Welcome to the huberman live podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today. We are discussing memory in particular, how to improve your memory. Now, the study of memory is one that dates back many decades. And by now, there's a pretty good understanding of how memories are formed in the brain, the different structures involved in some of the neuro.
Chemicals involved. We will talk about some of that today often overlooked. However, is that memories are not just about learning. Memories are also about placing your entire life into a context and that's because what's really special about the brain. And in particular, the human brain is, its ability to place events in the context of past events, the present, and future events. And sometimes even combinations of the past and present, or present and future. And so on. So, when we talk about memory, what we're really talking about,
What is how your immediate experiences relate to previous and future experiences? Today? I'm going to make clear how that process occurs. Even if you don't have a background in biology or psychology. I promise to put it into language that anyone can access and understand and we are going to talk about the science that points to specific tools for enhancing learning and memory. We're also going to talk about unlearning and forgetting. There are of course instances in which we would like to forget things. And that too is a
logical process for which great tools exist to for instance, eliminate or at least reduce the emotional load of our previous experience that you really did not like or that perhaps even was traumatic to you. So today you're going to learn about the systems in the brain and body. That establish memories. You're going to learn why certain memories are easier to form than others and I'm going to talk about specific tools that are grounded in not just one not just a dozen, but well over
Hundred studies in animals and humans that point to specific protocols that you can use in order to stamp down learning of particular things, more easily. And you can also leverage that same knowledge to better forget or unload, the emotional weight of experiences that you did not. Like we're also going to discuss topics, like, deja vu, and photographic memory. And for those of you that do not have a photographic memory and I should point out that I do not have a photographic memory either. Well, you will learn
Learn how to use your visual system in order to better learn Visual and auditory information, their protocols to do this grounded in excellent peer-reviewed research. So, while you may not have a true photographic memory, by the end of the episode, you will have tools in hand or I should say Tools in mind or in eyes and mind to be able to encode, and remember, specific events better than you would. Otherwise before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire.
Effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight sleep. Eight sleep makes Smart mattress, covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking many times on this podcast. I've talked about the incredible relationship between temperature and sleep as well as temperature and wakefulness. Many people aren't aware of this but waking up in the morning is in part the consequence of your body heating up.
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To address both of those things. We need to do a little bit of brain science, 101 review and I promise this will only take two minutes and I promise that even if you don't have a background in biology, it will make sense.
We are constantly being bombarded with physical stimuli patterns of touch, on our skin light, to our eyes, light to our skin. For that matter, smells tastes and sound waves fact, if you can hear me saying this right now. Well, that's the consequence of sound waves arriving into your ears, through headphones, a computer, or some other speaker device, each one of and all of those sensory stimuli are converted into electricity and chemical signals by your so-called nervous system. Your brain, your spinal cord.
And all their connections with the organs of the body and all the connections of your organs of the body, back to your brain and spinal cord. One of the primary jobs of your nervous system. In fact is to convert physical events in the world that are non-negotiable, right? Photons of light are photons, of light sound waves are sound waves. There's no changing that. But your nervous system does change that it converts those things into electrical signals and chemical signals which are the language of your nervous system now. Just because you're being bombarded with all this sensory information and it's being converted.
Inverted into a language that neurons and the rest of your nervous system can understand does not mean that you are aware of it. All. In fact, you are only going to perceive a small amount of that sensory information. For instance. If you can hear me speaking right now, you are perceiving my voice, but you are also most likely neglecting the feeling of the contact of your skin with whichever surface. You happen to be sitting or standing on. So it is only by perceiving a subset. A small fraction of the sensory of
In our environment that we can make sense of the world around us. Otherwise, we would just be overwhelmed with all the things that are happening in any one given moment. Now, memory is simply a bias in which perceptions will be replayed again in the future. Anytime you experience, something that is the consequence of specific chains of neurons that we call Neural circuits being activated and memory is simply a bias in the likelihood that that specific chain of neurons will be activated again.
So for instance, if you can remember your name, and I certainly hope that you can. Well that means that there are specific chains of neurons in your brain that represent your name. And when those neurons connect with one another and communicate electrically, with one another in a particular sequence. You remember your name, we're that particular chain of neurons to be disrupted. You would not be able to remember your name. Now, this might seem immensely simple, but it raises this really interesting question, which
We talked about before which is why do we remember certain things and not others because according to what I've just said as you go through life, you're experiencing things. All the time. You're constantly being bombarded with sensory, stimuli some of those sensory, stimuli you perceive and only some of those perceptions get stamped down as memories today. I'm going to teach you how certain things get stamped down as memories, and I'm going to teach you how to leverage that process in order to remember the information that you want.
Far better. Now, even though I told you that a memory is, simply a bias in the likelihood that a particular chain of neurons will be activated in a particular sequence again, and again, it doesn't operate on its own. In fact, most of what we remember takes place in a context of other events. So for instance, you can most likely. Remember your name? And yet you're probably not thinking about when it was that you first learned. Your name like this generally happens when we are very, very young children.
And yet, I'm guessing you could probably remember a time when someone mispronounced your name, or made fun of your name, or as the case was, for me. I got to the third grade and there were two Andrews and sadly, for me. I lost the coin flip that allowed me to keep Andrew and from about third grade until about the 12th grade people called me and E, which I really did not prefer. So if you call me Andy in the comments, I'll delete your comment. Just kidding, doesn't bother me that much, but eventually I reek.
Named Andrew as my name. Well, it was mine to begin with and throughout but I started going by Andrew again. Why do I say this? Well, there's a whole context to my name for me and there may or may not be a whole context to your name for you. But presumably, if you ask your parents, why they named you your given name, you'll get a context Etc, that context reflects the activation of other neural circuits that are also related to other events in your life. Not just your name, but probably your siblings names and who your parents are.
Our and on and on and on. And so the way memory works is that each individual thing that we remember or that we want to remember is linked to something, by either a close, a medium or a very distant Association. This turns out to be immensely important. I know many of you will read or will encounter programs that are designed to help you enhance your memory, you know, the you have these phenoms that can remember 50 names in a room full of people, where they can remember a bunch of names of Novel objects or not.
Even in different languages and oftentimes that's done by association. So people will come up with little mental tricks to you know, either link the sound of a word or the meaning of a word in some way that's meaningful for them and will enhance their memory that can be done and is impressive when we see it. And for those of you can do that, congratulations, most of us can't do that or at least it requires a lot of effort in training. However, there are things that we can do that. Leverage The Natural biology of our nervous system to enhance.
Learning and memory of particular, perceptions and particular information. Let's first just talk about the most basic ways that we learn, and, remember things and how to improve learning and memory and the most basic one is repetition. Now, the study of memory and the role of repetition actually dates back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, when ebbinghaus developed, the first so-called learning curves, learning curves, are simply what results when you quantify how many repetitions of
A required in order to remember something. In fact, it's been said that ebbinghaus, liberated the understanding of learning from the Philosopher's by generating, these learning curves when we mean, by that. Well, before ebbinghaus came along learning, and memory were thought to be philosophical ideas. Ebbinghaus came along and said, well, let's actually take some measurements. Let's measure how well, I can remember a sequence of words or a sequence of numbers, if I just repeat that.
Them. So what ebbinghaus did is he would take a sequence of numbers or words on a page and he would read them. And then he would take a separate sheet of paper and we have to presume, he didn't cheat and he would write down as many of them as he could and he would try and keep them in the same sequence. Then he would compare to the original list and he would see how many errors he made you do this over and over and over again. And as you would expect early in the training and the learning, it took a lot more repetitions to get the sequence, correct.
Over time, it took fewer sequences and he referred to that difference in the initial number of repetitions that he had to perform versus the later number of repetitions that he had to perform as a so-called savings. So he literally thought of the brain as having to generate a kind of a currency of effort. And he talked about savings as the reduction in the amount of effort that he had to put forward in order to learn information and what he got was a learning curve and you can imagine what that learning curve looked like it was in a very
Very sharp Peak at the beginning that dropped off over time. And of course, he remembered all this meaningless information. But even though the information might have been meaningless the experiment itself and what ebbinghaus demonstrated was immensely meaningful? Because what it said was that with repetition, we can activate particular sequences of neurons and that repeated activation lays down what we call a memory. And that might all seem like a big duh, but prior to ebbinghaus, none of that was known. Now, I should also say
House because of, when he was alive, was not aware of these things that we call neuro circuits. It was in 1906 that Golgi and qahal got. The Nobel Prize for actually showing that neurons are independent cells connected by synapses. These little gaps between them where they communicate, so he may have been aware of that. But the whole notion of neural circuits hadn't really come about nevertheless. What the ebbinghaus learning curves really established. Was that sheer repetition just repeating things over and over and over again. Is sufficient to learn
Something that no doubt had been observed before but had never been formally Quantified. Now, if we look at that result, there's something really important that lies a little bit cryptic. That's not so obvious to most people which is the information that he was trying to learn. Wasn't any more interesting the second time than it was the first probably was even less interesting and less and less interesting with each repetition and yet it was sheer repetition that allowed him to remember.
Now sometime later in the early to mid 1920s, a psychologist in Canada named, Donald Hebb came up with what was called hebbs, postulate and hebbs postulate broadly. Speaking is this idea that if a sequence of neurons is active at the same time or at roughly the same time that that would lead to a strengthening of the connections between those neurons and many many decades of experimentation later. We now know that postulate to be true.
Neurons themselves are not smart. They don't have knowledge. So, every memory is the consequences. I told you before of the, repeated activation of a particular chain of neurons and what ebbinghaus showed through repetition, and what Donald Hebb proposed, and was eventually verified through experimentation on animals. And humans was that if you encourage the co activation of neurons, meaning have neurons fire at roughly the same time, they will
Will strengthen their connections. It leads to a bias in the probability that those neurons will be active again. Now, this is vitally important because nowadays, we hear a lot about how memories are the consequence of new neurons added in the brain or that every time you learn something a new connection in your brain forms. Well, sorry to break it to you, but that's simply not the case. Most of the time and I want to emphasize, most not all. But most of the time when we learn something, it's because existing neurons.
New neurons, but existing neurons strengthen their connection through Co activation over and over and over through repetition. Or and this is a very important or or through very strong activation once and only once, in fact, there's something called one trial, learning whereby we experience something, and we will remember that thing Forever. This is often most associated with negative events, and I'll explain why in a few minutes, but it can also be associated.
Dated with positive events, like the first time you saw your romantic partner or something that happened with that romantic partner where the first time that you saw your child or any other positive event as well as any other extremely negative event. So again, both repetition and I guess we could label it intensity, but we really mean when we say, intensity is strong activation of neurons can lay down these traces. These circuits that are far more likely to be active again.
Then had there not been repetition or not some strong activation of those circuits. So, with that, in mind, let's return to the original contrarian question that I raised before, which is why do we remember anything every day? You wake up, your neurons in your brain and body are active, different, neural circuits are active. And yet you only remember a small fraction of the things that happen each day and yet you retain a lot of information from previous days in the days before those. And so on, it is only
with a lot of repetition, or with extremely strong activation of a given neural circuit that we will create new memories. And so in a few minutes, I'll explain how to get extremely strong activation of particular, neural circuits repetition is pretty obvious, repetition is repetition. But in a few minutes, I'll illustrate a whole set of experiments and a whole set of tools that point to how you can get extra strong, activation of a given neural circuit as it relates to learning so that you will remember.
Member that information, perhaps not just with one trial of learning, but certainly with far fewer repetitions than would be required. Otherwise, before we go any further. I want to preface the discussion by saying that there are a lot of different kinds of memory. In fact, we're you to take a voyage into the neuroscience and or psychology of memory, you would find an immense number of different terms to describe the immense number of different types of memory that researchers focus on. But for sake of today's discussion really just want to focus on short-term.
Marie, medium term memory, and long-term memory. And while there's still debate as is always the case with scientist, frankly about the exact divisions between short term medium and long-term memory. We can broadly Define short-term, memory and long-term memory. And we can describe a couple different types of those that I think you can relate to in your everyday life. The most common form of short-term memory that we're going to focus on is called working memory. Working memory. Is your ability to keep a chain of numbers in mind for some period of time.
But the expectation really isn't that you would remember those numbers the next day and certainly not the next week. So a good example would be a phone number if I were to tell you the phone number for 93 2938. Well, you could probably remember it for 93 2938. But if I came back tomorrow and ask you to repeat that chain of numbers, most likely you would not unless of course, we used a particular tool to stamp down that memory into your mind and commit it to long-term memory. Now, of course, in this day and age.
Most people have phone numbers programmed into their phone. I don't really have to remember the exact numbers. It's usually done by contact, identity and so forth. So a different example that some of you are probably more familiar with would be those security code. So you try and log onto an app or a website. And it asks you for a security code that's been sent to your text messages, and then you can either plug that indirectly in some cases. You have to remember that short sequence of anywhere, usually from six to seven, sometimes eight numbers, your ability to do that to switch back and forth between
web pages or apps and plug-in that number by remembering the sequence and plugging it in by texting or King it in on your keyboard. That's a really good example of working memory long-term memory of the sort that we're going to be talking a lot about today, is your ability to commit certain patterns of information, either, cognitive information, or motor information, right? The ability to move your limbs in a particular sequence over long periods of time, such a such that you could remember it a day or a week, or a month or maybe even a year or several.
Years later, so, we got short-term, memory and long-term memory. And we've got this working memory, which is going to keeping something online, but then discarding it. Okay, not online on a computer but online within your brain, there are also two major categories of memory that I'd like you to know about one is explicit memory. So this is not necessarily explicit of the sort that you're used to thinking about. But rather the fact that you can declare, you know, something so you have an explicit memory of your name presumably you have an explicit memory.
Of the house or the apartment that you grew up in, you know, something and you know, you know it and you can declare it so I can ask you what was the color of the first car that you owned? Or what is the color of your romantic Partners hair? These sorts of things. That's an explicit declarative memory. But you also have explicit procedural memories. Now procedural memories as the name suggests involve action sequences the simplest one. It's almost ridiculously simple.
Is walking. If I say, how is it that you walk from one room to the other? You'd probably say, well, I go that direction. I turn left. I say no. No. No, how is it exactly that? You do it say, well, I move my left foot, then my right foot, my left foot and you could describe that. So it's an explicit procedural memory, so much, so that if you were going to teach a young toddler, how to walk, you would probably say, okay good good try. Okay and you, you know, probably that's going to be pre language for the toddler, but you're going to encourage them to move one leg, then the other and you're going to
I encourage and reward them for moving one leg. Then the other because you have an explicit procedural memory of how to walk. Okay, almost ridiculously simple. Maybe even truly ridiculously simple, but nonetheless when you think about in the context of neural circuits and neural firing, pretty amazing, even more amazing is the fact that all explicit memories, both declarative and procedural explicit memories can be moved from explicit to implicit.
What I mean by that? Well, an example of walking you might have chuckled a little bit or kind of shook your head into this a ridiculous thing to ask. How do I walk from one room to the next? I just walk, I just do it. Well, what is just do it? What it is is that you have an implicit understanding, meaning your nervous system knows how to walk without. You actually having to think about what you know, about how to walk, you just get up out of your chair or you get up out of bed and you walk.
In
the brain, you have a structure. In fact, you have one on each side of your brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus literally means seahorse. Anatomists like the name brain structures after things that they think those brain structures resemble when I look at the hippocampus frankly. It doesn't look like a seahorse which either reflects my lack of understanding of what a seahorse really looks like a visual deficit or I think it's fair to say that those anatomists were using a little bit of creative collaboration when thinking about what the
A looks like nonetheless. It is a curved structure. It has many layers. It's been described by my colleague, Robert sapolsky by others as looking more like a jelly roll or a cinnamon roll is what it looks like to me. And if you were to take one cinnamon roll chop it down the middle. So now you've got to have cinnamon rolls and rather than put them back together in the configuration. They were before you just slide one down. So that you've got essentially to cease to c-shaped.
Halves of the cinnamon roll and you push them together, right? Slightly offset from one another. Well, that's what the hippocampus looks like to me. And I think that's a far better description of its actual physical structure. But I guess if you were to use that physical structures, the name, well, then you'd have to open up a brain Atlas, and it would be called to half C, cinnamon rolls stuffed halfway together. So that's not very good. So I guess seahorse will work. Hippocampus is the name of this structure and it is the site in your brain. And again you have one on each.
Each side of your brain, in which explicit declarative memories are formed. It is not where those memories are stored and maintained it is where they are established in the first place in contrast implicit memories, right? These subconscious memories are formed and stored elsewhere in the brain mainly by areas like the cerebellum, but also the neocortex, the kind of outer shell of your brain. The cerebellum is literally means mini brain.
And it does, in fact look like a mini brain and is in the back of the brain and the neocortex is the outer part of the brain that covers all the other stuff. So the hippocampus is vitally important for establishing these new declarative memories of what you know, and what, you know how to do. Now in order to really understand the role of the hippocampus in memory in particular explicit declarative and explicit procedural memory. And to really understand how that's distinct from
Declarative an implicit procedural memories. We have to look to a clinical case. In the clinical case. I'm referring to is a patient who went by the name. Hm. Patients go by their initials, in order to maintain confidentiality of their real identity. Hm. Had what's called intractable epilepsy. So he would have these really dramatic so-called grand mal seizures or drop seizures. For those of you that know somebody with epilepsy or that have epilepsy.
You might be familiar with this. You can have petit mal seizures which are minor seizures. You can have tonic-clonic seizures, which are sometimes, not even detectable. You can have absence seizures. What people will just stop. It's almost as if their brain goes on pause and they'll just stop. There was a reported actually that Einstein had absence seizures, although I don't know that it's ever really been confirmed neurologically.
Grand mal seizures are extremely severe and that's what hm had. So he could just be going about his day and maybe even cooking or doing something driving operating any kind of machinery and then all of a sudden he would just have a drop seizure. So he would just physically drop and go into a grand mal seizure such a convulsing in the whole body loss of consciousness etcetera, or he would feel it. Coming on oftentimes people with epilepsy can feel the epileptic seizure coming on, kind of like a wave from the back of the brain and sometimes they can get to a safe circumstance.
Not always and so the frequency and the intensity of his seizures were so robust that the neurosurgeons and neurologists decided that they need to locate the origin what they call the foci of those seizures and remove that brain tissue because the way seizures work as they spread out from that Focus, so that Foci of brain tissue. And unfortunately, for hm, the focus of his seizures was the hippocampus. So after a lot of deliberation,
A neurosurgeon. In fact, one of the most famous neurosurgeons in the world at that time made, what are called electrolytic lesions, actually burned out the hippocampus in the brain of hm, and as a consequence, he lost all explicit memory. Now, the consequence of this was that he couldn't exist in normal everyday life, like most people, so he had to live mostly not entirely but mostly in a kind of hospital setting and I've talked to several people who
I should say who met hm directly because he's no longer alive. But an interaction with him might look like the following. He would walk up to you just fine. You wouldn't know that he had any kind of brain damage. He could walk fine. He could speak fine and he'd say hi. I'm Andrew. And he'd say hi. I'm whatever his name happened to be eight. He wouldn't say hm, but he'd probably say his real name and then perhaps someone new would walk into the room. He might turn around. Look at that person. As
any of us might do then turn around back to me. And say hi. What's your name? And if I were to say well I just told you my name and you just told me your name. Do you remember that? He'd say, I'm sorry. I don't remember any of that. What's your name? So you to go through this over and over again? So a complete lack of explicit declarative memory. Now, he did have some memory for previous events in his life that dated way back. Okay again hinting at the idea that memories are not necessarily.
Stored in the hippocampus. They're just formed in the hippocampus. So once they've moved out of the hippocampus to other brain areas, he could still keep those memories. They're in a different database. If you will, they're in a different pattern of firing of other neural circuits, but he couldn't form new memories. Now, there's some very important and interesting twists on what hm could and could not do in terms of learning and memory that teach us a lot about the brain. In fact, I think most neuroscientists would agree that this unfortunate case of HMS epilepsy and the subsequent neurosurgery that he
Had taught us much of what we know or at least. Think about in terms of human learning and memory. For instance, as I mentioned before, he still had implicit knowledge, he knew how to walk, he knew how to do certain things like make a cup of coffee. He knew the names of people that he had met much earlier in his life and so on and yet he couldn't form new memories. Now, in violation to that last statement, there were some elements of H&M's emotionality that suggests that there was
Sort of residual capacity to learn new information, but it wasn't what we normally think of as explicit declarative or procedural memory. For instance. It's been reported or it's been said I should say because I don't know that the studies were ever done with intense physiological measurements that if you were to tell hm a joke and he thought it was funny. He would laugh really hard. So he like jokes. He told me you'd say. Hey Jim, I want to tell you a joke. You tell him a joke. Need laugh really hard then.
You could leave the room, come back and tell him the same joke again. Now. Keep in mind. He did not remember that. You told him that joke previously and the second time he would laugh a little bit less and then you'd leave the room. Come back again. Say hi. I'm Andrew, he say oh nice to meet you because as you know, as you recall because you can recall things, but he couldn't recall things. He didn't know that he just met you or at least, he couldn't remember it. You tell him the joke, a third time, or a fourth time and with each subsequent telling of the joke. He found it. A little less funny just as
Keep this in mind folks, if you tell a joke, and you get a big laugh. Don't tell it again, at least not immediately not to the same person or the same crowd, because the second time, it's a little less funny in the third time. It's a little less funny. And that actually has to do with a whole element of dopamine and its relationship to surprise and that's the topic of a future podcast where we talk all about humor and Novelty in the brain, but the point being that certain forms of memory seem to exist in a kind of phantom, like,
A within HMS brain. What do I mean by that? Well, this underscores, the fact that he had an implicit memory of having heard that joke before and it suggests that humor, or at least what we find funny is somehow more related to procedures similar to walking or a motor ability. Then it is to this precise content of that joke. All right, that's a little bit of an abstract concept. But the point is that hm lacked. Explicit declarative memory. He couldn't tell you what he had just heard he could.
Not learn new information and he couldn't tell you how to do something unless he had learned. How to do that something, many years prior. Now there have been a lot of other patients besides. Hm, that have had brain lesions due to epilepsy, or I should say do two surgeries to treat. Epilepsy do two strokes, do too sadly gunshot wounds and other forms of what we call infarcts infarct INF a RCT infarct is the word we use to describe.
Describe damage to a particular brain region and many different patients. With many different patterns of infarct have taught us a lot about how memory and other aspects of the brain work.
Hm, really teaches us that what we know and what we are able to do is the consequence of things that we are aware of and learnings that have been passed off into subconscious knowledge, that our body knows, our brain knows, but we don't know exactly how we know that thing. And I tell you the story about H&M's ability to understand a joke, but that with repeated telling of a joke. It has less and less and less of an impact in creating a sense of
Laughter of humor in. Hm. Not as just an anecdote to flush out his story. But because emotion itself, turns out to be the way in which we can enhance memories, even if those are memories for things that are not funny are not intensely. Sad are not immensely happy or don't evoke a really strong emotional response or even any remote emotional response. And the reason for that is that emotions just like
Like perception. Just like sensation are the consequence of particular neurochemicals being present in our brain and body. And as I'm going to tell you next, there are particular neurochemicals that you can leverage in order to learn specific information faster. And to remember it for a much longer period of time, it maybe even forever and you can do that by leveraging, the relationship in your nervous system between your brain and your body, and your body, back to your brain. So let's talk about tools for enhancing memory.
Now, there's one tool that it's absolutely clear works and it's always worked. It works now and it will work forever and that's repetition the more often that you perform something or that you recite something, the more likely you are to remember it in the future. And while that might seem obvious, it's worth thinking about what's happening? When you repeat something. But when I say what's happening, I mean at the neural level, what's happening is that you are encouraging the
Hiring a particular chains of neurons that reside in a particular circuit, right? So particular sequence of neurons, playing neuron ABCD played in that particular sequence, over and over, and over again, and with more repetitions, you get more strengthening of those nerve connections. Now.
Repetition works, but the problem for most people is that they either don't have the patience. They don't have the time and sometimes they literally don't have the time because they've got a deadline on something that they're trying to remember and learn or they simply would like to be able to remember things better in general. Remember them more quickly this process of accelerating repetition based learning so that your learning curve doesn't go from having to perform something a thousand times and then gradually over time, is it?
1750 times a day. 500 times a day. Three hundred times a day in down to know, repetitions, right? You can just perform that thing the first time. And every time, well, there is a way to shift that curve. So that you can essentially establish stronger connections between the neurons that are involved in generating that memory or behavior more quickly. How do you do that? Well, in order to answer that we have to look at the beautiful work of James McGraw and Larry Cahill.
Bill James McGraw, and Larry Cahill did a number of experiments over several decades really based on a lot of animal literature but mainly focused on humans that really established what's required to get better at remembering things. And to do so very quickly. I want to talk about one experiment that they did, that was particularly important and we will provide a link to this paper. It's some years old now, but the result still holed up, in fact the results establish an entire field of memory in
And since psychology, what they did is they had human subjects, come into the laboratory and to read a short paragraph of about 12 sentences. And the key thing is that some subjects read a paragraph that was pretty mundane. The content, the information within the paragraph was all related to the content of the previous sentence. It was a cogent paragraph, right? It just wasn't meaningless scramble of words, but it described a kind of mundane set of
Oz. Maybe it would be a story about someone who walked into a room, sat down at a desk wrote for a little bit and got up and had lunch, you know, just kind of mundane information, not very interesting, another group of subjects, read also a 12 sentence paragraph, but that paragraph included a subset of sentences that had a lot of emotionally intense language or that had language that could evoke an emotionally intense response in the person reading it. So might have talked about
Car accident or a very intense surgery, but it also can be positive stuff. Things like a birthday party or a celebration of some other kind, or a big Sports win. So, in other words, you have two conditions of this study. People either read a boring paragraph, or they read a really emotionally Laden paragraph. And again, the emotions can either be positive or negative emotions. Subjects, left the laboratory and sometime later. They were called back to the laboratory and I should say, at no point in the
Experiment. Did they know they were part of a memory experiment? Okay, they don't know why they're reading this paragraph. They came in either for class credit or to get paid. It's typically how these things are done on college campuses or elsewhere. Come back into the lab and they would get a pop quiz. They would be asked to recall the content of the paragraph that they had read previously, as is probably expected. Perhaps even obvious to you the subjects that read the emotionally intense paragraph remembered.
Are more of the content of that paragraph and we're far more accurate in the remembering of that information. Now, that particular finding wasn't very novel, many people had previously described how emotionally intense events are better remembered than non emotionally, intense events. In fact, way back in the 1600s Francis Bacon, who is largely credited with developing the scientific method said quote, memory is assisted by anything that makes an impression on a powerful passion.
Inspiring fear, for example, or wonder shame or Joy? Francis. Bacon said that in 1620. So, Jim McGann Larry Cahill were certainly not the first to demonstrate or to conceive of the idea that emotionally Laden experiences are more easily remembered than other experiences. However, what they did next was immensely important for our understanding of memory and for our building of tools to enhance learning and memory what they did.
Was they evaluated the capacity for stress? And for particular, neural chemicals, associated with stress to improve our ability to learn information, not just information, that is emotional, but information of all kinds. So I'm going to describe some experiments done in animal models. Just very briefly and then experiments done on human subjects because Maga worked mainly on animals. Also, human subjects Larry Cahill almost exclusively on human subjects.
If you take a rat or a mouse and put it in an arena, where at one location the animal receives an electrical shock. And then you come back the next day, you remove the shock of oking device and you let the animal move around that Arena. That animal will quite understandably, avoid the location where it was shocked. So called conditioned place a version that effect of avoiding that particular location occurs in one trial. That's a good example of one trial.
Learning. So somehow the animal knows that it was shocked at that location. It remembers that it is a hippocampal dependent learning. So animals that lack a hippocampus or who have their hippocampus pharmacologically or otherwise incapacitated will not learn that new bit of information, but for animals that do they remember it after the first time and every time unless you are to block the release of certain chemicals in the brain and body.
And then chemicals. I'm referring to our epinephrine adrenaline and to some extent, the corticosteroids things like cortisol. Now, we know that the effect of getting one trial learning somehow involves epinephrine, at least in this particular experimental scenario. Because if researchers do the exact same experiment and they have done the exact same experiment, but they introduced a pharmacological Blocker of epinephrine. So that epinephrine is released in response to the shock, but
Cannot actually bind to its receptors and have all of its biological effects. Well, then the animal is perfectly happy to tread back into the area where it receives the shock. It's almost as if it didn't know or we have to assume they didn't remember that it receive the shock at that location. So it all seems pretty obvious when you hear it, something bad happens in location. You'll go back to that location. So that's condition Place avoidance, but it turns out that the opposite is also true meaning for something called conditioned Place preference. You can take an animal
I'll put it into an arena, feed it, or reward it somehow at one location in that Arena. So you can give a hungry rat or Mouse food at one particular location. Take the animal out, come back the next day. No food is introduced but it will go back to the location where it received the food or you can do any variant of this. You can make the arena a little bit chilly and provide warmth of that location, or you can take a male animal and turns out male rats and mice will mate at any point or a female animal. That's at the particular so-called receptive phase.
For mating cycle and give them an opportunity to mate at a given location. They'll go back to that location and wait and wait. This is perhaps why people go back to the same bar the bar seat at the bar or the same restaurant and wait for because of the one time they you know, things worked out for them. Whatever. The context was conditioned Place, preference conditioned Place preference, as with conditioned Place, avoidance depends on the release of adrenaline rights. Not just about stress. It's about a heightened emotional state in the
The brain and body. Okay. This is really important. It's not just about stress. You can get one trial learning for positive events conditioned Place preference. And you can get
One child learning for negative events. Here is a positive - I'm putting what's called valence on a making a value judgment about whether or not the animal liked it or didn't like it. And we have to presume what the animal liked or didn't like and how it felt. But this turns out all to be true for humans as well. We know that because McGann Cahill did experiments where they gave people, a boring paragraph to read and only a boring paragraph to read. But one group of subjects was asked to read the
Graph. And then, to place their arm into very, very cold water. In fact, he was Ice Water. We know that placing ones arm into ice water, especially if it's up to the shoulder near to it, evokes the release of adrenaline in the body. It's not an enormous release, but it's a significant increase and yes, they measured adrenaline release. In some cases. They also measured for things like cortisol Etc. And what they found is that if one evokes the release of adrenaline through this
The arm into ice water approach, the information that they read previously just a few minutes before was remembered. It was retained as well as emotionally intense information, but keep in mind that information that they read was not interesting at all, or at least, it wasn't emotionally Laden.
This had to be the effect of adrenaline released into the brain and body because if they blocked the release or the function of adrenaline in the brain and or body, they could block this effect. Now, they biology of epinephrine and cortisol or little bit complex. But there's some Nuance there that's actually interesting and important to us. First of all, adrenaline is released in the body. And in the brain, it's released in the body from the adrenals, remember epinephrine and adrenaline, or the same thing.
Cortisol is also released from the adrenal glands. These two little glands that ride, atop our kidneys, but it can't cross into the brain. It only has what we call peripheral effects quickening of the heart rate, right changes. The patterns of blood flow changes are patterns of breathing in general, makes our breathing more shallow and faster. In general, makes our heart beat more quickly etcetera within our brain. We have a little brain area called Locus coeruleus, which is the back of the brain which has the opportunity to sprinkler the rest of the brain with the neuromodulator.
Aaron adrenaline as well as norepinephrine and related neuromodulator and to essentially wake up or create a state of alertness throughout the brain. So it's very general effect. The reason we have two sites of release is because these neurochemicals do not cross the blood-brain barrier and so waking up the body with adrenaline, and waking up. The brain are two separate so-called parallel phenomenon. Cortisol can cross the blood-brain barrier because it's lipophilic. Meaning, it can move through.
Tissue. And we'll get into the biology of that in another episode. But cortisol in general, is released and has much longer term effects. And as I've just told you can permeate throughout the brain and body, adrenaline has more local effects or at least a segregated between the brain and the body, this will turn out to be important. Later. The important thing to keep in mind is that it is the emotionality evoked by an experience or to be more precise. It is the emotional state that you are in after you experience something.
That dictates whether or not you will learn it quickly or not. This is absolutely important in terms of thinking about tools to improve your memory. And no, I am not going to suggest that every time you want to learn something. You plunge your arm into ice water. Why won't I suggest that? Well, it will induce the release of adrenaline, but there are better ways to get that adrenaline release before. I explain exactly what those tools are. I want to Tamp down the biology of how all this works. Because in that understanding
We'll have access to the best possible tools to improve your memory. First of all, Maga and Cahill were excellent experimentalists. They did not just establish that you could Quicken the formation of a memory by accessing material that was very emotionally Laden or creating an emotional High adrenaline state after interacting, with some things, some word, some person, some information. They also tested whether or not that whole effect could be blocked.
T' by blocking the emotional state, or by blocking adrenaline. So what they did is they had people read paragraphs that either had a lot of emotional content or they had people read paragraphs that were pretty boring, but then had them put their arm into ice water, and I should say they did other experiments tutoring increase adrenaline there, even some Shock experiments that were done by other groups, any number of things, to evoke the release of adrenaline even people taking drugs, that increase adrenaline, but then they also did. What are called blocking experiments? They did experiments where they had people.
Get into a highly emotional state from Reading highly emotional material, or they got people to get into a highly emotional neurochemical state by reading boring material and then taking a drug to increase, adrenaline or ice bath or a shock. And then they also administered a drug called a beta, blocker to block the effect of adrenaline and related chemicals in the brain and body. And what they found is that even if people were exposed to something really emotional or
Had a lot of adrenaline in their system because they received a drug to increase the amount of adrenaline to manipulations, that normally would increase memory. Keep that in mind. If they gave them a beta blocker, which reduced the response to that adrenaline, right? So no quickening of the heart rate, no quickening of the breathing no increase in the activity of locus coeruleus, and these kind of wake up signals to the rest of the brain. Well, then the material wasn't remembered better at all. What this tells us is that yes, Francis Bacon was right McGann Cahill were right.
Hundreds, if not thousands of philosophers and psychologists and neuroscientists were right in stating and in thinking that high emotional states help you learn things, but what McGann Cahill really showed and what's most important to know is that it is the presence of high, adrenaline, high amounts of norepinephrine and epinephrine, and perhaps cortisol as well as you'll soon, see that allows a memory to be stamped down.
Down quickly. It is not the emotion. It is the neurochemical state that you go into as a consequence of the emotion and it's very important to understand that. While those two things are related. They are not one in the same thing because what that means is that were you to evoke the release of epinephrine norepinephrine and cortisol or even just one or two of those chemicals. After experiencing something you are stamping.
Down the experience that you just previously had. This is fundamentally important and far in a way different than the idea that we remember things, because they're important to us are because they evoke emotion. That's true. But the real reason, the neurochemical reason the mechanism behind all that is, these neurochemicals have the ability to strengthen neural connections by making them active. Just once there's something truly magic about, that neurochemical cocktail.
That removes the need for repetition. Okay. So let's apply this knowledge. Let's establish a scientifically grounded, set of tools, meaning tools that take into account, the identity of the neurochemicals that are important for enhancing learning and the timing of the release of those chemicals in order to enhance learning. When I first learned about the results of Magog and Cahill. I was just blown away. I was also pretty upset but not with them. I was upset with myself because I realized that
Way that I'd been approaching learning and memory was not optimal. In fact, it was probably in the opposite direction to the enhanced protocol for learning and memory that I'm going to teach you today. My typical mode of trying to learn something while I was in college or while I was in graduate school or as a junior, Professor tenured professor was to sit down to whatever it is. I was going to try and learn perhaps even memorize or if it was a physical scale move to whatever environment I was going to learn that.
All skill in and prior to that, to make sure that I was hydrated, because that's important to me. And certainly can contribute to your brain's ability to function in your body's ability to function and general patterns of alertness, but also to caffeinate, I would have a nice strong cup of coffee or espresso. I would have a nice strong cup of yerba mate and I still drink coffee or yerba mate, very regularly. I drink them in moderation. I think certainly for me.
Typically, I would drink those things before I would engage in any kind of attempt to learn or memorize or to acquire a new skill. Now caffeine in the form of coffee or yerba mate, or any other form of caffeine does create a sense of alertness in our brain and body and it does that through two major mechanisms. The first mechanism is by blocking the effects of adenosine adenosine is a molecule that builds up in the brain and body. The longer that we are awake and its larger than what's responsible for our
Owings of sleepiness and fatigue. When we've been awake for a very long time, caffeine essentially acts to block the effects of adenosine. It's a competing agonists, not to get technical, but it binds to the receptor for adenosine for some period of time and prevents adenosine from having its normal pattern of action. And thereby reduces our feelings of fatigue, but it also increases state of alertness. So while it's reducing fatigue, it's also pushing on neurochemical.
Comes in order to directly increase our alertness, and it does that in large part by increasing the transmission of epinephrine, adrenaline in the brain and body. It also has this interesting effect of up regulating the number and or efficiency or we say the efficacy of dopamine receptors such that when dopamine is present and as a molecule that increases motivation and craving and pursuit that dopamine can have a more potent effect than it would. Otherwise so caffeine really hits these three systems, it hits other systems to but it
Only reduces fatigue, by reducing adenosine increases alertness by increasing epinephrine, release or adrenaline release. I should say both from the adrenals in your body and from Locus coeruleus within the brain. And it can in parallel to all that increase the action, or the efficacy of the action of dopamine. So my typical way of approaching learning and memory would be to drink some caffeine and then Focus really hard on whatever it is that I'm trying to learn try and eliminate distractions and then hope hope.
Hope or try. Try try to remember that information. As best as I could frankly. I felt like it was working pretty well for me. And typically if I leveraged other forms of pharmacology in order to enhance learning and memory things like Alpha GPC, or phosphatidyl serine. I would do that by taking those things before I sat down to learn a particular set of information, or before I went off to learn a particular physical skill. Now, for those of you out there listening to this, you're probably
Bubbly thinking. Well, okay, the results of McGann Cahill pointed to the fact that having adrenaline released after learning something enhanced learning of that thing, but a lot of these things like caffeine or Alpha GPC can increase epinephrine and adrenaline or dopamine or other molecules in the brain and body that can enhance memory for a long period of time. So, it makes sense to take it first or even during learning and then allow that
To occur in, the increase will occur over a long period of time and will enhance learning and memory. And while that is partially true. It is not entirely true. And it turns out it's not optimal work that was done by the Maga laboratory. And other Laboratories evaluated, the precise temporal relationship between neurochemical activation of these Pathways and learning and memory. What they did is they had animals and or people depending on the experiment, take a drug could be calf.
Fein could be in pill form, something that would increase adrenaline or related molecules that create the state of alertness that are related to emotionality. And they had them do it either an hour before 30 minutes before ten minutes before five minutes before learning or during the bout of learning, right? The reading of the information or the Performing of the skill, that one is trying to learn or 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes Etc. After
So they looked very precisely at when exactly is best to evoke this adrenaline release and it turns out that the best time window to evoke the release of these chemicals. If the goal is to enhance learning and memory of the material is either immediately after or just a few minutes 5 10, maybe 15 minutes after you're repeating that information, you're trying to learn that information again, this could be cognitive information or this could be a physical skill. Now, this really
Spits in the face of the way that most of us approach learning and memory. Most of us if we use stimulants, like, caffeine or Alpha GPC, we're taking those before or during an attempt to learn not afterwards. These results point to the fact that it is after the learning and memory that you really want to get that big increase in epinephrine and the related molecules that will Tamp down memory. So, what this means is that if you are currently using caffeine or other,
We'll talk about what those are and safety issues and so forth in a moment. If you're using those compounds in order to enhance learning and memory by taking them before, or during a learning episode. Well, then I encourage you to try and take them either late in the learning episode or immediately after the learning episode. Now, given everything I've told you up until now. Why would I say late in the learning episode or immediately after well, when you ingest something by drinking it or you take it in capsule form, there's a period of time before that gets absorbed.
And into the body and different substances such as caffeine Alpha, GPC, Etc, are absorbed in from the gut, into the bloodstream and reach the brain and Trigger these effects in the brain and body at different rates. So it's not instantaneous. Some have effects within minutes others within you know tens of minutes and so on. It's really going to depend on the pharmacology of those things and it's also going to depend on whether or not you have food in your gut. What else you happen to have circulating in your blood stream, etcetera, but at a very basic level, we can confidently say that there are
Not one, not dozens, but as I mentioned before, hundreds of studies in animals, and in humans that point to the fact that triggering the increase of adrenaline late in learning or immediately after learning is going to be most beneficial. If your goal is to retain that information for some period of time and to reduce the number of repetitions required in order to learn that information. Now, I want to acknowledge that on previous episodes of this podcast and in appearing on other podcasts. I've talked a lot about things like none sleep, deep, rest, and naps, and sleep, as vital to
Learning process and I want to emphasize that none of that information has changed, right? I don't look at any of that information differently as the consequence of what I'm talking about today. It is still true that the strengthening of Connections. In the brain, the literal neuroplasticity, the changing of the circuits occurs during deep sleep, and non sleep, deep rest, and it is also true. And I've mentioned these results earlier, that two papers were published in cell reports. So, Press Journal, excellent Journal, over the last few years, showing that brief now,
Maps of about 22 up to 90 minutes, some in some period of time, after an attempt to learn can enhance the rate of learning and memory, however, those bouts of sleep, the deep sleep that night. I should say, or those brief naps, or even the so-called NSD are, as we call it non sleep, deep rest that was used to enhance the learning and memory of particular pieces of information, either cognitive or physical information, or both.
That still can be performed but it can be performed some hours later. Even an hour later. It can be performed, two hours later, four hours later. Remember, it's in these naps and in deep Sleep that the actual reconfiguration of the neural circuits occurs, the strengthening of those neural circuits occurs. It is not the case that you need to finish about of learning and drop immediately into a nap or sleep. Some people might do that. But if you're really trying to optimize and enhance and improve your memory, the data from a gone.
Cahill and many other Laboratories that stemmed out from their initial work, really point to the fact that the ideal protocol would be focus on the thing. You're trying to learn very intensely there. Also, some other things like error rates, Etc. Please see our episodes on learning. We have a newsletter on how to learn better. You can access that at huberman, lab.com, it to zero cost newsletter. You can grab that PDF, it lists out the things to do during the learning, about still try and get excellent sleep. Again, fundamentally important.
Mental health, physical, health, and performance. And we can now extend from performance to saying, including learning and memory nap. If it doesn't interrupt, your nighttime sleep naps of anywhere from 10 to 90 minutes or non sleep deep. Rest, protocols will enhance learning and memory. But we can now add to that that spiking, adrenaline provided can be done in a safe way, is going to reduce the number of repetitions required to learn. And that should be done at the very tail end or immediately after a learning about
Out which is compatible with all the other protocols that I mentioned. And the reason I'm revisiting the stuff about sleep and on sleep, deep breast is I think that some people got the impression that they need to do that immediately after learning. And today. I'm saying to the contrary immediately after learning, you need to go into a heightened state of emotionality and alertness. Now, it's vitally important to point out that you do not need pharmacology. You don't need caffeine. You don't need Alpha, GPC. You don't need any pharmacologic substance to spike adrenaline.
Unless that's something that you already are doing, or that you can do safely or that, you know, that you can do safely. And I always say and I'll say it again. I'm not a physician. So I'm not prescribing anything. I'm a professor. So I profess things you need to do what's safe for you? So, if you're somebody who's not used to drinking caffeine and you suddenly drink for espresso, after trying to learn something, you are going to have a severe increase in alertness and probably even anxiety. If your panic attack prone, please don't start taking stimulants in.
ER to learn things better. Please. Be safe. I don't just say that to protect me. I said that to protect you and I should mention that if you're not accustomed to taking something, you always want to first check with your doctor, of course, but also move into that gradually right. Stop start with the lowest effective, dose and dose the minimum effective dose. And sometimes the minimal effective, dose is 0 mg. It's nothing. Why do I say that? Well, we already talked about results where they put people's arms into.
An ice bath, in order to evoke adrenaline release. You are welcome to do that. If you want. In fact, that's a pretty low cost, zero pharmacology. At least exhaustion is pharmacology way to approach this whole thing. That's a way of evoking your own natural epinephrine and it turns out also dopamine release. You could take a cold shower, you could do an ice bath or get into a cold circulating bath. We've done several episodes on the utility of cold for health and performance. You can find those episodes at Hebron labs.com., Also the episode with my colleague at Stanford.
Inferred from the biology Department. Dr. Craig Heller, lots of protocols, in particular, in the episode on cold for health and performance that describe how best to use the cold shower, or the ice bath, or the circulating cold bath in order to evoke epinephrine and dopamine release. The point, is that the time in which you would want to do those, protocols is after ideally immediately after your learning about meaning, when you're sitting down to learn new information, or after trying to learn some new physical skill.
Now, whether or not that's compatible with the other reasons, you're doing coldest, deliberate, cold exposure, and whether or not that's compatible with the other things you're doing. That depends on the Contour of your lifestyle, your training, your academic goals, your learning goals, Etc. But if your specific purpose is to enhance learning and memory, you want to spike adrenaline afterwards. And so what I'm telling you is you can do that with caffeine. You can do that with Alpha GPC. You can do that with a combination of caffeine and Alpha GPC. If you can do that safely, some of you, I know are using other forms of pharmacology. I did a long episode.
All about ADHD. I have to just really declare my stance very clearly that I am not a fan. I am actually opposed to people using prescription drugs who are not prescribed those drugs rides in order to enhance alertness. I think there's a big addictive potential there. Also is a potential to really disrupt one's own pharmacology around the dopaminergic system. However, some of you I know are prescribed things like Ritalin, Adderall, and modafinil, and things of that sort.
It in order to increase alertness and focus. So for those of you that are prescribed, those things from a, you know, board certified physician, you're going to have to decide if you're going to take them before trying to learn or after trying to learn. You also have to take into consideration that some of those drugs are very long acting, some are shorter acting and time that according to what you're trying to learn and when so that's pharmacology. But as I've mentioned, there are the behavioral protocols. You can use cold and cold as an excellent stimulus. Because first of all,
It doesn't involve pharmacology. Second of all you can generally access it at low 20 costs, especially the cold shower approach and third you can titrate it, you can start with warmer water. You can make it very very cold if that's your thing and you're able to tolerate that safely. You can make it moderately. Cold. How cold should it be in order to evoke adrenaline release? Well, it should be uncomfortably cold, but cold enough that you feel like you really want to get out but can stay in safely. That's
Going to evoke adrenaline release. If it quickens your breathing if it makes you go wide-eyed, that's increasing adrenaline release. In fact to those effects of going wide-eyed and quickening of the breathing and the challenges and thinking, clearly. Those are the Direct effects of adrenaline, on your brain and body. And of course, there are other ways to increase, adrenaline. You could go out for a hard run. You could do any number of things that would increase adrenaline in your body, which things you choose is up to you, but from a very clear solid grounding,
In research data, we can confidently say that spike in Adrenaline after interacting with some material physical or cognitive material that you're trying to learn is going to be the best time to spike that adrenaline. Now, I realize that I'm being a bit redundant today or perhaps a lot redundant in repeating over and over that the increase in epinephrine should occur either very late in an attempt to learn something or immediately after an attempt to learn something. I also want to emphasize the general Contours.
Or of pharmacologic effects and of Behavioral tools to create adrenaline. What do I mean by that sentence? What I mean is that Maga and colleagues explored a huge number of different compounds and approaches everything from the hand into the ice bath, to injecting adrenaline to caffeine Two drugs that block the effects of adrenaline and caffeine drugs like muesum all and Pico talks. And please don't take those. These are drugs that reduce or enhance the amount of adrenaline and the overall take away.
That anything that increases adrenaline will increase learning and memory and will reduce the number of repetitions required to learn something, regardless of whether or not that something has an emotional intensity or not provided that that spike in Adrenaline occurs late in the learning or immediately after and anything that reduces epinephrine and adrenaline will impair learning. And that's the key and novel piece of information that I'm adding now which is if you're taking
Beta blockers. For instance, or if you're trying to learn something and it's not evoking much of an emotional response and you're not using any pharmacology or other methods to enhance, adrenaline release after learning that thing. Well, you're not going to learn it very well. In fact McGann Cahill did beautiful experiments in humans. Looking at how much adrenaline is increased by varying. The emotional intensity of different things that they were trying to get people to learn.
Or by changing the dosage of epinephrine or by changing the amount of epinephrine, blocker, that they injected, lots and lots of studies. The key thing to take away from those studies is that for some people adrenaline was increased 600 to 700 percent. So six to seven fold over Baseline in the amount of circulating epinephrine or adrenaline and keep in mind sometimes that increase was due to the actual thing. They were trying to learn being very emotional positive or negative emotion. And sometimes it was because they were using a pharmacological
Logic approach or the ice bath approach. I don't think they ever used a cold shower approach, but that would have been a very effective one. We can be sure. However, other people had a zero to ten percent increase over a small increase in epinephrine, what we can confidently, say, on the basis of all those data is that the more epinephrine release, the better that people remembered the material over and over. Again? This was shown whether or not it was for cognitive materials to learning a language learning. A
Of words, learning mathematics, or whether or not is for physical learning. I want to emphasize something about physical learning because I know a number of you are probably drinking a cup of coffee, or having a cup of your mate, or maybe even an energy, drink, and taking some Alpha GPC or something before physical, exercise. I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do or that you wouldn't want to do that. But that's really to increase alertness. It won't enhance learning at least not as well as doing those things after the physical exercise. Now, again, many of
View including myself exercise for sake of the physical benefits of that exercise of cardiovascular, resistance training, but we're not really focused on learning and memory.
So
I emphasize this just, so it's immensely clear to everybody, if you want to use those approaches of increasing, adrenaline prior to, or during physical training, or cognitive work, for that matter, be my guest. I think that's perfectly fine, provided that safe for you. It's only by moving it too late or after the learning that you're really.
Shifting the role of that adrenaline increase to enhancing memory specifically. And as a cautionary note, don't think that you can push this entire system to the extreme over and over again or chronically as we say and get away with it. In other words, you're not going to be able to take a alpha GPC and a double espresso. Do your focus bout of work, cognitive or physical work and then Spike adrenaline again afterwards and remember that stuff even better, right? I'm
I'm not encouraging. In fact, I'm discouraging you from chronically increasing adrenaline both during and after a given bout of work, if the goal is to learn, why do I say that? Well, work from a garden Cahill and others have shown that. It's not the absolute amount of adrenaline That You released in your brain and body that matters for enhancing memory. It's the amount of adrenaline that you release relative to the
Amount of adrenaline that was in your system just prior in particular, in the hour or two prior. So again, it's the Delta, as we say, it's the difference. So, if you're going to chronically increase adrenaline, you're not going to learn as well. The real key is to have adrenaline modestly low, perhaps even just as much as you need in order to be able to focus on something, pay attention to it and then spike it afterwards. This is immensely important because while much of what we're talking about is actually a form of inducing a neurochemical
Chemical acute, stress, meaning a brief and Rapid onset of stress. Well, chronic stress The Chronic elevation of epinephrine and cortisol is actually detrimental to learning and there's an entire category of literature. Mainly from the work of the great and sadly, the late Bruce McEwen from the Rockefeller University and some of his scientific Offspring. Like the great Robert sapolsky showing that chronic stress, chronic elevation of epinephrine actually, inhibits.
In memory and also can inhibit immune system function whereas acute, right? Sharp increases in Adrenaline and cortisol actually can enhance learning and Andy can enhance the immune system. So if you really want to leverage this information, you might consider getting your brain and body into a very calm and yet Alert state. So a high attentional state that will allow you to focus on what it is that you're trying to learn. We know, focus is vital for encoding information and for triggering neuroplasticity, but
remaining calm, throughout that time. And then afterwards, spiking, adrenaline, and allowing adrenaline to have these incredible effects, on reducing the number of repetitions required to learn. So if you're like me, you're learning about this information. This beautiful work of Magog and Cahill and others and thinking, wow, I should perhaps consider spiking my adrenaline in one form or another at the tail end or immediately following an attempt to learn something. And yet, we are not the first to have this conversation, nor worm.
On Cahill or any other researchers that have discussed today. The first to start using this technique. In fact, there is a beautiful review that was published. Just this year may of 2022 in the journal neuron cell Press Journal, excellent Journal called mechanisms of memory under stress, and I just want to read to you. The first opening paragraph of this review, which is the name, suggests all about memory and stress. So here, I'm reading and I quote in medieval times communities.
Through young children in the river when they wanted them. To remember, important events. They believe that throwing a child in the water. After witnessing stork proceedings, would leave a lifelong memory for the events in the child, believe it or not. This is true. This is a practice that somehow people arrived at. I don't know if they were aware of what adrenaline was probably not but somehow in medieval times. It was understood that spiking adrenaline, or creating a row.
Just emotional experience after an experience that one hoped a child would learn would encourage the child's nervous system and they me know what a nervous system was, but would encourage the brain and body that child to remember those particular events, very counterintuitive. If you asked me, I would have thought that the kid would remember only being a thrown into the river. My guess is that they remember that, but that they the idea here. Anyway, is that they also remember the things that preceded being thrown into the river. So both,
Interesting and amusing and somewhat I should say, thought stimulating really, that this is a practice that has been going on for many, hundreds of years. And we are not the first to start thinking about using cold water as an adrenaline stimulus. Nor are we the first to start thinking about using cold water, induced adrenaline, as a way to enhance learning and memory, this has been happening since medieval times. So up until now, I've been talking about pretty broad. Contour of these experiments have been talking about the A on
Lying pharmacology, the role of epinephrine and so forth. I haven't really talked a lot about the underlying neural mechanisms. So I'm just going to take a minute or two and describe those for you because they are informative. We all have a brain structure called the amygdala. A lot of people think it's associated with fear, but it's actually associated with threat detection and more generally, and I should say more specifically, with detecting, what sorts of events in the environment are novel and are linked to particular emotional states, both positive.
All states and negative emotional states. So the neurons in the amygdala are exquisitely, good at figuring out, right? They don't have their own mind. But at detecting correlations between sensory events in the environment that trigger the release of adrenaline and what's going on in the brain and because the amygdala is so extensively, interconnected with other areas of the brain. I basically connects to everything and everything connects back to it. The amygdala is in a position to strengthen particular Connections in the brain.
Very easily, provided certain conditions are met in those conditions of the ones we've been talking about up internet up until now emotional saline. See that results in increases in epinephrine and cortisol or circulating epinephrine and cortisol being much higher than it was 10 minutes or 15 minutes before and the net effect of the amygdala in this context is to take whatever patterns of neural activity, preceded that increase in Adrenaline and corticosteroid and strengthen those synapses that were involved in that neural activity. So the amygdala
Doesn't have knowledge. It's not a thinking area. It's a correlation detector and it's correlating, neurochemical states of the brain and body with different patterns of electrical activity in the brain. This is important because it really emphasizes the fact that both negative and positive emotional states and the different. But somewhat overlapping chemical states that they create or the conditions as we say the and Gates through which memory is
Down and Gates will be familiar. To those of you who have done a bit of computer programming, an and gate is simply a condition in which you need one thing and another to happen in order for a third thing to happen. So you need epinephrine elevated and you need robust activity in a particular brain circuit. If in fact that brain circuit is going to be strengthened. It's not sufficient to have one or the other, you need both. Hence the name and gate and the amygdala is very good at establishing these and
A gate contingencies. It's also a very generic brain structure in the sense that it doesn't really care. What sorts of sensory events are involved provided. They correlated in time with that, increase in Adrenaline and corticosteroid on this has a wonderful side and a kind of dark side. The dark side is that PTSD and traumas are various kinds often involve a increase in Adrenaline, because whatever it was that caused the PTSD.
Indeed very stressful cause he's big increases in these chemicals and because the amygdala is rather General and it's functions, right? It's not tuned or designed in any kind of way to be specifically active in response to particular types of sensory, events or perceptions. Well, then what it means is that we can start to become afraid of entire city blocks, where one bad thing happened in a particular room of a particular building in a city block. We can become
Full of any place that contains a lot of people. If something bad happened to us in a place that contained a lot of people. The amygdala is not so much of a splitter as we say in science. We talk about lumpers and Splitters. Lumpers are kind of generalize a generalized seizures. If that's even a word and I think it is someone will tell me one way or the other and Splitters are people that are Ultra precise and specific and nuanced about every little detail. The amygdala is more of a lumper than a splitter when it comes.
Sensory events, other areas of the brain only become active under very, very specific conditions and only those conditions. And similarly epinephrine is just a molecule. It's just a chemical that circulating in our brain and body. There's no epinephrine specifically for a cold shower that is distinct from the epinephrine associated with a bad event, which is distinct from the epinephrine associated with a really exciting event. That makes you really alert epinephrine is just a molecule, its generic. And so these systems have a lot of overlap.
And that can explain in large part why, when good things happen in particular locations, and in the company of particular people, we often generalize two large categories of people places and things. And when negative things happen in particular circumstances, we often generalize about people places and things associated with that - event. So, now, I'd like to talk about other tools that you can leverage that have been shown in quality. Peer reviewed studies, to enhance, learning and memory and perhaps one of the most potent of
Tools is exercise.
There are numerous studies on this in both animal models. Nfortunately. Now, also in humans, thanks to the beautiful work of people like Wendy Suzuki from New York University. Wendy's lab has identified how Exercise Works to enhance learning and memory and other forms of cognition. I should mention as well as things that can augment can enhance the effects of exercise on learning and memory. And other forms of cognition. Wendy is going to be a guest on this podcast. It's actually the
That follows this episode and includes a lot of material that we have not covered today, and she's an incredible scientist and has some incredible findings. That I know everyone is going to find, immensely useful. In the meantime, want to talk about some of the general effects of exercise on learning and memory that she's discovered in the other Laboratories have discovered. If you recall earlier, I mentioned that learning and memory. Almost always involves the strengthening of particular synapses and neural circuits.
In the brain and not so much. The increase in the number of neurons in the brain. There is one exception. However, and we now have both animal data and some human data to support the fact that cardiovascular exercise seems to increase what we call dentate gyrus. Neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons. The dentate gyrus is a sub region of the hippocampus that's involved in learning and memory of particular kinds, right? Certain types of events in particular, contextual learning.
Other things as well. Sometimes involved in spatial learning. There's a lot of debate about exactly what the dentate gyrus does. But for sake of this discussion and I think everyone in the Neuroscience Community would agree that the dentate gyrus is important for memory formation and consolidation.
The dentate gyrus does seem to be one region of the brain. Certainly in the rodent brain, but more and more. It seeming also in the human brain. We're at least some new neurons are added throughout the lifespan and as it turns out that cardiovascular exercise can increase the proliferation of new neurons in the structure and that those newer new neurons. Scuse me are important for the formation of certain types of new memories. They're wonderful data showing that if
Use x and radiation which is a way to eliminate the formation of those new cells or other tools and tricks to eliminate the formation of those cells that you block the formation of certain kinds of learning and memory. What does this mean? Well, there are a lot of reasons for the statement. I'm about to make that extend far beyond neurogenesis in the hippocampus, learning and memory but it's very clear that getting anywhere from 180. I should say a minimum of 180 to 200 minutes of so-called Zone to cardiovascular exercise. So this is
Cardiovascular exercise, that can be performed at a pretty steady state, which would allow you to just barely hold a conversation. So, breathing hard but not super hard. This isn't Sprint's or high intensity interval training, but doing that for 180 to 200 minutes per week total, is it appears the minimum threshold for enhancing? Some of the longevity effects associated with improvements in cardiovascular fitness, and we believe that it is indirectly. I should say indirectly through enhancement.
Is in cardiovascular fitness that there are improvements in hippocampal dentate gyrus neurogenesis. What does that mean? The improvements in cardiovascular function are in directly impacting the ability of the dentate gyrus to create these new neurons to my knowledge. There's no direct relationship between exercise and stimulating the production of new neurons in the brain.
It seems that it's the improvements in blood flow that also relate to improvements and things like glymphatic flow. The circulation of lymph fluid within the brain that are enhancing neurogenesis. And that neurogenesis is it appears is important. Now In fairness to the landscape of Neuroscience and my colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere, there is a lot of debate as to whether or not there is much if any neurogenesis in the adult human brain, but regardless, I think the
Are quite clear that 180 to 200 minutes, minimum of cardiovascular exercise is going to be important for other health metrics. Now, it is clear that exercise can impact learning and memory through other non neurogenesis, non new neuron type mechanisms. And one of the more exciting one that has been studied over the years, is this notion of hormones from bone traveling in the bloodstream to the brain and enhancing the function of the hippocampus.
The words hormones from Bones is surprising to you. I'm here to tell you that yes, indeed your bones make hormones. We call these endocrine effects. So in biology, we hear about autocrine paracrine and endocrine and those different terms refer to over what distance a given. Chemical has an effect on a cell for instance. The cell can have an effect on itself. It can have an effect on immediately neighboring cells or it can have an effect on both itself immediately.
Neighboring cells and cells far far away in the body. And that last example of given chemical or substance, having an effect on the cell that produced, it plus neighboring cells plus cells. Far away is an endocrine effect. In a lot of hormones. Not all work in this fashion. Hence, why we sometimes hear about endocrine and hormone is kind of synonymous terms.
Your bones make chemicals that travel in the bloodstream and have these endocrine effects of they're effectively acting as hormones. And one such chemical is something called osteocalcin. Now, these findings arrive to us through various Labs, but one of the more important labs for sake of this discussion today is the laboratory of Eric kandel at Columbia Medical School. Eric, is now a believe in his mid to late 90s, still very sharp and has studied learning and memory. It also turns out that he is an avid swimmer. Now, I happen to know that Eric.
It was anywhere from a half, a mile to a mile a day. And again, this is anecdotal. This is I'm not referring to the published data just yet, but he credits that exercise as one of the ways in which he keeps his brain sharp and has indeed kept his brain sharp for many, many decades. And as I mentioned before, he's well into his 90s. So pretty impressive. His laboratory has studied the effects of exercise on hippocampal function in memory and other Laboratories have done that as well. And what they found is that
Cardiovascular exercise and perhaps other forms of exercise too. But mainly cardiovascular exercise creates the release of osteocalcin from the bones that travels to the brain, and to sub-regions of the hippocampus and encourages the electrical activity, and the formation and maintenance of connections within the hippocampus and keeps the hippocampus functioning. Well, in order to lay down new memories, now osteocalcin has a lot of effects besides just improving the function of the hippocampus osteocalcin.
Is involved in bone growth itself. It's involved in hormone regulation. In fact, there's really nice evidence. They can regulate testosterone and estrogen production by the testes and ovaries and a bunch of other facts in other organs of the body. Because again, it's acting in this endocrine manner. It's arriving from bone to a lot of different organs to have effects load. Bearing exercise in particular, turns out to be important for inducing, the release of osteocalcin. And when you think about this, it makes sense.
A nervous system exists for a lot of reasons to sense perceive etcetera. You've got taste you got smell, you got hearing, but the vast majority of brain real estate, especially in humans is dedicated to two things. One Vision. We have an enormous amount of brain, real estate devoted to Vision, certainly compared to other senses and to movement, the ability to generate course movements of the body. The generate the ability. Scuse me to generate fine, movements of the body like the digits, or to wink one eye, or to tilt your head in a particular way or
Your lips, move your face and do all sorts of different things in a very nuanced and detailed way. So much of our brain, real estate is devoted to movement that it's been hypothesized for more than a half century. But especially in recent years, as we've learned more about the function of the brain at a really detailed circuit level, that the relationship between the brain and body and the maintenance.
And perhaps even the Improvement of neural circuitry in the brain depends on our body movements and the signal from the body that our brain is still moving. So think about that. How would your brain know if your body was moving regularly and how would it know how much it was moving? How would it know? Which limbs it was moving? Well, you could say, if the heart rate is increased, then the blood flow will be increased and then the brain will know. Ah, but how does your brain know that? It's increased blood flow due to movement and not to, for instance, just stress, right?
Maybe you actually can't move in your very stressed about that. And so, the increased blood flow is simply a consequence of the increased stress.
The fact that osteocalcin is released from bone and in particular can be released in response to load bearing exercise. So, this would be running again, weightlifting hasn't been tested directly, but one would imagine anything that involves jumping and Landing or weight lifting or body body, weight movements, and things of that sort. That's a signal to release osteocalcin and we know that signal occurs that is directly. Reflective of the fact that
The body was moving and moving in particular ways. In fact, you could imagine that big bones like your femur are going to release more osteocalcin or be in a position to release more osteocalcin than 5 move find movements like the movements of the digits. And this idea that the body is constantly signaling to the brain about the status of the body, and the varying needs of the brain to update its brain. Circuitry is a really attractive idea that fits entirely with the biology of exercise osteocalcin and
no function. I do want to mention that I'm not the first to raise this hypothesis. This hypothesis actually was discussed in a fair amount of detail by John ratey, who is a professor in Harvard Medical School. He wrote a book called spark, which was one of the early books least from an academic about brain, plasticity in the relationship between exercise and movement and plasticity and John, who I have the Good Fortune to know, has described to me experiments or I should say observations of species of ocean-dwelling animals.
That have at least for the early part of their life, a very robust and complicated nervous system. But then these particular animals are in the habit of plopping down onto a rock. They find a kind of a safe comfy space, and they actually stick to that rock, and they don't move anymore for a certain portion. I should say the late portion of their life, and it is at the transition between moving a lot and being stationary, that those animals actually digest their own brain. They literally metabolize a
Good portion of their nervous system because they decide we don't need this anymore and Gobble it up. Use it for its nutritional value and then sit there, like a moron version of themselves with a limited amount of brain tissue because they don't need to move anymore. Now. I certainly don't want to give the message that just moving. Just exercise is sufficient to keep the neural architecture of your brain healthy young and able to learn while that might be true. It's also important to actually engage in a
Times to learn new material, either physical material, so new types of movements and skills and or new types of cognitive information languages, mathematics history, current events, all sorts of things that involve your brain nonetheless. It's clear that physical movement and cognitive ability and the potential to enhance cognitive ability and the ability to learn new physical skills are intimately, connected and osteocalcin appears to be at least one way.
In which that brain-body relationship is established and maintained. So given the information about osteocalcin and movement and given the information about spiking adrenaline late, or after a period of attempt to learn, you might be asking when is the best time to exercise? Now? Unfortunately that has not been addressed in a lot of varying detail where every sort of variation on the theme has been carried out. And yet Wendy, Suzuki's lab has done really beautiful experiments where they have people.
Exercise generally it was in the morning, but at other periods of the day as well. And what they find is that at least as late as two hours after that exercise. There is an enhancement and learning and memory. Now. I want to be clear. We don't know whether or not that exercise led to Big increases in Adrenaline. It may be that those forms of exercise were modest enough or didn't challenge people enough that they merely got a lot of blood flow going. And that the
And learning and memory were related to blood flow and we presume increases in osteocalcin. However, you could imagine a couple of different logical protocols based on what we've talked about. Let's say you were going to do a form of exercise that was going to spike adrenaline a lot. So this would be exercise that really challenges your system. Enforces. You kind of push through a burn, right? So here I'm mainly thing about cardiovascular exercise, but it could be, it could even be yoga. It could be resistance training if it's going to give you a
Spike in Adrenaline. It's going to take some serious effort. Then, logically speaking. You would want to place that after a learning about in order to increase learning and memory. However, if you're using the exercise in order to enhance blood flow and to enhance osteocalcin release in efforts to augment the function of your hippocampus, I think it stands to reason that doing that exercise sometime within the hour to three hours, preceding an attempt to learn, makes a lot of sense and they're on.
Basing it on the human data from Wendy Suzuki's lab on basing. It on the studies from Eric. Kandel and from others Labs. Again, right now. There hasn't been an evaluation of a lot of different protocols to arrive at the, you know, peer-reviewed laboratory super protocol. However, since what we're talking about is using activities like exercise that most of us probably perhaps all of us should be doing regularly anyway, and I do believe most, if not, all of us, should only regularly be trying to learn and keep our brain functioning well, and
New knowledge because it's just a wonderful part of life. And there is evidence that that actually can keep your brain young, so to speak. Well then exercising either before or after learning, about makes a lot of sense with the emphasis on after learning about if the form of exercise spikes, a lot of adrenaline for all the reasons we talked about before, Okay. So we've talked about two major categories of protocols to improve memory that are grounded in quality, peer reviewed science, and there is yet another third protocol that we'll talk about.
In a few minutes, but before we do that, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of memory. In fact, two aspects of memory that I get a lot of questions about. The first. One is photographic memory to be clear. There are people out there who have a true photographic memory. They can look at a page of text. They can scan it with their eyes and they can essentially commit that to memory with very little. If any effort while it might seem that having a photographic memory is a very attractive skill to have should caution you against
Leaving that because it turns out that people with true photographic memory are often, very challenged at remembering things that they hear and oftentimes are not so good at learning physical skills. It's not always the case, but often that's the case. So be careful what you wish for. If you do have a photographic memory, there are certain professions that lend themselves particularly well to you and indeed a lot of people with photographic memory have to find a profession and have to move through life in a way that
is in concert with that photographic memory. So again, it's a super ability. It's a hyper ability and yet it's not necessarily one that is desirable for most people. There's also this category of what are called super recognizers. These people are, I should mention highly employable by government agencies. These are people that have an absolutely astonishing ability to recognize faces and to match faces to templates. They can look at a photograph of say somebody on a most
To list. And then they can look at video footage of, let's say an airport or a mall or a city street at fairly low resolution and they can spot. The person whose face matches that photograph, that they looked at even if that video or other footage is of people profiles or even the tops of their heads and just a portion of their forehead, these people have just an incredible ability to recognize faces into template match. And again, these people often will take
Jobs with agencies where this sort of thing is important. Some of you out there probably are super recognizers and may or may not notice it if you ever had the experience of watching a movie and thought to yourself. Wow, her mouth looks so much like my cousin's mouth, or you. Look at a character in a movie or television show. And you think how they look almost like the younger sister of. So, and so well, then it's very likely that you have this or at least
Old
form of the super recognizer ability. That is not memory per se. That is the hyper functioning of an area of the brain that we call the fusiform gyrus. The fusiform gyrus is literally a face recognition area and a face template matching area and it Harbors neurons that respond to faces generally so as humans and other non-human primates care a lot about faces and their emotional content and the identity of faces is super important to us for all the kinds of reasons.
It's that are probably obvious knowing whose friend who's foe. Who do you know? Well who's famous? Who's not famous Etc. That is not memory per se and yet if you're a super recognizer, or I guess we could call it a moderate face recognizer or not, very good at recognizing faces. Because indeed, there are some people that are kind of face blind. They don't actually recognize people when they walk in the room. I used to work with somebody. Like this, I'd walk into his office and he'd say, are you rich, or are you Andrew? I'd say, well, my
Rich rich like you know, wealth Rich know and he'd say no. Are you Richard or are you Andrew? And I'd say I'm Andrew, we know each other really. Well. He said, oh, I'm sorry, my face. I'm kind of face blind. And it actually tend to be better or worse. I'm depending on how much he was working. Ironically, the more rested. He was the more face blind, he would become. So it wasn't a sleep deprivation thing that exists. That's out there. There's the full constellation of people's ability to recognize faces. That's not really memory. And yet visual function is a
I found Lee powerful way in which we can enhance our memory. So whether or not you're a super recognizer of faces, whether or not you are face blind or anything in between. Next, I'm going to tell you about a study which points out the immense value of visual images for laying down memories and you can leverage this information and this involves both the taking a photograph. Something that's actually quite easy easily. Done these days with your phone as well as your ability to take mental photographs by literally snapping your eyelid shut.
So, I just briefly want to describe this paper because it provides a tool that you can leverage in your attempt to learn and remember, things better. The title of this paper is photographic memory, the effects of our volitional, photo-taking on memory for visual and auditory aspects of an experience. I really like this paper because it refers to photographic memory, not in the context of photographic memory that we normally hear about where people are. Truly photographic. Look at a page and somehow absorb all that information and commit it to memory.
Yeah, but rather the use of camera photographs or the use of mental camera, photographs literally looking at something in deciding blink and snapping a so-to-speak snapping, a snapshot of whatever it is that you're looking at and remembering the content. The reason I like this paper and the reason I'm attracted to this issue of mental snapshots, as this is something that I've been doing since I was a kid, I don't know why I started doing it, but every once in a while, I would say maybe twice a year. I would look at something and decide to just snap a
Snapshot of it and I've maintained very clear memories of those visual scenes. Two years ago. I was in an Uber and I looked out the window and it was a street scene. I was actually in New York at the time and I decided for reasons that are still unclear to me to take a mental snapshot of this city street image, even though nothing interesting in particular was happening and I do recall that there was a guy wearing a yellow shirt walking there was some construction, it's better. I can still see that image in my mind's eye because I took this mental snapshot this paper address.
Is whether or not this mental snapshotting thing is real. And this is something that I think a lot of people will resonate with whether or not the constant taking of pictures on our phones, or with other devices is either improving or degrading our memory. You can imagine an argument for both. A lot of people are taking pictures that they never look at it again. And so, in a sense, they're Outsourcing their met their visual memory of events into their phone or to some other device and they're not ever accessing the actual image. And they're
Looking at it, right? You're not printing out those photos. You're not scanning through your phone again. Sometimes you might do that. But most of the time people don't most of the photographs that people taking their not revisiting again. So the motivation for this study was that previous experiments had shown that if people take photos of a scene or a person or an object that they are actually less good at remembering the details of that scene. Where object, Etc, this study challenge that idea and raise the hypothesis.
That if people are allowed to choose what they take photos of that taking photos again. This is where the camera not mental, snapshotting that taking those photos would actually enhance their memory for those objects, those places, those people, and in fact, details of those object places and people and indeed, that's what they found. So, in contrast to previous studies where people had been more or less told take photos of these following objects, or these following, people are these following places and then they were
Given a memory test at some point later in this study, people were given volitional control, right? They were given agency. In making the decision of what to take photos of and I'll just summarize, the results will provide a link to this study should say that some of the stuff that they tested was actually pretty challenging. I'm some of them were pottery and other forms of ceramics that are of the sort that you see if you go to a big Museum and a big city and if you've ever done that and you see all the different objects, there are a lot of details in those objects and a lot of those objects look a lot alike.
And so, you know, some will have two handles, what? Someone handle the position of the handle is how how broad or narrow these things are, you know, a lot of this is pretty detailed stuff. They also took photos of other other things. So basically what they found was that if people take pictures of things and they choose which things they are taking pictures of Rights up to them. It's volitional that there is enhanced memory for those objects later on. However, it degraded their ability to remember,
Ettore information. So what this means is that when we take a picture of something or a person, we are stamping down a visual memory of that thing and that makes sense. It's a photograph after all, but we are actually inhibiting. Our ability to remember the, auditory the sound component of that visual scene or what the person was saying, very interesting and points to the fact that the visual system can out-compete. The auditory system, at least in terms of how the hippocampus is encoding. This information, the other finding I find particularly interesting within this
Is that?
It didn't matter whether or not they ever looked at the photos again. So they actually had people take photos or not, take photos of different objects. They had some people keep their photos and they had other people delete the photos and turns out that whether or not people kept the photos or deleted those photos. Had. No bearing on whether or not they were better or worse. At remembering things. They were always better at remembering them as compared to not taking photos of them. What does this mean? It means if you really want to remember something or somebody, take a photo of that thing or person.
Pay attention while you take the photo, but it doesn't really matter. If you look at the photo again somehow, the process of taking that photo probably looking at it, you know in a camera. Typically we say through the viewfinder or now because of digital cameras on the screen on the back of that camera or on your phone, that framing up of the photograph stamps down a visual image in your mind. That is more robust at serving a memory than had you. Just look at that thing with your own eyes, very interesting and raises. All sorts of questions.
For me about whether or not, it's because you're framing up a small aperture, a small portion of the visual scene, but that's one logical interpretation. Although they didn't test that. I should also say that they found that whether or not you looked at a photo that you took or whether or not you deleted. It never looked at it again, didn't just enhance visual memory or the the memory for those for the visual components of that image, but it always reduced your ability to remember sounds associated with that experience. So, that's interesting. And then last but not,
First and perhaps most interesting at least to me was the fact that you didn't even need a camera to see this effect. If subjects looked at something and took a mental photograph of that thing, it enhanced their visual memory of that thing significantly. More than had, they not taken a mental picture. In fact, it increased their memory of that thing, almost as much as taking an actual photograph with an actual camera. And the reason I find this so interesting, is that a lot?
A lot of what we try and learn is Visual. And for a lot of people, the ability to learn visual information, feels challenging and we'll look at something and we'll try and create some detailed understanding of it will try and understand the relationships between things in that scene. It does appear based on this study that the mere decision to take a mental. Snapshot like, okay. I'm going to Blink my eyelids and I'm going to take a snapshot of whatever it is. I see can actually stamp down a visual memory much in the same way that a camera can stamp down a visual memory.
Of course through vastly distinct mechanisms. No discussion of memory would be complete without a discussion of the ever intriguing phenomenon known as Deja Vu. This sense that we've experienced something before but we can't quite put our finger on it. Where and when did it happen? Or the sense that we Bend some place before or that we are in a familiar state or place or context of some kind. Now, I've talked about this on the podcast before, at least. I think I have
And the way this works has been defined largely by the wonderful work of susumu tonegawa at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT susumu collected, a Nobel Prize quite appropriately for his beautiful work on immunology. And he's also a highly accomplished neuroscientist who studies memory and learning and Deja Vu. And I should also mention the beautiful work of Mark mayford at the Scripps Institute and UC San Diego. Beautiful work, on this notion of deja vu, here's what they
Covered. They evaluated the patterns of neural firing in the hippocampus as subjects, learn new things. Okay. So Neuron a fires, the neuron B fires, the neuron C Fires in a particular sequence. Again, the firing of neurons in a particular sequence, like the playing of keys, on a piano. In a particular sequence leads to a particular song on the piano and leads to a particular memory of an experience within the brain.
They then used some molecular tools and tricks to label and capture those neurons such that they could go back later and activate those neurons in either the same sequence or in a different sequence to the one that occurred during the formation of the memory. And to make a long story short and to summarize multiple papers published in incredibly High, tier journals journals, like Nature and Science which are extremely stringent found.
That whether or not those particular neurons were played in the precise sequence that happen when they encoded the memory, or whether or not those neurons were played in a different sequence or even if those neurons were played activated, that is all at once with no temporal sequence all firing in concert all at once.
Evoked, the same behavior. And in some sense, the same memory. So at a neural circuit level. This is deja, vu, this is a different pattern of firing of neurons. In the brain leading to the same sense of what happened leading to a particular emotional state or behavior, whether or not the same sort of phenomenon occurs when you're walking down the street. And suddenly, you feel as if now, I feel like I've been here before.
For you, meet someone, and you feel like wash. I feel like I know you. I feel like there's some familiarity here that can't quite put my finger on. We don't know for sure that that's what's happening. But this is the most mechanistic and logical explanation for what has for many decades. If not hundreds of years, has been described as Deja Vu. So, for those of you that experience Deja Vu, often just know that this reflects a normal pattern of encoding experiences and events within your hippocampus. I know
I'm not aware of any pathological situations where the presence of deja vu inhibits daily life. Some people like the sensation of deja, vu other people don't almost everybody. However describes it as somewhat Eerie. This idea that even though you're in a very different place, even though you're interacting with a very different person that you could somehow feel as if this has happened before and just realize this that your hippocampus while it is exquisitely, good at encoding new.
Types of perceptions, new experiences, new emotions, new contingencies, and relationships of Life events. It is not infinitely large, nor does it have an infinite bucket, full of different options of different sequences for those neurons to play. So in a lot of ways, it makes perfect sense. That sometimes we would feel as if a given experience had happened previously. I'd like to cover one additional tool that you can use to improve learning and memory and I should mention this is a particularly powerful.
Powerful one and it's one that I'm definitely going to employ myself. This is based on a paper from none, other than Wendy Suzuki at New York University. We talked about her a little bit earlier. And again, she's going to be on the podcast in our next episode and it's just an incredible research. I've known many for a number of years and it's only in the last. I would say five or six years that she's really shifted her laboratory toward generating protocols that human beings can use and she's putting that to great effect.
Act great. Positive effect. I should say, publishing papers of the sort that I'm about to describe but also incorporating some of these tools and protocols into the learning curriculum and the lifestyle, curriculum of students at NYU which I think is a terrific initiative. So you don't need to be an NYU student. In order to benefit from her work. I'm going to tell you about some of that work. Now and she'll tell you about this and much more in the episode that follows this one. The title of this paper will tell you a lot about where we're going. The title is brief daily meditation and enhances attention.
Memory mood and emotional regulation in non experienced meditators. If ever there was an incentive to meditate, it is the data contained. Within this paper, want to briefly describe the study. And then I also want to emphasize that when you meditate is absolutely critical. I'll talk about that just at the end. This is a study that involves subjects. Aged 18 to 45, none of whom were experienced meditators, prior to the
study.
There were two general groups in this study. One group did a 13 minute long meditation and this meditation was a fairly conventional meditation. They would sit or lie down. They would do somewhat of a body scan evaluating, for instance, how tense or relaxed, they felt throughout their body and they would focus on their breathing trying to bring their attention back to their breathing and to the state of their body as the meditation progressed.
The other group, which we can call the control group, listen, to of all things a podcast. They did not listen to this podcast. They listen to Radio Lab, which is a popular podcast for an equivalent amount of time, but they were not instructed to do any kind of body scanner pay attention to their breathing, every subject in the study either meditated daily or listen to a equivalent duration, podcast daily for a period of eight weeks. And the experimenters measured a large number of
So variables, as we say, they looked at measures of emotion regulation. They actually measured cortisol a stress hormone. They measured as the title, suggests, attention and memory, and so forth. And the basic takeaway of this study. Is that eight weeks? But not four weeks of this daily 13-minute a meditation, had a significant effect in improving, attention, memory, mood, and emotion regulation.
I find this study to be very interesting. And in fact, important because most of us have heard about the positive effects of meditation on things like stress reduction or on things such as improving sleep. And I want to come back to sleep in a few moments because it turns out to be very important feature of this study, this particular study. I like so much because they used a really broad array of measurements for cognitive function, things like the Wisconsin card, sorting task. I'm not going to go into this.
Like the Stroop task and they also, as I mentioned, measured cortisol and many other things, including not surprisingly memory and people's ability to remember certain types of information. In fact, varied types of information and the basic takeaway was again that you could get really robust improvements in learning and memory mood and attention from just 13 minutes, a day of meditation. Now, there's an important twist in this study that I want to emphasize if you read into the discussion of this.
Buddy, it's mentioned that somehow meditation did not improve, but actually impaired Sleep Quality compared to the control subjects. You might think. Oh, wow. Why would that be? I mean, meditation is supposed to reduce our stress stress is supposed to inhibit sleep and therefore why would sleep get worse? Well, what's interesting is the time of day when most of these subjects tended to do their meditation, most of the subjects in this study, did their meditation late in the
This is often the case in experiments. I know this because we run experiments with human subjects in my laboratory and people are paid some amount of money in order to participate or they're given something as compensation for being the study. But oftentimes the meditation or in the case of my lab, the respiration work, or other kinds of things that they're assigned to do are not their top top priority and we understand this. But in this study the majority of subjects here, I'm reading completed their meditation sent sessions from eight somewhere between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m.
P.m. And sometimes, even between 12:00 and 3:00 a.m. I think there probably were a lot of college students enrolled in this study and their hours often are late shifted, that impaired sleep, and this raises a bigger theme that I think is important many times before on this podcast and certainly in the episode on mastering sleep and conquering or mastering stress. Those episodes. We talked about the value again, of these non sleep, deep rest, protocols and SDR, for reducing the activity of your sympathetic nervous system. This the
Alertness, so-called stress arm of your autonomic nervous system. The one that makes you feel really alert and Str superb for reducing your level of alertness, increasing your level of calmness and putting you into a so-called more parasympathetic. Relaxed State meditation does that too. But it also increases attention. If you think about meditation meditation involves focusing on your breath and constantly, focusing back on your breath and trying to avoid the distraction of things. You're thinking or things that you're hearing.
Up and coming so called, back to your body, back to your breath. So meditation is actually has a high attentional load. It requires a lot of prefrontal cortical activity that's involved in attention, which then logically relates to the one of the outcomes of this study, which is that attention abilities, improved in Daily meditators. It also points out that increasing the level of attention and the activity of your prefrontal cortex May, and I want to emphasize met because
Here, I'm speculating about the underlying mechanism inhibit your ability to fall asleep. So while we have meditation on the one hand that does tend to put us into a calm state but it is a calm, very focused state. In fact, attention and focus are inherent to most forms of meditation. Non sleep deep rest such as Yoga Nidra as some of, you know it to be or NSD are there's a terrific NST R script that's available free online. That's put out by made for. So you can go to YouTube and SD are made for you. Can also just do a search for
NS TR their number of these available out there again at no cost. Those NSD, our protocols tend to put people into a state of deep relaxation, but also very low attention and we have to assume very low activation of the prefrontal cortex. So, the takeaways from the study are several fold. First of all, that daily meditation of 13 minutes can enhance your ability to pay attention and to learn. It can truly enhance memory.
However, you need to do that for at least eight weeks in order to start to see the effects to occur, and we have to presume that. You have to continue those meditation training sessions.
In fact, they found that if people only did four weeks of meditation, these effects didn't show up. Now eight weeks by seem like a long time, but I think that 13 minutes a day is not actually that big of a time commitment. And the results of this study certainly incentivize me to start adopting a going for 15 minutes a day. Now. I've been a on and off meditator for a number of years. I've been pretty good about it lately, but I confess I've been doing far shorter. Meditations of anywhere from three to five or maybe 10 minutes. I'm going to ramp that up to 15.
It's a day and I'm doing that specifically to try and access these improvements in cognitive ability and our abilities to learn. Also based on the data in this paper. I'm going to do those meditation sessions either early in the day, such as immediately after waking or close to it. I might get my sunshine first. I'm as you all know, very big on, getting some light in the eyes early in the day as much as one can in as early as one can, once the sun is out, but certainly doing it early in the day and not
Past 5:00 p.m. Or so, in order to make sure that I don't inhibit sleep. Because I think this result that they describe of meditation inhibiting quality sleep, compared to controls is an important one to pay attention to, no pun intended. Today. We covered a lot of aspects of memory and how to improve your memory. We talked about the different forms of memory and we talked about some of the underlying neural circuitry of memory formation. And we talked about how the emotional salience e and intensity of what you're trying to.
And has a profound impact on whether or not you learn in response to some sort of experience whether or not that experience is reading or mathematics or music or language or a physical skill, doesn't matter. The more intense of an emotional state that you're in, in the period immediately following, that learning, the more likely you are to remember, whatever it is, that you're trying to learn. And we talked about the neurochemicals that explain that affect about epinephrine.
And corticosteroids like cortisol and how adjusting the timing of those is so key to enhancing your memory and we talked about the different ways, to enhance those chemicals, everything ranging from cold water, to pharmacology and even just adjusting the emotional state within your mind in order to stamp down and remember experiences better. We also talked about how to leverage exercise in particular load bearing exercise. In order to evoke the release of hormones, like osteocalcin, which can travel from your bones.
Your brain and enhance your ability to learn, and we talked about a new form of photographic memory. Not the traditional type of photographic memory in, which people can remember, everything. They look at very easily. But rather taking mental snapshots of things that you see again, emphasizing that, that will create a better memory of what you see when you take that mental snapshot, but will actually reduce your memory for the things that you hear at that moment. And we discussed the really exciting data looking at how particular meditation protocols can enhance memory. But also
so attention and mood. However, if done too late in the day, can actually disrupt sleep precisely because those meditation, protocols can enhance attention. Now, I know that many of you are interested in neurochemicals that can enhance learning and memory and I intend to cover those in deep detail in a future episode. However, for sake of what was discussed today, please understand that any number of different neurochemicals can invoke or in can
Is the amount of adrenaline that circulating in your brain and body. And it's less important. How one accesses that increase in Adrenaline right. Again, this can be done through behavioral protocols or through pharmacology.
Assuming that those behavioral protocols and pharmacology are safe for you. It really doesn't matter how you evoke the adrenaline release because remember, adrenaline is the final common pathway by, which particular experiences particular perceptions are stamped into memory, which answers are very first question raised at the beginning of the episode, which is, why do we remember anything at? All? Right. That was the question that we raised. Why is it that from morning till night and throughout your entire life, you have tons of sensory experience tons?
Perceptions, why is it that some are remembered and others are not? While I would never want to distill a important question such as that down to a one molecule type of answer. I think we can confidently, say, based on the vast amount of animal and human research data that epinephrine adrenaline and some of the other chemicals that it acts within concert is, in fact, the way that we remember particular events and not all events.
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