Mnemonology (MEMORY) Part 2 with Michael Yassa

Remembering names! Preventing dementia! Photographic memories! Weed! Goldfish! It’s the thrilling conclusion of Mnemonology with Dr. Michael Yassa, the Director of UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. We talk long vs. short term memories, how smells can pack a wallop of emotions, prosopagnosia (“facial blindness”), the fog of new parenthood, Alzheimer's and other causes of dementia, and tips to keep your brain in tip-top shape. Let’s make some mems.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:43Alie Ward?

  If you are a PhD student, postdoc, or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with a people-not-projects approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. You can find your program at HHMI.org/ologies. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on: sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that

• 1:27Alie Ward?

  information together to help you see patterns across your sleep and stress, activity, and more, so you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at AuraRing.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Oh, hey, it's still the fountain at the mall that's never on. Ali Ward, you are here for part two of Neimanology: Memory. Please tell me that you started with part one. Even if you don't remember it, start with part one because this is the thrilling conclusion. With professor, researcher, and the director of UC Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. He's amazing. We're going to get into it, but first, this is a wall-to-wall episode of questions from patrons. And if you'd like to submit some time, you

• 2:10Alie Ward?

  too can join for as low as a buck a month. And upper tiers can submit audio questions. Thank you also to everyone getting Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And thanks to everyone leaving us reviews, which boosts the show so much. And each week, I remember to read them all. And I pick a just-written one, such as this one from Sula Singh, who wrote, "This podcast saved my life. It's like spending an hour at the most amazing library ever, where you find exactly the right book that you didn't know that you needed." Sula Singh, and everyone who's ever left a review, I have read it. And thank you. Welcome to the library. Okay, on to part two, where we answer your questions about how to remember names and faces, what causes Alzheimer's, photographic memory,

• 2:53Alie Ward?

  short-term versus long-term memory, how to prevent dementia, cannabis and memory, goldfish brains, and why smelling sunscreen makes you want to cry sometimes, with neurobiologist, professor, researcher, and memory expert, mnemonologist, Dr. Michael Yassa.

• 3:28Alie Ward?

  Oh, I have questions from listeners. Can I ask you one million?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 3:31Alie Ward?

  You're the best. Okay. So this question was on the minds of patrons Esoparty, Elsa T., who's a first-time question-asker and face-name-forgetter, Diana Stareznik, Dean, Lilly B., and audio-question submitter Summer. Wanted to know...

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Hi, Ellie. Summer from New Zealand here. What I find really interesting is that I remember faces, but sometimes I can't remember where I've seen that person before, even in what country I've seen them. And I'm wondering why we're so good at recognizing faces and remembering knowing a face.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  But knowing none of the details around that face.

• 4:12Alie Ward?

  What is it about remembering certain aspects of a person or a connection? I know some people have total face blindness as well. Either evolutionarily, or how do we look at faces where we blank and say, who is that person?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a fantastic question, Summer. So you've already mentioned one version of this, which is face blindness, right? And I'm not saying that Summer has face blindness at all. In fact, I think all of us struggle with faces to an extent.

• 4:43Alie Ward?

  So this condition is medically known as prosopagnasia. And a 2023 study in the journal Cortex titled, "What is the Prevalence of Developmental Prosopagnasia? An Empirical Assessment of Different Diagnostic Cutoffs", found that developmental prosopagnasia, meaning it's lifelong and not caused by injury to the brain, is more common than previously thought, and that it lies on a spectrum of severity. I was doing some reading on it from people who have it to try to figure out what it feels like. And I've read it described as seeing a tree and then trying to pick out that specific tree in a forest, or telling the difference between two different cows in a field.

• 5:25Alie Ward?

  And if this sounds like you, and if you watch movies wondering, wait, is that the same guy? Or is that a different guy? You may be 1 in 33 people who have it. Which is cool, but also awful. So don't let anyone make you feel too bad about it.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Now, faces are a very important piece of information. When you look at somebody's face, you can tell by their expression whether they're a threat to you, whether they're a friendly person you can choose to approach or avoid. You can base a lot of your decision making based on a face. If somebody's face has an expression of fear, and they're looking behind you, they might warn you to something, and you might react accordingly. So we evolved, and not just our species, many social species have evolved, to try to always interpret faces and facial expressions.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  But recognizing a face and remembering whether a face belongs to a certain name is this thing that happened much later in evolution.

• 6:17Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  And I don't think our brains are just very good at it yet. I think we're developing that, but we're still sort of half-baked when it comes to connecting names and faces. So number one complaint that I hear from everybody is, I remember faces, but I could never connect them with when did I see this person, what their name is, or sometimes I'll hear the name and I can't recall the face, but then I connect when I see it. So face names, associations like that, they tend to be the most challenging for us humans. But one of the reasons why faces are really important is because of this evolutionary survival, sort of significance, things around fear, things around pleasure, reward, all of that. We get our cues, a lot of our cues from faces.

• 6:56Alie Ward?

  I learned a trick once on a film set where one guy I worked with, it was Adam Savage from Mythbusters, he knew everyone's name on this huge set we were on. I was like, how do you do that? He was like, okay, I have this trick where that woman's name is Dorothy, and I think of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. That person's name is Ben, and I have a brother-in-law named Ben. And so as soon as they said their name, you had to pay attention, but then you made a connection.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, there's lots of folks out there who try to train you on how to make your memory system better, and many of them, you might know, there are memory champions out there, they're sort of memory grandmasters out there. And they've learned tricks that have been used by the Greeks for a long time, ancient Greeks, I should say, like mind palaces and so on. And all of these methods are based on forming strong, personal associations. So if you have never seen The Wizard of Oz, it wouldn't have made sense to you.

• 7:48Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  To associate it, right? But if you've seen it and you can picture the Dorothy in the exact movie, right, that makes it much more personal. So they tell you to try to be able to remember people's faces and names, make that something that is emotionally significant to you, but making those connections and making them as vivid as possible seems to be the trick that works for most people.

• 8:10Alie Ward?

  So I hope that helps. Clay Trover, Sarah McKeechurn, Eric Gidseg, Jennifer Frowe, Elise Weible, Hannah Nolan, Jacqueline Church, Gnome's Lormore, Bennett Vander Bosch, Eileen Lanz, Kent Durbinless, Zolika Pevick, Callie Fong, Kelly Larson, Carleen DH, and Connor They Them, all of whom say that they are garbage at remembering names. It's okay. Obviously, based on that list, you are not alone. And patron Jackie G. said that a tour guide shared this tip with them, that you introduce yourself first, then you can actually listen when other people say their names, instead of mentally rehearsing your own introduction. And Jackie G. says it's amazing and has worked wonders for me. So perhaps that'll make some of you less anxious. Oh, speaking of anxiety, and trauma, and emotions in general, many,

• 8:54Alie Ward?

  many of you, little miss particular, Camilla Gamino, Susan Singley, Maddie Cakes, Popsicle Emperor, Joshua Towson, Sarah Argueda, Rowan Tree, Michelle Gregos, Ally Brown, Patricia Evans, Katie Hammond, and Rachel Persaco wanted to know how emotions affect retention. And Nick Alston asked, what's the chemistry behind emotional memories? And also, patron Ryan asked-

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Hi, this is Ryan from Los Angeles. I was wondering if you could speak to the effects that negative emotions, such as shame and guilt, have on working memory and long-term memory?

• 9:25Alie Ward?

  Are people who experience heightened emotions, either with anxiety, or pretty happy people, do they, do they keep those memories more because there is more of an emotional connection?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  There's no doubt that having an emotional connection strengthens the way that you store a memory. So certainly, if you tend to have much more emotional reactions to things, or the experiences that you're having are much more emotional, they will have the capacity to be stored for longer, to be able to influence your actions and decisions for longer. And again, there's the evolutionary significance for that. Of course, more emotional things may be a little bit more involved in your survival, right? That said, emotion doesn't always improve your ability to store things. It colors the experience for sure, but it also kind of zooms in on certain aspects of the experience and zooms out from others.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  So you may recall certain details incredibly well, but there may be other things that are kind of lost on you because of the emotionality. So it creates this competition between some central features of the experience and then a lot of the peripheral stuff kind of doesn't win out in that competition and that can be forgotten.

• 10:36Alie Ward?

  Many of you wondered about what is normal, given our very chaotic and technological world, such as ologist from the Caribology episode, Megan Lynch, Amelia Frank, Ginny Bateman, Katie Britt Klein, Margaret Anuska, Miranda Panna, Regular K, WASP's ologist, Eric R. Eaton, Rachel M., Megan Walker, Tiny Nature, and first time question askers, Julie Williams, Chelsea Loves Chocolate, Theo Klein, Tara Villanova, and some folks who are distracted by stress, Dawn Ewald, Holly Cole, Eric Masterson, and Helen Langill. I wonder if our lack of presence, because we're distracted a lot with our phones and internet stuff, I wonder if that lack of presence is making our memories a little bit more Swiss cheesy.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  I like this, Swiss cheesy. It's a good way to think about it. Certainly every time that I've lifted up my phone and tried to record a video of my daughter playing basketball as opposed to put the phone down and actually watch her play, I feel like I have Swiss cheese in my brain.

• 11:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  So 100%, I think that you're right. When we replace actually experiencing something in its full glory, three dimensionality and all of that, with some 2D version of what we're recording on the phone, or being distracted by looking at something at the same time and not being fully aware, fully cognizant of what's happening, of course, it's going to change how these memories are stored and how they're represented. And I do worry about that. I think that, you know, there's no doubt that there's value to having the electronics and having, I mean, look at us, we have, our devices are out all the time.

• 12:06Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  And that's just the nature of what we have to do to be able to deal with the situations around us and the rapidly kind of evolving world and all of the stimulation. But I think it misses something about experiencing something. Fully and truly with all of its three dimension, four dimensionality, I should say. And with all the emotional contexts that come with it, right? And to be able to have that genuinely, you have to be there. So immersion, I think, is really key for good memory storage.

• 12:34Alie Ward?

  So those four dimensions are like a 3D object on the X, Y, and Z axes, but with the added dimension of time. It's interesting because we're experiencing it less in the moment, but we're able to recall it more with that video footage. And it's such a weird trade off that it's like, well, I can remember it later as long as I don't fully experience it now.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  It is a weird trade off because what you remember based on the video is this weird sort of, you know, two dimensional version on a screen. And you're never able to piece back being there fully in three dimensions. But if that was your experience, that's what you piece back. So it comes back with all of the pleasure, the sensory experience that came with it. As opposed to if you're looking at the screen, that's your version of that reality. And that's what comes back. It's just that two dimensional, more impoverished version.

• 13:22Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And that, to me, I think, is the big concern.

• 13:26Alie Ward?

  That's funny because I, my husband and I got married three years ago and a good friend of mine was like, let's watch the video on your first anniversary. My husband and I can't watch the video. What we remember from it is what we remember. And both of us have like the ick when it comes to watching it for some reason. We're like, I don't want to remember it any differently.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:43Alie Ward?

  Because we are kind of always, like you said, reconstructing those memories based on input, right?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  And you don't want to change the version that you have in your brain.

• 13:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Especially if that version was beautiful and something that you want to hold on to. Now, I have the ick anytime anybody tells me to watch a video of myself. So I just can't do it categorically. That's just something I don't want to do. But I can totally resonate with what you're saying. If you've experienced it fully being there, being able to piece it back together in this two dimensional version and looking at it on a video, it's just never the same. And it kind of alters your, you know, actual recollection of that experience.

• 14:16Alie Ward?

  And a University of Chicago study recently recruited users of this app called One Second Every Day to hop in an MRI and look at quick videos of strangers' lives versus one-second clips that they had recorded themselves using that app. And the study found that different parts of the brain light up if it was their own memory versus just intaking a stranger's video. And other neurobiologists at the University of Toronto are exploring how video diaries like that could help Alzheimer's patients connect more to their own past. So to patrons Aunt Tifa and Rosalie de la Fore, who recall more when prompted by photos and videos, that's some real science right there for you.

• 14:59Alie Ward?

  Everyone else, that app was called One Second Every Day, if you want to log little chunks of your whole life. Now, what if you don't need physical memorabilia or pixels to jog your memory? What if your mind is a camera? So Alia Myers and Erica Periandri, among others, had questions about that. Well, on the topic of photographic memory, many people asked. Mariah Kay said, "This question has been on my mind for so long." All caps. "I know there's photographic memory, but are there different versions or levels of it?" Reed Barry wants to know what actually is photographic memory. This question was asked by Cyber Mains, Erica Periandri, Rachel McGill, Earl of Gramm Mckin. What is photographic memory exactly?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Okay, fellas, this is myth bustin' time.

• 15:41Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Ready?

• 15:43Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Photographic memory does not exist.

• 15:46Alie Ward?

  How? How?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  And it's so uncomfortable to hear that. Well, so photographic memory is what we sometimes refer to as eidetic memory. You know, the way that it's defined, it's that you have this perfect recall, perfect recollection of something that you've seen potentially only once, right? And if it's in the context of, say, reading, you're talking about, like, remembering page numbers and all of that. The evidence that that exists historically is slim to none.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  We've been lied to.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  There's maybe a very small handful of cases of Savant syndrome where somebody could legitimately make the claim for a true photographic memory. But aside from that, there's no real evidence that photographic memory to this sense exists. That said, there's really, really, really good memory and there's really, really, really bad memory. There's a whole spectrum. And a lot of times when we're thinking about photographic memory, it's not exactly that, but it's close. It's really good memory, where you're memorizing where things are laid out on the page, where you may be memorizing things like, you know, the page numbers and where the figures were, where the pictures were, all that kind of stuff. To the extent that we can tell whether or not, you know,

• 16:59Speaker 01

  that's actually helpful in a day-to-day learning experience, it's not clear whether or not that actually helps you.

• 17:03Alie Ward?

  And while a true photographic memory is at this point just flim-flam, there is such a thing as eidetic memory, where someone can see a visual and look at it, or sometimes hear something. And once it's removed, they can recall it in great detail. It's as if visually they're still looking at it, but it's not 100% faithful, and it does not last a lifetime. Your brain's like, I don't really need that fancy of a feature.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Because remember, what we're trying to learn and remember on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily the details of the exact words on a page, or the exact details of what happened. It's the gist. It's sort of the overall experience kind of abstracted. It's whatever knowledge I can abstract from that experience and be able to use it to guide my future decision-making. So if you start to think about memory a little bit differently, that it's not really about the past, it's all about the future, this is no longer uncomfortable. It's okay to sit with that, that there's no photographic memory, because there's no rationale, there's no reason for it to exist.

• 18:02Alie Ward?

  So though we debunked learning styles in part one, what about people who don't retain things as well visually but through sound? Hey, first-time question askers Kimberley, Kirsten Cornell, as well as E. Jordan, Sean Thomas-Kane, Matthew Walter, Lisa Gorman, Maria Kay, Josh Walden, Sidoni S., Vanessa Adams, Daniel, Ben Voren, Jennifer Froh, Deb Does Science, Alicia Clarkson, and Sam wanted to know about sound and memory, including song lyrics. Well, I know because we have obviously a lot of listeners who learn by auditory memory. Are some people better at recalling things if they hear it?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:39Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yes. So, and this takes us back to the conversation about learning styles. So I want to be very clear, right? It is a myth. Learning styles is a myth. There is no one way to be able to get to your brain, and it could be visual for you or auditory for you. That said, People do have individual differences in how much they learn visually and how much they learn through their ears auditorily and how much they learn through other senses. But at the end of the day, the most effective learning is the one that combines the most senses.

• 19:08Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  So as a species, we are far more visual. As a species collectively. If you look at rodents, for example, rats, they have a much stronger sense of smell than we ever would be motivated by. Right? That does not diminish our sense of smell, does not diminish our other senses. But it says that primarily because we are not nocturnal, we operate usually in daylight and the sunlight. Visual information seems to be really important to us. We tend to kind of prioritize that. We have a lot more real estate in our brain dedicated to processing of the visual sense than to other senses. So when somebody says, well, I learn better if I hear it. I'll say, I'm willing to bet that you'd learn better if you heard it and saw it at the same time.

• 19:49Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  So don't just rely on, oh, I just want to hear it. If you can, so for example, if you're reading and you say, I'm just not a reader. Well, try reading out loud. So you're also hearing it and listening to yourself say the words. And you'll notice that that is a bimodal kind of learning and things will stick a lot more.

• 20:06Alie Ward?

  We did a reading episode recently and there was a big question as to whether or not audiobooks were reading, whether they count, whether you can count them in your book.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Oh, I sure hope they count.

• 20:14Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I know. Me too. So we talked about this in the recent Enegysology episode all about reading. And I'll just give you an excerpt from that with Dr. Adrian Johns, who is a professor and a historian and who authored the book, The Science of Reading.

• 20:29Speaker 05

  It's actually interesting that eBooks, or actually audiobooks more, the idea that you could, as it were, read a novel or something by having it read to you by a machine. There are schemes for those going back as far as the, pretty much the origin of recording. So the late 19th, early 20th century. There were visionary schemes for having things like, oh, vending machines, where you could put your money in and there would be a speaker's, you know, like a speaking trumpet that would

• 20:56Alie Ward?

  No.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  speak a book. It's not like there's something that is that radically new about audiobooks per se. Having said that, I mean, my own sense of it kind of crudely is that I think with audiobooks, it's really that you're having something read to you rather than reading. And part of that has to do with the control of the pace of it. You know, so you can slow down recordings. You can pause it and all of that kind of thing. But it's not the same as doing what one does with one's mind's eye all the time in reading a page where you're constantly shifting the speed and considering things and going back, you know, without necessarily thinking about it. You don't have to press a button or something. E-books, on the other hand, I think are just reading. I mean, I don't have any issue with those at all.

• 21:40Alie Ward?

  So Dr. Johns is a reading scholar, and I am a lady recording this while not wearing a bra, but whose entire life revolves around reading to people. So we'll have to arm wrestle for dominance. But I will say that per an ancient study from the late 1960s titled Retention and Recall: Incidental Learning of Visual and Auditory Material in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, that visual memories tend to be better for recall, but there is, quote, "a decline with age for recall of visual material, but virtually no deterioration in performance on the auditory task." So I'm going to amplify that data in my favor. Now, what about smell? Cody Burdock, Vanessa Adams, Christine Hurley, The Dork Next Door, Amanda Regan, Guy Hutchinson, Eating Dark Hair for a Living, Renee Van Den

• 22:24Alie Ward?

  Hoven, Jess H. Fiona, Elizabeth Caro Young, Anastasia Press, all wanted to know about smell and memory. And Susan Singley asked, "Why do some aromas bring back such clear and nostalgic memories like cut grass, old books, coconut sunscreen, ocean waves, and that smell after rain?" But yeah, earlier, Mike mentioned that rodents have a much stronger sense of smell than us, and I wonder if they feel nostalgic for smelling certain garbage. I bet they do. Well, you mentioned smell and rats. We have an excellent urban rodentology episode about rats that made me cry with affection for rats. But Amanda Regan wanted to know, why do smells or sounds trigger memories sometimes? And I have heard that

• 23:09Alie Ward?

  it's difficult to really know what a smell is. You have to have a memory of that smell, that it goes straight to some memory center? Yeah. What's up with that?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Couple things, so let me break this down because you asked a couple of really, really interesting questions, but they're a little bit different from each other.

• 23:24Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  So the first one is maybe whether or not we can sort of label smells. You can label a sound and people that have perfect pitch can tell you exactly what note it is and so on. And you can certainly label visual things. We have objects, we have colors, right? But with smells, it's a little bit different and we don't have a great lexicon for smells. A lot of times we're relegated to kind of like lavender, kind of like and fill in the blank, right? Something that you're familiar with, but that's the rub. You have to go back to something that you're familiar with. So it reminds you of something else. It reminds you of something that you might have smelled or sensed before. And that may be just an evolutionary thing, like we haven't really evolved to prioritize this kind of information, smell information. We don't use it typically to navigate around the world, although if you've got a nice baking

• 24:09Speaker 01

  cake in the kitchen, you might navigate your way there. So in some situations, maybe it's helpful, but we tend to navigate mostly based on visual information.

• 24:17Alie Ward?

  So our sense of smell isn't keen enough to save us essentially, so it remains pretty mid. And think back to any time you've tried to describe a smell, you've probably said it smells like and thought of the last instance or the strongest instance of smelling something like that thing.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  We tend to kind of know what we need to do based on visual information. So because it was never prioritized, we never sort of bothered to create robust labels for it. And when you don't have labels for things, your brains sort of struggle to kind of store it with that fidelity because you don't have that verbal thing that you can attach to it. I know what a coffee mug is because I have a verbal label for those coffee mugs, right?

• 24:55Alie Ward?

  Right, right.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  So that's one piece. The other piece, which I think is fascinating, is that especially smells can trigger memories, sometimes long-lost memories. There's a certain smells that will remind me of my grandmother's house, certain smells that remind me of specific people in my past because that might have been the perfume or cologne they wear or something like that or similar to it. And then the experience of going back, sort of it like washes over you. You kind of go back in time, you're immersed, you're exactly in that moment. The sense of smell. Almost has this incredibly privileged capacity to do this. And we don't know why this happens, but we suspect that it's possible. Part of it is the fact that your sense of smell, unlike all of the other senses,

• 25:41Speaker 01

  it has direct access to your hippocampus, your memory bits of the brain. And it's not clear why that is, but it's sort of co-evolved that way. The sensory systems in the brain that are outside of smell, so vision, audition, all have to go through the thalamus, which is this sort of major hub in the brain, before they get to the memory parts of the brain. There isn't like this direct access. Whereas everywhere else, this happens for our sense of smell, it doesn't happen. Our sense of smell doesn't go through the thalamus. It like directly has this, you know, revolving door straight into our memory bits of the brain. We have no clue why the hell that is. It's just this weird quizzical thing. And I don't know to what extent that means it's truly privileged. And that's the reason why we remember things so vividly.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  But it seems plausible that it's at least a contributing factor, that you don't have to gate through somewhere else before you get to the hippocampus, right there.

• 26:33Alie Ward?

  It's like an express train.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:35Alie Ward?

  So exciting. What about, as someone who has had a nasty concussion, Hope, Lauren Galerio, Addie Capello, Adam Foote's wife, Anna, a bunch of people wanted to know how studying concussions or TBI has influenced work or influences our memory?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's challenging with concussions or TBI, traumatic brain injury, because there's no two injuries that are the same. So that is a particularly difficult set of conditions. It depends on the severity of the concussion, the location, all sorts of things. And we're learning a lot more about this. Clearly, it impacts a variety of different memory systems, memory being one of the key ones that gets impacted. But depending on the kind of injury, whether it's a coup, contre-coup kind of injury, where there's sort of stretching and shearing of some of the brain's white matter pathways, the connections between different regions, all of those things tend to happen. There's inflammation, there's sometimes frank injury, you can actually see evidence of that. But it's not clear how much of that is, first of all, common across individuals,

• 27:38Speaker 01

  because again, the extent of the injury is different. The etiology, the root of the injury, the cause, it can be very, very different. But the fact that memory is impacted almost in all concussive injuries. Is an interesting phenomenon. And I always go back to our, our memory system is, or at least the hippocampal memory system is one of the most vulnerable systems in the brain. It tends to feel the brunt of pretty much anything.

• 28:03Alie Ward?

  Patrons Rye of the Tiger, Heidi, Brenda Palencia, and Christine Hurley asked about what is loathingly called mom brain, or in Tim Fars words, I don't feel like I know things anymore, and it's horrible. I myself do not have kids, but I have damaged my brain with a hospital grade blow to the head. I feel for you.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  And not just concussions, but even if we're sleep deprived, even if we're, you know, anxious or depressed or anything that's happening to us tends to impact the system. It is one of our most primitive systems in the brain. It's one that we share with all the mammalian species and many others. Even though it's tucked in the middle of the brain, it seems like it would be like nice and enveloped and covered up. It has kind of weird positioning. The vasculature around it is quite vulnerable. The white matter is quite vulnerable. It's also very close to the most porous parts of the blood brain barrier. So toxins can get into those limbic structures much more easily than in other places in the brain.

• 29:02Alie Ward?

  So remember from part one that memories are stored all over the brain, kind of like coins hidden in the sand. But the hippocampus, that seahorse shaped organ, acts as a sort of metal detector to find and retrieve those memories. So the hippocampus is this wicked combination of really important and very delicate.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Just be careful. So it's just a hub of vulnerability. And it's one of the reasons why we studied so extensively in my lab across a variety of different conditions, because we believe that it is very vulnerable. And if we develop ways to be able to protect it or treat it, that will generalize across a number of different conditions.

• 29:40Alie Ward?

  And is it rather new that we even know that the blood brain barrier is permeable at all?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would think, I mean, we've always known that it's permeable to some things. We know this because there's a lot of things that are in our blood that get through the blood brain barrier very quickly and get into our brain easily. Alcohol is one of those, right? That gets straight from the blood to the brain. So there are things that we've known about for quite some time that can traverse that barrier with great ease. But there are new things that we're learning about now that we didn't realize can get through the blood-brain barrier easily that seem to get through. And some of these things may be inflammatory in nature, some of them may be toxins. So when we talk about the connection between the body and the brain, that is real and it's always been there, but we've only really started to study the sort of mind-body or

• 30:28Speaker 01

  brain-body connection much more in recent years and trying to understand how our gut, for example, influences our brain, how our brain influences our gut. This back and forth, which has to be able to kind of get through some of those barriers and the blood-brain barrier being the key one. One of the most interesting things that happened in terms of technology recently is there is actually an approach, a technique, using what's called focused ultrasound to open up the blood-brain barrier to be able to transmit things through. Because it's always been a challenge for us in developing drugs and interventions, sort of pharmacological interventions, how to package something just right to get it through the blood-brain barrier. And this may be this other approach. It seems a little scary, I know, but with focused ultrasounds and what's called microbubbles,

• 31:10Speaker 01

  we can actually open up the blood-brain barrier and get some things that maybe are larger macromolecules that normally wouldn't get through actually to go through the blood-brain barrier. So lots of fun activity these days in research on the blood-brain barrier.

• 31:22Alie Ward?

  Well, you mentioned something about the gut connection, too. People are talking a lot about the vagus nerve.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:28Alie Ward?

  Just a quick background on that vagus nerve. So it's the longest nerve in your body and it plays this key role in your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the chill side, the rest and digest, as the vagus nerve carries messages between your heart and your brain and your guts. And according to this 2017 study, "Childhood Trauma and Lifetime Syncopy Burden Among Older Adults," researchers say that vasovagal syncope, where your heart rate and blood pressure fall suddenly, which can cause dizziness and sweating or fainting, according to the study, it's governed by the autonomic nervous system and it's often precipitated by a highly salient emotional situation. And researchers found that the report of childhood abuse was independently associated with frequent syncope in youth.

• 32:12Alie Ward?

  So what role does this physiology have? Does that vagus nerve play a role? Role in memory at all?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  It certainly does. One easy way to think about that is, and it's been known for quite some time, is that this is one of the ways by which the adrenal hormones can impact the brain. So when we think about cortisol and cortisol release, when we think about epinephrine, those kinds of things do have a way to be able to impact the brain through its impact on the vagus nerve. But it's way beyond that now. There's a lot of literature now suggesting that vagal stimulation, for example, could have some really interesting effects, therapeutic in some ways. And we're starting to understand a little bit more about how that mode of communication is operating. But it's certainly there, and it's, again, one that we stand to learn a lot more about.

• 32:58Alie Ward?

  I feel like this is all a really good endorsement for meditation and deep breathing.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that should be endorsed right off the bat all the time.

• 33:07Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, you were mentioning toxicity in the brain, blood-brain barrier, alcohol. Many people wanted to know. Matthew Walker, Allie and Julianne, and Neil Anderson asked about different opinions of alcohol affecting memory, but others have more herbal questions, such as Allie and Myers, Adam, Michael James, Storm, Cericity, and Olympia Rempel, and first-time question askers Craig Steinberg and Zach Gary. And? Chris Bullock asks, why does marijuana make memory so shitty? Asking for a friend. Winky face.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Okay, asking for a friend, I see. Well, answering for a friend, can't say it, I've had firsthand experience of this. But I can say that, first of all, there's different kinds of memory that are made shitty to different extents by marijuana. So it doesn't impact all kinds of memory. It might impact your recollection for things that you were doing previously or sort of around that same time. Not exactly clear why that happens, but I can tell you that one of the things that's really interesting about marijuana is that when you think about how it impacts the brain, there are particular receptors in the brain, what we call endocannabinoid receptors, that are specifically geared to

• 34:19Speaker 01

  responding to cannabinoids, which is essentially the active species in marijuana.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  But the interesting thing is that endocannabinoid receptors are involved in long-term potentiation in memory, in plasticity. So in some ways, it's not surprising that it impacts your memory. It's surprising if it's always shitty, because I think there's probably an optimality. I'm not telling you, you should use it to improve memory, but there may be some realm in which it can actually improve plasticity as opposed to make it worse. That's very difficult to get at at an individual level. But the fact that you have receptors in your brain, and especially in your memory systems, that are specifically geared to responding to the impact of marijuana, I think is a very, very cool thing. And it also tells us that we need to invest a lot more energy and a lot more time and a lot more resources in understanding exactly how it's impacting the brain, how that changes

• 35:09Speaker 01

  from individual to individual, on what background and what context with everything else that's happening in the brain. So recreational use versus use for depression, anxiety, other things, some more sort of therapeutic uses. All of those are really interesting questions. And now that we are seeing the legalization sort of across many states and a desire from the National Institutes of Health to really support research on this front, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to have a lot more answers. A lot of my colleagues here actually are studying this exact thing. Would there be a difference between the CBD component and the THC component? Definitely. So they're different chemicals, and they have different potency and different binding properties and so on. I don't know that there's as much evidence for CBD in

• 35:52Speaker 01

  terms of brain-active kinds of things or psychoactive kinds of things. There may be a little bit out there, but certainly the impact of THC has been the one that's studied much more, and there's a lot more literature on that.

• 36:04Alie Ward?

  So a 2023 paper in the journal Biomolecules titled Effective Cannabis on Memory Consolidation, Learning, and Retrieval and Its Current Legal Status in India acknowledges that, quote, "The role of cannabis on cognitive functions is a matter of long debate, but that generally THC is responsible for cognition-related deficits, while non-psychoactive CBD has been shown to elicit neuroprotective activity. However, because it's a restricted substance...

• 36:34Alie Ward?

  There's not enough research on it, they say, and contradictions exist. And some reports showed low THC dose improved learning and cognition. So I guess keep an eye out for emerging studies. And as discussed in the recent surgical angiology episode on veins and arteries, smoking is not the best way to ingest it if you're going to. So remember to protect your blood plumbing for the long term. Oh, patrons Lila Weller, Carleen D H and Barb Miller had questions about the long and the short of it all. Well, you know, I feel like some people talk about short term versus long term when it comes to that. But the difference between short term memory and long term, when does it become a long term memory? When does it get filed?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question, Carleen. I'm gonna get ready to bust another myth here. When I talk to people about long term and short term memory, typically they're complaining about their long term memory. And they're saying, my short term memory is okay, so I can remember things from yesterday or the week before, but it's like, you know, long term memory that's impaired. Or my mother, if they're talking about maybe their mother with developing Alzheimer's or early dementia, it's the opposite. It's her long term memory is okay. She can remember her past, her childhood, but everything in the last few years, her short term memory is what's impaired. And I kind of have to stop and say, okay, let me just clear up the terminology so that when you're talking to a physician or talking to somebody, they understand what you're talking about. Both of those are long term memory. You're talking about recent versus remote memories.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Short term memory is very, very short. We're talking the span of seconds. So that's the, at least the way that these things are defined in psychology and neuroscience. Short term memory is extremely short. It's what we also call working memory. If I were to give you a phone number, not that you would have to dial a phone number these days, but if I were to give you a phone number and say, hey, hold on to this phone number, and then you have to dial it, you might sort of rehearse that phone number to yourself for a few seconds, and then you dial it, and then what happens to that number? Poof, goes away. So you stored it very briefly in your short term memory store, your working memory, which is there to be able to help you store things for Very short period of time, you can get distracted out of it very quickly.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And also, I can exceed your span very quickly if I just yell out a whole bunch of numbers at you.

• 38:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Things are gonna fall out, right? So it's not intended to store any more than just a few, a handful of items. People used to say seven plus or minus two, but that number is likely closer to three or four.

• 39:04Alie Ward?

  Okay, he just threw a whole bunch of numbers at you, but seven plus or minus two means that brain scientists used to think we can hold five to nine items in our short term memory. But turns out, we don't even have that much room. It's like three or four things at a time.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Three or four things. And the reason why phone numbers work is because we chunk them into three bits.

• 39:22Alie Ward?

  Yep.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  So then, everything beyond that is actually long term memory storage. But when we think about memory for yesterday, or last week, or the month before, versus, you know, years ago, we're talking about recent long term memories versus remote long term memories. And as we get older, our memory for things that happened way in the past could be very preserved, because we talked about how memory over time gets strengthened and kind of linked to a whole bunch of different regions of the brain, so it becomes more robust, more resilient to forgetting. Those are typically the last memories to go. Say for a patient experiencing dementia, they're gonna remember those memories much later in the progression. But memories of the last few months, the last year, the last few years,

• 40:07Speaker 01

  they're gonna be the ones that are the earliest to go. Because they have not been solidified as much. They have not been stored in all of these parallel networks in the brain and made kind of more resilient to forgetting. They're still somewhat dependent on the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is kind of the culprit in early dementia, right? It's one of the places that's changing very early. So as we think about long term versus short term, that's typically what people are thinking about. Why am I not remembering as much of the recent things, but I remember memories in the past for longer? We experience that as we get older, but much more dramatically in the context of dementia. Yeah, so it's just a little bit of a misnomer, but I think. You know, being able to kind of divide it into recent versus remote covers the same question.

• 40:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Oh, I had no idea. And I do want to ask about dementia and Alzheimer's as well, but a quick detour with short-term memory. Many people mentioned having the memory of a goldfish. Jasmine Patino, first-time question-asker, whose dear, wonderful boyfriend is a goldfish in that capacity, and Caitlin Tindale, who compared themselves to a fish cognitively. True or false? A goldfish remember for two minutes and then they don't know why they're in a bowl.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  You know, I'm trying to remember Finding Nemo now and think about whether it was truly two minutes. You know, I don't know if it's exactly two minutes, but it is very short.

• 41:27Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  It is thought to be one of the shortest memory spans.

• 41:31Alie Ward?

  How do they test that on a goldfish?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  It's difficult. I think that whenever you're testing things with animals, you have to be clever, right? So you have to figure out a way that the animal can kind of indicate to you whether or not they recognize something.

• 41:44Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Maybe it's by the amount of exploration or the amount of time they spend in the vicinity of that thing. If they're more familiar with it, maybe they'll navigate to something that's newer. So you can position things in the environment in a way where you can see how much they explore one over the other and be able to tell, oh, yeah, their memory is shot, or maybe their memory is really good.

• 42:02Alie Ward?

  I love the idea they're like, you know this guy? And they're like, ah, no.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:07Alie Ward?

  No.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  The name has not come into my... I remember the face, though, anywhere, but yeah.

• 42:12Alie Ward?

  We're in luck because, yeah, people study this, of course they do. And according to a recent paper, "Distance Estimation in the Goldfish," in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B of Biological Sciences journal, "Goldfish can accurately estimate distance after learning it." And another study in the journal Animals, titled "Visual Perception of Photographs of Rotated 3D Objects in Goldfish," trained six goldfish to tap either a photo of a frog or a turtle for a treat. And researchers report that all the fish had successful performance, showing that they were able to distinguish between the turtle and the frog photographs, which is evidence of object constancy. So, flim-flam, goldfish memories are not trash.

• 42:55Alie Ward?

  They can be trained to do things. And it should be noted that in five years of having my daughter, who's a poodle mix named Gremlin, I have never successfully trained her to do anything. So lay off the goldfish and lay off yourselves. Although, when it comes to future fears and caring for loved ones, many patrons had questions about Alzheimer's and dementia, including Lisa Gorman, Deb Does Science, Stephanie Halfrey, Matty Cakes, Two Stones With One Check, Mia, Meg McDaniel, Ken Edmondson, Erin White, Camelia B., Brian Reesinger, Sarah Crocker, and Stephanie, who wrote, "There are cases of dementia on both sides of my family. Is there actually anything we can do to stop or slow down this awful disease?"

• 43:36Alie Ward?

  A lot of people, obviously, concerned about dementia, concerned about Alzheimer's. That deserves its own two-part episode.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Certainly.

• 43:44Alie Ward?

  Can you describe, when it comes to memory, the difference between dementia and Alzheimer's? Is Alzheimer's a disease and dementia is the symptom of it? Or how does it exactly what's happening?

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the easiest way to think about it is that dementia is a larger umbrella term, and Alzheimer's disease is one of the principal causes of dementia.

• 44:06Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  You're right that dementia is a set of symptoms, and Alzheimer's is a little bit more about the biology that leads to those symptoms. And there are many other types of dementias. So Parkinson's disease can lead to dementia. There's frontotemporal low bar degeneration, or frontotemporal dementia. Huntington's disease can lead to dementia. So there's a number of different causes for dementia. But the most prevalent one, the one that most people are really concerned about, is Alzheimer's dementia. So yeah, dementia is the umbrella term. Alzheimer's is the subcategory, or the set of causes that lead down the path to dementia. And it's among many others. But Alzheimer's is the chief one. When we think about, how do we differentiate between dementia and, say, you know, healthy aging? That's another question that pops up a lot, is as I'm getting to a certain age,

• 44:50Speaker 01

  I feel like I am losing my memory. I'm starting to lose my way when I navigate, or I'm having some memory issues and be forgetful. And some of that happens as we all get older, and the majority of it is okay, right? That's just the natural part of a normal aging brain. But when it becomes pervasive and noticeable to not just to the person, but to others around them, and people are sort of missing doctor's appointments, or getting lost around their neighborhoods and they're wandering, then it becomes a real concern. And when that's happening, already, things have changed so much in the brain. That now it's really unable to compensate for it because we tend to compensate so much for any sort of brain deficit for the longest time. So for many years, a patient

• 45:35Speaker 01

  with Alzheimer's disease wouldn't technically be a patient because they're not reporting symptoms, they're not experiencing anything. Neither patient nor doctor can say anything is wrong with the brain. But already, the pathology is changing the brain. And one of the challenges for us in research is trying to develop ways that we can detect that pathology, maybe with brain imaging, with brain scans and so on, very early, even at a time when the patient and the doctor don't really know that anything is wrong. But when it comes to memory deficits experienced at that older age, you know, the question is always, how do I know when it's really kind of tipped over? How do I know when it's really problematic? And a good rule of thumb to think about is that if somebody's forgetting things, all

• 46:17Speaker 01

  natural and fine, especially if they can remember it later on. If they're reminded and they go, oh, now I remember. So it's tracked somewhere, it's there. You know that it's okay. Maybe that's a challenge as we're getting older, that just changes to some extent. But if they're really never able to piece it back together and no reminder is helping them, that they may be kind of over that cliff and they're going down the path to Alzheimer's disease. The somewhat more crass example is if you forget where you placed your car keys, it's okay. But if you forget that you drove the car, you know, then that may be a challenge.

• 46:50Alie Ward?

  Is that because of plaques in the brain? Is that parts of the brain atrophying into almost spaces where there used to be more white or gray matter? What's happening biologically?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  We used to have this idea, and the idea took the field by storm and actually resulted in, I think, an overinvestment of resources into clinical trials that try to get rid of those plaques. We used to think that plaques were sort of evil, right? And the two pathologies of Alzheimer's disease are plaques and tangles. Plaques are made up of amyloid protein, tangles are made up of what's called tau protein. And for the longest time, people thought if you have amyloid and tau or plaques and tangles in the brain, that's Alzheimer's disease, and we should be trying to break up those pathologies somehow to restore the brain or prevent it from getting worse. But the reality is the idea never really fully panned out because just having amyloid in the brain is not sufficient for you to experience memory problems.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  It's not sufficient for you to have dementia. There's about a third of everyone with amyloid in their brain will likely never experience dementia. So clearly by itself, it's not sufficient. But something else that you mentioned turns out to be sufficient and really important, which is neurodegeneration. Actual atrophy, actual loss of cells. That doesn't happen naturally as we age. We lose synapses, we lose connections. As we get older, it becomes more difficult to make them, difficult to maintain them. That happens for sure. But cell loss in these massive amounts doesn't really happen unless there's a progressive neurodegenerative illness, which is what Alzheimer's disease is. So when we find evidence of neurodegeneration, say for example on MRI scans, we see a very

• 48:32Speaker 01

  close connection, a close link or a relationship between the extent of that neurodegeneration and memory symptoms or memory loss and cognitive symptoms down the line that are not memory also. So executive function gets disrupted, all of our cognitive faculties, right? Because it's progressive. But in the absence of that neurodegenerative change, it's very difficult to see associations with actual cognitive or clinical decline, which has created a bit of a dilemma for the field. Even though the FDA has been approving anti-amyloid therapeutics, these drugs have some nasty side effects. And it's not clear that clearing amyloid is going to be the solution in the long run. Coupled with that, also the complexity that Alzheimer's disease is extremely heterogeneous.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  So if I were to get it, and hopefully not, but if you were to get it, it may look very different in your brain than it does in my brain. We may have a lot of variability. So that means you may respond to a drug or a therapy that I may not respond to and vice versa. So the idea of like a one size fits all kind of solution is also kind of falling away by the wayside and people thinking about the complexity of maybe Alzheimer's disease is actually diseases and we need to be able to tailor therapeutics to the individual.

• 49:45Alie Ward?

  Obviously dementia, once again, deserves its own episode. It's a complex condition with a lot of emerging research, but there are some pharmaceutical treatments that can involve modulating neurotransmitters in the brain like glutamate. There are dietary modifications that can ease some related symptoms and psychopharmaceuticals that can help with depression and anxiety related to the progression of dementia. And Robert G. O'Day and Isabel Leclerc mentioned Lewy body dementia in their questions, and it is the second most common cause of dementia after Alzheimer's. And it's caused by aggregations of proteins in the brain called Lewy bodies. And some symptoms of it can include visual

• 50:25Alie Ward?

  hallucinations, trouble with sleep, including sleepwalking, mood changes and stiffness. And Isabel, whose mom had it, asked why public awareness of Lewy body dementia was low, but there's a little bit of background on it. And we're going to get to more questions about how you can avoid dementia and memory loss in yourself per an expert. But first, let's donate to a cause of his choosing, and he opted to send it to a fund at his center called the Junior Scholars Fund, which goes to supporting graduate students and their professional development because he says they are the next generation of talent and he wants to do whatever he can to support them. And there's a link in the show notes for more on the Junior Scholars Fund at the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. So thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible.

• 51:09Alie Ward?

  This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS-1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose Treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have,

• 51:53Alie Ward?

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• 52:38Alie Ward?

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• 53:14Alie Ward?

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• 53:48Alie Ward?

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• 54:32Alie Ward?

  So whether you're giving that to you or to someone else, you can give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or you can go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies. It's the best way to support the show.

• 55:01Alie Ward?

  Okay, back to the million-dollar question here, which honestly I think is eating away at everyone listening, but it was asked by Stephanie, Christina Manu, who loves saunas, Margaret Anuska, Karat Singh, Shushanja Getinger, Nicole D. G., Carol Young, and Jenny Hoover. So let's go. Well, I think, you know, last listener question that we got so much, obviously, is every day I feel like we're all getting older. It's nuts. Wow, time. We're going to get old eventually if we're lucky, right? What actually does help us stay sharp and retain our memories? Is it Sudoku? Is it going to Zumba classes? Is it reading?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the challenge of brain aging and sort of body aging is an interesting one. I think everybody wants to, you know, live longer and live happier and healthier lives and so on. And the trick is to make sure that our brain aging is sort of consistent with our body aging. You really want to kind of maintain health across both of those. So mind longevity is something that we think about a lot. And there are some answers. So we know, for example, that maintaining levels of physical activity, regular physical activity, hopefully not just undertaken when you're 80, right?

• 56:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  So starting kind of in midlife and continuing, regular levels of moderate physical activity seem to be helpful, seem to be preventative. They are associated with reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease. If people get it, they tend to get it later in life, but they're protected from it for some period of time.

• 56:28Alie Ward?

  So, exercise. And for more, you can see the paper "Exercise and dementia prevention" from the journal Practical Neurology, which notes that around a third of dementia cases are attributable to modifiable risk factors, such as physical inactivity, smoking, and hypertension. And they say that with the rising prevalence of dementia, there is a renewed focus on prevention strategies. And exercise has emerged as a key intervention for influencing cognition positively, including reducing the risk of age-related cognitive decline and dementia. So, use ologies as walking time, dance around your kitchen, get a dog to walk,

• 57:10Alie Ward?

  take a break dancing class, do some arm stretches, just keep it moving, folks. Okay, what else, Doc?

• 57:17Speaker 01

  The other thing that people have identified in these large-scale, not just trials, but also epidemiological studies, what seems to help? Well, social activity. And this was a challenge in the pandemic, actually. And I got to hear a lot about that from folks who felt that they had social structures and Zoom was no replacement for it. It just did not help as much. You really wanted to be around people. And being around people in older age is really key. Now, we see this all the time when people retire. There's sort of a fork in the road. You are very socially engaged in your job and other Settings and then when people retire, in some cases, they become very isolated and they're spending a lot of time at home, maybe with just a 24 hour news cycle and, you know,

• 58:00Speaker 01

  all that kind of stuff and not going out and being around people. And others have planned appropriately and said, these are going to be my post retirement plans. I'm going to spend more time in my community center, in my church, in my whatever it is to maintain that social level of activity. And those individuals tend to do better cognitively over time.

• 58:17Alie Ward?

  Wow. And of course, not everyone is able to get the same levels of physical activity. And we have an entire episode about disability sociology that discusses accommodations and attitudes toward disability. So talk to a doctor or a physical therapist about what you can do and how your activity level is. And we also have an episode on chronic pain with some bio psycho social interventions that have helped some folks. And as this is being released right before the crush of holiday travel and flu season, likely a spike in more COVID cases, it's always good to take precautionary measures against infection. If I'm on a plane, I'm in a mask. So do what's right for you, but know that doing physical activity that works for you and staying

• 58:59Alie Ward?

  social is incredibly important for your health and your brain, she said to herself in an aside.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  So maintaining a good level of physical activity and a good level of social activity, you know, a great exercise to do both simultaneously is dancing. So we tend to hear about that a lot. Like if somebody is in a dance group or does dance classes a couple of times a week, they are much happier. You know, you get a lot of endogenous sort of dopamine boosts that happen when you do that. But the social exposure and the physical activity seem to be key. Then we go on to other things that people are really curious about. What about brain games? What about Sudoku? What about this and this and that? And, you know, the evidence there is a little bit shaky, right? So there's some evidence to suggest that maintaining sort of cognitive engagement, of course, is very helpful. But most of it is based on cognitive engagement, again, in a

• 59:46Speaker 01

  social setting, right? So if you're playing chess out in the park with somebody and having discussions and all that, that seems to be more helpful than playing chess against the computer avatar at home, right? You might think, well, cognitively is the same on playing chess, but it turns out to be different if you're doing it with a human, right? And actually having conversations and actually being out and about. So again, I go back to the two things that are kind of tried and true and I think are very helpful. The third thing that seems to be helpful has to do with diet and being able to have sort of a heart healthy diet because we know that heart health is really important for brain health. So maintaining something that looks close to something like the Mediterranean diet, smaller amounts of red meat and things like that, high levels

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  of leafy greens and fruits and vegetables and those kinds of things, that also seems to be associated with better longevity and higher levels of cognition into that longevity. Those are massive studies that were done where they randomized people to either the Mediterranean diet or sort of a typical American diet and they see, you know, some really decent results for something like the Mediterranean diet. But the brain game stuff is the one that I'm sort of tentative about. It's like, I don't know if it'll hurt you, but I'm not sure it's helping you all that much.

• 1:00:53Alie Ward?

  You know, my husband's grandfather played a lot of video games in his later years and he would play multiplayer. So he would be on the headset with his grandkids across the country while he was playing like World of Warcraft or League of Legends or whatever.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  I mean, we've heard that from a number of folks who were involved even in our studies said, you know, I started playing video games and I started to, and they felt like even the learning experience was a really good thing for them. And some others just said, nope, not for me. I don't know what you're talking. There's no way I could ever do that. There was just kind of a block. So while it's challenging, there's no doubt that incorporating the social aspect into this has made a huge difference. This is why I was also reluctant to like tell my kids not to play games and do things because I felt like if they're doing it with their friends and it's sort of communal, then it's a little bit different than just droning in front of the computer and playing a game by yourself against the computer.

• 1:01:43Alie Ward?

  Yeah. I love that you are, you're not only researching this on the daily, but also seeing it as your children are growing up and watching how memory might change. But I imagine there are some difficult things about your job or studying it. I always ask what sucks, what sucks the most about your job?

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Oh, what sucks the most? Um, let's see. I think sometimes the pace by which things move frustrates me. And in research, you know, I think in science in general, there's this notion that we're going to do the best science that we can. We're going to put it out there. We're going to publish our work and then hope that somebody else is going to come and take that work and build on it and then be able to translate things and get them to be helpful to somebody out in the real world.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  That takes forever.

• 1:02:32Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  And it's so frustrating that it takes forever. And so one of the things that I've started to do in recent years and get my lab more involved in is say, "To hell with that. We're not going to wait. We're actually going to try to do it ourselves." So I've started to bridge a little bit between sort of the academic environment and more of the industry. But for the longest time, it sucked.

• 1:02:53Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  It felt like we're so removed as academics doing the science. And there's not enough of that science that's getting out there and helping people, even though it has the potential to help people. And then the other thing that's frustrating, I will say, that, you know, you can't change everything. You always want to do what you feel is scientifically very rigorous and also like morally and ethically right, and you have kind of a code by which you operate. But there are certain systems in place that are really, really difficult to change.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And some of them you can change, and you have to kind of figure out who to work with to make sure the message is communicated very well outside of academia to be able to influence people. But I'm very fortunate that I'm surrounded by people who are equally frustrated and also believe that that sucks. So at least we can kind of riff off of each other a little bit and commiserate slash come up with ways that we can try to address it.

• 1:03:51Alie Ward?

  Well, there's that community aspect too, right?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:03:53Alie Ward?

  That's helping your brain.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  And that's the thing. Also, science, you know, when it started out, hundreds of years ago, when people were doing science, it really was kind of a solo practice. When you look at Nobel laureates, it was always sort of singular winners. And that's not a thing anymore. Science is so communal now. It really requires teams and communities of people that are dedicated to solving these big, you know, challenging questions. They're not very simple at all. They're extremely challenging. And I think that's one of the reasons why things have been exponentially growing in recent years, right? It's not just that we have better technology. We have smarter people and hordes of them that are dedicated to answering these questions and doing it together. So when you look at the number of authors on a paper or the number of co-investigators

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  on a grant, those numbers have also shot up. So that community aspect of it, I think, is what keeps a lot of us at the table, and it's what makes it worthwhile despite the occasional sucking.

• 1:04:49Alie Ward?

  Well, if someone wanted to go into this field or just curious, what is the best thing about your job?

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, there are so many things. I mean, I'm like a kid in a candy store most of the time. I can tell you that for someone who is naturally very curious and inquisitive, this is like heaven, right? Because you're learning new things every day and it never stops. And there's no real retirement also for people like me. Like you retire, but you're still on recall. You consult, you do things. You're constantly continuing to learn. So if that's something that appeals to you, being a constant student, man, science is like the best place to get into. The other thing also is being an academic, I have incredible freedom to pursue the questions of my interests and my lab's interests. If tomorrow I decided I wanted to study fruit flies, I will not lose my job. I can do that. I have to go support that effort somehow.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  But no one tells me what to study. No one tells me what science to do. I get to decide that. And I do it communally with my lab because they were all collectively. And so we get to decide on the science that we want to do. We get to write the grants and papers together. So that's liberating. And I don't know of any other job out there where you can decide what you want to do at any given day and just go do it.

• 1:06:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Right? That's incredibly empowering. You can continue to do what you want to do and continue to be in love with it for as long as you want to.

• 1:06:12Alie Ward?

  This has been such a journey into my own brain and anyone listening. So thank you for just inspiring us also to treat our brains a little better.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  You're very welcome. This was so much fun.

• 1:06:24Alie Ward?

  Thank you so much. This is great.

• 1:06:27Alie Ward?

  So once again, ask neuroscientists neurotic questions if you are me. And thank you to Dr. Michael Yassa and everyone down in Irvine for helping arrange this. There's more links to their lab and his work. They're in the show notes and up on our website at aliward.com/neimanology. And we're at Ologies on Instagram and now Blue Sky. Where everyone seems to be headed, see you over there. We also have Smologies, which are shorter, kid-friendly episodes that you can find anywhere you get podcasts. We put them in a new feed, so it's easier for parents and teachers, or anyone who's looking for shorter, clean language versions of ologies, to find them. You can look for the new green artwork and the Smologies logo. Thank you also to Erin Talbert for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website.

• 1:07:12Alie Ward?

  Noelle Dilworth is our birthday girl this past week, and she's our wonderful scheduling producer. Susan Hale, managing director at All, Jake Chafee edits, and lead editor. And another great brain is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, with some assists the last couple of weeks from Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media, when I'm late on things. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around until the end, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's that I have a theory that if you have a good friend who has a party, like they're close buds, you should either be the first one there to help set up and just kind of like set the mood, so they're not worried about when people are going to start showing up, or you should be the last one standing to help tidy up and say, hey, man, great party. Relatedly, I love ice.

• 1:07:55Alie Ward?

  I love having any cold beverage with an absolutely egregious amount of ice, so much so that our freezer could not keep up with my ice consumption. Our ice maker was like, I don't know what to tell you. Now, during early quarantine, there were a lot of cafes that were closing, and Jarrett surprised me when I was out of town, I was helping my dad, and he bought an ice machine from a closing cafe. We have it in our garage, and I use it every single day, even in winter. Now, what does this have to do with parties? So, we have become the friends who show up first with a giant bucket of ice, and it feels heroic. So, if you are someone who goes to bed early, be the first to show up at a party, pick up some bags of ice on the way. Everyone will love you forever, you get to bed early.

• 1:08:40Alie Ward?

  Okay. Just in general, be safe out there, okay? Bye-bye.

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

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