Ep. 1402: Don't Forget with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Please enjoy my monologue Don't Forget with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive. --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel https://twitter.com/covel Facebook: @trendfollowing https://www.facebook.com/trendfollowing/ LinkedIn: @covel https://linkedin.com/in/covel/ Instagram: @mikecovel https://www.instagram.com/mikecovel/ Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There is a film director named David Lynch. I don't like any of his films. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever been able to finish his films. But David Lynch was an endlessly fascinating man when it came to ideas and thinking. He had very unique ways of talking about ideas. And I watched one presentation he gave. He said that he had had three ideas, I believe, that he had forgotten. They came and went. And he still remembered that those three ideas were three of the most important ideas he could ever imagine. And he forgot them.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Now, this is a man who has endless accolades, made many movies. And obviously, a lot of his good ideas, from the perspective of many people, did survive. But for him, it was the three ideas that got away, that got lost, that didn't make it. Have you ever had that happen to you? For sure, it's happened to me. And I deal with lots of ideas, lots of information, making connections between these data points. It's not a fun feeling to have a great idea and lose it. Now, that brings me to my guest today, an archival guest, a repeat guest, who actually

• 1:29Speaker 00

  goes into the psychology of losing ideas. And maybe I'm phrasing it a little bit differently than he would say it. But if you've ever been, and this gets very granular, if you have ever been in one room with an idea and then went to another room and the idea was lost, there is a psychological issue happening there. And if you're aware of it, you can manage it. You can keep that idea, perhaps. But if you're unaware of it, having an idea in one room and going to the next room can force you to lose the idea.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  So when it comes to the cognitive side of us, sometimes we need hacks to manage ourselves, just like a system, a trading system is a hack to manage yourself. Well, when it comes to ideas, you need hacks too, because you don't want to lose those ideas. You don't want to have that feeling that David Lynch had, that perhaps his best ideas were ones that he forgot. Without any further delay, let's jump right in. This summer of 2026, this August of 2026, I hope you're having a great summer. And I hope you remembered this episode, even if you walked to another room. Enjoy.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  My guest today, Gabriel Radwansky. He's a professor specializing in cognition, brain, and behavior. His research is focused on the development of mental model theory for human memory and cognition. Mental models, you know, look, just a person's representation of a situation they experienced, read, or heard about. His research is aimed at understanding how people create, organize, store, and retrieve mental models. And he has some especially interesting research into the issue of walking through doors and forgetting. You know, when you walk through a door and you forget what you were just thinking when you go into the next room?

• 3:48Speaker 00

  It's a touch more complicated than perhaps you've ever thought about. Let's jump right in today to my guest, Gabriel Radwansky.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  In advance of our call, I started thinking about architecture, which is probably not a surprising thing to say, given your work. And so I started thinking about one thing in particular that's kind of close to my heart. I started thinking about Wall Street trading floors. And Wall Street trading floors, for years, have been these open-air environments, people sitting side by side, very not closed in, you know, not walled off. This guy's got all the money in the world that could be in their own little private offices. Why do they have to be next to each other? But going through your world, I'm starting to think to myself, you know, have some of these folks figured your work out? Maybe not scientifically, but maybe just kind of realized over the years that their

• 4:43Speaker 00

  productivity, hence involving their cognition, their memory, was increased when they're in these open-air environments versus closed environments?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see. I haven't thought about it in terms of that particular example. Clearly, when you don't have to switch from one event to another, you can hang on to some of the information. Thinking about that example, there, what your idea of a location is and what your idea of an event is, is much more fluid. You can either have the location just be you at your particular spot right there, or you can expand out to something larger. So, you know, thinking about my office here, I can be sitting here in front of the computer, or I can be over up to the side at the table, or I could be, those would be two different locations, or I can be in my office, which is one location.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  And that's one of the advantages of the whole event cognition approach. It's the advantage and it's a disadvantage in that the definition of what is a location, what is an event, is kind of fluid, kind of slippery. That's apparently how cognition works, that we can switch between different levels pretty easily.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  I'm jumping in here right off the bat with that example, but for our audience, I should probably let you take it a little bit from the top. A little inside baseball here. And what we're really talking about is this classic conundrum that we've all experienced that you've really figured out, which is, why does walking through doors just throw us for a loop? Happens to me all the time. I'll be in one room and I've got the great thought, the brilliant thought. Look, I'm a guy that writes things. I walk into the next room and I'm like, where the hell did it go?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I think most people think about it in terms of the disadvantage. Why is that a problem? Why does that happen? Why do I forget these things when I walk through doorways? But I think of that more as an advantage. Because if you think about the environment, when you go from one environment to another, you don't want to carry the stuff from the previous environment into the new environment. So what you do in a forest may be different from what you need to do when you walk into a meadow. And so you need to leave some things behind and pick up on new things. I think it comes into play in terms of the architecture of the buildings that we build,

• 7:05Speaker 01

  bringing up your previous point, that the reason we have different rooms and doorways separating between rooms is because we do different things in those places. And you usually want to leave behind what you're doing in one place to pick up what you're going to be doing in the new place. And that's, I think, an advantage. So that's why I think that happens.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Why don't you define event boundary? You brought it up there in the beginning, but I should probably let you define it and let people understand where you're coming from.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  An event boundary is something that defines. For us, events have a lot of components. Events occur in some spatial-temporal frameworks. So that means the location that you're in, so the spatial boundary is whatever it is you're at, you're a room or an outdoor area, or whatever it may be. And the temporal boundary is the beginning and end of some coherent sequence of actions, such as watching a movie or having a phone call, or whatever it may be. So that's the container, the spatial-temporal framework. Within that framework are entities. And the most important entities for us are people. But there could be other things. It could be objects or things of that nature.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Each of those entities has properties. It can be something very physical, like how something looks, or how something sounds, or it could be something more innate, such as some internal state, or some goal, or things of that nature. The fourth component is that those entities within that spatial-temporal framework have interrelations amongst one another. It could be spatial relations, it could be social relations, it could be ownership relations, any of those kind of things. And then finally, each of those spatial-temporal frameworks

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Can be joined by temporal sequences or causal sequence where you have cause and effect. So that's kind of how we think about events. Now, an event boundary is whenever any major shift occurs in any of those elements. So, most of the work that you've been thinking about and that probably is some of our time talking about are spatial shifts going from one region to another. So, when you change that spatial temporal framework, change that setting from one place to another place, we call that a spatial boundary. Then you can have other kinds of boundaries as well. So, you can have a temporal shift. You're watching a movie and suddenly there's a big jump in time, either forwards or backwards

• 9:39Speaker 01

  or what have you. That would be an event boundary. Or, a major character walks into a room or walks out of a room, then that's another event boundary because you're changing the entities that are involved, things of that nature. Does that give you a better idea about what an event boundary is?

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, I'm just getting people to grasp the idea of like, look, we instinctively have all experienced the walking through the door and forgetting you've broken this down at a very granular level. So, I just wanted people to have a framework to understand where you're coming from.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yep. That's kind of the basics of it.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Let me let you go back in time a little bit, though, because before we start to flesh out things, I would love for you to go back in time, because this is terribly interesting direction you've gone down. We take for granted these things and we really don't ever get under the surface, but you've gotten under the surface. What was the moment for you where you said, "Oh, my gosh, memory cognition, I'm going down this path"? What age were you when you started to say, "This is it. I love this. This is my passion. I'm going this way"? Was there, was there some kind of moment for you that really triggered you, your passion?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was my first day of introductory psychology. I don't know. Something about Ben Wallace, my introductory psych teachers, it was clear to me that all the questions I'd sort of been asking in my head could be answered from that perspective. So, as a cognitive psychologist, like a lot of cognitive psychologists, I come from psychology from a sort of a different angle. So, my original major in college was physics and then I went to computer science because I liked the whole AI thing. And then I got into psychology because I was really getting at, you know, the questions about what is thinking, what is the mind, how does it all work? So, a little bit different from a lot of psychologists who want to be helpers, who want to be clinicians and things like that. So, it's a little bit different kind of psychology.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  I guess I'm the more nerdy guy in a lab coat with the rats in the maze kind of, kind of approach to things. So, that's kind of how I got involved. You know, my, my college grades were average and then after I got into this, they, they just sort of took off. So, clearly that was an indicator to me that this is what I should be doing. And I've been doing it ever since and everything is good.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Was there any particular, you mentioned that first class, was there anything, a particular example, something the professor said, something that sticks his color in your memory that really pushed you, or is it just the overall experience?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  I think it was just the overall experience. Just his first day description about what a psychologist is, what a psychologist does, sent me over the edge. You know, I was at a sort of a loss of what to do. I'd taken the previous quarter off because I didn't feel like I was going anywhere. And this was actually in the summer, coming back to school and it just, everything just opened up for me. Everything was timed perfectly. I was ready to receive that.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  I would love to go back to the history of memory research and for you to perhaps lay some of that foundation for some of the early pioneers. I've read some names, but is there a particular pioneer where we can really look at, say, "Okay, you know, that, it really started there"? And perhaps knowing that it started there and then kind of trace some of the evolution to where we are today?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Well, it all started with Herman Ebbinghaus and the publication of his book in 1885, Looking at Memory. That was very early on. He basically wanted to study memory, what he thought was the pure form by memorizing long lists of nonsense syllables. So, consonant vowel, consonant trigrams that have no meaning in the language. In the case, his case was German, because he was German. From that, we derived some basic principles of memory, such as the forgetting curve, the idea that you lose information over time and this goes in a regular way. It's proportional loss over time.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  That's kind of started it all. Memory from that point had fits and starts. There was what we call the behaviorist era in psychology where you give guys running rats in mazes and things of that nature. And then memory didn't really take off as a topic of study per se in force until probably the early 1960s, where people started using the invention of the modern digital computer as an analogy for how the mind works, which makes sense because engineers were assigning computers the way that they thought the mind worked. We were using this device to serve as an analogy for how we think that human memory

• 14:12Speaker 01

  works. So, we've got this long-term memory, which would be like your hard drive. We've got your working memories, what you're currently thinking about, such as be like your RAM and things of that nature, and looking at how the computer accesses information and using that as a guideline to look at how we access information from our own memories. The way of thinking about studying cognition and memory is, as psychologists and other cognitive scientists, are we're trying to reverse engineer the mind. We're giving people information, we're seeing what comes out at the, on the other side and trying to figure out what's going on in between. The same way an engineer might try to reverse engineer some device that he can't actually get into to figure out how it's working and what it's doing. That's kind of where we are.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  As you bring up that example with the early pioneers in computing technology, their thinking of how the mind works, given that basic, and we can all kind of think about the basic operations of a typical computer, hard drive, RAM, etc. How closely do we think we are in terms of understanding? Because I know there's been some over the years and I believe some thought where, "Okay, there's some silos here", so to speak, I'm using my own jargon, "but then, hold on, memories everywhere and then it's nowhere, but then, I guess, some of the newer research would say, 'Hold on, there is a regional component'". Can you elaborate there to give people a better handle on what's going on?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  In terms of how we represent memories?

• 15:36Speaker 00

  In terms of the storage of memories, what we know about that? And you brought up the idea of the early computing and what scientists thought our minds were working like and say, "Oh, this design, design computers like what we think our minds are operating". Were we close at all?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yes and no. What's sort of guiding the way we think about memories is what has been called a literacy metaphor, that memories are like pages or like books that you can, they're sort of discreet and they're, you know, they're there as a whole. And that's not how it works at all. I mean, our memories are very fluid, very flexible. So, we're basically at the, still at the very early stages, just trying to quantify the characteristics of memories, what their shape is and how they can alter themselves as need be, depending on the demands that the person is dealing with at the moment. Several decades ago, there was this push to shift from the computer metaphor to what

• 16:30Speaker 01

  they called the brain metaphor, where memories are in the connections among the neurons. And nobody really knows what pattern of connections would correspond to a given memory or how big a memory is, how many neurons a given memory might require to represent, you know, a trip to the beach or something like that. We're just not there yet. We're still at the level of trying to figure out what the various components of the brain do and how those are involved in the processing of information. Let me give you an example here of what I'm, I'm talking about this, builds on some of my more recent work. So, I told you before about back in 1885, Ebbinghaus had this forgetting curve, which

• 17:15Speaker 01

  is this negatively accelerating function. So, basically, the more time that's passed, the more information that's lost in a proportional sense. So, and people thought for over 100 years, that it was just sort of this continuous process, the more time that's passed, the further away you get, unless you're able to access that information. And what I've been finding is that that isn't completely true. One of the things that I've found that's been particularly striking to me and to people I've been telling about is that there is this gradual loss of information that sort

• 17:53Speaker 01

  of levels off until about a week, about seven days later, and then it gets worse again. So, it's like there are these two phases of memory retention where people are losing information, it levels off, and then after about seven days, it starts picking up again. So, it's like this two-phase process, which most people didn't notice that because they were looking at very short-term or very long-term and nobody really looking at something that spanned that. So, that's why I don't think that was discovered. And that's interesting in terms of how information is represented in the, the brain and the mind, is because that sort of maps on to one of the things that we think about is going

• 18:35Speaker 01

  on in terms of the long-term storage of information. So, the idea is that initially, the hippocampus is very involved in retaining and holding on to information, but the long, very long-term representation of the information is going to be beyond that sort of stored cortically more broadly. And the idea is that seven days is when information is being held or maintained in the hippocampus. And that after that period of time, those memories become disrupted. And so, what you're left with is just the cortex. And what we're seeing behaviorally is something that maps on to this neurological shift.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And I think this is also something that people in their everyday experience have some sort of intuition about. So, in experimental psychology, we are very clear to define what we call short-term memory as being something that lasts thirty to sixty seconds, things you're actively thinking about. But that's not how people use that term typically in their everyday conversation. When you, people are saying they're having short-term memory problems, they can't remember things over the short term, they're usually talking about something that's a much longer period of time. I have some data that I actually collected last week showing that that tends to map onto

• 20:01Speaker 01

  the seven-day shift, that most people, when they use the term "short-term memory," they're talking about a few days. And if you ask them to give a number, the average of that is pretty close to seven plus or minus two days at which they can remember things. So, just like people have that everyday experience of walking through a doorway causes forgetting, we also have this sort of everyday intuition about the shift and the change in the nature of our long-term memories. And that's sort of getting at the representation of things. How are things being represented in different parts of the brain over different periods of time for different purposes?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  I've got a great example, at least I think it's a great example, it's very personal to me, I want to share it with you, just to get some feedback. I'm sure you've heard these stories many times. You just said that, you know, we've got this intuitive feel about things, and you know, you said, "Well, you know, the more time that's passed, we're less able to access," and that's not necessarily true. I should share with you, in the last five years, I've had a chance to spend most of my time in Asia. It's been an interesting experience, relationships, ups and downs, all that kind of stuff, fantastic exposure to different things, but you know, over time, it starts to dull. That's one point. The second point, ten years ago, I had a book come out, a true story about a trading story. Both of these events, the living in Asia and this trading story, both have inspired

• 21:20Speaker 00

  me this year to develop film scripts. And what's been amazing to me is that when, I like to say this kind of intensity and passion hits, things from my memory, that I don't know where they are coming from, appear. And they weren't appearing before the project started, they really weren't like jumping out at me, I wasn't thinking about them on a daily basis. But when the words start to appear on the page, and you start to fill in the blanks, it's phenomenal to me that things start to appear out of nowhere. The trading script, I hired an LA screenwriter, she comes up with a first draft, and it was

• 22:03Speaker 00

  based on my book, I look at it, it was great structurally, but she doesn't have, she can't be expected to have, the same level of detail that I know about the story. When I saw her script, it was like I would see a line, and all of a sudden, I'd be like, "Oh, my gosh, that line she wrote is okay, but my memory puts this instantly there, and it's ten times better, and she agrees with me, and she's probably thinking, 'Where did that even come from?'" And I'm not sure where it even came from.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  That's one of the things that's really fascinating about memory. So, one of the things that frustrated me about the scientific study of memory is that it tends to focus on relatively short-term, things that are hard to remember. Well, I think that comes from education. Education is basically focused on trying to learn things that are hard to remember. There's a lot of things that we learn at a high level of detail, very, very quickly, that are stored very, very well. And the example I always use is Netflix. So, your favorite show comes on Netflix, you know, it's released, the whole season's there, you binge-watch it, and then you don't see another episode for like a year or more, right?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  That next season starts, you have no trouble remembering basically what's going on. You've forgotten a few details here and there, but you basically have a good grasp of what's happening and why it's happening, things of that nature. And I think that's basically how our memories are working in our everyday experiences, that we're encoding, consolidating, and storing high levels of information. So, when I look at memories for things that people are in the lab, they forget those things very quickly, you know, lists of words and sentences, you know, it's gone within a few minutes, or hours, or days, or what have you. But other things tend to hang on for long periods of time, so memories for films, or

• 23:56Speaker 01

  books, or life experiences, there's some forgetting there, but the forgetting is much, much more shallow. The rate of forgetting is much, much more gradual. That's, I think, an important thing that we really need to start looking at, and it's hard to do that, because you have to wait very long periods of time to assess these things. And, you know, you're not going to get tenure if you're waiting ten years to somebody's memory. An important thing to keep in mind about memory, and this is very, very important, I tell this to my students the first day of class, is that memory is not about the past. We don't have memories so we can think about things that happened in the past.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  We have memories so that we know what to do right now, and we know what to do in the future. And we draw upon our experiences of the past to help us with what we're doing now, and to help us doing things that we're going to be ready to be successful in the future. So, when you talk about these things coming to mind that you haven't thought about in years, generally, whatever the cues are that are available to you at the moment, they're very diagnostic, and so they're picking out those memories perfectly.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  That's a great example. In my situation, you're right, the writing from this other person, it was a cue that then smacked me in the head and said, "Boom," like that. I used two words with you, I said, kind of my intuitive feel would be, when things happen with me that involve a certain intensity or passion, I find my memories are spurred even more. But you know, the better word to use really might be the emotion of it. When the emotion hits, that's when, boom, it's go time, and it comes back instantly.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, our memories are, you know, I talked about the hippocampus, another structure that's really associated with that is the amygdala, and the amygdala is really important for processing emotional events, and those two are highly interconnected. This is why you tend to remember emotional events much better, things that have an emotional consequence for you, much better than everyday events. And so, if you think about things that happened to you in your life, they're going to be, the highlight reel's going to be more emotional experiences that you had, and so those emotions trigger a better encoding of memories. It's why you have things like flashbulb memories, which are these seemingly highly detailed memories for very surprising events in our lives.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Now, doesn't mean they're wrong, doesn't mean that you forget things over ti, you don't forget things over time, because you do, but certainly, those memories tend to be better. So, absolutely.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  I'm shocked at this situation with me, because the moment, it's like there's an inflection. I guess the door, walking through the door, doesn't necessarily have to be a door, it's some kind of trigger that allows you to kind of shift, and then, boom, it all just appears.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Right. Doesn't have to necessarily be doorways, we've also shown it with computer windows as well, so whatever defines that location, yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Explain that example, that's a great, your experiment you did with that, explain that, that's awesome.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  With the computer windows? Yeah, so, basically there, basically had the same thing, where we had people walking through doorways to do things, but instead of going through a doorway, we had information on different computer windows, and people had to shift between those windows, and you basically, we basically had the same experience. You have also the same thing going on when people read stories. In fact, the whole walking through doorways thing didn't come from me thinking about the world and my experiences, forgetting things when I walk through a doorway, it came from understanding narratives, how we comprehend stories that we read about and hear about. And there was a finding in the narrative literature that when there's an event boundary,

• 27:45Speaker 01

  like a character goes from one location to another, information from the prior location was less available. And so, we decided, well, if this happens in the narrative world, does it happen in the real world as well? And that's why we decided to create these virtual environments where people were navigating around, and lo and behold, we found that what we're seeing in the narrative world also applies in the virtual world, and we did it in actual reality as well, and computer windows, all these different places, it shows up all the time. And this sort of resonates with my idea that the reason we have narratives is to allow us to have these vicarious autobiographical experiences, for us to experience the world

• 28:30Speaker 01

  in ways indirectly that has the same structure and the same memory form, same processes as actual experiences. This is why narratives are so valuable to us. You know, your life story is a narrative, hearing about other people's stories are narratives, when you read books, when you see films, things of that nature. And the narratives that we're drawn to are the ones that are, allow us to have experiences that would be difficult to have in the real world, or don't really actually want to have it, but want to have the experience of it, those kinds of stories. So, that's why we have the kinds of novels and films that we do, and nobody's watching stories about people in their office, typing at the computer.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  I would prefer some diversity past superheroes, though, right now. We seem to have gotten stuck on superheroes, you know?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, they're, they're pretty intense.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Hey, listen, let me, let me kind of shift you into a big philosophical point. This is a quote from you, it's kind of random, but I'm sure it won't feel random to you, but it's a quote from you, it says, "The study of human memory is the closest one can get to a systematic study of the human soul."

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  That's a, that's a big line, that's a big line. I could probably keep you for hours on that one, huh? Why don't you set that up for the audience and explain that sentence, and let's see if we can kind of go down the rabbit hole with it some.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Basically, you know, who are you? You know, I think, who are you as a person? And I'm not using soul here in the theological sense, I think I'm using soul here in the sense of just understanding who you are as a person. Who you are as a person is driven a lot by your experiences. And to know who you are, you have to understand what your memories are, what experiences you've had, what kind of information are you carrying around with you.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  When you meet somebody, you give this story of what you've been through and you tell stories about experiences you've had, things of that nature, to give people a feel for what your values are, where you're coming from, what your goals are, things of that nature. We also tell these stories to ourselves to understand, why am I doing this? You know, why am I going on this trip? Why am I, why am I, do I want to buy this music? Why am I reading this book? Those kinds of things. That's kind of what I mean by that. By understanding all of the experiences that we've had, that gives us a feel for who we are as people.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Speak to the systematic study, though. The word systematic jumps out at me in that sentence.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  We're really good at telling ourselves lots of stories about ourselves, and some of those stories are wrong. Sometimes we think that things are going on with ourselves that we're just wrong about. It's just not, it doesn't work that way. In order to understand what's really going on with memory, we have to do these scientific studies where we have our, you know, experiments, dependent variable, independent variable, control variables, all those good things, so we can really be sure about what it is that's producing the kinds of behaviors that we're observing. That's, it's due to thing X, not due to thing Y.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  We'd be really certain about it. So, one of the examples I give in class is I ask people how they access information in their working memory, which is the stuff that they're currently thinking about. And I give these three different possibilities about how it might work. I ask them to raise their hand in terms of which one they think it actually is, and then I show them the data from the actual experiment where they actually assessed how this is going on, looking at response times on the order of tens of milliseconds, things of that nature, what evidence is really being used to support a particular theory. And

• 32:32Speaker 01

  the theory they pick is, by and large, wrong. Ninety to ninety-five percent of the students get it wrong. The point of that is that even for things that involve memory, very close to conscious awareness, there's a lot going on underneath that we just don't understand. We don't have conscious access to. And we have to do these systematic experiments to test various ideas about what's going on, to be sure, to actually understand objectively something about the nature of the human condition. What does it really mean to be

• 33:14Speaker 01

  human apart from our subjective experience about what we think it means to be human? Which is sometimes right. I talked about intuitions before, but it's sometimes is wrong. There's a lot going on that we just don't have conscious access to. And I'm glad that, because if we did, then I wouldn't have a job.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I guess at some point in time, if we figure it all out, we'll just kind of like hook our minds up to a hard drive and we'll duplicate our minds to a hard drive and we'll live in virtual reality forever, I guess, to some point.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  I would love that.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  I don't know if you've read the book, but there's a book out by a professor named Robin Hanson called The Age of M. that goes into this. As we were talking about the systematic study of the human soul and memories coming from experiences, now, what's difficult here is that, you know, as a scientist, you're kind of like observing, but as you start to observe, it becomes hard not to push students and to push adults further. And what I'm getting there is that the more experiences we have, the more interesting it's going to be, it's going to become for all of us. But if we, if we go down this path, and I think so many people do, they kind of go down the path, they say, okay, we'll do four years of college, and then we stop, we go into the quote, "real world," we get a job,

• 34:32Speaker 00

  start family, etc. And a lot of that learning and those experiences stop, and I mentioned earlier to you, ending up in Asia for five years, completely unexpectedly, and it does something to you. It changes something, it shifts things. It's all tied together with the damn topics that you're in the middle of, excuse my bad language. From your situation, like, we really want people to say, you know, you, don't stop. Keep going. Don't quit.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, you know, formal schooling is only one way to do this. You know, Art Kramer has this, um, these three things he suggests for successful aging. That is to be active intellectually, be active socially, and be active physically. So, be active in those three areas. That means exposing yourself to lots of different things. You know, if you want to be a good old person in terms of having lots of memories and intellectually healthy, go lots of different places. Travel lots of different places, watch lots of different kinds of movies, read lots of different kinds of books, go out and have lots of different

• 35:38Speaker 01

  experiences. Because the more varied and the more intense your memories are in terms of the variety of experiences, the higher level of functioning you're going to be at, so that when things do start to decline, you're not going to see the deficits that you would see in somebody who isn't doing that. So, you're starting at a much higher level. I think there's some research by Arthur Shemimura where he tested, uh, younger adults and older adults, and some of these older adults were college professors, and the college professors looked just like the younger adults. They didn't really show much in the way of deficits, other than maybe just being a little bit slower. You're exactly right. Do as much

• 36:21Speaker 01

  as you can. Have as many experiences as you can. That will be one of the best things you can do to improve your memory. People, as a memory researcher, people always ask me, what can I do to improve my memory? And there's, there's two things I tell them. One is, write things down, okay? Because you're going to forget. And number two is, have as many experiences, as broad of experiences, as you can possibly have, because the more you know, the easier it is to learn, the easier it is to remember. And that can be hard, that can be work, or it can be, it can be fun. It's up to you, how you want to do it. So, you're absolutely right on your assessment of what's going on with yourself.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  I'll give one example that I, it's kind of hard to do, but, you know, if you just kind of start a podcast and do it for six years and do like six hundred plus episodes and talk to like the smartest professors on the planet that are completely outside your discipline, that's a good way, too.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We should all do that. I mean, that's, that's what I like about the fact that I've never actually left college, you know? I've been here my whole life, you know, talking with these people and having all these interesting conversations.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  You just went down the path of aging. I think it's a useful direction to go in our limited time left. And that would be to help people to better understand, you know, what is good aging and memory cognition, and what is, as family members, and we might observe, a friend or another family member, where something starts to change in a way that's not good. It happens to all of us at some point in time, perhaps. What is your, some of your, your thought process there in terms of looking for cues that, that maybe it's not just, you know, someone being tired or whatever, but there's a, there's a downfall happening?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  First off, successful aging is achieved by doing a lot of things I talked about in terms of being active socially, intellectually, and physically. That's going to keep you sharp. Another big component of aging successfully is attitude. So, there's a lot of literature out there that I'm aware of, that the more you think that your memory or your cognition is going to get worse as you get older, the worse it's going to be. It's just going to, it's just going to, you're going to have trouble. Self-fulfilling prophecy, right? So, if you tell yourself that I'm older, I'm wiser, I'm smarter, you're going to be doing better than somebody who says, oh, I have all these senior moments and I can't remember. And you're not going to remember. That's one thing. And, you know, even with

• 38:52Speaker 01

  the walking through doorways thing, you know, when that became more widely known, I was getting a lot of emails from older adults saying, oh, thank God, I thought I was getting old. You know, this happens to everybody. And it's true. You, when you're older, you forget about how much you forgot when you were younger, and you started tripping at your age. Now, in terms of things going south, my expertise is not in dementia per se, but you tend to see a greater incidence where people have trouble knowing what the right word is, or using the incorrect word, or not being able to, uh, navigate effectively, especially in new environments, things of that nature. Their ability to segment information

• 39:36Speaker 01

  into events becomes more difficult. So, you start seeing those kinds of problems. Now, the thing about that is that...

• 39:48Speaker 01

  You need some pretty rigorous tests to be able to verify that that's in fact what's going on and it's not what I mentioned before is that maybe just getting worried about things. So that can also cause problems. There are some regularities that you do see in people's ability to remember things over the shorter period of time over for like a minute, days, things of that nature, as well as being able to access general knowledge, like finding words that are needed at a particular moment and that's going to maybe an indicator of something that's going wrong.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  I have used the line since the age of 19 and I still use it. People say, "Well, how old are you?" I'll say, "I'm 19." And I'm not, but you know, it's a, it kind of, it kind of works for attitude in terms of mindset and I don't want to be, I don't want to be 19 with what I knew at 19. I like being my age now and what I know now, but then just saying, "I'm 19." You know, let me throw one thing out too, and I would love for your feedback on this. I know that my ability to process or my ability to recall memories, to recall information that I really need dramatically decreases when I'm tired, lack of sleep.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, whenever there's a problem with the system, then things aren't going to work well. So if you're tired and your brain's trying to shut itself down, you're not going to be very effective at retrieving information, unless it was something you learned when you were falling asleep, then it actually might be easier. It's kind of a counterfactual thing. It's like, you know, consuming alcohol. If you consume alcohol and then study, you're actually going to do worse because the alcohol is disrupting your brain's ability to do what it's supposed to do and so you're not going to learn things very well.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Adding to that would be the, the students that stay up all night thinking they're going to crash study to pass your course. That's not helping them either.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  That's not helping at all. You know, I, I, I give my students all this really good advice in the beginning of the semester and they don't listen. We have these intuitions about what works and what doesn't work in terms of our memory and there's just things that just aren't true. If you study consistently every day, use a little bit of time every day studying whatever topic it is, by the time you get to the final, you know all that information. And if there's some sort of disruption, it's no big deal. You've, you've learned it across time. You learned it better. So spreading learning out improves memory much better than waiting to the end and cramming. And if students feel like, "Well, I'm working really hard when I'm cramming," and they're right, they're working hard because they're not learning anything, because we're not

• 42:32Speaker 01

  set up to learn things that way. It's a really debilitating and self-harming way to try to learn things. So you're trying to cram all this information in there is not very effective and you're staying up all night and so you're tired and so you make mistakes on the exam. It's just really, really dumb.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  I always prefer to not stay up all night and get a good night's sleep and get the F than to stay up all night and get the F.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're going to get an F, at least be well-rounded when you do it.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. That's what, that made a lot more sense to me. Hey, so as we wind down here, I got kind of a big picture question. You have to really kind of jog your mind and what's really your focus right now. But as we talk about these topics, are there major debates in your headspace, so to speak, with colleagues across the globe? Or is it people are generally in agreement about where we are in our understanding right now, memory cognition, and we're kind of just keep moving down the path? Are there particular thoughts or views out there that cause you discomfort because you think someone, I'm not asking for names, but you think someone has gone a really wrong direction? I can see this in finance, for example, the efficient market hypothesis.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Okay, this isn't just, this should not be taught still, but it's still taught. Are there areas in your space where that happens or are people aligned and getting closer to the truth right now?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  I think overall the field is getting more and more accurate ideas about how memory works. But the things that make me angry personally is the, the focus on the here and now, focus on short-term gains and not having a big picture, which is, which is hard to do. It really is hard to do. I think you need to be more advanced in your understanding of that, but I think the field as a whole doesn't have that. Memory research is very much an effect-driven science at this point. We just don't have enough information to have really big unified theories, which everybody

• 44:40Speaker 01

  would like to have, but, but we just don't, we're just not there yet. I get angry when, when people are really focused in on an effect and not trying to link things together in broader ways and, and not looking at what Ebbinghaus taught us, which is that memories change over time. Usually there, people study something, they get tested, you know, 10, 15 minutes later, an hour later, and then that's it. Whereas for me, I want to know how things are changing over time because I think that can be very, very useful. One of the things that we should be able to do at this point, which we cannot do, is say how long somebody will remember something reliably.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  How long will a witness reliably remember what they saw? How long will a student remember something that they heard in the classroom? How long will you remember something that happened on your vacation? And we just, we can't answer those questions. We have, we just throw up our hands and say, "Well, it depends." And it's true, but it depends on what. And so this is one of the things I start pounding my, the table in my lab meeting and people are grabbing their coffee cups and stuff because I'm making things bounce. It just, it frustrates me. I understand why we are where we are, but I would like to see us expand and then take this broader view of things. So, and there are some people who are doing that. So it's not like nobody is doing that, but it's just definitely not where the bulk of

• 46:08Speaker 01

  the work is in human memory. That's my pontification.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Well, you mentioned at the top, you know, with, with, you know, not having the time to, to really get something done. It kind of reminds me of something like politicians. I mean, politicians only say what they need to say to get elected. They pretend like there's this big long-term thing. I don't care whether it's left or right. They pretend it's a big long-term thing. That's baloney. They just want to get elected and that's, it's all short-term nonsense.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they, they want to do some things long-term, but they generally don't have the ability. And I, and this gets to the value of tenure. So if you want to look at very long-term things, so things I'm looking at now are, I'm looking at things that are months out after people learn things. You know, if I'm trying to get tenure, that's a very poor strategy because if it doesn't work, I'm, I'm sunk. And if you're looking for short-term gains, you just, there's just not the time to do that. But because I have tenure, I can take that time. I can look at how things are spinning out over time, look at different angles of things and not have to rush out and be more certain about what it is that I'm saying and what

• 47:20Speaker 01

  are the implications of it. So I'm sort of in the phase of my career where I'm not trying to get as many publications as I can. I want, I'm trying to focus more on getting publications that are going to be cited 20 years after I retire. Things that are foundational, things that are fundamental, things of that nature. And that, for some kinds of science, just takes more time and effort to do that. I understand why young scientists wouldn't necessarily want to do that because of the way the world is, but we need to be able to take that perspective and know how things fit in that, that larger picture. We know, need to look at the forest as well as the trees.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Well, from a personal standpoint, the motivation of trying to leave a legacy, you know, at some point in time, everyone's life, that starts to feel like, "Hey, you know, gosh, I, I want to leave something. I want to do something that's going to stand the test of time." Yeah, I get that motivation for sure.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not about me. It's just, I want to be able, whatever I'm doing is worthwhile, but it's not about me.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, you want, it's a search for the truth. I mean, that's, it's, it's a search for the truth. That's the only thing that really matters at the end of the day because I mean, you know, okay, if you're just searching for not the truth, I mean, no one's going to remember that at some point in time. The truth is what people remember ultimately, hopefully.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  The basic fundamental principles, yep.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  The best website we can send people to check you and your world out. Is there anything we, you would like to promote, any, any, be on a website? Anything you would like to push people in directions, a book or whatnot?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Uh, probably my lab website.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  You've got a lot, there's a lot.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, just probably my lab website for what I'm doing in particular. Gosh, memory is so fascinating. If somebody who's not an expert, I would encourage them to read Daniel Schachter's books. He covers a lot of basic principles and he has a very good writing style. I would recommend those. That'd be my, probably my number one.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  You know, we didn't get into it today, maybe another conversation. I find one of the things interesting, we're talking about recalling memories. I find too, that when I can get into that quote, "flow state," that when I get into that state of mind where I forget time and place, the memories just flood back. The, the information you want to access just floods back and then you, you, you stop doing what you're doing. You, you look, you look at the clock or the date, you know, half a day's gone by, you didn't eat, you don't know what happened and, but you produce this fantastic piece of work. That's a amazing feeling. I love that every time it happens to me.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish I could make that happen on demand. That would be nice.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, we'll leave the audience with that one. Like, how do we make the flow state happen on demand?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Make a lot of money, figure that out.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely. But you know, I, I, listen, a lot of people probably really don't even have that feeling, is my guess.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I think they do. It's just so rare. It's just so rare. You know, it's hard to get into that.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Hey, I appreciate you coming on today. Thank you for educating everyone, including myself.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Thank you, Michael, for calling me.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets. Whether a new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash or just trying to make a lot of money, trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected]. I will send you the right trend following steps to take, along with my free video.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.