Dr. Charan Ranganath: How to Improve Memory & Focus Using Science Protocols
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is doctor chan wrong enough? Doctor charon wrong enough is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the university of california, Davis.

He is one of the worlds 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 bring the image or due to age related cognitive decline or diseases like timer's dementia, suffers 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 relay cognitive decline, what the research really says about that, in ways to prevent things like alzheimer dementia.

We also talk about A D H. D or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and doctor rong gona shares his own experience with add how IT relates to memory and the tools that he is used in order to combat his own adhd. Doctor, wrong enough, has an exclusivity to describe research studies in clear terms and to combine that with his no 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 researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired 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.

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Again, that's levels dot link I N K slash huberman to try their new sensor and two, three months of membership. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja sessions and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about fifteen years old, and I made a profound impact on my life.

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And now for my discussion with doctor charm wrong enough. Doctor charm wrong enough? welcome.

Thank you.

Speaking of memory.

we go way back. We do. We do.

I was a graduate student when you were first tired as an assistant professor, which, for those that are not familiar with the academic nomenclature and trajectories, assistant professors or professors that have not yet received ten year, 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 all of us, even if for not trying.

So that's actually the sad way 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 supposed to being driven by prior memories. Studies ever been done that evaluate how often our brain switches to thought 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 at some point. But what i'm referring to is how much of our our thinking on a data day basis is literally in the past.

Well, it's interesting that I mean, it's first was a great question to start off with. And it's interesting because I actually don't think memory is is about the past. I think memory is about the present in 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 your vision, guy, right? And so if you look at people's just I movement right? The first time I came into this room, i'm sure I was an aware of IT, but i'm sure my eyes, we're going all over the place.

Now if I came back to visit, you say, feel like some awesome interview, whatever, right? Hopefully, but maybe not. But let's say I do right?

Chances.

yes. So I go, and my eyes will probably go right to the rick room in photo. Then i'll go right to know something out of reach, the expression chine.

And so my memory allows me to make predictions about where things are, and it's almost prety conscious so that it's happening without our awareness. And it's like confirmatory. We're grabbing the important stuff in making sure everything's where it's supposed to be. And you can see this play out in phenomenon also, like change blindness. There's a little bit of a different phenomena, basically change blindness.

There is a famous example where they show uh, video of people playing basketball and they're passing the ball back and forth and then the guy in a gorilla costume just walks behind them and about I think it's forty percent of the people who watch this video don't see the gilla. 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 ally of what the outside world is and memory, whether it's semantic memory, which will talk about, i'm sure, uh, your knowledge about the world like the cup thing, if it's episode memory, which is your memory, what happened, let's say, just a minute ago, it's all coming into play in turns of your sense of where you are, right? If I just ask you what day is that? You will use episode memory for that.

Tomorrow morning i'm going to wake up in a hotel room. If I don't have episode memory, I will freak out because of you. Like, where am I? Did I get kidnapped? Why am I here? And that's really the experience of people with memory disorder is I think they have to be in really familiar environments because it's frightening otherwise, right? So even I wouldn't necessary 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 in nap in the afternoon. I do this practice of non sleep deep .

breath in the afternoon.

You teach to me time. Yes, it's very restoration for mental and physical energy, I find. But I fell asleep toward the end of IT.

And when I woke up, I was in a dark room, but I didn't know where I was for about, felt like ten, fifteen seconds, somewhat scary. But I, i'd forgotten that I was in my solo studio. I turn, turn, the room lights down. What is IT when we have these lapses of memories, we emerged from sleep, or sometimes if one has been severely jet lagged, you can experience the disorientation of of place.

Do we know what that is? Well, a lot of your sense of where you are comes from episode memory. Now there is a school of thought that says that episodic memory, which is your ability to remember a past events, is comes from your ability to understand where you are. And we have some interesting data from sea lines actually, that speaks to the sea lions. Lions get back to back to the sea lights but um I would argue that to remember like where you are when you first get up, you have to engage in an active episodes, memory, retrieve. That is, you have to figure, well, how do I get here and that takes a mm orienting yourself, takes a moment and that because it's it's a little bit of a controlled memory search IT, 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 IT stage one is just just high alpha um all these brain waves that are like very much associated with kind of Greenness is you're getting on na modulators are probably .

super lose you so basic .

american much a yeah yeah exactly and so that's gonna lead you to really be slow in doing that memory retrial, al, that you need orient yourself. So like in the clinic, if you want to asks, if you want to understand whether someone as memories or one of the simplest things is to ask him what day of the week is, what month is?

Who is the president?

Who is the president yeah right now that's a good question that .

depends on what time of your relatives to the election you ask right? Yeah, very interesting.

I'm curious also, why is that most all of us have a stable representation of who we are? So my understanding is, is that even people with very severe memory deficits don't wake up in the morning and wonder you, who am I or who is this person in this body that somehow we remember that we have self, that we are separate from others selves, that that kind of knowledge might be an aid, we might be born with IT, and that the representation of self in memory is very stable. Is that true?

Well, here's what i'll say. There is a really interesting and complex question. Everything you always doctor like to see this complicated. But um i'll give you a simple of the thing as I can, which is so if you look at patients with m na, so they have a memory disorder where they can't form new memories, they have a sense of who they are as you mention, right? They it's not like they don't know who they are and I mean like they know their names, they know their biography.

And so for but what happens is at the time, let's say, if you had gone swimming and you nearly drown yet a hypoxia incident or cardiac rest or um you know you had like a traumatic brain entry, 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 um as you are because like you think you're stuck in your sense of who you are.

And I do think I talk my good friend rick or Davis as a personality psychologists and studies the development of personality. And IT does develop, you know, if they kind of stabilizes in these adolescent years. And that's actually also interestingly related to memory.

But that does change. People do change in really interesting way. So one thing is that people grow more optimistic on average as they get older. Um and yeah yeah that's sure. So a Constance senior colleague get stanford actually has done some really cool work on that topic.

They become more optimistic. And yet I would argue that we become more quality court set in our ways because neuroplasticity the ability to read, reshape our neural circuits diminishes with age.

Well, you know so I think that's overdone a little bit. I think you're write you you definitely see less dope mean activity for instances. People get older.

And um um but what i'll say is that people have gobs. If you have a healthy aging person, they have gobs of neural plasticity. But often what happens this is, yeah, you get stuck in reason that could be related to a few things.

One is that you get changes in the refund cortex and that leads you to be less cognitive ly 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. Mean, you can to see this with all scientists, right? They go like nothing's new, everything, everything's been discovered in one thousand nine hundred and sixty and nothing new has happened since then.

And by the way, for folks listening who are considering your career and science, nothing to be further from from the truth. In fact, prior to recording, you told me a saying that i've never heard before.

I don't know if it's cynically are optimistic, but if I recall the the quote that doctor, wrong enough, 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 a very interesting statement. IT could be examined from a number of directions, but I think 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 nobel Price when a Richard axel talk about his love of action 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 seventies and hopeful.

He'll live a very long time and certainly science progressed as a consequence of him being alive and yeah working on the old factory system. But I think what you're referring to is really important. Nea plasticity doesn't necessarily shut down as we age IT might even stay open to the same degree as early adult. But if I understand what you're son correctly, you believe that it's because people tend to seek out less new knowledge as opposed to lacked in 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 precious someone's looked at, but that would be my senses. 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 in their experience.

And that's not to say that, I mean, yes, neural plasticity does change as you get older, but IT doesn't account for the degree to which sometimes people can get stuck. And said in the ways, and you know, your example, the scientists is such a beautiful example, because I look at the scientists who don't get stuck in their way right, and they constantly chAllenge their beliefs. They surround themselves with the diverse group of people who stimulate them and they're also open to predict er that is they are open to saying something could be violating my knowledge of the world or my my understanding of the way world work.

So here's just an example and this is I know i'm going to be free associated or place get into that, but it's like what are the cool lest studies that we ever did um and I totally credit my postdoc matteus glober for this. He came into my lab originally german, came in from university calls london, and he told me he wanted to study curiosity and its effect. Time like this is just, I am being totally closed mind, and I ince a dum topic.

You know, it's everybody knows if you're curious about something, you'll remember IT Better. This is, 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, I know we really kind of collectively, it's just this beautiful thing where I was exposed, everything new, and I got excited about IT. And so the idea was we would give people these trivial questions. And so it's kind of like a pub quiz.

And you sit in pub quiz, sometimes you get a question and it's like on the answer, sometimes you get IT, 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 is right or sometime you're listeners, I mean, they're probably very curious people. That's why they listen to this. And maybe some of them go to your show notes effort because they want to learn more, right? So we actually scan people's brains using functional mmi.

And so we stand them when they get questions. And sometimes they said, i'm really curious to find out the answer to this question. Sometimes they weren't curious.

And then we make them wait about eight seconds, and then are ten seconds, I think about something like that. And then we showed the answer. So kind of in suspend, kind of like you're watching, like breaking bad or something back in the day, people like commercials. And you, now i've got to find out what's going to happen to walk, right?

So in suspect, you need to know the answer to this, or you don't care and sometimes you just don't care you just so we show a little face and we say, hey, how likely is that? You think this person knows the answer to the question? That was 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 sion.

But i'll get to why we did that because that was, I think, the rules part of the experience. But let's first get back to the trivial 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 series. It's not really A D circuit as we've discussed offline. It's really these areas of the brain, the process, the neural transport of doped, mean, and unlike many other neuromodulators to school, still means much more restricted and its effect. And so in the mid brain near the venture al tegmental area are geeks out? No.

we've talked about this is a particular I think the key state that you made that people should hold onto as we progressed through this is that dopamine is not dumped everywhere. It's not sprinkler all over the brain. Released in a fairly restricted sites in order to drive particular processes. That's that's sufficient for now.

Yeah yeah. And so when we look at functional mmi, we can't measure doping. But what we see is activity in the dopamine gy mid drain area, meaning the area of brain around the mid brain.

And you see IT in the nucleus combs or what it's called the ventures strain, which is another area that's super high dupe mean reward processing area. The more curious people are like gonna want to six scale, the more activity you see is just like this beautiful relationship, right? And it's not driven by the answer.

Now there's a reason we truly didn't get for the answer is 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 bumpin memory for the faces relatives 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 the stop energy c activity in the membrane. So a lot, a lot of other studies findings from that study. But basically, I think of and you know how sometimes you do a lot of studies published like our native try to over the example, I think I was like functional connectivity between the hip campus and the red brain during the face was predicting Better memory for these faces and general something like that we .

can put a link to the paper, of course in the capture to let me make sure understand that the um when people are prompted with a question, yeah that drives a release of dopamine ah, the amount of dopamine is proportional to how curiously are to get the answer to that particular question. And then the dog in itself, if elevated, because they are very curious, can increase the probability that they will remember the answer.

IT creates a mill u an environment for Better memory. But that can confuse us and make us think that dopamine improves our memory. But is that curiosity increases dopamine, which increases the capacity to store information that comes subsequent to curiosity.

Beautiful, some options, but i'll do two cheerful amendment. 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 metaphoric activity but it's following all the usual suspects of where you'd expected to be.

Um the second thing is I do think that dopamine is playing apart and I mean he definitely facilitate plasticity. So I do think that helps and learning the answer for sure. And there's a whole theory called synaptic tagg, which basically says that if you just release a bunch of delp mean and then you have these potential synapses that you can drive plasticity in those synapses even if it's not happening at the same time.

But what's really cool as the face has nothing to do with the trivial question. The theory that we have is when you get that bump and up activity, you're motivated your energize to get the answer and you're driven towards the state of plasticity. And now we're giving you something is 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 doping? One reasonable answer based on this study is curiosity to engage curiosity. Do you know that, quote, by north y.

Parker, the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity, I believe, is IT was dorthy Parker? If IT wasn't, i'm sure we'll find out quickly in the 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, we could talk about knowledge gaps and all these things that stimulate curiosity. Novelli is another one. Richard Morris is some beautiful data, this with rats. But um ever duce all and I too have some data with humans surprise all of these things. I will chapter my book on this, a drive that system, so the dope dupine 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 all this person saying something that I disagree with, I can't deal with that. Or, oh, we figured this out thirty years ago. We don't need thing'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 something is preserved age.

Recently, we had one of the world's experts on romantic relationships on this podcast, est perl, to be specific. And we talked about a lot of things related to romantic relationships. But he 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 one self and how one changes in the context of the relationship and also curiosity about where the relationship could eventually go.

Where want to continue to invest in IT so this word of curiosity seems to be a resounding theme um i'm struck by, although he makes total sense, that curiosity would drive dopamine released in these pathways, that novelty would drive dopamine released in these pathways and that also in the physical realm, dopamine is so important for physical movement yeah, I don't think this is A A coincidence, right? Somehow evolution organized ed the snowy modulator dopamine to be involved. The way I think about IT is in both a physical movement, it's required forward, 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 that is were both neuroscientists but you're the memory researcher, is there is there sort of a word or a framework for thinking about cognitively forward meaning 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 ha.

that's a really interesting question. Well, first of all, I want to be careful and not to say, don't mean does this because it's kind euro. It's a trap, right?

Well, to be clear, you serve hinton activity in a in a dopamine ergimo cited. So the idea that I would not involve the open miners is a bit of a stretch, but you didn't directly show that I was.

So yeah, yeah, I won. Be exact. And just say that assigning a single function to a chemical is risky.

But that said, I do believe there's a link. One of the things he sees in parkinson's disease, dopamine gic na transmits sion, is shot. And depression is also a symptom of parkinson's disease. It's quite a severe one in fact.

And uh so what I think one theory goes is the dopamine energies us to seek rewards or to seek information, right? So a big part of movement is you move to get something. It's approach, right? They talk about approach and avoidances basic kind of things that you want a program.

And so a person with parkins's disease has a problem with willful movement, tremors and stuff to um but I think that dope mean 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 so I do think there is some kind of a common pathway there and speaks to the issue of the difference, which you've talked about and I talked about a lot, is wanting versus liking. And so can't burge at michigan great work on this recent gobs and gobs of manipulations of dope mean activity and what he finds us in animal that say that deprived of dope mean? IT will go for words just fine.

I just won't work for them IT won't do the work that you need together work. But if you just put in front of them, we'll take IT. So what dope mean? IT is heavily involved with these opposite 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 dope energia bump when an animal gets a reward because you're learning about the reward and what predicted the reward, there is a little bit of a credit assignment process that takes place.

What's interesting is you get this to with actually my colleague, a Davis brian wilkin beautiful work, where he looked at trace conditioning, which is when you have like a say, if you play a tone and you wait a long time and then the animal gets a shock rain. And so what you are, 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 ten seconds or above.

The animal has to be somehow doing something to be able to blame that tone for getting shot, right? And so what he found was that there's a burst of dopamine activity in the lost rule is which actually known for neural and afra. But there's really cool work on dope, meaning the L C. Now, uh, modulating the camp.

nervy here. Trust me, this audience likes nerdy OK. I think that's why part of why a local is, is just the area of the of the brain that tends to sprinkler large brain areas with ef in which is or nor up and ever nor generalin for alertness, so somewhat distinct from the dopamine system. But you're telling us IT can also release dopamine.

that's right. And sometimes they go 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, is not the the animal is going, oh, I just heard a tune, I heard a tone.

And then they get shocked IT. Maybe more like they get a shocked 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 tongue cause 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 I were real threat, you could actually escape from IT, right? And there is this whole active avoidance literature that you can look at with this 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 often rewards. I mean, I like rewards as much as the next year. I look at how much coffee I like what I got here. Um so it's not that, but it's just that it's mobilizing you. I think i'd .

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Right now, they're giving away five travel packs plus a year. Supply a vitamin d 3k two。 Again, that's drink A G one dot com slash huberman to claim that special offer. One thing that we talked about just briefly earlier was this non sleep deep pressed protocol um that in um um yoga tradition is called yoga nedra yoga sleep because you lie down, its self drifted relaxation, long x breathing to slow your heart rate at at that I called IT n sdr not to appropriate IT, but because the language of yoga, idris, a little bit of a separator for people that sounds a little bit esoteric, right? And nonce ly keep breast tells you what IT is, right?

Um there's a study, the university of copenhagen, I can find a linux in the shown note captions and i'd love your thoughts on that to show that people who do this practice a pet imaging study, a positive onomea tommo's phy for those that don't know. And they see significant increases in a strangle doping 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 n sdr is useful for restoring mental and physical vigor, which translates to the idea that dopamine prepares us for or is a reservoir AR for potential movement typically toward rewards.

And I love that we're talking about some of the other facets of dopa I mean because all too often people think about IT as pleasure or motivation and certainly it's involved in motivation um and i'm very happy um to learn that it's also involved in learning. I think that's A A novel perspective on doping when we hear so much about doping. But 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 um entuned in particular behaviors or um routes of pursuing curiosity um to the exclusion of others.

What i'm thinking about here as a kid, we've seen these data. Kids with A D H D actually have terrific ability to focus if it's something they're really excited about, really curious about yeah so you give a kid with A D H who loves video games of video game and they're like a laser yeah so it's not that they lack the capacity, yes, to focus is that they have a harder time dropping focus yeah but IT seems that because of the learning is a um dimension to dopamine that the circuits could potentially learn that its video games that provides that feeling a focus to the exclusion of other things. Meaning how does one keep a diversification of of inputs to the dopamine system so that were continually driving dopamine through lots of different things, I suppose, just social media or just video games or just pick your favorite yeah yeah thing because becoming a functional human being involved the requirement to focus on many things, not just the things we we're 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 if you look at literature to you can see this a big part of being curious is the praise al process so to speaking 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 important? Is this scary? And I think the thing is, is that you need to be open to that possibility that is interesting.

So like, so let me just give you like an example that I that I often give. Let's say, you're walking in a neighborhood travelling like you do for many of your events, and you walk into a new neighbor. You have been to its nighttime kind of poorly lit, and you hear a loud noise, right? You could be like, well, that's a gunshot.

I Better high or a Better run. Or you could be like, oh, maybe there's a club nearby and there is like a cool band plane. I should go check this out. That appraisal is really critical for how you respond. And 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 witness grow 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 of my friend, a MRI jaws really gone. Turn me on to this.

H SHE wrote a book on a mindfulness meditation, and one of the things that happens is your breathing. And yes, wait a minute. This one isn't the same as the last one, right? Or you can do this meditation.

I'm sure you've done this, right? This a part of, like, this sound is different. I'll sit in the backyard doing but thanks to you, I do this morning ten minute thing.

It's L V out the backyard and i'll be like hearing some sound and i'll be like all that sound there's a bird there and even notice that, you know and then there's some other sound. I'm hearing the freeway that's annoying, but I heard IT. So this is 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, something people find IT scary. To be in a new place, people find IT scary to meet a person whose different from them or so for the, I mean, I love listening to music. That's a little bit out of my comfort songs. Some people hate IT, do you know? So I I think some of IT is sort of cultivating and being comfortable with discomfort.

It's such an important theme I feel like nowaday in part because of the algorithms on social media where we are fed things that um feed our progressively greater and greater scrolling and dwell time as it's called, they algorithms are measured clearly how long we do well on a given image. What's in that image at at a um but you be nice to um cultivate an an algorithm for curiosity. I surely IT can be done.

I mean got all these Spark computer scientists and I folks ah and we come in to this world naturally curious um all primates including humans will visually fix IT on anything that novel yeah and study IT i'm trying to make predictions, gain understanding um maybe there will be a good time for us to discuss a little bit about the the circuit tree involved in memory so that we have that as a tempt digest some themes in memory. Most people are provably familiar with the so called hippo campus, which is a mean sea horse looks little bit like a sea horse, although the anatomy had a little bit of imagination. They are my opinion but um hip a campus um let's add to the prefrontal cortex, which you've already mentioned, and um and then these new modulator system. So we were going to assign a one sentence definition, functional definition, each of those areas. What would you say the hyper campus .

does any more sentence, please?

But I think if you can start with three, I think both. So the hippo .

campus is controversial. Mean, it's the most studied area of the brain. Arguable, except for maybe v one visual cortex. Yeah, yes. yeah. And but I believe in my colleagues do a vote big paper with hari delete hardee woman and in us on this 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 rate, and the hip campuses wiring is really set up to not understand what's going on to the late David mars. Pioneer computational neuroscience proposed that what the hypothesis about is what he called simple memory. It's basically saying, I know andy huberts, sorry.

I just call me that's fine .

yeah story is the first thing you so um uh so I know andy huberman, right but to have a memory of this moment that separate from, let's say, I saw you at some newer science retreat when we were in uh, when you're 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 hip hap s what i'll do is little former 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 you to support what's called epithetic memory, which the abilities say. I went to washington, D.

C. Once, and I remember going to the smithSonian, as opposed your knowledge about what generally happens in washington, D. C.

Of the president there. Oh, that's where a lot of politics happen. Oh, the Smith soni an is a place in dc. It's a memory of your being there at a particular place in 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 to create these narratives and these stories about him and where the preform cortex comes in. And it's it's a huge gary. It's about one third of the primary brain, so it's just massive.

Uh, there are a lot of people go well, there is no real. There's a bunch of different areas and i'll do different things in. I subscribed to the view that, that is very true. And at the same time, there is a global function of the performer court check, which is what's called cognitive control. It's this ability to say i'm going to regulate my movements and i'm gonna gulp my perceptions and my thoughts based on what's important to me in terms of this higher goal, right? So um when i've tested, for instance, patients with refund lions, i'm sure marked pieto talk to you about this.

It's like the hallways of them they used to tell all the profond cortex it's important for working memory and you could record from neurons in the prefrontal cortex or look at after my signal and and if a person or a animal is holding something in their mind like a phone number, neurons are bold signal in MRI will be highly elevated. Their activity will be elevated um throughout this period of time. They're holding in mind.

But IT turns out if you just ask somebody with a major profundities tion, here's a bunch of numbers, five, two, seven, eight. You know, ask you to tell him back to me in right order. Think you do just fine.

But now I started to distract them. I move my hands are, and there's a plane going on, you flying outside the window that literally happened once. Now they start to bomb IT because their attention is not controlled by their goal.

It's controlled by the environment around. And so this is where the things get really interesting. So I went to test the patient, and i'd heard about this. But until you see IT IT like doesn't register really bluem my mind. So there there's a test call, the wisconsin cards sorting test, and we don't have to get into all the details of in, but basically a test where people learn in some rules about where to put a card on this table, right, and they don't get told the rule, they just learn IT. And patients learn this, put profond damage.

learn IT just fine, is that that they get 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. Yes, give a little bit more background.

but I don't want to go in the week. That's O I mean, if i'm correct, if i'm wrong, i'd forget that was looking cartoon case details. But you know, like they are told to start showing the cards and that the the the correct algorithm reveal itself by a series of error and correct signals.

And so maybe i'm taking all the red cards and putting in one pile. Black cards are putting in another, getting err signals that maybe I go od evens, maybe I divide by suit if it's depending on what kind of cards they are, organize, even add, alteration. And sooner later, the brain figures IT out.

Yes, exactly, exactly. And you don't need a profond cortex to do that, which is surprising. But you don't you can do IT.

So there's context dependent action and learning without the prefrontal cortex.

yes, but let's let's unpack this context, 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 problem, right?

So now I changed the rule, but I don't tell you, you put the diamonds, the queen of diamonds, and the diamond pilots say, and now I said, no, that's wrong. So now you have to wait a minute. That was right all the time.

What's going on 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 will learn the neural right? It's not easy, it's pain. But people do IT. This patient, in particular, kept on using the old road.

And so you have to give a series of hands going like what's your strategy here? And then like it'll tell you and putting IT according to the color and then you, okay, well, does that appear to be working for you? And i'll go. No.

keep doing that. 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 preferable cortex is, is not about this declare of 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 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 preferable cortex to translate these high order beliefs. Things 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 are constantly bridge by information. I think it's I might have something like thirty five terabits under no is is a big number and the estimates get bigger and bigger every year.

So we're brush by information. There's no way you can even pay tension to at 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 test. But IT turns out in the in labs, we kind of over estimate that. And the reason we over restin ate IT is we're giving them a test, which is something hard that requires a lot of focus and it's something they do everyday.

But Karen cambell and lin hasher, this great, uh, cogent psychologists, is 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 that are trying to memories a bunch of stuff, but they're stuff going on their supposed to ignore. The older people were just as good as the Younger people at remembering the stuff they're supposed to ignore. They were just bad at the stuff they're supposed to be.

Attention ed, to that so interesting. Maybe could say that another time I you said IT very clearly, I got IT, but say one more time, because if anyone missed that, 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. IT speaks to um almost two um parallel processing streams for memory, if i'm not mistaken or maybe so what's going on there is is that one form memory involves the suppression of information in that circuit. Is actually quite active in these older people. And Young people were as curiosity for and the ability to remember and integrate new information is somehow diminished in older people. Earlier we we were talking about how that's not the case that Carry us if curiosity is intact, memory is intact and .

growing yeah okay. I should say the benefit of curiosity on memory is intact. And older people got that wrong. I don't know the tears could tell me if email and a breakers so they but, uh, I don't know if curiosity itself is as high and older adults I would support IT or I would .

just know but this is why asked about movement earlier. It's also curiosity is also linked to your ability to access novel scenario. Of course, online you can just throw, score or click and access all sorts of novelty. Um is there any there must be data as to whether not people in their seventies, eighties and nineties are scrolling ling social media, uh, to the same extent that Younger people are.

I don't know. But I can say two things to one is, is that definitely there's a lot of work on media multi taking and .

the short answers is bad for memory. okay. So calling is bad for memory.

Well, media multitasking is bad for memory. And 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 function function is not going to be as good. You will be more distractible, you will be more likely to go off course.

And so that scrolling is going to be more content because as you point IT out, the algorithms are all designed to suck up our attention. So psychologist subside and 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 impoverish you are in terms of your attention. So just such thing as free speech, because is like you have a limited supply of attention, so everything has a cost. 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 a sound of perfect analogy is neurons are functioning kind of like a democracy in the sense that you real democracies involve these political coalitions or alliances, right? And people talk about the right in the left with us done because it's just alliances between people who like different things and they're just form these convenient alliances each other well, is just imagine norms kind of do this in the brain rain. 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 tension to.

But if something is silent, you break chinese 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 profond cortex, you can buy as 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, as you can find, the visual cortex neons that fire when you're seeing something red, nor on the fire when you see something blue.

Let's right, i'm kind of distorting the picture, but you get the idea. So if in an animal is trying to hold in mind something I seek hold animated picture of something that's blue. What happens is the blue neurons are firing in visual cortex even though the animals is not seeing blue, right? It's just they're thinking about you.

You damage the profundo cortex nothing. So you lose that selectivity. So what's happening is the preferable cortex is biasing the competition and saying, I know blues not shining in front of, 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 is still relevant. So what happens when the communication goes? Let's I do to hypertension, diabetes. You get all the 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 that White matter are the fiber tracks, the wires that essentially that connect neons across long .

and short distances exactly ah and if you damage those long range tracks, the performer cortex is not efficiently able to bias that competition.

And so now the n ae gets remembred at the expense of the important that that I think the key thing and A A lot of that's why people talk about the preferable cortex as the central executive as many body is work to job knows it's like the executives are useless, right? Try to get an executive to do, I mean, except for someone who are useful. But then they don't really run companies very well.

There are some CEO. They're doing spectacular things.

But yeah well, okay, we will go there. Um controversial show, we said but anyway so uh like a good executive, their job is to micromanage. Their job is to say, here's the big picture. Here's my vision for the company.

And I want everyone to be working towards the school, not you know sifting through the male 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 bravas cual events most likely and we've done some research on this um in our lab in collaboration with built gigas is not berkely and charlie to Carry and you can measure this in mice with a uh measures called White matter hyper intensity as you use the 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 hyper intensities actually have memory performance that as poor as people who have hipp atrophy probably in the released stages of all and they're also bad at controlling information when they don't have to remember something. So it's like a double wai, and it's kind of like the executives is trapped in in a remote place and they got no internet access and no phone.

And so they can communicate with the company is obvious, is doing their own thing, right? And that's that's a little bit 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 scroll is um diabetes um uh many kinds of things. We talked about brain fog and many kinds of inflaming conditions will affect IT, depression， clinical depressions. I've seen people, older adults with depression who are recognize more impaired than people in the mci stage of alzheimer.

really? yes. So depression is dangerous for memory.

It's terrible for memory and seems to be a risk factor for alzheimer's as well.

Do you think the depression is dangerous for memory and a risk factor for alzheimer m's? Because he is by definition, anti curiosity.

I would probably not say that. And I would say also, I don't know what 我 mean， you once you kind of get into these things in the epidemic, I ological world, everything interacts .

with each other and .

there's genetics. Think that part, but you do. okay. So let's go back to your question, because I do that. Curiosity is affected by depression. I don't know the research on this, but i'll be shocked if IT isn't. And I do think the dopamine in activity is disrupted, depression and you're motivation to get annotation. Ia is the home one of the hole mark symptoms of depression, as is rumination, by the way, which is memory retrieval preferential negative review, val of negative events and dating over them.

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And i'm just curious at a personal level, what are the sorts of things that you do to try and offset cogniac decline? You seem to be a very, very vicious and curious person i've known a long time and I don't know whether that you are capitated every time we met, but you have a lot of energy your very curious person, you just rote a book um we will talk more about and you going on podcast, you do a lot of things. Besides running A A world class research laboratories is clearly a lot of curiosity um what do the data say about ways to maintain or enhances one's memory capacity with the understanding that curiosity is probably involved, as we talked about earlier, but at at a really basic level, I mean, number things lead to mind. But I am just curious what you are. If you had to pick 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 a shame 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, um you mention sleep, that's a big one.

Um we can actually there is a beautiful study that speaks to this that was done twenty nine thousand subjects in china and they follow them up for ten 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 factories that we're going to investigate. One was I think um um engagement and covert activities. I think one with social engagement, one was um um physical exercise, uh not smoking, I think no alcohol.

But they identify these lifestyle factories that were basically just kind of good lifestyle factors, tes. So they get people who have ford to six of these lifestyle factories going versus uh, zero to one of these lifestyle factors to take the extreme. When they start, they're all the same. Ten years later, the people with four to six lifestyle factories going for them are performing almost twice as high and memory test as the people as zero to one life.

While so these are people exercising, paying attention to their sleep, social engagement. What are some of the other guessing low inflammatory diet?

Yeah you definitely not smoking and and smoking and alcohol um I think we're big.

The smoking one is interesting because we know smoking can cause cancer. And cardiff asked lar risk is is real there, although there are some data, as I understand that nickey itself not smoking, baby dipping or nothing but that nickey can be pro cognition and maybe even pro memory um and nowadays are using the keine more and more. I'm not a big proportion of this because of the blood pressure increase in the typical route of administration are dangerous. But um nicotine i've been told this protective for parkinson's and alzheimer's.

Is that true? Well um let me know why the way I just have to say I forgot healthy diet.

Healthy diet was a big which I do a bit of people wonder what is that? And there are all these online debates about indian vegetarian can, but I think most people in the world are omen of worse. Most, and I think it's very clear that the number one thing for a healthy diet is to try and get most of one's food from non process or minimally processed source sets you in the right direction. Yeah, yeah.

So I was actually emAiling with d an asian sher's eye who really talk a lot about those. Yes, they do great work. And so they were actually any some stuff. And I had known about some of of us. But like meta, trani and diet has worked really well.

Olive, il fit, vegetating, fish eggs, limited amounts of meat, although I have argentine.

So yeah.

you like 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 press material study that I didn't know about, that put people on.

I think he was called the dash diet. And IT included leafy Greens as a big part of IT. And that had a dramatic increase in cognitive, mean, dramatically preserved cognitive performance in people who are on that.

对。 So the healthy diet is a big part. Now, nick, he is interesting. So if you notice a lot of people with schizophrenia, a smoke and a one of the things that's been found is, is that nicotine does seem to improve functioning in people, functioning, the people with schizophrenia.

Now I think the big thing to remember about any kind of drug in this goes for food effects, probably too, but especially drug, 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 if you have got some coffee. Some people really are affected by these things differently.

And then of course, there's always a dose response curve and they often follow these inverted use to mark as pieto um who was my postdoc mentor, did a lot of work with the open energy c drugs. And a lot of people have done these drug studies early on and cognition that would find no effects for sometimes they make people worse. And what he found was, was that if you looked more carefully, there is an inverted you effect, where some people and IT dependent on the working memory capacity, we're actually benefiting from the drug.

And then these other people who were, let's say I can as hire or lower, we're doing worse. And there is a genetic component to that. Unsurprisingly, don't mean transporters play a role. And so far, 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 nickey is good, nickey is bad. I think IT really, really is a much more complex ison, just like marijuana, right? So you can look at, uh, smoking weed and adolescence, four people who are at hype etic risk for psychosis IT dramatically increases your risk for psychosis.

S O, although the times i've said that on the internet, I caught a lot of push back from some of the canvas researchers, but then having invited one of them on in this podcast, I then got subsequent input from other researchers which countered their narrative which we can both say because we're both research scientists. That's what you call a field.

No, sorry, baby, cut out any misinformation I might have said.

no, no, no. You didn't. You didn't. I think the point is just that um it's very clear that they're a certain individuals for whom high T H E consumption can trigger psychotic episodes. Yeah, I working this, but not everyone.

Yeah, me. I mean, we're now interestingly seeing this with psychedelics where it's like all these positive effects of psychiatry ics were being are being brought up because, you know, a lot of people remember, the negative effects of people like rocky and from the thirteen floor elevators are like sidebar from pink floyd who became psychotic after doing large amounts. L. D.

Was the first example.

a rock, eric s, and from the thirteen flor elevators, the right .

psychology? H I will take more about chan is a himself a rockin royal musician and loves rockin role, hence the reference to rick rubin earlier. And there's a photo of ricker in the studio that our photographer, my playback took. Um so we were looking at that together so yes psychiatrically have claimed the minds of certain people made them helped contribute their preexisting prison ly psychosis I should also say um in fairness to the other compounds out, their methodologies have also significantly contributed to the progressions of psychosis in many people. So it's not just psychodeviant ah yeah yeah right yeah and then of course there are those who have somehow managed to take psychedelics .

and become more sane yeah and .

at least remain at least as sane as they were .

before yeah of course sanity in the air the beholder too. But what else says is that yeah and you can see this actually there's some new concern about at all and stimulants and uh if you're giving IT to people who might be at high risk for schizophrenia.

might also promote echos SE, giving doc involve any and those drugs, logic, document energy in .

general yeah yeah exactly exactly. So it's really a much more complicated interaction and I think this is where this whole run with personalized medicine will be super helpful. Um but there does seem to be a broad general effect for certain dietary and interventions. Barriers seem to be good. Leafy Greens seem to be good, healthy.

We talked about the exercise. Yes, in 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 said should both should do both cardiovascular exercise, so to speak, eleven heart rate for twelve to sixty minutes of thing, depending on the intensity, as was a resistance training to maintain A A muscular function offset circle pi sea to the really impressive effects of exercise on learning capacity in 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 these studies. But even when one looks at some can compares the best human studies, IT really does seem like getting blood flow up to the brain yeah, getting A A nice release of new modulators into the brain facilitates learning. And then of course, people love 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 finish my book, I limped to the finish line.

I had all sorts of crazy stuff happened. I won't depressed this. sure.

People will be curious, what does he take to finish your book? And how much did you mean what you have .

took a toll on your body? IT took probably, I mean that I probably lost some like biological years, but IT was really like, I mean, he was great. I mean, he was really an emotional role 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 goes and then I had, life happened, you know, my mom was in the hospital, my cat died on my birthday, and IT was just like, yes, I didn't want to to express .

people with all the stuff.

But yeah, no, no, no, it's okay. So then I finished my book and I was like just thread threshed and I had a sabattis because I wanted to have time to promote the book and educate people about what's in the book. And uh, i'd never gone a chance to do before. It's like doing this fantastic get to talk to people. So um I really wanted to make some changes and actually this gets something we are 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, he said, we're talking about A D H D IT just like dad, you told me of A D H D and i'm like, what you know and I like Jenny, you over diagnoses of hd, whatever, right? And then I remembered when I was a kid, my school contact, my parents said, you have A D H. He has A D H D.

And IT was interesting because he 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 um um and so but you know the seventy is nobody did anything you know and and I had all sorts of behavior issues and so for and there are other factors going on to but IT really got me thinking, oh my god, I got ta make some changes on living this unsustainable life where i'm jumping from crisis, crisis, crisis and I say don't have time for people and so um my again, it's going to sound depressive but it's got a happy edit. So if my dog had died in twenty nineteen of cancer and that was my first dog, so I thought never being a dog again and uh in twenty twenty and the pandemic I got another dog to yeah yeah dog uh, he is. Both of these were shelter dogs and so are all mixes.

I'm sure there's some pit in archias. Every shelter dog there is people to a exactly so but she's looks very belgian melon one. SHE moves like a belgian melon one yeah.

And there is so smart and super athletic. I mean, SHE is like jump vertically, know? I just like it's so like IT would all come home. She'd like jump up and then push herself off me, which is like a very classic thing. That's why they can jump like you can climb up like seven feet up a trade to chase the square.

And they use these for military Operations and tear one military. Yeah yeah. Trying to jump out of planes. parachute. Ts.

SHE is, but she's a smaller dog or a big or older dog looked like and SHE wasn't SHE was actually a copy mix, I think but he look like a uh rot wild and so everyone was scared of her. Is the swedish dog this one? She's like smaller, even though he looks kind of shepherd like everyone, your talk is so sweet.

you so.

Yeah, I mean, all shelter dogs have a little bit of a crazy switch and then do it's like it's tough for them .

like federal people, feral dogs yeah, but they have big hearts and they're eternally grateful. Yes, my home.

Yeah yeah. exactly. Know one of the things that I was inking 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, totally drifting .

away. ironic.

So, but this this is a the but it's related which is um having a sense of purpose is very important for healthy brain aging. There's a transit country science article and you is one of these things that neural ciencias don't talk about because it's not we don't understand IT but it's hugely important as part of this whole phenomenon what they call a cognitive erp.

And you know, having this dog that i'm taking care of, especially because, you know, my gone to college, growing up, living independently, walking the dog every day, IT gives him, you know, obviously I married, I love my family and I got lots. I got love my students, and so but IT gave me more, and i'm exercising in a way that's kind of fun. I'm looking in the podcast and I moving.

And so that's something right. There is 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 by hd brain doesn't like to do stuff unless it's shiny and fun, right? I can go to work and write this book because it's fun for me, you know? But so like, how can I do this? And so I ended up shelling out for a personal trainer.

Blew my advances on a personal trainer is great. And I go to see her. And a chief tells me what to do. So I have to think about IT and it's .

fun and you're in great shape, is older than I am and I haven't seen in a while. And I I always have this like slight feel when I run into a colleague event after a while because there was this joke that we didn't tell professors until we became professors about that. This so called ten years look, see someone coming as a postdoc.

You see them as a junior profession. Then you see them after ten years, yeah, and ten years. A big mile's stone course sponsors academic freedom, IT said. So it's a wonderful mile sense of onder ful thing that we both have this um but you see some people who got tell you just call goodness they look like there you know age twenty five 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 the I will I saw you on like treatment spot guess but then to see on my is taking great care of himself that makes me happy. It's not a judge 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 one federal time of my favorite scientists OK.

Let's not attach that saying to be so that I feel are .

out there anywhere dore's .

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 would presumedly gets you some sunlight um a lot of sunlight in Davis, even in the winter. Cloud covers bright up there, gets your own a regular sleep for them. 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 and now you train regularly and that's also an investment in your brain health. 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 understanding of how the brain works, your brain explorer after all and therefore the exercise and the money you put towards the trainers linked to the ability to that. Are you linking these nodes or are these kind of separate entities? Like I want to be healthier and here's a way to be healthier and go um i'll be around longer to .

study the brain to me and again, you know, i'm not a social psychologist at the little bit off how do my wheel husband to me the sense of purpose is kind of this existential thing of like, you know, I got ta take care of this stock and I got up, 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 you know I had was very, very fortunate to have many people leave my lab after the pandemic, which destroyed so many cars and many people left .

my lab and got faculty .

positions and like, so happy for them. Thank you. You well, good people know and so, uh but what was interesting was I had finished the book and my lab was relatively empty and I did feel purposes, 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. People will.

I got an email this morning as I was getting on the plane from so you asking me a question about memory as just like this is so cool. You know, after you spend years lecturing students and some of them were sleeping in class, and you want to, anybody really impacted by this? And this has been a beautiful thing.

That is me sense of purpose i've come up with. I've really rededicated myself to research, and we are 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 rest surch.

That gives me a sense of purpose. But a lot of IT to me about the connection thing that you bring up is super important because often I find myself again, because everything I for all of these things that I like, there are things that you have to do that suck. And for me, that sucker is uteri painful.

I mean, and I know there's live, I know A D H D is over diagnosed right now for reasons that are interesting um and I know a lot of people is very kind of fashionable to say stuff something like that. Maybe I don't know people who can be judged about the stuff, but for me he really is painful. I mean, I i've actually found that it's hard for me to work with certain people if they talk with, it's that tough.

So i've really had to think about. So I actually hooked up with an hd coach who has been phenomenal for me. And I know coaches are another controversy .

thing I do not in my world. You learned, you learned something from somebody who's skilled and 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 an unregulated world. So as peak criminally regulated. But the person I found was just amazing.

And the first thing he had me do was you put down, let me right down, a sheet of all my values and ordered them and rank them. And I like such a waste of time is story Lorry. But as they addition, this is such a waste of time.

Why am I doing this? I really value I I don't know. I just do things I don't necessarily value them or whatever. But 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 kind of infamous for having trouble getting things done that I don't want to do in terms of like administrative .

tasks and social scientists.

eighty and scientists .

that likes administrative stuff, I think i'm willing to call out as know. What are they do in in science? Because that's like to be focusing on experiment. So bravo. So values, motivation.

So basically it's like, so 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, I mean, in a way that goes back to the profundo cortex conversation is, what's my goal if i'm gonna see someone and have a meeting and I don't feel like going to the meetings, tired and I bore out or I wanted, just look at this youtube video or ongoing social media, whatever done the thing that I waste my time, and right, I say to us, so why am I doing this? And I remind myself of that motivation and IT kicks everything in gear, because now I have that go in place because the goal just doesn't pop up for me automatically. And so relating what I do to values is a game changer 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 are close to who are 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 scrawler or you know being radical zed 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 is really been to get in touch with what do I really want? And I mean, this goes back to another thing with memory I can I know is a total P D G preassured. But it's like um I can people often ask me, okay, fine, you give me all brain aging and we didn't even get into hearing aides and a vision testing .

hy gene .

and so far you talk three yes but um what I tell people as I can tell you lots of strategies for remembering names, for remembering where you and for trying to um remember like to do something in the futures, the hardest memory chAllenges we have. But unless you do them do those strategies, I can help you.

And the problem is, is that and this speaks to, I really like what you say, we do have talk about some exceptions like retrieve and do forgetting, and some interesting things like the protesting effect, but europe thing and study skills. I listen the pocket and is 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 adding house, he tested himself, and he actually, you created these weird words called programs that weren't really words.

Tried to memorize them and what he found was within twenty 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 mine. IT took him as long to remembered them as as if he had never done IT.

right? So sometimes we a partial memory, we can't recall IT, but we get some savings and its easier first learn, even even have IT out for a lot of the stuff. So then he waited twenty four hours, and he had lost two thirds of what he had memory as try.

So translate this into the real world. There are some things that are coffee as we do Better in the real world out, say, at the big things, that just what we care. But the details, we lose most of them, most of the details of your life, we will be gone.

And this is true for even I would argue this is even true for people highly spirit autobiographic memory you don't know for sure, but I can tell you more about that. Um this is true for for everyone who's been studied as far as I know. And so if that's the case, the question is not like why I so forgetful?

Why do you remember the first was why that titled for the book? And the question is, what do you want to remember? What are the memory is that you want to take with you, whether it's memorizing things for a class like a study skills or whether it's your kid's birthday party should took about chapter one. Um these are it's about intention is what I say is the difference in attention which can be grab b by anything this is intention which is saying this is what I want .

to take with me right hover on that attention versus in intention. We hear these words all the time. Attention is the direction of once perception to particular sensations or things in our environment this loosely defined um accurate but not exhaustive intention is understanding why we're 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 provenal cortex really comes. So it's very easy in some ways to pay attention to me if i'm like just stimulating and i'm talking very loudly because it's grabbing your attention constantly means face. I know lots of people of my life who hate because i'm so loud and .

speculate loud. Who are these people giving you this feedback? Send me their named in numbers, I words for them.

And in listen, I would say, given if you run a world class laboratory, you're successful in your family life, are successfully raising your second dog. You written in a spectacular book. You're going on podcast of education in the public.

I would say you're doing great. So keep going. And whoever these people are, we have work to that. I need like huberman s .

like words of encouragement on my phone that I could just open up. I don't want to take us off track.

but I spend a lot of time each morning I first stood in on sleep, deep pressed or some sort of meditation, recruit in to get into intention. And the other people have coming in my life recently, this notion of intention, reason. I said the tower on is so important because we are in a world where things will grab our attention, especially on social media.

Basic a war for attention yeah, I don't think it's an attention economy anymore. brilliant. I'm not trying take anything away from that, but it's a war for attention. And one of the ways that you rob your competitors is by taking their attention. Used to joke.

And I was in a very competitive area as a post talk, was competing against a big lab, harvard, and this and that trying to find genetic markers for retina. Neon is set up. And I said, if I could just get them excited about the wire, remember that show the wire? Yeah, because it'll suck like fifteen hours of those posters time.

So I thought, you know, be really die abolish. I didn't do IT, but you know, telling people like you have to see the wire, they know this and that know because you get someone on a really good netflix program and and if there are a competitor, you just got a competitive advantage yeah this being done all day long. In any case, attention is our ability to for our perception to be um drawn to whatever is most moving, most loudest, most salient. Um intention is different yeah .

and this is by the way, is in a technical terms as just I like rims and a friend might came up with that so 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.

hence the values list because if I don't keep that in mind so we tend to think of control is being just like willows or like you wanted, do the right thing or whatever. It's not it's really a big part. There are so many parts of IT really bit a big part of IT as 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 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 the having your attention if you wanted to be flexible, but you want to keep these higher goals in mind and such as baLance between stability and flexibility. Now the key is, are the gills get to your specific example of like technology, right? So ever since I got a phone, h that is a smart phone, my first iphone .

one was that mine was twenty ten.

Mine was more youtube Better than me I think maybe is around the as iphone three I think was my .

first yeah to look up.

I think I had the iphone three, which was whenever that came out here. So until then, I would check email when I inside 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 front, right? So let's let's play this out now.

We're having this great conversation. Let's we leave. We talk about skip boarding and punk rock and like, yes, why do we talk about this on the pokey? I were a very great conversation, right? But now let's say I didn't put my phone on focus mode and I start getting all these little beats on my phone.

I know people. I know. I played in a band with over two and A D H D. And you would cost any time we're in a conversation, you would just check this text messages and only text in front of me, right? So what happens is every time you do that, 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's 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 speeds. So i'm straining my metro resources.

I'm straining my code of control by shifting back forth. But here's an even worse part of IT. So a memory we have 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 neurons that shouts out loud hey, that's this conversation ahead with right?

It's like it's just kind of this blurry sense of I talk to someone on a podcast and getting this happened now because one but um so I have this blurry memory well, why does that happen? What part of IT is? You have to catch the distinctive moments of these events and you have to associate them together into this cohesive nara.

One of the things we found in our research, other people found win. Let's see if you're watching a movie and somebody changes the topic of conversation or character, comes in something that shifts your attention, focus and shifts your understanding what's going on. You see this big peak and activation in the hip campus.

And what that seems 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 under the next event and you have trouble remembering the stuff that happened right before the event.

It's why people end up in the kitchen and their like, what was my reason for coming here? And because they passed there, three different rooms, and there are sense of where they were, was changing their mental context, updated at the point where now they have to work to figure that 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 satis scientists, you know Better, are sitting typing emails while someone is giving. I've done this because I attention ally impaired, or I actually A D D is a cogent of control issue, I think, but not unless 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 ve got a little bit more.

I get 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 is super important to just do one thing and then do another. You wanted do social media fine.

Do IT then do whatever is you are supposed to you for work, right? But it's the shifting that really kills you because IT creates sap cog of control, is actually uh creates these fragmented memories that also actually increases stress levels. So there's all sorts of you know things. I know there's a lot of tech brows or just like, you know.

I multi task can greater or not from the area, spent a long time with those folks, 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 news.

And the ones that are doing a lot of switching often aren't don't have complete lives. They really got they're not taking care their health also. And they serve up to their sense that like they're working all the time when they are not.

As a graduate, I didn't have a smart phone. I did something recently. I tweet about this you may have commented about, I don't know, but this has helped me a lot um I took an old phone no um and I put social media on the old phone yeah and only social media.

So IT doesn't Operate as a phone I can um air drop things to. So I use that for looking at social media for posting that phone is in a box and then my my main phone is for um texting, other forms of communication. So I still have that distraction around me.

But social media is now IT dedicated thing that I spend a specific amount of time and I ve have a timer on that phone that so I know I allocate myself a certain amount of time each day. So for every moment I start that timer yeah once IT hit zero, that's IT. And i'm starting shorting that amount of time.

The impact on productivity in terms of writing, in terms of researching, in terms of just dropping in the conversation, IT has been enormous with that simple switch. And I just find IT easier to just segregate social media from the phone by the promise that the phone is it's like a walking office. It's not even it's a phone, it's a computer. It's is 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 were out of control, even though we feel like we're in control, right? And it's really if I have a higher goal, sometimes you have 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 learned off if I have a habit. I'm thinking about IT. And every time I think about IT that urged pops in the mind, i'm getting a little distraction of losing a little bit of exec control so you would have to do IT right. You can just think about IT. Um so in multiple is just one thing.

There's other things uh like, uh, one thing is that I talk about the book is taking pictures so you probably been to concerts I know I have where it's like 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 is a wall that exists so people could post instance. Nothing wrong with this, but most not all the research. Interesting and I can get into why h shows that taking pictures actually in povertie people's memory .

really yeah what about looking at pictures um of I think IT was Larry swee when I was down at santiago that said that hanging a few pictures are in your office of things that are really pleasant memories can really enhance your work environment because he looked them oh, I remember that like because of all the context that brings about we are saying that the act of taking pictures deplete our memory for that experience.

Let me be more specific about this, right? So let's say i'm mindlessly taking picture so I go in. I'm seeing the grand cannon.

Er 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 distinct development of their experience. They're just grabbing as much stuff as they can, right? Let's give the concert is another example.

If you are filming the concert and you're just trying to grab what's being song, you will have a recording of the concert, but what's the memory you want have? Do you want to have memory of the song that you already can stream any time? Are you at the memory of how you felt the friends you are with the connection that you had with the artist because you were there?

I know this sounds real hippy dippy, but it's real in the sense this is what you want to remember. I think at least I don't want lecture people. They want to remember taking pictures of things that, so i'm sure everybody remembers taking pictures at these things.

But what did you take a picture up? 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 queue that will remind me later of this great conversation.

I focus the camera on that take picture mine plan. Use the camera not as a way of spreading my attention and just grabbing everything in the shock and approach, but rather use IT to find what's a 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 over document. I'll take a picture. Uh, people laughing or people eating.

I like to go to conferences now. Uh, john list man used to do this. And late Johnny sen, so he passed away.

It's, and I try to do this. I think more about these things. So I tried to take pictures of people randomly.

You know, they are drinking a beer and then they spit out laughing or something like that. And these are not things that are like landMarks. There are not things that are tours up, but they're great retrieval cues.

And so what happens is the next part of IT is seeing the picture. Or what do you do when you see the picture right, you score right? Or do you use IT as A Q to effectively test yourself to recall what happened during that event and integrated?

Now it's interesting is, is that act of recollecting, the event in itself will change the memory, and IT can make IT more accessible, but you 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 documented. 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 one hundred times. So so that sounds like if we we gone on a vacation or to a show or something that taking a photo as long as its intentional of something specific, that will look the key is to look at IT later, not just posted, but to look at IT later, and to spend a few moments or more drawing to mind some of the emotional and cardinal experiences around that memory.

That, however, changes the memory, right? Any time we create a story, we're changing the memory but perhaps provide IT was a good experience that's Better than to not access the photo at all. But i'm struck by, as you are, that the number of people who you're taking photos at a concert, a friend of mine who's a very successful photographer um which allows photos of musicians, thinks this is the crazy 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 where you're described. 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 they are feeling. It's not like the friends they are with them what they talked about, you know it's it's more like, you know, uh, I I use this example in interviews apologies before seen this but it's like, uh I just um I got to see the descendants so i'm guessing .

cape or you probably yeah yeah I so I grew .

up listening to them in high school, but I never got to see them because all the great brands bands I get into broke up right before the black flag in the minute, man and so for and so when they reunited I was like I had an opportunity see them in club, uh, in h sacramento and so I saw them for the first time and what was I wasn't one of the kin staking photos I was actually watching but then there is a moment where bill Stevens in the drama who's super intense guy and really want to create force, be on the band.

Um he gets up and he starts walking towards the crowd and my lows like sit down, go back behind the drums and he's like, no, I want to say something and I was like, I going 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 for in his 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 take away. I have, you know, a lot of the songs they played, they did a good job on. But what I really took away from that was this connection that I really wanted when I was a kid, you know, and we experiencing that feeling of being a kid and hearing these songs when they were fresh and new for me. And so that that I know i'm sounding like kind of a hippy .

years of the is like a pen roller for two. That's good. Yes.

I got desire all over them.

No, no, it's I have a question that that um i'm hoping buying some of this together to taking photos and memories. 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 when I keep most of them manage at home polo ids 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 film on a camera. There's a waiting process. There's that you actually get to see the photo emerge over time.

I would bet even 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 usually people want to do another photo because they don't like the way they looked in the previous photo with polar you can do too many of those ah right kind of one and done maybe too and done. But I feel like the act of taking the the polaroid, waiting for the photo to emerge kind of scamped in your memory of the experience itself in the act of taking the photo is more involved. It's more of a process than just a click.

And then you see the photo later. Now, of course, with digital photography, you see that. But you can take hundred. You can 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 the conversations like this.

One of the reasons I do this podcast, the solo episodes and these interviews is that they provide something that my life prior to IT did not provide, which was depth. I mean, we'd just here. There's no phone here.

And if they are, they're off, right? And I feel like any time we go into these trenches could be a video game, could be an interaction with a loved one of various kind. And but when we go into these tunnels of attention, there's something that 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. Is there any relationship of this, of the focus system to release of doping? I know released 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 .

that's the question.

yeah. Hi, well, I don't know. I I wish I could give you an answers, I don't know. 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 is that I think that we often think of, you know, we think of like, let's say in 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 norad magic activity, right?

astrium. Yeah.

but it's like, I mean, well, that case that I could be if you survive.

you versed the catastrophe tion, 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 age sort of our energy c systems is that they capture lots of memory. They open up thoughts about what could have gone wrong yeah but if you didn't go wrong, you didn't go wrong, you're alive. You only need to remember to avoid whatever put 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. The surprisal is very important, you know um in the case of focus is a little bit different but just to make this very concrete, the preferences cortex has topped down inputs to many of the modulator system. So on average people tend to the think of the module tory systems like dupine in europe, our friend is 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 stronger focus, you can in fact regulate the document system, I think, a reasonable and or nor an effort nor agenor system. So I think it's a reasonable thing. And I I bet you amy or instant is dumb somewhere later. Work on this topic.

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. Could you share with us what's known .

about that is IT just starting to be a thing, but the effect sizes, for instance, for hearing raids, are really strong both in reducing eight risk, I believe, and in a alzheimer's risk and in just good cog into ageing and risk keeping your memory is get older.

so don't listen to your headphones too loud. This is right, right. Well.

actually, OK is big of things I did to preserve my brain health. I playing in a band now, we're pretty dam loud. So I got, I went to an audiologist and I got custom earplugs.

Oh yeah yeah. All the time i've been friends with some, some really amazing musicians. They all wear insert earplugs.

Oh yeah, yes. But I think these customers will be more effect at both preserving the spectrum of all the frequencies.

So I just protect your hearing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah no but yeah but they're related because if you can't hear your freak, this might end up turning up and you get this paradoxically think too much information, I do. But basically that is yes.

So uh there is this issue with in fact actually there is an article that the shares I sent me on in the last set that one of their um um public alth recommendations is to get into a preventative mode for preventing alzheimer's disease on one of the things they say is screen for hearing and give people hearing adds and and make people use them if they have, encourage people to use them. Uh, vision is starting to be a big one. People are older, get cat acts, get a treated, you know um a lot of this preventive health care, which which our system is not really equipped for IT.

But IT can really save so much money, can save so much emotional pain for so many people. It's really amazing. Another one we meant I mentioned briefly as all gum disease IT turns out increases your risk for, I believe it's alzheimer, and also for a cordial brain earth in general.

I did an episode on oral health, and the effects on, as you said, on brain health are amazing. If you strapped to ocs mutants, which is the bacteria that causes cavities, can fund its way into the bloodstream and potentially cross the blood brain barrier, which is, I think, why people think that might be detrimental to brain health.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, why? I don't know the detail mechanisms, but I I think that and there is a fake notion of cogent 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 all time mery.

So what is IT? One of the things that seems to come up as far as deleting cognitive s putting at a high risk seems to be um information right no information. And uh so chemically stars you know was doing work on on this topic of neural union interactions.

And basically the immune system expresses itself in the brain. You get microbial activation that can causes and flame responses, and reasonable evidence suggests that it's interacting with tow and employed in this kind of casket of stuff that happens and all on 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, as long coat is associated with significant cost effects .

and brain is that a the explanation for the brain fog? The people report well.

so they they report a subjective brain fog. And you can see this, you can measure this as a significant cognitive deficit that they are 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 transport sion.

Um we can like you can see with multiple scroll is where you have like otto ammon e uh, responses in the brain affect mental functions dramatically. We're seeing more and more evidence of this. So this is again another one of those things like people go, oh coit, I don't care about IT, but I mean is a health thing that can really affect people and I can I don't think anybody is not a political issue to get brain fog.

Is the socks right? Nobody wants. So I I think that there's a lot we're learning about viruses and bacteria. One of the the cool things are I was talking about before we started recording is um I was out of conference and with the cool sky and i'm blanking on his knee but but all entity after um but he's uh he did this great study and he studying the effects of nutrition on brain health and memory special recognition and so what's the most interesting finding that you've gotten? I love to ask people those because of curious that it's stimulates my curiosity and usually get a good answer.

So he told me to the study where he has these rats and he gives them sugary water during the day about the equivalent, he said to a kind of coke a day. So they're getting the sugar. When they reach adult hood, you know, these teenage rods, they reach adult hood, and they have memory problems.

And they do. They have hip camp atrophy. So you OK, well, the hip campus is affected. Memories, affected. Sugar, no problem. So what he does, he takes the gut bacteria from the sugar animals and puts in in an animal that doesn't get this style. 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 good brain interaction is also seems to be playing a part in ways that I don't understand. I think they're still figuring out. But again, this this really shows this tight neural immune you and we're seeing this now with pollution.

Air pollution is a big factor, so even if people don't believe in global warming is nothing good about being in a place with a lot of smoke in the know it's uh it's definitely can. And this is one of the risk factors that is noted in the landsat report for alzheimer's disease of one of my colleagues. Uh pam line is doing research on this site.

You see Davis showing that you get like SHE actually takes real pollution from the called cot tunnel which connects oaklands on and yeah yeah and finds that rats exposed to this pollution have a cample damage uh um so it's there are so many of these environmental factors that can trigger the inflaming response. We talked about blood sugar. Blood sugar also seems to be related to these issues.

So um and diabetes is like so bad and so many ways IT. It's associated with those White matter, hyper intensities 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 if you can get if you get severe diabetes kito aedas, you can actually have hyper cample damage from that directly and IT also dramatically increases all timers or even epidemic of diabetes right now.

But this probably explains at least of my mind why these lifestyles tors like improve sleep Carter vascular and resistance training exercise. But certainly cardiff asked lar exercise. Eating a lot of leaf leafy fords at sea.

We know all of those things off set information to some degree, or right. I mean, one, the best ways to inflame your brain and body is to not enough sleep. And you know a lot of highly process foods, for instance, 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 employ that are producing some modest effects, installing the progression of the disease. See the problem with alzheimer as you know, is once you lose neurons, you're not getting them back grade and it's like gathers neo genesis and you can run around that.

It's it's not much not you don't want to if you're depending on that your host do you know so um like but getting back to the exercise thing, it's neuroprotective. And so like let's save with a drug, right? I mean, everybody wants a truck.

If I told you I give you this drug, you sixty years old and it's going to have some terrible side effects, you're gna get the all stop, but it'll reduce your risk of all timers before percent. A lot of people will be motivated, taken. Now I tell you OK, well, here's a lifestyle and intervention that's going to involve what ceremonial calls downs tes doesn't have.

We can actually get into that in a memory reactivation during downstage, but um um involve sleep, diet, exercise, social stimulation, right and these things, by the way, also reinforce each other. Having Better sleep makes the user exact having extra SE makes are 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 forty percent, if not more.

Oh um if you go to, I can send you the silencer 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 bigger, 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, today we have some OK treatments for parkinson's to try and offset the loss of dopa neurons. They can even transplant essentially dopo energia neurons into the substantial grow. But none of those things aldobrand that have proved to be cures for parkinson's. Um not getting hit in the head helpful oh yeah yeah traumatic .

entry is one big. So there are lot of .

don't i'm grateful that today you're sharing a number of and both in the context of offsetting age, rely, cognitive decline, alzheimer, but also in terms of how to enhance focus and enhances memory. Um I want to make sure that we touch on a few topics, relate the memory that a little bit of the trajectory were on now, but that come up a lot when people start thinking about memory and one that kind of intriguing, very intriguing, is daily. O 嗯， do we have any understanding about what deja vu is? Is that just like a recollection of something similar, that spontaneous ly get triggers red.

um what is daja? U well, it's not fully understood, but give you my best guess that science based, and not just my wildly speculating completely, but basically one of the early findings that gave you sense about what the ijaw who is, is healings Jackson, who is this great news logic, who did pioneer work in behavioral neurology, observe that many patients who get apple psy would have this, or as the mental sensations right before a seizure, where they would get an intense feeling of asia.

That doesn't happen in everyone, but a certain number. And this is so sea with temporal by pileup in the hip campus, as you know, is in the temporary low. But there's also these areas are rounded that are super important for memory um um including the middle a but also really the parietal cortex is is a key key player in this answer the um so then you have wilder pen field and other people who started to do these surgeries for epytus y and they said, well, I want to make sure i'm not taking out good brain, right? You don't want so pnd field wasn't responsible for H M, and that was like kind .

of an irresponsible surgery. M is is a now dead famous patient and literally chapter in the history of neuroscience that somebody who had his hip campaign illegally, one on your side, the brain removed to treat epilepsy um IT fixed the epilepsy but he had a lost all capacity to remember prior events yeah .

and so in fact I had this dense, dense amusa right? And actually one of the little known things, even in memory research, is he actually lost hit what's called a temporal lobe to me, or they just hack off the front part of the temporal lobes and might have been cauterized. I I can't remember the, I think he cauterized IT, but anyway, they do that temporal.

Look back to me. He actually had the poster one third of his hippo campus, but he had lost his parrino cortex by laterally. And that turned out to be bec married and age later. And other people should turned out be huge thing. So one of the reasons, I think, that he became so densely amissing is that he was bilateral.

So if you think about the brain, like have side of the brain that's causing seizures, you kind of get a spare tire on the other side, or it's like the 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 scovel did that.

You actually did IT for people who H. M. Has apple absa as a legit Operation and that has been good for people.

I think psychosis to depression mean, back then they just did all kinds of crazy stuff so um uh but pen field was like, no, I want to make sure I take out only the tissue that needs to go. What do you do? You stimulate different parts of the brain, and you see, does IT produce anything other than the season.

And if so, that's not an area you want to remove. And so you would go into the entire 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 dasia vu.

Or it's like they feel this I feel like I 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 in andy on lenna said U.

C. Davis was a really central to a lot of the stuff found that the perrino cortex, which is this areas, 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, using the book an example of, like if I say, have you eaten a Roberton before? Now you being a world guy.

might have you even a robot on?

I don't know what. okay. So how quick was IT that you were able to say? No.

you're able to think about that.

So you didn't have to search your entire memory for whether or not you've norbiton, you know because it's so unfamiliar, right? So things that are highly familiar, like you know, maybe i'll ask if you in a banana before grapes before you, you can say yes, because and partly you you have to remember any instance IT just feels right. You know, those are very familiar things to you.

Have you ever seen a great before? Yes, of course you have right apple very familiar to people. So we just have that general fluency and you can look at this like I um you go into the grocery store and you see someone and you're like, I know i've seen this person.

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're in expecting them at this context is and no episode memory is triggered. But there is something about the features that felt very fluent and natural to you and trigger that sense of familiarity, and that seems to be processed. And you can see brain activity associated with that in the pario inal cortex.

And people with damage to the person. Core tax seem to not differentiate between the robot in 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 rebeca burwell, a Brown university of the cools experiment that doesn't nearly get, you know, how science you get, these unsung hero experiment.

Well, this is one of them where SHE stimulated in rats, uh, the peruonto cortex at this frequency called the beta frequency, which is kind of a relatively low frequency association, and basically put to objects in front of the the animal. And so like typically if there's a new object, the animal will spend more time like we expLoring IT, right? And depending on how SHE timed the stimulation, SHE could make the animal think that her familiar object was nwf one SHE stimulate tes.

That a different frequency, I think, was gamma. And the animal now thinks, uh uh, actually was like, yes. So he thinks that the animal thinks that a familiar thing is novel with beta, was that I thought a novel thing was familiar, so could literally use the stimulation to change the way the animal is interacting with, and presume a memory driven away with this object.

So for those looking for novelty in different domains of life.

maybe this is the solution maybe yeah and so, uh, and clearly just close the loop here, who's a great researcher, color state develops this beautiful paradigm. What he does is, is okay. Well, does that relate to this? Oh, well, let's see.

So what you do is use virtual reality. And so in virtual reality, you can create these environments and, you know, put objects in particular places. And so you create these virtual environments where their particular objects, in particular places.

And let's see, one's a museum, right? So person can go through passive and watch a movie. They actively navigate through these spaces.

And then what he does is he has them go through the video ark, but unbeknownst 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 shaped the spacing layer. You know, everything is identical, just it's got a different skin on its, so to speak, for video gamer.

So what happens is people are much more likely, very likely to produce a dash of us sensation when they're in these places, these virtual environments that look very much like where they have been, but they're mismatching in some critical way. So if 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 familiar you get.

And by, though i've watched these movies and I cannot for life of me see that the museum is the same as the ark and just feel so different codify. But you know, I can imagine being like if I really did immersive ly having that sense of familiar. So you really pinting these things in opposition to each other.

And so what likely happens with dash vu is something uncanned that triggers a little bit of memory retrieval or a strong fluency. But then there's a mismatch that surprises didn't prevents that. The a context from coming up.

I'd like to talk about the relationship between memory and mental health for the following reason. I'm very struck by the fact that in experiments such as the work that call dara, who was actually the first guest on this podcast, brilliant um no engineer of course in psychiatrist described in which um he is talking to patient who's depressed um this patient has a stimulator for the vagus nerve that can crank up stimulation the vagus nervy and essentially that the narrative goes from this patient to believe as a woman in this case talking about being suicidally depressed SHE can't anticipate doing anything of any interested excitement to her increasing vegal stimulation which by the way folks does not just calm people down. Vegal stimulation actually creates a lot of alertness.

So this is A A vast mst conception out there that vegal stimulation is all about coming. In any case, as the vegal stimulation goes up, her narrative literally changes in real time too. Yeah I could see myself going out and applying for a job.

I'm kind of excited about the future. That said, are 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 a build right now conceptual is that there are two papers that um intrigued me.

One is a paper from liberta, a face lab in pizza which had a paradigm for expLoring learn helps nesses in rodents, which is of a model for depression, how long rotten is willing to swim in water to save its life before he gives up. And there's a learned helplessness ness that eventually rise, these yes or not kind experiments um but at some point they give up and then they ve essentially learn their helpless, and of course, they save the animal before IT dies. But these animals, given a essential asset, I like prosaic, um can restore some sense of hope, meaning theyll swim longer after having learned to be helpless.

And is the recovery of depression we don't know. But in humans you see some of the same thing. When s have been effective, they are not always effective. You also see this in some of the silicide and trials where people have .

done the suicide and therapy .

the correct context. And now over sun, people have this completely different emotional version of the same events, like yet a bunch of terrible things happened or with the md. Ma trials for ptsd controversial right now, if D I didn't to prove IT, but a good number of patients describes in 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 there's maybe even forgiveness at at ta. So to me, this is this is a shift in memory brought about by a dramatic shift in neuromodulators. Access arise, of course, increase are toned south. I an increased sertorius. And is interesting to me that dma wallet increases dopamine, most dramatically increases serotonin 7x or more in terms of the now i'm not suggesting anyone do these drugs。

You can blow out the service generic system with too much of IT.

with much, too much M D A, M A. Although the studies on this is interesting because the study that claimed that M M D M A did that actually was retracted, IT was out inadvertently used methods to me. Keep in mind folks, that md ma is method, dioxin method federman. So i'm not suggesting .

anyone do these drugs.

I'm using this as as a concept in clinical trials. It's clearly been shown both for us as arise as well as for suicide. And these are still emerging clinical trials and m dma 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 at ta is based on memories about failures of past yeah or harms .

of past rumination, basically.

So what is the relationship between the serotonin system and memory? Or what is the relationship more broadly of the these new modulator systems are the vegal 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 leading into life again. What is that .

again you sir tones like a neuromodulator IT enhances plasticity and ah what I mean by that is that if you have like a transit learning event, you will get a change in the connections between neurons that were active during that effect and super interesting work right now going on a behavioral time scale plus to see if so, such ourselves a wired together fighting is more interesting actually or fire together, wired together, it's more interesting.

But those changes can often be transit ent in what people so like A R andel differences, one who studied serotonin in particular and emphasize this, but basically many neuromodulators. If you give a little bath of these by these neurons in in uh um serotonin or other modulators, you stabilize that plasticity. And that allows you know increases in recept density between these around that allow them communicate more effectively.

Now you can get weakening and ltd to will get into that. But but satan and definitely promotes plasticity, right? And so one of the things I talk about in my book is that memories are, we all have plasticity.

As they said, retrieving a memory can allow us to change the memory in certain ways and 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 is that feeling of the context. There is that emotional response that we have, that both a kind of a basic, raw motivation, my hearts racing, or something like that, as why people often say, well, emotion, emotional memories are stored in the body.

What's this part of the memory? It's a retrieval. cute. So as big can be also be part of the retrieved experience. But you have all these factors going on that are part of the emotional memory.

And then you have a story that you create, a narrative that used to make sense of IT, and that affects all these psychological systems too, right? So every time I use, 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 the narrow at how loud in you to lie.

Member, hang out with you. You were loud, then you're not loud now. And so now I can update these memories.

Maybe, yes, yeah, exactly. I can reframe IT. right? And these framing effects are huge. So in theory, people can take an experience of traumatic.

And many people do and say, this made me who I am, and i'm happy with who I am now. Even those a horrible thing. I'm stronger for IT or am a survivor, or, you know, I couldn't have done anything about IT and it's not my fool.

And or you can have these narratives of shame and so forth and guilt and anger. And so far that nothing i'm not judging anybody's reaction to trauma, but what I am saying is that part of the emotional response is part of the memory that people construct. The problem is, is that with traumatic memories, when they do stick, it's hard to change because there is so much plasticity driven by the modulators during that event with P, T, S, D.

And we could talk with that whole other thing, but just as take traumatic memories, there's it's so intense and the amiga, a response drives the physiology in many cases of that arousal, which makes you feel like this immediate cy of rain and infect sleep in. Now there is also, but stay out P, T, S, D. Forever, because that's whole other thing. But those memories are very resistant because of that intensity. And often the more you retrieve them, we re traumatize ourselves.

So reframing, in a cognitive therapy sense, is very difficult because they feel this in their brain, is calling them, i'm under threat or i'm ashamed because they're reinforce this narrow sometimes, and you can work through the logic, but sometimes you need to create some big prediction error to generate some air driven learning when you talk about or you need some kind of help. So if you're driving your module ory systems like that theoretically could give you a broader window plasticity. In fact, actually, we're trying process of my dog and one of the things that uh that I seem that he is very anxious .

and .

very like a like she's just in this to the point where should not exercise even though she's a very active dog sh'll stop on a walk if he hears a garbage truck anywhere. And so it's a very low dose.

I'm not i'm not generally and go drug your talks, but i'm just saying that the story that i've heard is, is that you get the spirit of plasticity where you can kind of rewrite some of these behavioral patterns and make them more open and training. And so for that does even have you a permanent thing, right? And I think a lot of these things, like your time to learn, help us studies probably transient effects of not being honor for years or something, but it's not very effective in terms of S S. arise.

But so cyber and psychology have shown a lot of promise as being bigger effects, right? And these produce massive plasticity. There's two things I think they're really interesting about IT. So my name, by the way, Davis, I would just say I bias, but it's one of the top three places in the world for learning a memory research.

And so I next or day for David, all so IT turns out is studying psychiatric effects on plasticity and and um so he really emphasizes that there these massive neurotrophic tors B D N F like all these factors that are going on their promoting plasticity. And you know for people who have taken them, that's what they report, is that there's this period of integration afterwards for your brains, just like. You know you can feel everything 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 opening plasticity.

Plasticity is just an opportunity for learning new contingencies, right? Just taking psychedelic is an experience, but 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 therapies that the mirror of having plasticity, plasticity is an opportunity for learning. It's not the actual .

learning that's right. IT opens up like significant opportunities for reshaping ah but the second part of IT, which maybe I think is is really interesting, is there is also a deserted development of these drugs academy is in a psychiatric, but I think there are some interesting plasticity effects and definitely produces this association development too. But um with uh uh psychiatrically there is 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 the perspective that we adopt when we remember.

And research has shown that you can take the same encoding event, meaning like I tell you stories, to 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 of someone else and you're trying to remember IT, you can remember things that you didn't even 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. Dilating is crazy effects from pacelle, but you're seeing IT. And it's not you there are some deeper cell fear feeling whether it's true.

you have a sense of agency in there. Yeah some of the psychodeviant s i've never tried this one um but there are interesting studies of ibogaine e boga where the universal the experience as I understand, is that people is twenty two hours long. It's actually cardiovascular.

Sk, there's some things that need to be offset there. So don't run on do this folks. But people, i'm told, get a high definition movie of specific events in their life that actually happened only when they close their eyes.

So I know who, listening 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 search 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 psychiatric stuff is over hpc and there's not some of the science is quite bad in that field right now.

Apps are being retracted now yeah.

yeah, yeah. I do think that some of the concerns they had in the F, D, A, 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 contacts that you have when you pull up the memory. So you have a real opportunity for memory updating.

And there is 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 your modulators again to really promote resealing of the memory, so to speak. But IT can also be if you interpret IT, you can raise 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 giving me this Normally gives me this physiological response, IT sets off the train of thoughts, and it's associated with this physical and mental context. And I can dramatically, I can access the news, but ramada reshape the context and dramatically reshape the narrative. I've created the opportunity, a massive change.

I don't know if that's true, but IT sure makes sense to me. That's the case. Now having said that, if you and me share a traumatic elements of our childhood, i'm sure we go.

I do this for quite a few hours, right? That into of itself will also produce some change to our memories. It's very powerful.

And I saw this in the clinic where I was doing group therapy with vietnam. That and i'm like, i'm a total fraud. D, i'm like, earn up twenty seven years old, twenty eight years old. And i'm like in with these, like, you know, vietnam vets in their fifties, we'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 for me, but also from other members of the group who they can relate to that are different from their narrative. And now, of a sudden, what happens is the memory is no longer theirs is a collective memory that 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.

Rain and I, I, and we can just take a much more water down version of this, where how many times you had a terrible experience? And IT became a great story. I basically say that there is no point in having a bad experience in life if you don't get a great story out of that, right? So I talk to the book about a near death experience at paddle boardings. And as everything about this was stupid, like the degree I could say, you pictures of you look, oh my god, what was he thinking?

I made, i've made foolish errors in 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 that some of the stupid stuff that we did um even N S kids like bridge James and without testing water depth and stupid stupid stuff yeah um that I don't recommend anyone repeat but you write the the the surviving stories are uh you Carry those forward yeah .

yeah exactly exactly is the .

other stories we can talk about people are paralyzed, dead and that those stories .

exist too yeah yeah and well, to be clear, it's like I felt horrible during that experience and that was one of the most immediately fear inducing experiences of head. But later me in randa ri computational nerisse ze friends, we both did the stupidist together. We would tell the story tag team and knew he told her to students and friends and over and IT just became funny. And so each time we told IT, IT just became kind of funny funk and you start to embrace sh things that so far. And so that change of perspective was really drawn out by sharing and seeing people, staff and see you 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 keep in mind there are people who do this that they say, like, i've had a really traumatic experience, but i've learned from, 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 drama tize by and they Carry with them. But what I am saying is, is that the memory so as big I think in neusatz right now, there's a big hot topic about n grams as if a bunch of neurons is the memory. But every time we have memory work, painting a new picture, we're creating a new novel.

Well, I think this is where people have to be very careful not to. Cowboy post max stress disorder treatment in a way that um allows the narrative to make IT worse because people we at previous guests on this podcast has this notion of um in describing this of story funding 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 then either the real events were or just simply worse within their body and mind and then they have to live that forward so I can go both ways which points to the key, which is to do this with really trained professionals.

Yeah yeah and it's it's all about like because you can retrain, matiz yourself and this is also why rumination is so bad and 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, recall more negative memories. And then every time you recall them, now they're getting more power because they are associated .

these negative mood. So reelection is really blade.

Oh yeah yeah. I mean, look at like so if you take something like reminiscent or nostalgic, um so the original term nostalgia, a credibly be deregister toys. A philosopher scientist, 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 of post traumatic experience that soldiers had where they will get so wistful about their home that I just made the miserable in the places that they were at.

It's um been referred to as the pain .

of an old wound I and .

uh um so I can the research .

shows that can have very positive effects on mental health right and IT connect positive effects on mental health if you use that as a way of saying, hey, this is just a great thing that happened. I'm grateful for that but you can become toxic if you're like, my life used to be so great and now it's terrible even if it's positive reminiscences.

If you come into IT with the wrong attributions IT can become negative of toxic and I can contaminate your present, right? I mean, the past has got good and it's got bad and it's just like the present has got good and it's got bad in IT. And it's really all about whether the narratives you're constructing for IT in many ways. And that plays a big part in the dynamic, malleable, constantly shaped, 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's land squarely in the conversation we pad until now, which is your love for and your participation in rock and roll. You have a band right pavlov's dogs yeah actually .

a couple billions now think.

please. Okay, what are the other ones called?

Well, so pavlov's dogs or verses like, uh, a band of neuroscientists and and psychology uo. Scientists who met, actually, most of us met at a memory meeting actually. And so, uh, we get together at conferences and we will rent out a club and will play basically, uh uh brad calls its skinny time music.

It's like is the original .

music or covers covers that ones a cover back cover o and so we will play like the moons the clash came for um it's a lot of work that you know we had a blind and she's .

still turning she's .

went .

on to our wether yeah there's been called support surface who is on tour was once yeah danged from surface no yeah that great band and SHE tored ond onis amazing still supervisors actually surf board and and and danny, what instrument do you .

play I play guitar and I also do vocals vocals um sort yeah and reluctant .

because .

sometimes is talking are being off key yeah .

can people find links to any people of dog live shows or recordings online?

I think we have some recordings on youtube and if you look at our face the page um maybe your instagram two, we have live recordings.

okay, and you have a show coming up. We will put a link to that, that because people will listen to this long after that, presuming that's coming up in chicago in october.

I think it's the seventh is at the monday.

put a link to that. So so as they can make IT because most of us are in chicago, including me, unfortunately will keep you out for pavlos dogs. 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. 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 hack that I came up with because it's like with the cover and we practice like we cramp. It's the worst that is not space learning is like we we go through the songs and we keep adding and taking away songs, but it's like will cramp for like I know about eight hours 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, want to play songs that i've written and so there's always everything and then I get nervous. So I 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 year.

I did with people lose dogs. I wear sunglasses and IT was great. He was because then I wasn't attuned to them, and I was I just goes back to what I just kind of with the camera 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. And there's a whole interesting literature choking under pressure that actually relates to this idea like and 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 when I do live shows, I like to have the house slights relatively dim. I don't want to see anybody at first. And then as they get more comfortable and happy to have the house lights come out because I don't play anything, I do live events.

I talk about science yeah, where I tell stories about science and scientists. Okay, couple of things are right in the front of my mind. And i'd be remissions.

I didn't see 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.

bring up the turkish of Davis.

the turn we didn't. Um second of all, I want to thank you for writing your book why we remember because it's a fantastic exploration of the modern understanding of memory still some of the mysteries that remain but um this is a field that's evolved a lot and and you captured so much of the incredible findings there over the years in a very pleasant 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 you're understanding about memory and also you're sharing of your experience with adhd and some of the tools you use, some of the struggles I think i'm all too often people hear about these know scientists or physicians are people who are authorities on the topic and they don't hear about the the chAllenges they face. And I assure you that a great, great many people will appreciate the fact that you yourself 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 family man, professor, author, now public educator, dog owner a second time around and um you know for that and for a great many other reasons, you've educated us and you've given us a great many practical tools also great to see you as a fellow punk rocker and old friend and I even let you call me andy so thank thank so thanks. We're coming here today and please do come back again.

Charm oh, I would love to thank you dry. It's has been great to be here.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about memory and A D H D with doctor charin wrong enough 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 podcast, please submit our youtube channel.

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