a computer when I'm not I don't think about it now it's always there and I get you know and you get alerts on your phone right so let's let's play this out now we're having this great conversation let's say we leave we talk about skateboarding and punk rock and like yes why didn't we talk about this on the podcast right we're having a great conversation right but now let's

say I didn't put my phone on Focus mode and I start getting all these little beeps on my phone I know people I know played with in a band with somebody who had ADHD and he would const anytime we were in a conversation he would just check his text messages you text in front of me right so what happens is every time you do that your you're essentially shifting your task your mindset changes your your intention is somewhat Changed by this new task right so now I've shifted and there's a cost associated with that in

fact actually people who study this there's like four or five different costs that go on it makes you slower to do the new thing right now I go back to the conversation well now I have another cost associated with that and so I'm not there where you are in this moment I'm several seconds behind you and I'm still catching up while you're talking and that requires even more control to get caught up and get back up to speed so I'm straining my matal resources I'm straining my cognitive control by shifting back and forth but here's

an even worse part of it so a memory we haven't even talked about this but it's like a lot of our forgetting happens because we have these blurry memories they're not distinctive they don't you don't get a population of neurons that shouts out loud hey that's this conversation I had with Andy right it's like it's just kind of this blurry sense of I talk to someone on a podcast and not saying that this will happen now because it won't but um so I have this blurry memory well why does that happen well part of it

is you have to catch the distinctive moments of these events and you have to associate them together into this cohesive narrative one of the things we found in our research and other people have found this is when let's say if you're watching a movie and somebody changes the topic of conversation or a character comes in something that shifts your attentional focus and shifts your understanding what's going on you see this big peak in activation in the hippocampus and what that seems to be related to is encoding a memory for what happened up to that point

and so we call that an event boundary and so once you have an event boundary it turns out you like you go on to the next event and you have trouble remembering the stuff that happened right before the event boundary it's why people end up in the kitchen and they're like what was my reason for coming here and it's because they pass through three different rooms and their sense of where they were was changing their mental context updated to the point where now they have to work to figure it out right so this is what's

happening when we are shifting between different tasks I'm texting and I'm emailing and then I'm talking to you or as you've probably seen in going to conferences people scientists scientists who know better are sitting typing emails while someone is giving I've done this because I'm intentionally impaired or I'm impaired actually ADHD is a cognitive control issue I think but nonetheless it's like I do this right so it's like I get it but it's like you are now creating this fragments of memories where it's not I have a cohesive conversation I have a little bit I

got a little bit more I got a little bit more and those fragments of memory don't play together well in memory they can compete with each other and that competition is a big part of forgetting and so that's why it's super important to just do one thing and then do another if you want to do social media fine do it then do whatever it is you are supposed to do for work right but it's the shifting that really kills you because it creates saps your cognitive control it actually uh creates these fragmented memories it also

actually increases stress levels so there's all sorts of you know things I know there's a lot of tech Bros who are just like oh no I'm multitask I'm great at you're not well I I you know I'm from the Bay Area and spend a lot of time with those uh folks uh men and women in Tech I think that the best ones like the truly exceptional ones are very good at dropping into a trench of attention they're very disciplined with their phone use and the ones that are doing a lot of task switching often aren't

don't have complete lives they really don't they're they're not taking care of their health also and they are sort of under the sense that like they're working the time when they're not as a graduate student I didn't have a smartphone um I did something recently I tweeted about this um you may have commented about it I don't know but this has helped me a lot um I took an old phone oh um and I put social media on the old phone yeah yeah and only social media so it doesn't operate as a phone I can

um airdrop things to it if so I use that for um looking at social media and for posting that phone is in a box and then my my main phone is for or um texting and other forms of communication so I still have that distraction around me but social media is now a dedicated thing that I spend a specific amount of time and I have a timer on that phone that so I allow I allocate myself a certain amount of time each day so for every moment I'm start that timer yeah once it hits zero

that's it and I'm starting to shorten that amount of time ni the impact on productivity in terms of writing in terms of researching in terms of just dropping into conversation has been enormous with that um simple switch um and I just find it easier to just segregate social media from the phone the part of the problem is the phone is it's like a walking office it's not even it's a phone it's a computer it's a I mean just too much access well and here's the thing and this is really gets back to this idea of

engineering your environment and because so much of our Lives we're out of control even though we feel like we're in control right and it's really if I have a hire or a goal sometimes you have to do exactly what you did which is hack your environment to allow to enable you to regain control right so what I mean by this is it's like I even though I might not check my phone I might have alerts off if I have a habit I'm thinking about it and every time I think about it that urge pops into

mind I'm getting a little distracted I'm losing a little bit of executive control so you don't even have to do it right you can just think about it um so and multitasking is just one thing there's other things uh uh like uh one thing is is I talk about in the book is taking pictures so you've probably been to concerts I know I have where it's like you know people are like just filming the whole things on their phone or like now you see the rise of Instagram walls where you go into places and there's

a wall that exists so people could post to Instagram nothing wrong with this but most not all the research interestingly and I can get into why uh shows that taking pictures actually impoverishes people's memory really yeah what about looking at pictures um of um I think it was Larry Squire when I was down at San Diego that said that hanging a few pictures in your office of things that are really pleasant memories can uh really enhance your work environment because you look at them go oh I remember that thing like because of all the context

it brings about but you're saying that the the act of taking pictures depletes our memory for that experience let me be more specific about this right so let's say I'm mindlessly taking pictures so I go in I'm seeing the Grand Canyon a lot of people like intuitively on average will say that they will remember it better because they took pictures but what often happens is they're not really focusing on the distinctive elements of their experience they're just grabbing as much stuff as they can right let's take the concert as another example if you are filming

the concert and you're just trying to grab what's being sung you will have a recording of the concert but what's the memory you want to have do you want to have a memory of the song that you already can stream any time or do you want the memory of how you felt the friends you were with the connection that you had with the artist because you were there I know this sounds real hippie dippy but it's real in the sense that this is what you want to remember I think at least I don't want to

lecture people if they want to remember taking pictures of things that's fine I'm sure everybody remembers taking pictures at these things but what did you take a picture of and so you can use the phone and this is where the studies show good effects is if I mindfully use the phone and I say like there's something here that that will be a good cue that will remind me later of this great conversation I focus the camera on that I take a picture mindfully I use the camera not as a way of spreading my attention and

just grabbing everything in the shop approach but rather use it to find what's distinctive and what's important and actually Focus me on it that's a really good thing so what I try to do is selectively document not overd doent I'll take a picture of people laughing or people eating I like to go to conferences now uh John lisman used to do this late John lisman and so he passed away and said I I try to do this I think more about these things and so I try to take pictures of people randomly you know they're

drinking a beer and then they spit out loud laughing or something like that and these are not things that are like landmarks they're not things that are tourist St but they are great retrieval cues and so what happens is the next part of it is seeing the picture well what do you do when you see the picture right do you scroll right or do you use it as a cue to effectively test yourself to recall what happened during that event and integrate it now what's interesting is is that act of recollecting the event in itself

will change the and it can make it more accessible but it can also make it a little bit more abstract and story like and so there is an interesting tradeoff where you have these things where you have these memories and you could even document it but if you use the the if the more you retrieve it the more accessible it will be but sometimes it'll be less immersive and more like a story that you've told a hundred times so is it so it sounds like if we H we go on a uh on a vacation

or to a show or something that take a photo as long as it's intentional of something specific that will look the key is to look at it later not just post it but to look at it later and to spend a few moments or more drawing to mind some of the emotional and um cognitive experiences around that memory that however changes the memory right anytime we create a story we're changing the memory but perhaps provided it was a good experience that's better than to not access the photo at all um but I'm struck by as

you are that the number of people who are taking photos at a concert a friend of mine who's a very successful photographer um who shoots a lot of photos of musicians thinks this is the craziest thing as if any one of those photos is going to be meaningful right um that they're outside of the experience of the concert which is exactly what you're describing maybe you just have a memory of taking a lot of photos yeah yeah that's exactly what happens people will remember something but it's not their feeling it's not like the friends they

with and what they talked about you know it's it's more like you know uh I I Ed this example in an interview so apologies people already seen this but it's like uh I just uh I got to see The Descendants and I'm guessing since you skateboarded you probably had heard The Descendants and the desc yeah yeah yeah exactly so I grew up listening to them in high school but I never got to see them because all the great Brands bands I got into broke up right before black flag and the minute man and so forth

and so when they reunited I was like I had an opportunity to see them in the club uh in uh Sacramento and so I saw them for the first time and what was I wasn't one of the kids taking photos I was actually watching but then there was a moment where Bill Stevenson the drummer who's a super intense guy and really one of the creative forces behind the band um he gets up and he starts walking towards the crowd and Milo's like sit down go back behind the drums and he's like no I want to

say something and I was like I got to take a picture of this because this is going to be like he's really connecting with us and he talked about how cool it was to just be able to have this moment where he's now at this age able to appreciate this connection that he has with the audience that he couldn't appreciate before when he was younger and I was like I'm taking a picture of this because that's what I want to remember you Won't Remember Everything But if I look at that photo technically I haven't looked

at that photo again but just taking the picture of it forced me to really think about that and that's the biggest takeaway I have you know a lot of the songs they played they did a really good job on but what I really took away from that was this connection that I had really wanted when I was a kid you know and reexperiencing that feeling of being a kid and hearing these songs when they were fresh and new for me and so that's that's I know I'm sounding like kind of a hippie or something that's

not myself not a you sound like a punk rocker it's not confus the two that's good yeah exactly I I I got a digic all over the place no no it's I I have a question that that um I'm hoping bind some of this together um related to taking photos and memories um I keep many photos I like printed photos I have these in a drawer um they mean very much to me some of them are in the studio um but I keep most of them in a drawer at home Polaroids are an interesting um

example I think of what you're describing the act of taking a Polaroid is more than just clicking or pressing with your thumb on a camera there's a waiting process there's a you actually get to see the photo emerge over time I would bet even though I haven't run the study I would bet that people keep Polaroids more than they and look at Polaroids more than they keep other photos which if you think about it is um if it's true if it's true is counter logic because you know usually people want to do another photo because

they don't like the way they looked in the previous photo with Polaroids you can't do too many of those right it's kind of one and done maybe two and done but I feel like the act of taking the the Polaroid waiting for the photo to emerge kind of stamps it in your memory of the experience itself and the act of taking the photo is more involved it's more of a process than just a click that then you see the photo later now of course with digital photography you see it but you can take 100 you

can take 200 photos like that if we were to export this theme of limiting our task switching as a way to enhance our memory setting up our environment in a way where we put our phone away perhaps or um and we we also are focused on intention why we are in something do you think that there's something positively reinforcing about um getting into a trench as I call it um because I find that conversations like this one of the reasons I do this podcast the solo episodes and the these interviews is that um they provide

something that my life prior to it did not provide which was depth I mean we're just here there's no phones here and if there are they're off right and I feel like anytime we go into these trenches could be a video game could be an interaction with a loved one of various kinds and but when we go into these tunnels of attention there's something that's so deeply satisfying about it especially to those who have attention deficit issues that it feels like something real happened and the rest is just noise mhm is there any relationship of

this of the focus system to release of dopamine I know release of dopamine can drive Focus but is the reverse also true that if you're in a state of focus do you enhance the release of dopamine correct that's the question yeah I well I don't know I I wish I could give you an answer and say I don't know um and it would be really hard to disentangle the Chicken and the Egg right because if you're measuring dopamine activity you'd have to well okay so here's what I can say is that I think that we

often think of you know we think of like let's say an emotion right or any other mental state and we think of it like it just happens but in fact there's a time scale to these things right so it's like there is a basic response that you get when somebody points a gun at you but then there's an interpretation that you have that can take that threat response and make it into something more and then you're like really jacking up your noradrenergic activity right you catastrophizing yeah but it's like I mean well in that case

it is it could be a catastrophy but if you survive the you averted the catastrophe the question is does the potential catastrophe live within you or does it die within you you only need to live within you sufficiently enough that you avoid the threat in the future right but that's the that's the the double-edged sword of norag energic systems is that they capture lots of memory and they open up thoughts about what could have gone wrong yeah but if it didn't go wrong it didn't go wrong you're alive you only need to remember to avoid

whatever puts you in that circumstance yeah but that that can still be scary right sure and and this is where I think it's like this uh we talked about this before this appraisal is very important you know um in the case of focus it's a little bit different but just to make this very concrete the prefrontal cortex has top down inputs to many of the neuromodulatory systems so on average people tend to think of the neuromodulatory systems like dopamine and neopine phrine as being very bottom up they just send signals everywhere and set the brain

into Focus or not focus or whatever uh but the prefrontal cortex has some anatomically at least some capability of regulating those systems both directly and indirectly and so that does I think speak to this idea that if you have a very strong gold Focus you can in fact Reg regulate the dopamine system I I think it's a reasonable and nor norrine to noradrenergic system so I think it's a reasonable thing and i' I bet you Amy arston has done some related work on this topic I'll check it out earlier you mentioned and I want to

make sure that we return to um this notion of taking care of one's vision and one's hearing as a way to offset memory loss very important Concepts um could you share with us what's known about that this is just starting to be a thing but the effect sizes for instance for hearing raids are really strong both in reducing ad risk I believe and in Alzheimer's dementia Alzheimer's risk and in just good cognitive aging and keeping your memory as you get older so to your headphones too loud yes this what right well actually okay so speaking

of things I did to preserve my brain health I'm playing in a band now and we're pretty damn loud and so I got I went to an audiologist and I got uh custom earplugs oh yeah yeah all the top music I'm friends with some some really amazing musicians they all wear insert earplugs oh yeah yeah but I think these custom ones will be more effective at both preserving the spectrum of all the frequencies so oh I just mean protect your hearing yeah yeah no but yeah but they're related because if you can't hear your frequencies

you might end up turning up and you get this paradoxical sure thing so too much information I know but basically that is yeah so uh there is this issue with in fact actually there's an article that the Shai sent me on in the Lancet that one of their uh um Public Health recommendations is to get into a preventative mode for preventing Alzheimer's disease and one of the things they say is screen for hearing and give people hearing aids and and make people use them if they have encourage people to use them uh vision is starting

to be a big one people who are older get cataracts get it treated you know um a lot of this preventative health care which we our system is not really equipped for it but can really save so much money it can save so much emotional pain for so many people it's really amazing another one we me I mentioned briefly is oral hygiene gum disease it turns out increases your risk for I believe it's Alzheimer's and also for cognitive brain health in general I did an episode on oral health and the effects on as you said

on brain health are amazing because streptococus mutans which is the bacteria that causes cavities um Can funnel its way into the bloodstream and potentially cross the blood brain barrier which is I think why people think it might be detrimental to brain health yeah yeah I mean I don't know the detailed mechanisms but I I think that makes sense and there's this vague notion of cognitive Reserve which is basically some people seem to be quite immune to the effects of cognitive aging and some people seem to be very protected against Alzheimer's so what is it one

of the things that seems to come up as as far as depleting cognitive Reserve or putting at higher risk seems to be um inflammation right neuroinflammation and and uh so Kim mallister as you know was doing work on on this topic of neuroimmune interactions and basically the immune system expresses itself in the brain you get microa activation that can cause these inflammatory responses and there's reasonable evidence suggests that it's interacting with toao and Amid and and this kind of cascade of stuff that happens in Alzheimer's disease right and one of the things that we we're

learning now and we don't know nearly enough but the data out there is quite scary in fact is long covid is associated with significant cognitive effects and brain is that uh the explanation for the brain fog that people report many many months so they they report a subjective brain fog and you can see this you can measure this as a significant cognitive deficit that they're experiencing right and we've seen in the past like HIV was there is actually a whole variety of dementia that was associated with HIV from the viral transmission um we can like

you can see with multiple sclerosis where you have like autoimmune uh responses in the brain affect mental function dramatically we're seeing more and more evidence of this and so this is again another one of those things it's like people go oh co I don't care about it blah blah blah I mean this is a health thing that can really affect people and it can I don't think anybody it's not a political issue to get brain fog it's just sucks right nobody wants this so I think that there's a lot we're learning about viruses and bacteria

one of the the cool things I was talking about before we started recording is um I was at a conference I met the coolest guy and I'm blanking on his name but I'll send it to you Afters um but he's uh he did this great study and he was studying the effects of nutrition on brain health and memory especially cognition and so I what's the most interesting finding that you've gotten I love to ask people this because I'm curious and it stimulates my curiosity and I usually get a good answer so he told me he

did this study where he has these rats and he gives them sugary water during the day about the equivalent he said to a can of Coke a day so they're getting this sugar when they reach adulthood you know these teenage rats they reach adulthood and they have memory problems and they do they have hippocampal atrophy so you go okay well the hippocampus is affected memory is affected sugar blah blah blah no problem so then what he does is he takes the gut bacteria from the sugar animals and put in an animal that doesn't get this

diet and he finds the same kind of pathology and the same kind of memory deficit in these animals so there's something about that process of like the gut brain interaction that also seems to be playing a part in ways that I don't understand I think they're still figuring it out but again this this really shows this tight neuroimmune link you know we're seeing this now with pollution air pollution is a big factor so even if people don't believe in global warming there nothing good about being in a place with a lot of smoke in the

air you know it's uh it definitely can and this is one of the risk factors that is noted in the Lancet report for Alzheimer's disease um one of my colleagues uh Pam L is doing research on this at UC Davis showing that you get like she actually takes real pollution from the calicott tunnel which connects Oakland and and uh Walnut Creek yeah and uh finds that rats exposed to this pollution have hi cample damage and uh um so it's there's so many of these environmental factors that can trigger the inflammatory response we talked about blood

sugar blood sugar also seems to be related to these issues so um and diabetes is like so bad in so many ways it It's associated with those white matter hyperintensities that we talk about and so that's bad we've done some research on that and but it also affects um it can cause little uh you can get if you get severe diabetes keto acidosis you can actually have hyp hipocampal damage from that directly and it also dramatically increases Alzheimer's risk an epidemic of diabetes right now this probably explains um at least to my mind why um

these lifestyle factors like improve sleep um cardiovascular and resistance training exercise but certainly cardiovascular exercise you know um uh eating a lot of leafy leafy foods Etc um we know all of those things offset inflammation to some degree or another right I mean one of the best ways to inflame your brain and body is to not get enough sleep and eat you know a lot of Highly processed foods for instance um to date are there any even semi satisfactory prescription drugs or other compounds that can slow the progression of Alzheimer's dementia once it's started there

are now some drugs that are um I think they're targeting amalo that are producing some modest effects in stalling the progression of the disease see the problem with Alzheimer's as you know is once you lose neurons you're not getting them back right and it's like yeah there's neurogenesis and you can run around but it's not it's not much it's not you don't want to if you're depending on that you're hosed you know so um like but getting back to the exercise thing it's neuroprotective and so like let's say with a drug right I mean everybody

wants a drug if I told you give you this drug you're 60 years old and it's going to have some terrible side effects you're going to get diarrhea nausea all this stuff but it'll reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by 40% a lot of people would be motivated to take it now I tell you okay well here's a lifestyle intervention that's going to involve what Sarah medin calls down States doesn't have we can actually get into that and and memory reactivation during down States but um uh involves sleep diet exercise exerise social stimulation right and these

things by the way also reinforce each other having better sleep makes it easier to EXC having exercise makes easier better to sleep all of these improve mood right so these will improve your mental function your mood as well as your mental function relatively soon and reduce your risk by at least 40% if not more wow um if you go to I can send you this Lancet article but it's like the amount the proportion of variance meaning the degree of risk that you can reduce with fully preventable or fully in our control lifestyle issues is huge

it's as big or bigger than the genetics I think people really need to hear and internalize that because I think everyone's waiting for this miracle drug that is unlikely to ever arrive frankly I mean you know to dat we have some okay treatments for Parkinson's to try and offset the loss of dopaminergic neurons but they can even transplant essentially dopaminergic neurons into the substantia but none of those things alopa Etc have proved to be cures for Parkinson's um not getting hit in the head is helpful oh yeah yeah traumatic brain injury is another one of

the big risk factors so there are a lot of don'ts yeah I'm grateful that today you're sharing a number of Dos both in the context of offsetting age relay cognitive decline Alzheimer's but also in terms of how to enhance focus and enhance memory um I want to make make sure that we um touch on a few topics related to memory that a little bit um off the the trajectory we're on now but that come up a lot when people start thinking about memory and one that's kind of um intriguing very intriguing is deja vu do

we have any understanding about what Deja Vu is is it just like a recollection of something similar that spontaneously gets triggered um I'm like what is deja vu well it's not fully understood but I'll give you my best guess that's science-based and not just my wildly speculating completely but basically uh one of the early findings that gave you sense about what Deja Vu is is hings Jackson who is this great neurologist who um did pioneering work in Behavioral Neurology observed that many patients who get epilepsy would have this Aura it's this mental Sensations right before

a seizure where they would get an intense feeling of deja vu it doesn't happen in everyone but a certain and this is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy and the hippocampus as you know is in the temporal lobe but there's also these areas around it that are super important for memory um um including the amydala but also really the peronal cortex is is a key key player in this and so the um so then uh you have Wilder Penfield and other people who started to do these surgeries for epilepsy and they said well I want to

make sure I'm not taking out good brain right you don't want so Penfield wasn't responsible for hm and that was like kind of an irresponsible surgery hm is a is a now dead famous patient and literally chapter in the history of Neuroscience somebody who um had his hippocamp high bilaterally one on each side of the brain uh removed to treat epilepsy um it fixed the epilepsy but he had uh lost all capacity to uh remember prior events yeah and so in fact he had this dense dense Amnesia right and actually one of the little known

things even in memory research is he actually lost he had what's called a temporal leomy where they just hack off the front part of the temporal lber it might have been cauterized I I can't remember the ex I think he cauterized it but anyway they do that temporal leomy and he actually had the posterior onethird of his hippocampus but he had lost his perir rhinal cortex bilateral and that turned out to be Betsy Murray at NIH later and other people should turned out to be huge thing so one of the reasons I think that he

became so densely amnestic is that it was bilateral so if you think about the brain like you have a side of the brain that's causing a seizures so you kind of got a spare tire on the other side where it's like that other healthy tissue on the other side can sometimes pick up the slack but if you take out both hemispheres now you're in really bad shape so Scoville did that you actually did it for people who are hm had epilepsy and it was a legit operation in that sense but he did it for people

who had I think like psychosis to depression I mean back then they just did all kinds of crazy stuff so um uh but Penfield was like no I want to make sure I take out only the tissue that needs to go so what do you do you stimulate different parts of the brain and you see does it produce anything other than a seizure and if so that's not an area you want to remove and so he would go into the anterior temporal lobes and stimulate and people would have sometimes they would have an intense real

memory but sometimes they would have this intense sense of deja vu where it's like they feel this I feel like I'm lived out this whole thing that's happening right now I've lived it before when you know that's not true right so what is this well a number of people my lab was heavily involved with this and Andy yenis that UC Davis was you know really Central to a lot of the stuff found that the perir rhinal cortex which is this area as I said it's a big player with the hip campus seems to be very

critical for this General sense of familiarity that we have and so you know I use in the book an example of like if I say have you eaten a rambutan before now you being a worldly guy might have you ever eaten a rambutan no I don't know what that is okay so how quick was it that you were able to say no that you were able to think about go I've never eaten Rutan uh less than a second okay so you didn't have to search your entire memory for whether or not you've eaten romitan you

know because it's so unfamiliar right so things that are highly familiar like you know maybe I'll ask have you eat a banana before or grapes before you can say yes because and partly you wouldn't even have to remember any instance it just feels right you know those are very familiar things to you have you ever seen a grape before yes of course you have right Apple very familiar to people so we just have that General fluency you can look at this like I've um you go into the grocery store and you see someone and you're

like I know I've seen this person before where have I seen them before and then you leave and eventually you're like oh well that was somebody who I met at this conference or something like that but you weren't expecting them at this context it's and no episodic memory is triggered but there was something about their features that felt very fluent and natural to you and triggered that sense of familiarity and that seems to be processed and you can see brain activity associated with that in the perinal cortex and people with damage to the perinal cortex

seem to not differentiate between the rambutan and the banana it's all kind of unfamiliar to them they might remember I've eaten a banana but they don't necessarily have that sense of familiarity and Rebecca Burwell at Brown University the coolest experiment that doesn't nearly get you know how in science you get these unsung hero experiments well what this was one of them where she stimulated in rats uh the peronal cortex at this frequency called the beta frequency which is kind of a relatively low frequency oscillation and basically put two objects in front of the the animal

and so like typically if there's a new object the animal will spend more time like exploring it right and depending on how she timed the stimulation she could make the animal think that a familiar object was novel she stimulates at a different frequency I think it was gamma and the animal now thinks uh uh or actually was like yeah so she thinks now the Animal thinks that a familiar thing is novel with beta was that it thought a novel thing was familiar wow so could literally use this stimulation to change the way the animal is

interacting with in presumably a memory driven way with this object right so for those looking for novelty in different domains of life maybe this is the solution maybe yeah and so uh an clear just to close the loop here who's a great researcher of Colorado State developed this beautiful Paradigm where what she does is she said okay well does that relate to Deja Vu well let's see so what she did was use virtual reality and so in virtual reality you can create these environments and you know put objects in particular places and so she creates

these virtual environments where there are particular objects in particular places and let's say one's a museum right so a person can go through passively and watch a movie or they actively navigate through these spaces and then what she does is she has them go through let's say a video arcade but unbeknownst to the subject the objects that are in the room are an exactly the same positions as the objects in the museum but it's a video arcade so it looks different but the room shape the spatial a you know everything is identical it just it's

got a different skin on it so to speak for video Gamers so what happens is people are much more likely very likely to produce a Deja Vu sensation when they're in these places these virtual environments that look very much like where they've been but they're mismatching in some critical way so it's like you've got enough to trigger the strong sense of familiarity but the mismatch is suppressing recollection and so that seems to be a crucial part of why you get this uncanny feeling of remembering is the strong familiarity you get and by the way I've

watched these movies and I cannot for the life of me see that the museum is the same as the arcade it just feels so different cognitively but you know I can imagine being like if I really did it immersively having that sense of familiarity so you're really pitting these things in opposition to each other so what likely happens with Deja Vu is something uncanny that triggers a little bit of memory retrieval or a strong wrong fluency but then there's a mismatch that suppresses it and prevents that a context from coming up I'd like to talk

about the relationship between memory and mental health um for the following reason um I'm very struck by the fact that in experiments um such as the work that Carl dyser off who was a actually the first guest on this podcast brilliant um neuroeng engineer of course and psychiatrist described which um he's talking to a a patient who's depressed um this patient has a stimulator for the vagus nerve they can crank up stimulation the Vegas nerve and and essentially The Narrative goes from this patient I believe it was a woman in this case talking about being

suicidally depressed she can't anticipate doing anything of any interest or excitement to her increasing vagal stimulation which by the way folks does not just calm people down vagal stimulation actually creates a lot of alertness so this is a a vast misconception out there um that vagel stimulation is all about calming in any case as the vagel stimulation goes up her narrative literally changes in real time to yeah I could see myself going out and applying for a job I'm kind of excited about the future Etc so complete transformation of one's Outlook but also in some

instances memory of Prior events so how we cast prior events is so interesting and the bridge I'd like to to uh build right now conceptually is is that there are two papers that um intrigue me one is a a paper from lamberto maf's Lab in Pisa which had a paradigm for exploring learned helplessness in rodents which is sort of a model for depression uh how long rodent is willing to swim in water to save its life right before it gives up and there's a learned helplessness that eventually arrives these yes are not kind experiments um

but at some point they give up and then they they've essentially learned they're helpless and of course they save the animal before it dies but these animals given a essentially an SSRI like prac um Can restore some sense of hope meaning they'll swim longer after having learned to be helpless okay is it recovery of depression we don't know but in humans you see some of the same thing when ssris have been effective and they're not always effective you also see this in some of the psilocybin trials where people have done the psilocybin therapy talk about

that in the correct context and now all of a sudden people have this completely different emotional version of the same events like yep a bunch of terrible things happened or with the MDMA trials for PTSD controversial right now FDA didn't approve it but a good number of patients describe saying yeah this really terrible set of things that happened those happened but I accept it and I'm taking the lessons and I'm moving on and and there's maybe even forgiveness etc etc so to me this is a this is a shift in memory brought about by a

dramatic shift in neuromodulators ssris of course increas serotonin Sil cybin increases serotonin and it's interesting to me that MDMA while it increases dopamine most dramatically increases serotonin like 7x or more in terms of the now I'm not suggesting anyone do these drugs at all you can blow out the serotonergic system with too much of it with too much of too much MDA ma although the studies on this is interesting because the study that claimed that MD MDMA did that actually was retracted science it turns out they had inadvertently used methamphetamine oh jeez keep in mind

folks that MDMA is methylene dioxy methamphetamine so I'm not suggesting anyone do these drugs I'm using this as a as a conceptual temp I mean this is abuse we're talking about to not like right right I mean so in clinical trials it's clearly been shown both for ssris as well as for psilocybin these are still emerging clinical trials and MDMA that in a significant percentage of individuals especially when combined with therapy people can now feel differently about the same memory so feeling different about the same memory and feeling different about therefore the sense of possibility

going forward this to me is incredible and it speaks to the fact that much of depression the lack of a positive anticipation about the future Etc is based on memories about failures of past yeah or harms of past yeah rumination basically right so what is the relationship between the serotonin system system and memory or what is the relationship more broadly of the these neuromodulatory systems or the vagal system that can create these incredible like reversals of what we previously thought of as terrible as like manageable and therefore we're willing to lean into life again what

is that again you know serotonin's like a neuromodulator it enhances plasticity and uh what I mean by that is is that if you have like a transient learning event you will get a change in the connections between neurons that were active during that event and super interesting work right now going on in behavioral time scale plasticity and all this stuff so it's not just cells that wire together fire it's more interesting actually or fire together wire together it's more interesting but those changes can often be transient and what people so like uh Eric kandell for

instance one who studied uh serotonin in particular emphasized this but basically many neurom modul if you give a little bath of these bathe these neurons in in uh um serotonin or other neurom modulators you stabilize that plasticity and that allows you know increases in receptor density between these neurons that allow them to communicate more effectively now you can get weakening in LTD too we won't get into that but uh but serotonin definitely promotes plasticity right and so one of the things I talk about in my book is that memories are I mean we all have

plasticity as I said retrieving a memory can allow us to change the memory in certain ways and it can change when you get into the details of it it becomes complicated in interesting ways but the short version is you can change it we get a small part of what happened when we remember but there's that feeling of the context there's that emotional response that we have that's both a kind of a basic raw motivational my heart's racing or something like that that's why people often say well emotion emotional memories are stored in the body well

it's just part of the memory it's a retrieval cue so to speak and it can be also be part of the retrieved experience but you have all these factors going on that are part of this emotional memory and then you have a story that you create a narrative that you use to make sense of it and that affects all these physiological systems too right so every time I used I talk in the book about an example of how group therapy is so powerful as a means of memory updating social interactions where it's like people can

change the narrative they say well you know I gave you this narrative about how I'm loud and you told well I remember hanging out with you and you weren't loud then you're not loud now and so now I can update these memories maybe byous yeah exactly I could I reframe it right and these framing effects are huge so in theory people can take and experience those traumatic and many people do and say this made me who I am and I'm happy with who I am now even though it's a horrible thing I'm stronger for it

or I'm a Survivor or you know I couldn't have done anything about it and it's not my fault and or you can have these narratives of Shame and so forth and and guilt and anger and so forth nothing's I'm not judging anybody's reaction to trauma but what I am saying is that's part of the emotional response it's part of the memory that people construct the problem is is that with trauma memories when they do stick it's hard to change because there's so much plasticity driven by the neuromodulators during that event with PTSD we could talk

about that that's a whole another thing but just let's just take traumatic memories there's it's so intense and the amydala response drives the physiology in many cases of that arousal which makes you feel like this immediacy of it right and it affects sleep and nightmares all but anyway stay out of PTSD for a moment because that's a whole another thing but those memories are very resistant because of that intensity and often the more we retrieve them we ret traumatize oursel so reframing in a cognitive therapy sense is very difficult because they feel this and their

brain is telling them I'm under threat or I'm ashamed because they've reinforced this narrative so many times and you can work through the logic but sometimes times you need to create some big prediction error to generate some error driven learning which is something we can talk about or you need to some kind of help so if you're driving neuromodulatory systems like that theoretically could give you a broader window plasticity in fact actually we're trying Prozac on my dog and one of the things that uh that I've seen she's very anxious and very like uh like

she'll just and it's to the point where she'll not exercise even though she's very active dog she'll stop on a walk if she hears a garbage truck anywhere and so it's a very low dose and I'm not I'm not necessarily saying go drag your dogs but I'm just saying that the story that I've heard is is that you get this period of plasticity where you can kind of rewrite some of these behavioral patterns and make them more open to training and so forth and so it doesn't even have to be a permanent thing right and

I think a lot of these things like you're talking about learn helplessness study is probably transient if effects of not being on it for years or something but it's not very effective in terms of ssris but soloc cybin and psychedelics have shown a lot of Promise as being bigger effects right and these produce massive plasticity there's two things I think that are really interesting about it so my neighbor DAV by the way Davis I will just say I'm biased but it's one of the top three places in the world for learning and memory research so

next door d David Olson it turns out is studying psychedelic effects on plasticity and and um you know so he really emphasizes that there's just these massive neurotrophic factors bdnf like all these factors that are going on that are promoting plasticity and you know for people who've taken them that's what they report is that there's this period of integration afterwards where your brain's just like you know you can feel it everything's you change you change yeah you change if if the integration is guided properly one thing that I do want to make sure I highlight

and it's not just for you know public safety reasons although that as well is that people are so intrigued by the idea of quote unquote opening plasticity plasticity is just an opportunity for learning new contingencies yeah right just taking psychedelics is an experience but um certainly but the learning of new contingencies occurs in the integration phase as well as within the session that's why the clinical trials that showed some efficacy for some people were guided intensely by therapists but the mere Act of having plasticity plasticity is an opportunity for learning it's not the actual learning

that's right it it opens up like significant opportunities for reshaping uh but the second part of it which maybe I think is is really interesting is there is also a dissociative element of these drugs so ketamine isn't a psychedelic but I think there are some interesting plasticity effects and and definitely it produces this dissociative element too but um with uh a psychedelics there's often a major perspective shift and perspective is hugely important for memory because a lot of our sense of the emotional impact of our memory is based on a perspective that we adopt when

we remember and research has shown that you can take the same encoding event meaning like I tell you a story let's just take a very simple thing uh very you know I give you a story and it's like I tell you now viewed from the perspective Ive of someone else and you're trying to remember it you can remember things that you didn't exper remember the first time around changing your perspective can literally change what you remember it can also change the narrative that you produce so now let's say you pull up this traumatic memory but

you're viewing it from the outside you're feeling your hearts racing your eyes are dilating there just crazy effects for psychedelic but you're seeing it and it's not you there's some Deeper Self you're feeling whether it's true or not or you have a sense of agency in there yeah some of this ad delics um I've never tried this one um uh but there are interesting studies of ibigan iboga where the universal uh experiences I understand is that PE it's 22 hours long it's actually a cardiovascular risk there's some things that need to be offset there so

don't run out and do this folks but people I'm told get a highdefinition movie of specific events in their life that actually happened only when they close their eyes so no hallucinating with eyes open interesting and then they have agency within those movies and once they exact the change they wanted to have it rotates like a cube very interesting perhaps to a memory researcher why this would be and then they get another event of past where they have agency in that event incredible it's I mean you know there's so much that we don't know and

I think it's you know and I I will say that some of the Psychedelic stuff is overhyped and there's not some of the science is quite bad in that field right now sum papers are being retracted now yeah yeah I do think that some of the concerns they had in the FDA I take issue with but what I will say is is that um you have a drug that dramatically increases plasticity but it changes dramatically the mental context that you have when you pull up the memory so you have a real opportunity for memory updating

now there's a phenomenon in the animal literature called reconsolidation where essentially the ACT of retrieving a memory opens it up to requiring some kinds of uh um neuromodulators again to really promote resealing of the memory so to speak but it can also if you interrupt it you can erase the memories and theoretically if you can do that you could also change the memories pretty significantly so if I can vividly access some neural population that's giving me this normally gives me this physiological response it sets off this train of thoughts and it's associated with this physical

and mental context and I can dramatically I can access those neurons but dramatically reshape the context and dramatically reshape The Narrative I've created the opportunity for massive change and I don't know if that's true but it sure makes sense to me that that's the case now having said that if you and me share our traumatic elements of our childhood I'm sure we could go out for drit and do this for quite a few hours right that in and of itself will also produce some change in our memories it's very powerful and I saw this in

the clinic where I was doing group therapy with Vietnam vets and I'm like I'm a total fraud I'm like I don't know 27 years old 28 years old and I'm like in with these like you know Vietnam vets in their 50s who've really seen stuff you know and they live in combat zones now in Chicago and what I realized was everyone was telling their story but they're hearing reflections of their story from me but also from other members of the group who they can relate to that are different from their narrative and now all of

a sudden what happens is the memory is no longer theirs it's a collective memory that's shared by all these people because the memory now incorporates elements of their reactions as well it allows people to remember it in a new context right and I mean and we can just take a much more watered down version of this where how many times have you had a terrible experience and it became a great story I basically say that there's no point in having a bad experience in life if you don't get a great story out of it right

so I talk to the book about a near-death experience I had paddle boarding and as everything about this was stupid it's like the degree I could send you pictures of it you oh my God what was he thinking you I've made I've made uh foolish errors in um uh Outdoor Adventures in my past where afterwards I thought that was a really dumb move to even go to that location to dive let alone what we did when we did there like you know I mean the some of the stupid stuff that we did um even and

as kids like bridge jumps and without testing water depth I mean stupid stupid stuff yeah um that I don't recommend anyone repeat but you're right the the uh surviving stories are uh you carry those forward yeah yeah exactly exactly problem is the other stories we can talk about people who are paralyzed dead etc those stories exist too yeah yeah and well so I mean to be clear it's like I felt horrible during that experience and it was one of the most immediately fear inducing experiences I've had but later me and Randy O'Reilly the computational Neuroscience

were friends we both did this stupid thing together we would tell the the story tag team it you know we told it to students and friends and so forth and it just became funny and so each time we told it it just became kind of funnier and funnier and you start to embellish things and so forth and so that change of perspective was really drawn out by sharing and seeing people laugh and seeing people like what were you thinking you're such a smart person and you did this and and it becomes part of the narrative

and you know keep in mind there are people who do this that they say like I had a really traumatic experience but I've learned from it I've had a horrible emotionally abusive relationship but I've learned from it right and I don't mean to trivialize anybody's experience who didn't have that thing and they're just traumatized by it and they carry it with them but what I am saying is is that the memory so to speak I think in Neuroscience right now there's a big Hot Topic about engrams as if a bunch of neurons is the memory

but every time we have a memory we're painting a new picture we're creating a new novel well and I think this is where people have to be very careful not to um Cowboy uh post-traumatic stress disorder treatment in a way that um allows the narrative to make it worse because people um we previous guest on this podcast has this notion of um in describing this of of story fondling where people can go further and further into the description of how terrible something is reinforced by others and then the memory changes to become much worse than

either the real events were or just simply worse within their body and mind and then they have to live that forward so it can go both ways which is really points to the key uh uh which is to do this with really trained professionals yeah yeah and it's it's all about like because you can retraumatization is so bad in depression is because you recall a negative memory and that gets you in a negative mood because you pull up the context and then that makes it easier to recall more negative memories and then every time you

recall them now they're getting more power because they're associated with these negative mov so recollection is really a double-edged blade oh yeah yeah I mean look at like so if you take something like reminiscence or um Nostalgia so the original term Nostalgia I credit phelipe ad Bard for tell he's a philosopher neuroscientist he he uh told me that uh Nostalgia used to be a term for a disease that was coined by a Swiss physician and he used it to talk about a kind post-traumatic experience that soldiers had where they would get so wistful about their

home that it just made them miserable in the places that they were at it's um been referred to as the pain of an old wound yeah yeah yeah exactly I didn't say that someone else yeah yeah and uh um so it can the research shows it can have very positive effects on Mental Health right and it can have positive effects on Mental Health if you use that as a way of saying hey this is just a great thing that's happened I'm grateful for that but it can become toxic if you're like my life used to

be so great and now it's terrible even if it's positive reminiscence if you come into it with the wrong attributions it can become negative and toxic and it can contaminate your present right I mean the past has got good and it's got bad in it just like the present has got good and it's got bad in it and it's really all about what what are the narratives you're constructing for it in many ways and that plays a big part in the dynamic malleable constantly shape-shifting nature of memory incredible I want to make sure that we

talk about something at first glance very different than all of this um but it land squarely in the conversation we've had until now which is your love for and your um participation in rock and uh you have a band right pavlovas dogs yep I actually have a couple bands now thankfully so okay what are the other ones called well so Pavlov's dogs also say ver is like a a band of neuroscientists and and psycholog neuroscientists who met actually most of us met at a memory meeting actually and so uh we get together at conferences and

we'll rent out a club and we'll play basically uh we uh Brad calls it skinny TI music it's it's like is it original music or covers covers that one's a cover band covers okay um and so uh we'll play like the Ramones The Clash gang of four great um it's it's a a lot of we're you know we added Blondie and um she's still touring yeah she's amazing is a friend of mine went on tour with her yeah there's a band called surf surfbort was on tour with I know them yeah oh that's a friend

Danny from surfboard know yeah the great band um and she tour with blondie Blondie's amazing she's still super vivacious as a surfboard and and um uh and Danny um what instrument do you play I play guitar and I also do vocals lead vocals uh yes or yeah and uh reluctant because sometimes it's talking or being off key but yeah can people find um links to any Pavlov dog live shows or recordings online I think we have some recordings on YouTube and if you look on our Facebook page um maybe our Instagram too we have live

recordings okay and you have a show coming up put a link to that it's um because people will listen to this long after that um presumably that's coming up in Chicago on October I think it's the 7th is it a mon it's the Monday we'll put a link to that yeah sorry but for those that can't make it because most of us aren't in Chicago including me unfortunately um we'll keep an eye out for uh Pavlov's dogs um I love that you play music and I just have for sake of time one question about your

love for rock and roll and playing music music when you're playing rock and roll live are you thinking about anything else sometimes and that's when I suck actually you know one thing one hack that I came up with because it's like with the cover I me we practice like we cram it's not the worst thing it's not space learning it's like we we go through the songs and we keep adding and taking away songs but it's like we'll cram for like I don't know about eight hours of practices over three days or something and so

it's for me it's like a constant memory thing because my brain doesn't want to play covers it wants to play the songs that I've written and so there's always this memory thing it's and then I get nervous I get really nervous and so I move a lot and then that distract and then I'll see friends and that kills me because then I start thinking what are they thinking and so I started last show I did with Pavlov's dogs I wore sunglasses and it was great it was because then I wasn't attuned to them and I

was it just goes back to what we're talking about kind of with the camera and stuff I was feeling it and I was thinking I was I was not I was in the flow in the zone and feeling it and doing it and not thinking about it and there's a whole interesting literature choking under pressure that actually relates to this idea of like you know sometimes having too much cognitive control going on is like really bad when you're under stress and if you know something fairly well you're going to be better off if if you

just go into an automatic State I love that um when I do live shows I like to have the um house lights relatively dim I don't want to see anybody at first and then as I get more comfortable I'm happy to have the house lights come up you play I didn't know you I don't play anything I do live events where I talk about science where I tell stories about science and scientists um okay a couple of things are right in the front of my mind and I'd be remiss if I didn't say them right

now first of all it's absolutely clear that we need to get you back here for more discussion about memory and learning there's just so much that we didn't have the opportunity to cover in this conversation but we most certainly will in a future conversation we didn't bring up the turkeys of Davis not the T no we didn't um second of all I I want to thank you for writing your book why we remember because it's a fantastic exploration of the modern understanding of memory um still some of the Mysteries that remain but um this is

a field that's evolved a lot and and you capture so much of the incredible findings there over the years um in a very uh pleasurable way so it's it's a pleasure to read and then also want to thank you for coming here today to share with us your understanding about memory and also your sharing of your experience uh with ADHD and some of the tools you use some of the struggles I think um all too often people hear about these you know scientists or Physicians or people who are authorities on a topic and they um

don't hear about the the challenges they face and I assure you that a great great many people U will appreciate the fact that you yourself have have struggled with certain issues related to attention but that you've overcome them at least as well to be able to be a functional parent and familyman Professor author uh now public educator dog owner a second time around and um you know for that and for a great many other reasons uh you've educated us and you've given us a great many practical tools it's also great to see you as a

fellow punk rocker and old friend um and I even let you call me Andy so thank thank you so thanks for coming here today and please do come back again Char oh I would love to thank you Andrew it's just been great to be here thank you for joining me for today's discussion about memory and ADHD with Dr charin rangano to learn more about his work and to find a link to his book as well as social media accounts please see the links in the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this

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