Memory and Your Brain, Explained

Episode Transcript

Dr. Correa:
From the American Academy of Neurology, I'm Dr. Daniel Correa.

Dr. Nath:
And I'm Dr. Audrey Nath.

Dr. Correa:
This is the Brain & Life podcast. Audrey.

Dr. Nath:
Hello.

Dr. Correa:
How was your memory during med school?

Dr. Nath:
Oh, not great. So there was a ton of memorization, and I just still remember to this day that while spending most of my waking hours trying to memorize things, if I went to the grocery store and if I had to get more than three things, it just wouldn't fit. It actually felt like it wouldn't fit. I would've to write down if I had to get more than three things from the store. So that's how that went. I don't know, maybe it went better for you.

Dr. Correa:
Oh no. I mean, memory and studying, it just, it's so prone to fatigue and just all the different decision making and just organizing life. I had to actually limit the amount of other things I had to get done just so that I could fit things in to study and had to work a lot with memory cards and different colors.

Dr. Nath:
Oh, the four colored pen of residency. Oh, boy. That was the only way I could keep track of everything that had to get done in the night. So yeah, I have my crutches, I guess. Maybe there's other people that know better.

Dr. Correa:
And so speaking of, we had a feature episode with Marilu Henner, where we talked about her experience with highly superior autobiographical memory. In that episode, our medical expert was Dr. Craig Stark. So many people enjoyed his perspectives on memory and learning and have asked for more information. So in this week's episode, we're going to focus just about memory. In my discussion with him, he breaks down the types of memory, learning and memory in kids and adults, along with kind of explaining some of the misconceptions we all have about memory in the brain.

Dr. Nath:
Well, that sounds like someone who I could learn something from and maybe get a few tips to help my life. Coming up on March 23rd, I'm so excited about this, we'll have our episode with Javeno Mclean, who is a British powerlifter, who opened a gym exclusively for people with disabilities and the elderly, is offering that service for free.

Dr. Correa:
And in the following week, March 30th, we have an episode with Richard Engel. He's chief foreign correspondent from NBC News, where he honors his son Henry's memory and shares with us his experience with Rett syndrome.
Welcome back to the Brain & Life podcast from the American Academy of Neurology. We are back with our brain health series. So this episode, instead of focusing on a specific disorder, we're going to build and learn more on what we know about our brains and our brain health. And back by popular demand, we are welcoming Dr. Craig Stark to talk more about how memory works and what we can all do to support our cognition. Dr. Stark is a professor at the University of California Irvine Center of Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. His lab and research focuses on how our memory works. Some of you may recall him from our episode with Marilu Henner and our discussion about people who live with highly superior autobiographical memory and how that actually works in their brain. Thank you so much for joining us again.

Dr. Stark:
It's great to be here.

Dr. Correa:
So let's talk about types of memory variants. Last time we talked, you mentioned photographic memory and how it doesn't exist, and that piqued so many people's interests, and so many people have asked us for a follow-up. So what do we know about this misconception?

Dr. Stark:
Yeah, so it's a very, very popular kind of notion because you'll have people who will describe things this way, and it can seem pretty darn impressive when somebody says, "I remember you walked in, this, this, this," and they describe a scene as if they are reliving it. And in fact, there's a kind of memory that memory researchers talk about called episodic memory, where the idea is you're recounting some episode, something that happened to you. And one of the notions is that you can sort of put yourself in that moment in time and relive it. All right, well, that sounds then a whole heck of a lot like a photograph or a video or something like that. The challenge is really that a lot of the details inside of there, some of them came from that event and some of them are perfectly accurate. A lot of them may still be accurate, but didn't come from that event. They came from very similar kinds of experiences. And others are just things that you're really filling in, and that we can't really tell things you're filling in from things that actually happened.

Dr. Correa:
So it's really in a way almost kind of like people are creating a detailed painting, but it's not all of one event.

Dr. Stark:
Exactly. And actually that notion of the painting, I think is a pretty good kind of analogy in that if I'm painting something, I'm constructing it right then and there. It's what am I thinking of having actually be inside of this. I just was watching this morning on, I think it was on CNN, there's an exhibit of Vermeer paintings. They had a whole bunch of them that were something like 27, 28 of them or whatever, all in one spot. And they were looking at it through a number of different advanced scientific instruments so they could see the process that he went through. Things like painting some stuff in the background then saying, "No, no, I don't really want that there." So it's a reconstruction of the event, just like he was constructing that in the original painting, and in some ways deciding what actually should be in there or not, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. As we are retrieving memories, we're making a painting, it doesn't have all the details, and we ourselves are the ones who are really creating that image, not something that actually happened a year ago, 10 years ago, et cetera.

Dr. Correa:
See, but I think of one of my mentors that I currently work with. He'll have a memory of something in our discussions and he'll think of something in a journal article or a paper and can actually even reference often what page it was on, and will usually tell me about where in the page it was. And to such an extent that sometimes it really seems like he must have a photographic memory.

Dr. Stark:
Okay. But that's one of the absolute classic kinds of examples. But if you take a look at what you shared there, in many ways, that's the kind of thing that I do as well. I tend to be a very visual person. In fact, we were chatting before we got on here about statistics, and I think of that in a very visual way. It's a lot about mental imagery and seeing this, and I can often tell a little bit of when and where it was, even on the page it was about, and the figure looked like this. It was a two by two figure, and the bottom right had this, et cetera. But let's kind of turn it around a little bit, and let's say that Apple or Google or Samsung is releasing their latest phone and these days, what do they all try to sell us on? The camera.
Oh, it's got four lenses, eight lenses, 12, whatever kind of thing. And here's the phenomenal stuff that it can do. And you can look at this image that was taken almost in the dark and that's great. But if instead, that camera said, "Yeah, it was somewhere in the upper left hand of the page." And if that's all the detail we could get out of that camera, that wouldn't sell too many phones now, would it? No. It has visual components to it, yes, absolutely. We can sometimes say, "Yeah, I remember you were wearing a dark suit and I thought such and such," but on a photograph, you could go through and say, "Well, was it double-breasted? Was it single-breasted? Were there two or three buttons on there? Was it buttoned? Was it not buttoned?" All of these kinds of things we could then ask about it if it were a photograph. It's not.
So what you have is you have a few details. I remember it was a blue suit, and you paint in your mind an image of it, how you remember that, yeah, the figure looked like this, or I remember I was reading and it was on the upper left-hand corner of the page. And I remember seeing that when I was thinking about it. That's what you have. You have a few details which commonly appear in image of language form, which is exactly what Frederic Bartlett said in 1937 when he said all of our memory is reconstructive.

Dr. Correa:
So really it's that some people have varying levels of accuracy for a framework for them to put the different components of their memory, whether it's visual or language, and maybe like the picture and these bigger and bigger pixel or size of pictures with smaller and smaller pixels. The more density of that framework, maybe the more it seems like it's a photograph to them, but really, they're still reconstructing.

Dr. Stark:
Exactly. And that idea of a framework, it's a really powerful and a really, really good idea. Psychologists called it a schema, and that's a comeback into the neuroscience of memory as well. And it's that framework, it's that structure. You go to the doctor's office, you expect certain things. You expect there's going to be some kind of receptionist that you check in at, that you're going to sit down, that you're going to wonder why it is that they tell me to get here a half hour early when I still have to sit here for a half hour before I see the doctor. Well, all these kinds of things you sort of expect. And so when they happen, you have a way to sort of slot them in. Or you go to a dinner, you expect it's a nice restaurant, you're going to be greeted by a host, you're going to get seated at, you expect these things to happen. We have that framework, we have that schema.
So when you're recounting the event, well, as things have happened to you, you're sort of putting them into this framework, these slots, and when you recount it, you use that same schema. In fact, people I've seen that they will recall things that they expect to happen because of that framework, that schema, and they put them in there even if it never actually happened. So did the host greet you? Or even if the person didn't, you'll remember often that they did because of that. It's our expertise. And some folks who have memory that looks to be absolutely incredible, really just have a really good schema for that kind of information. You get them outside of that and they don't do any better than the rest of us.

Dr. Correa:
So you mentioned before visual and language memory. Are those the only types of memory? Is memory just mainly big chunks? What are the different types of memory?

Dr. Stark:
So when memory researchers talk about different types of memory, they've done a couple of big divisions. And of course, as researchers, we try to get smaller and smaller divisions, and we argue about these divisions a whole bunch. But at a top level, one of the big ones that's been around for a good long time has been sometimes it's called declarative and procedural or explicit and implicit. And we came up with this distinction because it maps a lot onto actually how the brain treats the information. In some ways these days, we don't always think of it in this way anymore, but it captures a lot. So for example, you have some experience, you go and you take a golf lesson. All right, maybe you didn't know how to golf at all or whatever before. You go to a driving range, instructor gives you some kind of instruction on it and you get a little bit better. You can actually make contact and get it to fly off the tee, generally in a forward direction at least half the time. Cool.
You go, you have another one, et cetera, et cetera. You go practice and we're really forming different kinds of memory. On the one hand, you can tell me what you did. Oh, the first day I went with the instructor, he was telling me this, keep your elbow straight. Look at the ball. Three rules of golf. Keep your eye on the ball, keep your eye on the ball. And did I mention keep your eye on the ball? Right. So you can go through that kind of thing. But there's also memory that's going on. It's sometimes called muscle memory. It's nowhere near inside your muscles, it's still inside your brain, but it's a different part of the brain than your ability to remember that event and that it happened.
So the first kind has to do with structures like the hippocampus and adjacent structures inside your brain, deep inside your brain. It's for this things that have happened, facts and events. And that other kind of thing, actually the memory of learning how to swing the club and getting better and better each time with practice. Practice makes perfect, all of that. I know I'm supposed to keep the eye on the ball. I know I'm supposed to keep my elbow like this, and yet I'm still only kind of doing it, do it again and again and again and again. Other parts of your brain are figuring out the memory of exactly how to get your muscles to do those kinds of things. These are completely separate in the brain. You can take one of them out and the other is perfectly intact.
And so as researchers, we start thinking about some things like this, and about how in the brain these different kinds of memories are actually sort of organized and structured. And sometimes that maps onto a lot of common things that we think about like a visual versus verbal memory, sometimes not so much. That hippocampus is just as involved in visual as it is in verbal memory. Perfectly it's doing both of them. A lot though comes down to what you are doing with the information. When it comes in, do you sort of think of an image that goes along with this? And if so, then that's what's going to get stored in your memory.
Do you try to think of... I mean, you meet somebody. Hi, my name's Bob. Okay, do you come up with an image of this person that you're trying to then relate to the word bob or he is bobbing up and down or something like this? Do you do something like that? Or do you try to say, Bob, Robert, and try to come up with some sort of way of thinking about that in a verbal way? Different people have different preferences for doing this, and so they use one more than the other, and as they use it more than the other, they get better at it. And they get better at that strategy, and so this sort of helps push them into the, oh, I tend to think of it this way, I tend to think of it that way.

Dr. Correa:
But let's talk about in getting better at it, like you talked about the example of golf, and golf being a perfect example of most of the time you're doing it wrong, or the dancer learning new steps or choreography. And they begin it, more than half the time they're probably not doing it right. How is it that we are remembering little by little the right way, and forgetting the wrong way, which we're doing the majority of the time at the beginning?

Dr. Stark:
So as these things, these memories sort of stack on top of each other, the things that are in common stay and the things that are different sort of get kind of averaged away. It is a slow process. You are going to make lots of mistakes, but hopefully by going and maybe having some instructions and sort of forcing you to do it a little bit closer to right, you start getting that. And that's sort of, you start doing that more and more. And certainly when you actually connect and it's like, oh my gosh, that went down. What did I do? The little things on that you could have as some reinforcement and feedback to try to push you into doing it. But on other things, musicians. I'm learning to play, and I'll air quote the word play here because I'm still absolutely a rank newbie, the electric bass.
And the online instructor that I'm using, BassBuzz, I'll give it a little plug there. One of the whole things is, and I've heard other instructors say this as well, is that you should go very, very, very slowly to begin with. Don't make the mistakes. Get yourself really to do that form and gradually build yourself up to running at full speed, specifically so that you will actually learn the right thing more quickly. But yeah, a lot of times we're doing it wrong, but we still sort of fumble and stumble our way into gradually getting it closer and closer and closer to that ideal form.
Here's a neat little thing on that practice, by the way. If you take that golfer or the dancer or whatever, in fact, have you ever watched a dancer or whatever before they go on stage as they're getting warmed up? So go through and make little bits of the motions and this kind of thing to then go, and they're mentally replaying this often even at a faster rate. They're replaying it and that mental practice actually improves their performance. So you can mentally practice golf swings or jump shots or whatever, and for a while actually you'll get better as if it were real practice.

Dr. Correa:
Yeah, I mean, I always look better in my mind than whatever I actually did. Now, you mentioned visualization and how that can help in reinforce in this learning. I'm wondering, is the process of learning things like this with visualization different for someone who's visually impaired?

Dr. Stark:
Oh, that's a great question. And the real answer is, I don't know. It's probably going to come down to, have they always been visually impaired or were they reasonably sighted for some period of time? Because I know that they will describe sort of different levels of visualization. I mean, certainly if they were sighted for a good amount of time, then the notion of mental imagery and this kind of thing is certainly a familiar notion to them, and they can still utilize that. If they've never had this, still, we have lots of other kinds of ways of having what we still might call imagery. It's just not visual. You can hear a tune inside your head, you can hear our conversation inside your head. And you can also, again, almost feel the muscles and sometimes even make them move a little bit. But even if you're not moving, you can then go and actually have muscles as if you're about to do.
And what you're getting is you're getting your brain to play back a series of activity. There's a classic learning rule that you learn early on in all of this called the Hebb rule that says, well, colloquially, neurons that fire together, wire together. So you get these things to sort of fire in these patterns and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It sort of helps ingrain that pattern of activity. And so again, even if you're not sighted, well, you can still be playing back auditory patterns, somatic sensory patterns, olfactory patterns, all of these kinds of things. And each of these will still be having that same kind of thing inside your brain.

Dr. Correa:
And now, do kids just have a different framework or are the different types of memory in learning actually different for kids or at different stages in life?

Dr. Stark:
So biologically, it's pretty darn similar. As structures are still developing in the brain, as the hippocampus is still getting wired into the brain, we can see that there are certain kinds of memory, memory for specific details of events and this kind of thing. We can see that if you're talking about a kid who's very, very young, a year or so old, we can actually test memory in them. We can see that hippocampus isn't online and so they're having problems with a certain kind of memory, just like somebody who's getting older who has had biological damage to the hippocampus, somebody who's in an early stage of dementia who's having problems with this kind of memory. We can see some of the same kinds of things there.
Certainly as the frontal lobe is still developing, and that's a key part of certain kinds of memory, working memory and holding onto it. Again, you can see some issues in everything in there. It's a matter of degree in each of these kinds of things really. However, and that same kind of memory system, it's preserved not only really across development, it changes in development. Absolutely, I study this for a living and aging, but you can see it in every mammal. You can see a very similar kind of thing in birds. Nature figured out that this is a great way to have memories set up in the brain. And so we see these kinds of systems throughout.

Dr. Correa:
So as a neurologist and neuroscientists, we're incredibly excited to be on the forefront of the expanding knowledge in science about the different functions of the many different cells in the brain. Much of what we initially understood was much more focused on the wires or the neurons, and really if we have much community understanding of how the brain works, we've probably communicated pretty well the ideas of the computer and the wiring. But now that we're learning that all those other cells aren't just sitting there as insulation, what is it that we're learning now about how memory and cognition works with all of these other cells that are integrated into the brain?

Dr. Stark:
To me, one of the biggest shifts has been on this. It's a shift from a very sort of local view of processing in the brain to this more network and distributed kind of view. So when I started out, it wasn't all that long ago. When I started out, we could try to count the number of memory systems we might have in the brain. We would say, oh, there's this declarative system and there's a whole host of non-declarative ones. You could tell that distinction was created by somebody who studied the declarative system. There's my stuff, and then there's everything else. In any case there, but we could then start to go through and come up with classic diagrams where you could count. I don't know, maybe there are five, maybe there are six.
But rapidly, as we started really looking at how the brain was doing memory and what memory means, that it's the change in the connections here to make it so that this system is more adaptive, we started to really figure out, can we even ask that question, how many memory systems are there in the brain? Because everywhere in the brain seems to be malleable, seems to be changeable and plastic here, so that everything from earliest, earliest visual cortex. Yeah, you change the way you see based on your experiences. All the way through the rest of the brain here, all of this is changing.
And each of these collections of neurons that we might point and say, hey, look, this year is doing this job. Well, yeah, it's really important in that job, but so is the processing happening in a lot of different regions that are working in concert. So it went from sort of like, you doing your homework alone by yourself to everything as kind of a class project or a team effort kind of thing, as it's really that everything working in concert now. We can still pick apart individual sections and say, all right, but this person here is doing this aspect of the project and how much, what's the key contribution that they're doing? It's not all one big mush. But it has been a massive shift in our focus to really going and trying to think about the incredible dynamics across the entire brain as it's processing just about anything.

Dr. Correa:
And let's go back to that idea of the framework in terms of potentially skill building. What are some things that we can do for each of us to build the strengths that we have in forming a framework for our memories, and maybe address some things that we feel are weaknesses. Is it playing more crosswords and reading, or what are some other activities that have good evidence?

Dr. Stark:
I'll take that sort of two answers on that, one in a general kind of way, and the other in a more directed specific kind of way. The more general sort of way, there are things we could be doing that lead to better cognition, better brain health, better cognitive, certainly aging and things like the... Actually, CNN did Sanjay Gupta actually a week or so ago, had a fantastic little bit on it. I mean, often when I see things like this in the popular press, I get a little worried. Okay, what's really going to come out here? And they did a fantastic job talking about leading a cognitively engaged lifestyle. I know you've talked about this kind of stuff and everything as well, and which is really getting yourself involved in doing new things, and the importance of a good diet at the importance of exercise.
And these are just sort of general things that make the system work better. If we want to talk about memory itself, those do help. And we have some stuff even on how playing computer games can actually help in certain ways. But if you want to be very sort of pragmatic and concrete, it's to really treat your memory system like a device that you can guide and help. So that notion of the framework. Have one. So okay, a lot of us will meet people and then have a difficulty remembering the names. It's a very, very classic kind of problem. I admit I'm pretty horrible at it, but it's a very solvable problem. It's incredibly solvable problem. And it comes down to using things that we have known help our memory for ages, having that kind of schema, that sort of structure, filling it in. As you're talking to this person, having little slots that you're filling in.
Oh, okay, this person's name is Bob. I'm going to think of some other people with that name. I'm going to imagine them together. And so I'm doing these kinds of things that are sort of filling in slots. Let me come up with a way in which something about him I might then tie to that. Let me repeat it. Let me, all of these kinds of things we know make your memory actually better. And there's a phenomenal existence proof for just how well this can work. The journalist Joshua Foer a number of years ago wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. And in the book, he goes through his efforts. He was doing a story on these memory champions. They could do things like take a deck of cards and look at the deck of cards, and inside of a couple minutes, have memorized the entire order of a random deck of cards.
And he asked them, "When did you know you had a great memory?" And universally they said, "Well, we don't have great memories." "No, no, you can memorize the deck of cards. I can't do that. You have a great memory." "No." "Well what do you mean, no?" It's like, "Well, we just have techniques. We have tricks and techniques that we use to be able to do this, such that anytime the Jack of Clubs comes up, for me, that's a shaggy dog. Anytime the Queen of Clubs comes up, oh, for me, that's a pitchfork." Something like this where you're taking those things that are very, very similar. You're coming up with other images for them, and you have that down perfectly so that when you see it, you automatically think of the other thing. So now I can imagine a scene in which a shaggy dog is carrying a pitchfork and that. This is what they are doing in real time as they have this because they've built up these habits and tricks and techniques.
And they said, "Look, we can teach you to do this." He says, "Okay, fine, put your money where your mouth is." And sure enough, they did and he went on to become the US champion for a while. Got it so he could do it in about two minutes or something like this. So right, it's learning to use what you actually have, the way it works and just feeding into that will make your memory in that area better. It won't make your memory, won't make you learn how to swing a golf club any better, but of those kinds of things that you practice, yeah, you will be much better at it. It's a completely changeable kind of thing. And if it doesn't matter if you're five or 50 or 80 years old or whatever, all of these kinds of things still can be used and to help any of us have a better memory.

Dr. Correa:
Yeah, I remember in med school learning from a friend and using this a skill of playing the idea of sports playing cards, and for each of conditions or parts of the body, we would have a playing card, not just a flip over memory card, but actually on the back would have a structure of the different components. And so we're always sort of, I guess in that idea, slotting in the different parts of that.

Dr. Stark:
Exactly. What are the key, what is it used for? What's this? What's this? But you've also distilled down to, what do I really need to know about this? I don't need to know where I got the information first. I don't need to know some of these other kinds of things. This is what I need to learn about it. All right, so if you're trying to remember somebody's name, that's the thing. I want to remember their name, not what the shirt that they were wearing. Not that it... So, oh, wait a minute. I also maybe want to remember the name of their spouse or the name of their kids or whatever it may be. What company they work for, all this kind of thing.
Whatever it is here, you're identifying the bits of information that you really want to hang onto. You're discarding the rest because you know that your system is not going to take a photograph of everything. It's going to remember a couple little bits of it. What are those things? So taking that very active role has gotten it so that your memory is better. By the way, the mere act of making those cards also improved your memory for it, because you were isolating those things. You were focusing on that information and all of that. So taking notes actually improves your memory, even if you never look at the notes.

Dr. Correa:
And we talk often with our guests about different conditions or brain injuries that might impact memory and cognition. But thinking of just the day-to-day activities, what are some things that might worsen our memory or cognition, just in the weekend or during your day at work?

Dr. Stark:
So one of the biggest ones that unfortunately all of us or many of us put ourselves in the situation of is that real sort of divided attention multitasking kind of thing. Humans are not actually very good at multitasking. What we do is we try to switch rapidly between things, but there's something called a switch cost. And as we're also doing this, our memory, both sticking new things in and getting things out, is going to be worse. So that is what, to me, one of the daily kinds of things that we do that's actually hindering ourselves a good amount. Being able to spend a bit more time on each thing, longer chunks of time before you have to switch is going to then make your memory of what you're doing, whatever information you're trying to take in, et cetera, et cetera, a lot better.
Other things are highly important as well. We've talked about things like diet and exercise, stress levels. A little bit of stress hormone actually is good for your memory. Too much stress hormone actually makes it decidedly worse, both in sticking in new things and in retrieving things. So that's not a very good thing. And again, often people tend to put themselves into or be in higher stress kinds of situations that isn't helping. Having a decent night's sleep, any of these kinds of things. I remember describing after the birth of my first child, I was describing to people saying it's like I now have some idea what being a patient with mild cognitive impairment feels like, because I can kind of keep up and keep going along, but I am down a decent amount here. And yeah, I was sleep-deprived. And that's another pretty solid factor.

Dr. Correa:
And I'm sure you experienced when being sleep-deprived like that, that it's not just one night of sleep that can somehow get you back to it. And some people think of, oh, I just got to get good sleep the night before that test.

Dr. Stark:
Yeah, but I mean, also as they're doing that cramming or whatever kind of thing, it's not sticking. Sleep actually gets it so that your memory is improved. The things that happened to you before you went to sleep stick in your memory better as a function of having sleep. So we know that. That's a very nicely established kind of phenomenon. So yes, there is a little bit of this trade off. If you haven't studied anything and you can do one hour of studying and then eight hours worth of sleep, or, I don't know, four or five hours of studying and then just a couple hours of sleep. All right, if you hadn't done anything beforehand, you may be up a creek enough in which you should, but that's really only a situation that students are involved in. And for the rest of us, certainly out of school, no, seriously, get your decent night's sleep.

Dr. Correa:
So it might be just because I'm a neurologist or also because I'm getting older, but I think we're all, I feel like we're much more aware now and about talking about memory and learning throughout all of popular media. But what are some of the myths and misconceptions beyond photographic memory that you run into, among friends or when you're watching some of the things that are out there about how to hack your brain?

Dr. Stark:
Yeah. So couple of the things that come up. I mean, one is even really the sort of purpose of memory. People think of memory as something that looks backwards. Oh geez, I remember when. It's not really why we have memory. We didn't evolve memories so that our ancestral selves could sit there in some cave or whatever as were old and says, "Geez, I remember that mammoth hunt from 10 years ago," or something like this. No. Memory is actually for looking forwards. That's why we have it. The only reason we have it is so that our past can actually get it so that we're more adaptive in the here and now and moving forward. So it's actually something that's, its purpose is forward-looking, not backward-looking.
Yeah, it takes the past experiences and helps us do that, but most of the time you can't even necessarily remember those experiences. That golf swing that you've gotten better at over all those years. Well, you don't remember all of the times that you've swung that golf club. Those aren't separate events. No. There's really sort of one memory now of how to have that kind of swing, and it's not something you can even verbalize. You can't tell somebody how to swing a golf club. You can try doing this of saying, even like if you try throwing a ball with your non-dominant hand, you can't really do it. And what you'll often find is you watch your dominant one doing it and then try to mimic that image on the other side.
So most of memory is not something you have any conscious access to. You can't put it into any sort of verbal kind of extent. And it's really there so that your past just gets it so that you're more adaptive really in the here and now. So reforming it that way so that it's to take all of these experiences and munge them together so that you do better here and now, to me, kind of turns it on its head and redirects it. And that's still something that a lot of folks haven't really sort of come to grips with as to why we have it.

Dr. Correa:
There's a lot that people make of, maybe men and women have a different way of remembering things, or is it really just that we all have different frameworks and-

Dr. Stark:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Correa:
... types of and formats for our memory.

Dr. Stark:
We all have different backgrounds, we all have different experiences. And that quote I briefly alluded to from Frederic Bartlett, he says, "Memory is not the re-excitation of innumerous, lifeless ideas and fragmentary traces. It's an imaginative reconstruction or construction based out of our attitudes toward a whole organized mass of past reactions or experiences, and to a little outstanding detail." So it's everything that's happened to you. That's what you're reconstructing every memory based off of. And each one of us is, well, different. We've all had different experiences. And even if you have one experience that's in common, the fact that you have years worth of other experiences behind you that are different than somebody else is then going to change the way you perceive that event in the first place. So what is going to get into your memory from that event is going to be different, et cetera, et cetera. We all bring our own experiences to it, and that is fundamentally one of the big things that is actually shaping our memory.
So, to the extent that men and women have different experiences, on average, yeah. That's going to be factoring into this kind of thing. But our brains, I can't look at a brain of somebody and say that's a male or a female brain. Sorry. I've been looking at a lot of brains in my life. So there's nothing huge in that that's different along those kinds of lines. So yeah, we are bringing our own sort of stuff to it. There still is also then that notion sometimes you see out there of like, oh, I'm a visual learner, so I have to learn visually. I'm a auditory, so I have to learn. That sort of style of learning has really fallen out of favor for good reason. Yeah, there are people, you like to have it this way. You're more used to having it this way. It doesn't mean you can't learn the other way. And it's actually probably best to have things coming in in multiple different ways for all of us.

Dr. Correa:
Well, it turns out we have not exhausted all the possible topics about the brain and memory. But thank you so much, Craig. I know I'll be using the memories of this discussion to help build and grow in my own framework, and we truly appreciate you taking the time to talk with us about the brain health and memory and what we understand.

Dr. Stark:
Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Correa:
Thank you again for joining us on the Brain & Life podcast. Follow and subscribe to this podcast so that you don't miss our weekly episodes. You can also sign up to receive the Brain & Life Magazine for free at brainandlife.org.

Dr. Nath:
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Dr. Nath:
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Memory and Your Brain, Explained

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