Marilu Henner and the Mysteries of Memory

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nath:
Welcome back to the Brain & Life podcast from the American Academy of Neurology. Hello Daniel.

Dr. Correa:
Hola. How you doing Audrey?

Dr. Nath:
Hola. Good.

Dr. Correa:
Oh man. I've been working on some of those sleep tips that we talked about from last episode.

Dr. Nath:
Me too. Closing windows, getting it dark.

Dr. Correa:
Exactly. Now, Audrey, I have a random question for you. What were you doing last Friday?

Dr. Nath:
What was I doing last Friday? Okay. First off, what day is today? I'm so far from being able to answer that. I have no idea. I'm sure I took my kids to school. I did work. No recollection. Seriously.

Dr. Correa:
Okay, so the standard sense of things that you probably did. But do you remember things as specific as what you were wearing, what you dressed your kids in?

Dr. Nath:
No way.

Dr. Correa:
Any activities or things you watched on TV?

Dr. Nath:
I'm sure I watched YouTube, because I always am. But no. So I fail your test, whatever it is.

Dr. Correa:
So, that's a week ago. Don't have that much of a memory of that. How about this Monday? This last Monday? What were you doing?

Dr. Nath:
Okay. Well, this past Monday was memorable, because my son started kindergarten. But that was a big, big event. Other than that, so that was a big deal taking him there. I don't know what happened the rest of the day work wise.

Dr. Correa:
Well, I figure when he started kindergarten, you probably, there was like an event of even laying out the clothes, you guys took pictures.

Dr. Nath:
We did. Yeah. So, that part-

Dr. Correa:
So you have more memory of what happened and everything that occurred.

Dr. Nath:
Yes. Absolutely. We took him there. His little sister was there. We waited in line, we took pictures, and then we went home. After that I don't know. But yes, more memories from Monday for sure.

Dr. Correa:
I mentioned these things because this week in our episode, we feature an interview with Marilu Henner. Marilu is an actress and a podcaster/singer, she's an author. And she has a very unique skill called highly superior autobiographical memory or HSAM.

Dr. Nath:
Oh, whoa. I do not have that Daniel.

Dr. Correa:
And basically, she has a level of memory that she can recall tiny autobiographical details throughout her whole life.

Dr. Nath:
Whoa, that is exceptional.

Dr. Correa:
So not just last Friday, but she can recall, on a specific date, things that she was doing with her family, things that she did, things that she wore.

Dr. Nath:
Did you test her?

Dr. Correa:
Really true aspects. I did. I even asked her about dates important in my life to see what she was doing. It's amazing to hear.

Dr. Nath:
Oh cool. Random, but cool.

Dr. Correa:
And so, through people like that, we've learned more about how the memory works, how the structures of the brain that work memory. She shares some of her own perspectives on how using photos and imagery can help people with memory. And she shares some of her memory tips that she's put in her books. And we also talk to one of the world's few scientists who have studied the brains of people with HSAM including Marilu. And he shares what we know about memory and how it works.

Dr. Nath:
Oh, that is so cool. And if he's got any tips, I will be writing them down.

Dr. Correa:
Exactly. It's one to take note of. And before we get to the episode, we love hearing from our listeners and we would love to share a comment. We recently received.

Speaker 3:
I have a comment to make, of how much I enjoyed the podcast. It really gave me some ideas. I don't believe I've ever seen an image of my brain. And I thought I could do that too. And I am an artist. So I might look into that just from getting this idea. And I thank the person who wrote the podcast. And we'll see what comes of it, all right. Thank you very much. And you may be hearing back something. Bye, bye now.

Dr. Nath:
Thank you. It's so good hearing from our listeners. If you would like to share a comment or a question, please leave us a voicemail at 6-1-2-9-2-8-6-2-0-6.

Dr. Correa:
And you can also email us at blpodcast@brainandlife.org. I hope everyone enjoys the episode.

Dr. Correa:
Welcome back to the Brain & Life podcast. Today, I'm joined by Marilu Henner, actress, producer, radio host, singer, podcaster, author. And I just learned today she has a one woman show. She made her debut and name playing a gutsy character, Elaine O'Connor-Nardo on the seventies and eighties TV series Taxi. She has a much more unique claimed fame. Marilu has a highly superior autobiographical memory or HSAM. The ability to recall the slightest details of nearly every day she has lived. There are less than 100 people worldwide with this memory ability, and this trait drives her to advocate for more funding for brain research. And we thank her for being with us here on the Brain & Life podcast.

Marilu Henner:
Thank you so much for the opportunity. I love talking about memory and brains and everything. And life, of course.

Dr. Correa:
Oh no, thank you. It was a great interview and a feature in the Brain & Life magazine. And we're excited to feature you and just have this discussion here on the podcast.

Marilu Henner:
Sure.

Dr. Correa:
Marilu, I wanted to just even explore this whole idea of the superior autobiographical memory. And so, I was thinking about it. For example, for me, there's a day that is special to me and my wife, my wedding. We got married April 25th, 2010. What where you doing in April 25th, 2010?

Marilu Henner:
So my son, he was just about to graduate from eighth grade. And so that...you got married on a Sunday then?

Dr. Correa:
Yes we did. Because it's cheaper.

Marilu Henner:
We were actually at a rehearsal for his school play on that day.

Dr. Correa:
Oh, okay. And what play was it?

Marilu Henner:
He was doing Damn Yankees.

Dr. Correa:
For many people this level of detail, and memory, and awareness throughout their whole life. It's just a whole different level of thing to comprehend. Can you recall the specific moment that you realized that you might have a different perspective on memory than others?

Marilu Henner:
Well, it's interesting. I'm one of six kids. And when you're one of six kids, you look for anything that differentiates you from your brothers and sisters. And so, I just always had this unusual memory as a little girl. And my parents, people would come over and they'd say, well, what's with this kid and her memory? She remembers every detail of my last visit. And I got the nickname, memory kid, memory girl, little miss memory...

Marilu Henner:
And I think it is definitely a case of nurture and nature. So, I know that I was born with something unusual, but it's also something that I exercised throughout my life because I loved it. And it was like time travel in a way. So I knew I had the best memory in my family. And then when I was 18, a girlfriend of mine, when I said, well, don't you remember, blah, blah, blah, this. She said, when are you going to realize nobody else has this crazy memory? And I went, what? Really? And then I went to college to the University of Chicago and I became well known for my memory.

Marilu Henner:
So it all kind of started then that I realized that it's totally rare. And the last night I was doing my show and people were giving me dates from the audience, it's one of my favorite things to do. Is get a date and then tell them what day of the week it was, what I was doing, find out what they were doing. And tell them what song was popular then, and things like that. This is the way I always describe it. If all we do, is we wake up, we live our lives, we turn off the light, we go to sleep. We wake up, we live our lives, we turn off the light, we go to sleep. And nothing can move forward, what does it all mean?

Marilu Henner:
So to me, developing a better autobiographical memory is really our strongest line of defense against meaninglessness that we have. Because we are able to take our lives, our information from the past, bring it to the present, and then let it inform a better teacher. So I'm always really encouraging people to develop a better autobiographical memory.

Dr. Correa:
That's a great thought. And hadn't necessarily thought of it before in that way. And being able to use aspects of all parts of your life and the many people you've interacted to support every moment. But some people are challenged sometimes by the things they've experienced in the past.

Marilu Henner:
We all are. The thing is that memory is tied to adrenaline. So no matter what you do, you're going to remember the highs and the lows. The birth of a child, a wedding, a first kiss, a promotion. And you're going to remember the lows, being embarrassed in school, a breakup, a terrible accident, a death of a parent. Those highs and lows are going to be burned into your emotional psyche, because they're tied to adrenaline and they are there. They're part of you. They're your story.

Marilu Henner:
I'm able to cushion a lot of those things now. The little sweet, what I call, the our town moments of my life, and all the middle of the road things. But also, I as an actress, it's invaluable to process negative memories, positive memories, all of those things. Because I want those emotional connections right at my fingertips as an actress. And I'm going to, you're going to have them anyway. I got people say, oh, what about the bad memories? It's like, well, the more you process them... The way I described it in my book, Total Memory Makeover, is that you...the more times you see a scary movie, the less scary it is for you until you process it. All of a sudden you're watching a scary movie for the fourth time was like, okay, the monster going to come here, or that person is going to be finished. It's like you process it in such a way. And so you do that too with your own mind.

Dr. Correa:
Have you ever felt that having the highly superior autobiographical memory impacts your ability to focus, or be more present in a certain moment?

Marilu Henner:
Well, I certainly think that we've gotten very lazy, because our face, we're always in our phones. So I feel like because I'm constantly, I'm very conscious in taking things in all the time, which I like to do. I'm not always looking at a screen, I guess maybe that's part of it. I don't know. And we've just gotten lazy with putting everything in our phones. And if our phone is gone, it's like our memory is gone. Our memory hard drive is gone, and that shouldn't be the case. So I feel like maybe walking around life, we should all be walking around life a little more conscious of what's going on around them.

Dr. Correa:
You said that really the detail and the breadth of your memories has helped you process things over time. Have you felt like, any at any time, some of your memories or the extent and the detail of your memory and its connection to your emotion is a burden?

Marilu Henner:
Never. I've never felt it's a burden. I open myself to it. I appreciate it. As an actress, people go to acting class to try to unpack all kinds of different ways, positive and negative. So it's not for a second. I would rather remember horrible things every day than to lose them even for a day. I mean, both my parents had tragic deaths, even thinking about their deaths, I have them. I maybe I've never backed off from difficult things. I don't know. Maybe because of my memory I've been able to process things in such a way that it doesn't scare me. And I don't know. And I've never found... That's why I can't stand when people go, oh, condition this condition. No, it's just a gift. I don't think of it as a condition. I think of it as a tremendous gift that I've been given and definitely was born with something, but have nurtured and natured it throughout my life.

Marilu Henner:
And I feel like, I think that a lot of times the medical community, they have a round hole that they want the square peg to fit into. They're trying to understand it in some way. It's been blamed on OCD, it's been blamed on so many other things, and it's not. I've been tested for OCD, I've been tested for so many things. And they can't figure it out so that they are satisfied with something that they can write in a book. Because all the people who have this too were all very different. And the way we, not only process it, but also the way we view it in our own lives, it's very good.

Dr. Correa:
It sounds like, at least it'd been great for you. That you were able to find that connection to all of those memories.

Marilu Henner:
Yeah. Well, I mean, your memory is your story. It's your story, it's who you are. It's your emotional hard drive at work. And every person has memory, it's all there. We just, the people who have HSAM, we just happen to have an extraordinary retrieval. So we are able to access something. But you could be getting a massage, or you could be smelling something, or you could see a picture of something. And it's so evocative, and you just go like, wait, oh, why am I thinking of my grandmother's house? Or man, this reminds me of this past love or whatever, but it's all there. And it's just waiting to be tapped. It's the retrieval that's really extraordinary with people who have HSAM.

Marilu Henner:
You know people want to go back. And the saddest thing to me, with all this memory research that I've been done since this whole 60 Minutes thing happened. The saddest thing to me, and the statistic is just astounding, is that most people remember only eight to 11 events within any given year. Eight to 11. I mean, I've been tested 365, 366, if it's a leap year. It's insane to me that so much is lost. It's crazy to me that people remember eight to 11 events, within any given year. It's astounding to me that so much is gone. And we have to be, people would have to figure out how to tap into it.

Marilu Henner:
The way I describe it in my books and in interviews that I've done in the past. It's like, in the jigsaw puzzle of your life, what are the hard edge pieces by which you can start interlocking other memories to? Which are primary tracks. And for some people it might be places they've lived, places they've worked. Jobs. Travel is a huge one. Sports is enormous. A lot of guys remember sports events. They might not remember a birthday, but they remember sports events, or the chicken wings that were served, things like that.

Marilu Henner:
I've heard everything from hairdos, the food, to bats to. I've heard just a range of things that people have this primary track. And then in addition to your primary track, I always say that everyone has a dominant sense. Everyone is a sight, sound, touch, place or smell person. And let's say that you are a visual person. That that's your dominant sense. I always say at some point in the day, take a picture that would be the picture of the day. Like oh, I'm in the middle of this experience, I'm going to snap a picture. And then put it away. And then at the end of the month, think like, oh, what pictures did I take this month? I'm not going to look at them yet. We'll see how many I can remember.

Marilu Henner:
And if you can start bringing forward or training your brain to sort of remember that way, maybe you will get three to five per month. Which would certainly be better, 36 to 60 memories in a year, rather than just eight to 11. Just constantly... And at one of the other tips I would give people is that, at night when you're brushing your teeth, which is supposed to be for two minutes, you should scroll through your day. Go through the montage of your day and see what you might remember from that day. What's worth... Go through the whole day and say, hm? What's worth remembering again, because that second time through is when it's kind of, adhered to your brain a little bit more.

Dr. Correa:
We all need tools to access many of our cognitive abilities better. Tell us a little bit more about your experience in participating in research. Some of the reasons you chose to?

Marilu Henner:
I'd do anything to help other people. And I've spoken in front of Congress since I... Well, right around the time that I last talked to you guys in 2018. I went to Washington to talk about getting more research money for Us Against Alzheimer's. I'll do anything to help brain research, memory research, because it's such a crucial part of our life. I mean, it really is. And I feel like so many other things get attention. So I'm very involved in that. I'm just so glad that it is during my lifetime, that this incredible idea of HSAM has come about. Because I would hate years from now hearing about it, my boys, for example, hearing about it and I'm long gone. And then they see it and they said, oh, our mother had that. She could have been so helpful. So, I'm glad to participate in any way that I can.

Dr. Correa:
Well, we're glad you are. And I think it's so important that we understand more about our memory and cognition, how our brain functions. Because I think many of us don't even realize, our interaction and perception of everything in the world is all through our head.

Marilu Henner:
It is. It's all right here. It's our ability to figure it out. It's our ability to resolve something. And so our brains, our individual brain, it is more powerful than an atom bomb for each of us. It's the epicenter of everything that we are, our perception and how we respond to it. And memory such an important part of that. What would you like to remember? What's worth remembering? And I think also, because I know I'm going to remember it, I think I sort of feel a responsibility for myself to have a good day, cause I'm going to remember it. Or like, oh man, this is going to be a crappy day to remember. So, then how can I fix it a little bit?

Dr. Correa:
Oh, that's a good thought. And a way for all of us to approach each day, or having a bad day is investing in the memory.

Marilu Henner:
You know what's funny, is that people always think that somebody with a great memory is going to be, let's say much less resilient or much less forgiving because they remember the bad stuff. I find it, you become more resilient and become more forgiving because you say, hey, life is so many different shades of gray, or color, or rainbow, or whatever. It's like, there's so many nuances that are different every single day. So this too shall pass. Or that person might have been just having a bad day, so they weren't as nice as maybe they could have been or whatever. And people get over things. I think people are a lot more resilient than we give them credit for being.

Dr. Correa:
That's really great. And thank you, Marilu for helping us all work on our memories, open our hearts to those, and the positive memories that we have with the people around us. And thank you again for joining us on the Brain & Life podcast, and reaching out again to our listeners and readers.

Dr. Correa:
Can't get enough of the Brain & Life podcast. Keep the conversation going on social media, when you follow @brainandlifemag or visit brainandlife.org. As your host, we would also like to hear from you on Twitter @neurodoctorcorrea and @audreynathMDPhD.

Dr. Correa:
Welcome back to the Brain & Life podcast. That was an amazing discussion with Marilu Henner. And I'm joined now by Professor Craig Stark. He's a professor at the University of California Irvine, Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. His lab and research focuses on how our memory works. One of the unique situations that he has studied is the highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. Dr. Craig Stark, thank you for joining us here on the Brain & Life podcast and taking the time to spend with us.

Dr. Stark:
Well, thanks for inviting me.

Dr. Correa:
Now, you've done a substantial amount of work helping us understand a little bit more about highly superior autobiographical memory. Can you help us all understand what is HSAM?

Dr. Stark:
We came across HSAM from these individuals who say that they can remember all of these details about their lives. And at first blush to us this seemed incredibly unlikely. I mean, the first person who approached Dr. Jim McGaugh described this phenomenon, and there's no way that this could possibly... We haven't seen something like this, this is incredibly odd. But, on testing there was a lot of truth in what she was actually saying there. And what it comes down to is that, you can go back to most any day in their adult life, and they can remember, certainly the kind of diary entry version than what one might actually have of that day. So, what happened that day? And that's the kind of thing that they can retrieve almost effortlessly throughout their adult life.

Dr. Correa:
So how is it that they can do that? And it's different from the kind of memory and cognitive function that the rest of us might have?

Dr. Stark:
We still don't know a lot about the exact how. We have some good leads and some good ideas. And there are a couple things to really keep in mind that we figured out in some of our research with them. And the first thing, and they'll tell you this straight off, is that it's a very limited kind of domain. So you ask, did they do really well in something like biology or history classes that have a lot of memorization? No, they didn't. You give them a list of words and they sort of look at you oddly. And they say that's not what I can do. That isn't the thing here.

Dr. Stark:
So it's not just they can remember anything. It's they remember the personal sort of autobiographical details of their lives. So again, the list of words, dates, and history that doesn't really line up with it. So that's the first part. Second part is that we figured out that actually their memory for these details of their lives really isn't that strange. At least, if you look and say the first week or so. Because if I asked you what you did yesterday, hopefully you can tell me. If you can't tell me, I got some other experiments I'd like you to participate in.

Dr. Stark:
But, if you can tell me that sort of thing, if you can count the number of details, and do all sorts of great stuff on that. And that's cool. You ask a person who has HSAM that same question. What did you do yesterday? They come up with the same kind of thing. You go three days, five days. Again, we're holding even in that sort of timeframe. Now you get past a week or so, and they're still holding onto this, eh, we're getting pretty darn fuzzy on it. And certainly you get to a month, or a year, or 10 years. I mean 10 years, I start saying, what state was I living in? But they can do this. So it's not even that they're learning this much more. They hold onto it and don't forget it. Ah, all right. So that then gives you an idea as to what HSAM is like. They can remember a year ago, the way you might remember a few days ago.

Dr. Correa:
So this isn't like what we all think of, that that guy next to us in the class that had photographic or reading memory, that always aced the test. It's different in that way?

Dr. Stark:
Exactly. Oh, and by the way, photographic memory doesn't really exist. But, that could be a topic for another time.

Dr. Correa:
And, so in some of the examples and the people that you've encountered with this, what are some of the differences in how their HSAM functions from person to person?

Dr. Stark:
For different people it can mean different things. The very first sentence of the very first email that started off this entire program was, I have a problem. All right. So for the first person there, for Jill Price, it was a real challenge, because you're remembering all of these negative things. In addition to all of the positive things that have happened in life. And for somebody like Marilu Henner, as described there, it's like, well, this is a positive thing. She can hang on to this. So there's certainly that sort of difference in how they view it. But also even what form it takes.

Dr. Stark:
There's another one that you can see in the 60 Minutes episodes, Bob Petrella, who can just start telling you about Pittsburgh Steelers games. That, oh, okay, Lynn Swann was lined out to the right, and et cetera, et cetera. Even old games there, I just dated myself. In any case, he can tell you a lot of the play by play kind of thing. And you can watch some of the others, because they had a group of a half a dozen or so of them together, just sort in awe of what he's describing here. But for him, this is how this is cashing out. Whereas for others, it's very much that very, very date centric. And so there are sort of different flavors that we see of this, that share this common theme.

Dr. Correa:
And is there more we know about HSAM and similar memory functions since the 60 Minutes episode, and some more of the work that you've been doing?

Dr. Stark:
Yeah, so a lot of what we were doing, one of the big things was to try to figure out what are the limits on it, or does it spill into other kinds of domains? And one of the fascinating things is it does seem to be very specific to this sort of area. And since the 60 Minutes, another aspect was this idea that, their memory for a year ago is a lot like ours for a week ago. And honestly, on about a week or so, or five days, certainly we're all tied. So that it really is this notion of very, very shallow forgetting. And so then we can start to ask why it is that they're not... It's not that they're getting more in, it's that they're forgetting a lot less. Why might that be?

Dr. Stark:
And one of the big themes that's been coming up here is that a lot of what they describe to us, in terms of how they do things, are things that we have known sometimes for thousands of years, things that we know actually improve your memory. And that if all of us actually did this, our memory would be better. Marilu Henner has said that the rest of us are all just lazy, that we could actually all do this. Now, I don't know that's actually true. One of my students and I actually tried this one time, and one of the challenges was we couldn't bring ourselves to actually do these kinds of habits that they do naturally. So, they had exceptionally good memory habits that the rest of us don't. And that does bring up the question of, wait a minute here, just how much better could the rest of us get if we had those same kinds of memory habits?

Dr. Correa:
I think we all have that question. And so, what are some of those good memory habits that they engender naturally, that maybe we could try to pick at least one or two to work on?

Dr. Stark:
Yeah. So when you hear them describe what they do, you give them a date or something like that. And they start sort of scanning through. What they're really doing is often, they have a clear organizational structure. So, a number of them really use the concept of the calendar as an anchoring point and anchor things to dates. So, you have an organizational structure that you were using leveraging off of something that you already know the calendar, and you are making sure to tag each memory with that bit of information that's going to help you retrieve it. They'll also describe things like, oh, when I saw you, I immediately thought of the last time that we met and what we did and et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Stark:
So what that's doing is that's repetition, which we've known forever actually improves your memory, practice makes perfect. It's also something called spaced practice, instead of masked practice. If you want to study something, you want to be able to learn, do well on a test or whatever. One of the great things to do is, if you're going to spend, I don't know, 15 minutes trying to remember something and learn it. Don't do it all at once. Do five minutes now, little while later, do five minutes again, little while later, do five minutes again. This is a massive, massive improvement to our memory. So okay, this kind of thing of thinking about, hey, what did happen today? Go through when I see you, I try to remember the last event. It's repeating it and spacing it. It's tying it into a structure. All of these kinds of things we see that they are doing naturally. And even more, they automatically do it.

Dr. Stark:
So, I had turned in a grant to try to actually get some funding to do some more research on these folks. And one of the criticisms we had in the grant was, we were going to try to see, could we get people to have these better memory habits, and to actually then have better memory like this. And one of the reviewers said, are you sure you're not actually going to be hurting these participants? And do you have any idea that it would work? Well okay, you're hurting. Well, some people describe it as good, some as bad, and that kind of thing. That's one thing. Is it going to work?

Dr. Stark:
So my grad student and I, we went off for winter break and we said that what we're going to do is every night, we're going to think about what happened that day, the day before and the day before. And if we do this every day, well, okay, we're getting this repetition, this space, putting it together. And then maybe we'll come up with some structures, and maybe we'll also start to get in the habit of automatically doing this. So we don't have to think about it. So it becomes a routine.

Dr. Stark:
So we went off to the break, we were going to do this. We come back few weeks later. And so, sort of looking at each other. And I'm like so, how did you do there? And she looks at me and is like, how did you do? I'm like, I didn't make it past the first night, I'm sorry. But here I'm thinking the graduate student really out there to go. And she's like, yeah I didn't make it past that either. So, part of this though brings up one more thread about them. They have the real desire to have this. A lot of them described something that happened in their childhood, or something like this that was a real fear of having forgotten something, or that they might actually lose it. So, they really did not want to do that. They had a real motivation to do these kinds of things, and therefore start instilling these habits, and therefore actually have this great memory.

Dr. Stark:
So we know, if you wanted to be a great basketball player, what should you do? Should you watch basketball? No, you should get out there on the court and play. You've got to practice. And ideally you'd start young and practice every day, etcetera, et cetera, that will make you better. Will it turn you into the next great superstar or LeBron James or something? Probably not. You'd certainly be a lot better than if you didn't. So with these folks, there's probably something of this going on. That they have an innate propensity for it. But in addition, there's something that's driving them to make this a routine part of their day to day existence. And whenever they encounter somebody, oh geez, I better not forget that person's name here. Boom. They go through the habits of, I'm going to repeat it. I'm going to space it out. I'm going to come up with a story to try to tie it into something.

Dr. Stark:
Guy sitting there, his name's Bob. All right, I can imagine that he's sitting on a surfboard in the wave of bobbing up and down. Bob, Bob, Bob. Maybe singing Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Barbara Ann, whatever. And then a few minutes later you say to yourself, his name is Bob. He's hanging on the surfboard, bobbing up and down. There we go. And people who are very good at learning names all do this as a matter of course, they have that good memory habit. So, yes, there will be natural nature versus nurture. There will be things in here. I'm never going to become the next LeBron James. But, if I did go out there and practice, I'd actually hit the free throws a whole heck of a lot more often. So, we could be doing that.

Dr. Correa:
So, how does some of the studies that you, and the work that you've done on memory in HSAM help us understand kind of behaviors and things that people who have memory or cognitive dysfunction like Alzheimer's can do in the meanwhile to offset the dysfunction?

Dr. Stark:
Yeah. So with each of these sorts of things, for one thing, it shows us the capability, or the capacity that memory can actually have. And it does show us then that you don't have to be born with some superhuman kind of thing to be able to have this. We did a lot number of brain scans on them. And I run our neuroimaging center. This is one of the things that I actually do for most of my research here. And it's not like they've got some structure in their brain that's massively larger, that shows that they can do this and something like this. They have brains that look remarkably like the rest of ours, and yet they can have it.

Dr. Stark:
But there are other examples also of people who can gain incredible memory abilities just through learning how. You may have seen the book Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. And he describes, he was a journalist who was going on, had been assigned to do something on a memory championship. And so he goes, he meets some of these folks and they can do things like take a deck of cards and memorize them in a couple of minutes. It's like, holy cow, you have this incredible memory. And so he asked, it's like, so when did you know that you had this incredible memory? And they turned him like, well, we don't. We' don't have an incredible memory. He's like, look, I've seen it. You can memorize the deck of cards, I can't, that's pretty incredible. That's memory. You have an incredible memory. So when did you know that you had this? And they're like, no, no, no, you could do it too. Trust me, I can't. No, no. We can teach you.

Dr. Stark:
So what it is is, there are a whole series of techniques. And then part of the championship is you try to figure out better and more optimized memory techniques, and everything to do with it uses memory palace kind of thing and then... The great thing is then, he got so for a little while, he actually was the United States champion, doing it in two minutes or a little bit under. So, he went from, I have a crummy memory, to I can do this thing that everybody goes, oh my gosh, look at this. It's an amazing memory. And it's just from learning how to use our memory hardware better. And that's one of the things that we can actually do. That's that having better memory habits, that's one of the things that we can all do, in particular, as we are aging to try to then get it so that we can hold onto this. We can hold onto this more.

Dr. Stark:
One of the huge things in aging is we talk about resilience and reserve. So, some things like, are you able to keep some sort of pathology and problems from building up in your brain? Or are you able to still function even though you have that? And one of the things that we can see is that there are certainly people who can be building up some pathology and some real problems in their brain, and yet they're still functioning quite well. And what these people are doing is they're using what they have more efficiently. They're making sure that, okay, I just met somebody here. I know I'm going to forget it unless I do this. All right. So we can all start having these habits and make our memory better. We can also all have better physical exercise habits and make a whole bunch of other things in our bodies, in our lives and everything better. And it's a very, very similar kind of concept.

Dr. Correa:
So, it's about the things that we decide to value and invest in, in a way, like everything else?

Dr. Stark:
Exactly, exactly. There is one other fun little bit that isn't tied to the HSAMs directly here, but is a neat thing that we can actually do to help out our memories as we age. We've known for a good long time in studies of animal models, that there's a phenomenon called environmental enrichment. If you have animals living in an environment where there's more place to roam and explored, new toys, you keep changing things out, and you have a lot of novel things happening in their lives. It does all sorts of great things for their brain, particularly this structure called the hippocampus, that's distinctly tied to this kind of memory. Environmental enrichment helps.

Dr. Stark:
Environmental enrichment also actually helps in humans. We've had a number of studies now in which we even used things like off the shelf commercial big open world 3D video games. Or things like Super Mario 3D World, and getting older adults, even like 90 year olds with game controllers and this sort of thing. It actually improves their memory outside of playing the game. Going for walk in parks, not just the walk aspect, but learning where things are inside the park. And then going to a new park and a new one, a new one. Having this kind of novelty clearly actually improved their memory as well. So, that's another kind of thing. As I say, it's not tied directly to HSAM, but it's something that we can certainly be doing to helping out, to help out our memory.

Dr. Correa:
Well, it sounds like we have a lot of fun things to discuss in future episode between forest bathing for memory and video games for memory. So, what have you learned from the memory work and research that you've been doing and the people that you've worked with that you've taken for yourself, or even in interacting with aging family members?

Dr. Stark:
So, what I've learned on this is that it is changeable. And there are certainly going to be limits to how good your memory can be. And as you are aging, those limits do get worse and worse, yeah. But if you want it to be better, you're not going to get to the level of a Marilu Henner. If I wanted my jump shot to be better, I'm not going to get to the level of an NBA all star. But at the same time, our system is changeable. Memory is the thing that helps define who we are. We remember these events in our lives. We share them with our family members and our friends. And it's a huge aspect of our self identity. It's shaped our lives, what paths we decided to go in our career and all this sort of thing, is shaped a huge amount by memory.

Dr. Stark:
And in some cases, memory actually gets us into trouble. Whether it's something like post traumatic stress disorder, or even obsessive compulsive disorder, or rumination and depression. But memory is also a way out of all of these kinds of things. Our brain is remarkably flexible and remarkably changeable. And learning and memory is kind of how we can actually do that. And even as our learning and memory system is changing as we age, it's still there. And so we can still come up with and use better techniques and strategies to be able to hold onto that information better and that sort of thing. So yeah, it may take a little bit more work because the system isn't working quite as well, but it's certainly something that we still can do.

Dr. Correa:
Thank you for the encouragement and for that positive thought that we can all improve, and just investing a little bit more time and effort, having more novel settings. Thank you for the work that you and your research does and helping us all understand a little bit more about memory. And appreciate you taking the time with us today.

Dr. Stark:
Thank you for having me.

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Marilu Henner and the Mysteries of Memory

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