Mnemonology (MEMORY) Part 2 with Michael Yassa AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Ologies with Alie Ward

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Episode: Mnemonology (MEMORY) Part 2 with Michael Yassa

Author: Alie Ward
Duration: 01:03:34

Episode Shownotes

Remembering names! Preventing dementia! Photographic memories! Weed! Goldfish! It’s the thrilling conclusion of Mnemonology with Dr. Michael Yassa, the Director of UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. We talk long vs. short term memories, how smells can pack a wallop of emotions, prosopagnosia (“facial blindness”), the

fog of new parenthood, Alzheimer's and other causes of dementia, and tips to keep your brain in tip-top shape. Let’s make some mems. Listen to Part 1 hereFollow Dr. Yassa on Google Scholar and XVisit the Yassa Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at UCI websiteA donation went to UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory’s graduate student and postdoctoral Junior Scholar FundMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Attention-Deficit Neuropsychology (ADHD), Molecular Neurobiology (BRAIN CHEMICALS), Eudemonology (HAPPINESS), Traumatology (PTSD), Sports & Performance Psychology (ANXIETY & CONFIDENCE), Phonology (LINGUISTICS), Neuropathology (CONCUSSIONS), Quantum Ontology (WHAT IS REAL?), Surgical Angiology (VEINS & ARTERIES), Disability Sociology (DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH), Dolorology (PAIN)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Summary

In episode 2 of 'Ologies with Alie Ward,' Dr. Michael Yassa discusses the intricate nature of memory, covering topics such as prosopagnosia, the impact of technology on memory recall, and the powerful emotional connections linked to memories. He highlights the unique ways that smells trigger specific recollections and explores the effects of substances like marijuana on cognitive function. The episode also addresses dementia and Alzheimer's disease, focusing on the importance of early detection, personalized treatments, and lifestyle interventions to enhance brain health and memory retention.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Mnemonology (MEMORY) Part 2 with Michael Yassa) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_07
Oh hey, it's still the fountain at the mall that's never on. Allie Ward, you are here for part two of Mnemonology, Memory. Please tell me that you started with part one.

00:00:10 Speaker_07
Even if you don't remember it, start with part one because this is the thrilling conclusion. With professor, researcher, and the director of UC Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, he's amazing.

00:00:22 Speaker_07
We're going to get into it, but first, This is a wall-to-wall episode of questions from patrons and if you'd like to submit some time you too can join for as low as a buck a month and upper tiers can submit audio questions.

00:00:34 Speaker_07
Thank you also to everyone getting Ology's merch from ologysmerch.com and thanks to everyone leaving us reviews which boosts the show so much and each week I remember to read them all and I pick a just written one

00:00:46 Speaker_07
such as this one from Sulasingh who wrote, this podcast saved my life. It's like spending an hour at the most amazing library ever where you find exactly the right book that you didn't know that you needed.

00:00:57 Speaker_07
Sulasingh and everyone who's ever left a review, I have read it and thank you. Welcome to the library. Okay, on to part two where we answer your questions about how to remember names and faces, what causes Alzheimer's,

00:01:10 Speaker_07
Photographic Memory, Short-Term vs. Long-Term Memory, How to Prevent Dementia, Cannabis and Memory, Goldfish Brains, and Why Smelling Sunscreen Makes You Wanna Cry Sometimes, with neurobiologist, professor, researcher, and memory expert, pneumonologist, Dr. Michael Yassa.

00:01:45 Speaker_06
Oh, I have questions from listeners. Can I ask you one million? Of course.

00:01:48 Speaker_07
You're the best. Okay. So this question was on the minds of patrons. ESO party, Elsa T, who's a first time question asker and face name forgetter. Dianas Teresnik-Dean, Lily B, and audio question submitter, Summer, wanted to know.

00:02:04 Speaker_01
Hi, Allie. Summer from New Zealand here. What I find really interesting is that I remember faces, but sometimes I can't remember where I've seen that person before, even in what country I've seen them.

00:02:18 Speaker_01
And I'm wondering why we're so good at recognizing faces and remembering knowing a face, but knowing none of the details around that face.

00:02:30 Speaker_07
What is it about remembering certain aspects of a person or a connection? I know some people have total face blindness as well, either evolutionarily or how do we look at faces where we blank and say, who is that person?

00:02:47 Speaker_04
That's a fantastic question, Summer. So, you've already mentioned one version of this, which is face blindness, right? And I'm not saying that Summer has face blindness at all. In fact, I think all of us struggle with faces to an extent.

00:03:01 Speaker_07
So this condition is medically known as prosopagnosia, and a 2023 study in the journal Cortex titled, What is the Prevalence of Developmental Prosopagnosia?

00:03:12 Speaker_07
An Empirical Assessment of Different Diagnostic Cutoffs found that developmental prosopagnosia, meaning it's lifelong and not caused by injury to the brain, is more common than previously thought, and that it lies on a spectrum of severity.

00:03:28 Speaker_07
I was doing some reading on it from people who have it to try to figure out what it feels like, and I've read it described as seeing a tree and then trying to pick out that specific tree in a forest, or telling the difference between two different cows in a field.

00:03:43 Speaker_07
And if this sounds like you, and if you watch movies wondering, wait, is that the same guy or is that a different guy? You may be one in 33 people who have it, which is cool, but also awful. So don't let anyone make you feel too bad about it.

00:03:57 Speaker_04
Now faces are a very important piece of information. When you look at somebody's face, you can tell by their expression whether they're a threat to you, whether they're a friendly person. You can choose to approach or avoid.

00:04:07 Speaker_04
You can base a lot of your decision making based on a face. If somebody's face has an expression of fear and they're looking behind you, they might warn you to something and you might react accordingly.

00:04:18 Speaker_04
So we evolved, and not just our species, many social species have evolved to try to always interpret faces and facial expressions.

00:04:28 Speaker_04
But recognizing a face and remembering whether a face belongs to a certain name is this thing that happened much later in evolution. And I don't think our brains are just very good at it yet.

00:04:39 Speaker_04
I think we're developing that, but we're still sort of half-baked when it comes to connecting names and faces.

00:04:44 Speaker_04
So, number one complaint that I hear from everybody is, I remember faces, but I can never connect them with when did I see this person, what their name is, or sometimes I'll hear the name and I can't recall the face, but then I connect when I see it.

00:04:57 Speaker_04
So face names, associations like that, they tend to be the most challenging for us humans. But one of the reasons why faces are really important is because of this evolutionary survival sort of significance.

00:05:08 Speaker_04
Things around fear, things around pleasure, reward, all of that. We get our cues, a lot of our cues from faces.

00:05:14 Speaker_07
I learned a trick once on a film set where one guy I worked with, it was Adam Savage from Mythbusters. He knew everyone's name on this huge set we were on.

00:05:24 Speaker_07
It was like, okay, I have this trick where that woman's name is Dorothy, and I think of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. That person's name is Ben, and I have a brother-in-law named Ben.

00:05:33 Speaker_07
And so as soon as they said their name, you had to pay attention, but then you made a connection.

00:05:37 Speaker_04
Absolutely. You know, there's lots of folks out there who try to train you on how to make your memory system better. And many of them, you might know, they're memory champions out there, they're sort of memory grandmasters out there.

00:05:49 Speaker_04
And they've learned tricks that have been used by the Greeks for a long time, ancient Greeks I should say, like mind palaces and so on. And all of these methods are based on forming strong personal associations.

00:06:02 Speaker_04
So if you have never seen The Wizard of Oz, it wouldn't have made sense to you to associate, right? But if you've seen it and you can picture the Dorothy in the exact movie, right, that makes it much more personal.

00:06:14 Speaker_04
So they tell you to try to be able to remember people's faces and names, make that something that is emotionally significant to you, but making those connections and making them as vivid as possible seems to be the trick that works for most people.

00:06:27 Speaker_07
So I hope that helps Clay Trover, Sarah McEachern, Eric Gidzeg, Jennifer Froh, Elise Waple, Hannah Nolan, Jacqueline Church, Gnomes Lorimer, Bennett Vanderbosch, Aline Lanz, Kent Durbin, Liz, Zuleika Pevec, Callie Fong, Kelly Larson, Carleen DH, and Connor They Them, all of whom say that they are garbage at remembering names.

00:06:45 Speaker_07
It's okay. Obviously, based on that list, you are not alone.

00:06:48 Speaker_07
And patron Jackie G said that a tour guide shared this tip with them, that you introduce yourself first, then you can actually listen when other people say their names instead of mentally rehearsing your own introduction.

00:07:01 Speaker_07
And Jackie G says, it's amazing and has worked wonders for me. So perhaps that'll make some of you less anxious.

00:07:07 Speaker_07
Oh, speaking of anxiety and trauma and emotions in general, many, many of you, Little Miss Particular, Camilla Gamino, Susan Singley, Maddie Cakes, Popsicle Emperor, Joshua Talzin, Sarah Argueta,

00:07:18 Speaker_07
Rowan Tree, Michelle Gregos, Allie Brown, Patricia Evans, Katie Hammond, and Rachel Prosecco wanted to know how emotions affect retention. And Nick Alston asked, what's the chemistry behind emotional memories?

00:07:30 Speaker_00
And also patron Ryan asked, Hi, this is Ryan from Los Angeles. I was wondering if you could speak to the effects that negative emotions such as shame and guilt have on working memory and long term memory.

00:07:43 Speaker_07
Are people who experience heightened emotions, either with anxiety or pretty happy people, do they keep those memories more because there is more of an emotional connection?

00:07:54 Speaker_04
There's no doubt that having an emotional connection strengthens the way that you store a memory.

00:08:00 Speaker_04
So, certainly, if you tend to have much more emotional reactions to things, or the experiences that you're having are much more emotional, they will have the capacity to be stored for longer, to be able to influence your actions and decisions for longer.

00:08:14 Speaker_04
And again, there's the evolutionary significance for that, of course. More emotional things may be a little bit more involved in your survival, right? That said, emotion doesn't always improve your ability to store things.

00:08:28 Speaker_04
It colors the experience for sure, but it also kind of zooms in on certain aspects of the experience and zooms out from others.

00:08:35 Speaker_04
So you may recall certain details incredibly well, but there may be other things that are kind of lost on you because of the emotionality.

00:08:43 Speaker_04
So it creates this competition between some central features of the experience, and then a lot of the peripheral stuff kind of doesn't win out in that competition, and that can be forgotten.

00:08:54 Speaker_07
Many of you wondered about what is normal, given our very chaotic and technological world, such as ologist from the Caribology episode, Megan Lynch, Amelia Frank, Ginny Bateman, Katie Brick-Klein, Margaret Onuska, Miranda Pan, Irregular K, WASPs, ologist Eric R. Eaton, Rachel M., Megan Walker, Tiny Nature, and first-time question askers Julie Williams, Chelsea Loves Chocolate, Theo Klein, Tara Villanova, and some folks who are distracted by stress, Dawn Ewald, Holly Cole, Eric Masterson, and Helen Langiel.

00:09:22 Speaker_07
I wonder if our lack of presence, because we were distracted a lot with our phones and internet stuff, I wonder if that lack of presence is making our memories a little bit more Swiss cheesy.

00:09:36 Speaker_04
I like this, Swiss cheese-y, that's a good way to think about it.

00:09:39 Speaker_04
Certainly every time that I've lifted up my phone and tried to record a video of my daughter playing basketball as opposed to put the phone down and actually watch her play, I feel like I have Swiss cheese in my brain.

00:09:50 Speaker_04
So 100 percent, I think that you're right when we replace actually experiencing something in its full glory.

00:09:58 Speaker_04
three-dimensionality and all of that, with some 2D version of what we're recording on the phone, or being distracted by looking at something at the same time, and not being fully aware, fully cognizant of what's happening, of course it's going to change how these memories are stored and how they're represented.

00:10:16 Speaker_04
And I do worry about that. I think that there's no doubt that there's value to having the electronics. I mean, look at us. Our devices are out all the time.

00:10:24 Speaker_04
And that's just the nature of what we have to do to be able to deal with the situations around us and the rapidly evolving world and all of the stimulation. But I think it misses something about experiencing something

00:10:37 Speaker_04
fully and truly with all of its three-dimensionality, four-dimensionality, I should say, and with all the emotional contexts that come with it, right? And to be able to have that genuinely, you have to be there.

00:10:48 Speaker_04
So immersion, I think, is really key for good memory storage.

00:10:52 Speaker_07
So those four dimensions are like a 3D object on the X, Y, and Z axes, but with the added dimension of time. It's interesting because we're experiencing it less in the moment, but we're able to recall it more with that video footage.

00:11:07 Speaker_07
And it's such a weird trade-off that it's like, well, I can remember it later as long as I don't fully experience it now.

00:11:13 Speaker_04
It is a weird trade-off, because what you remember based on the video is this weird sort of two-dimensional version on a screen, and you're never able to piece back being there fully in three dimensions.

00:11:25 Speaker_04
But if that was your experience, that's what you piece back.

00:11:28 Speaker_04
So it comes back with all of the pleasure, the sensory experience that came with it, as opposed to if you're looking at the screen, that's your version of that reality, and that's what comes back.

00:11:38 Speaker_04
It's just that two-dimensional, more impoverished version. And that, to me, I think is the big concern.

00:11:43 Speaker_07
That's funny because my husband and I got married three years ago and a good friend of mine was like, let's watch the video on your first anniversary. My husband and I can't watch the video. What we remember from it is what we remember.

00:11:55 Speaker_07
And both of us have like the ick when it comes to watching it for some reason. We're like, I don't want to remember it any differently. Because we are kind of always, like you said, reconstructing those memories based on input, right?

00:12:06 Speaker_04
And you don't want to change the version that you have in your brain, especially if that version was beautiful and something that you want to hold on to. Now, I have the — anytime anybody tells me to watch a video of myself, so I just can't do it.

00:12:16 Speaker_04
Categorically, that's just something I don't want to do. But I can totally resonate with what you're saying if you've experienced it fully being there.

00:12:24 Speaker_04
being able to piece it back together in this two-dimensional version and looking at it on a video, it's just never the same. And it kind of alters your, you know, actual recollection of that experience.

00:12:34 Speaker_07
And a University of Chicago study recently recruited users of this app called One Second Every Day to hop in an MRI and look at quick videos of strangers' lives versus one-second clips that they had recorded themselves using that app.

00:12:51 Speaker_07
and the study found that different parts of the brain light up if it was their own memory versus just in taking a stranger's video.

00:12:59 Speaker_07
And other neurobiologists at the University of Toronto are exploring how video diaries like that could help Alzheimer's patients connect more to their own past.

00:13:08 Speaker_07
So to patrons Aunt Tiffa and Rosalie De La Foray who recall more when prompted by photos and videos, that's some real science right there for you.

00:13:16 Speaker_07
Everyone else that app was called One Second Every Day, if you want to log little chunks of your whole life. Now, what if you don't need physical memorabilia or pixels to jog your memory? What if your mind is a camera?

00:13:29 Speaker_07
So Alia Myers and Erika Perriandri, among others, had questions about that. Well, on the topic of photographic memory, many people asked, Mariah Kay said, this question has been on my mind for so long, all caps.

00:13:41 Speaker_07
I know there's photographic memory, but are there different versions or levels of it? Reed Barry wants to know what actually is photographic memory. This question was asked by Cybermanz, Erica, Periandri, Rachel McGill, Earl of Gramilkin.

00:13:54 Speaker_07
What is photographic memory exactly?

00:13:56 Speaker_04
Okay, fellas, this is myth busting time.

00:13:59 Speaker_07
Okay.

00:14:00 Speaker_04
Ready?

00:14:01 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:14:01 Speaker_04
Photographic memory does not exist.

00:14:05 Speaker_07
How?

00:14:06 Speaker_04
How? And it's so uncomfortable to hear that. Well, so photographic memory is what we sometimes refer to as eidetic memory.

00:14:14 Speaker_04
You know, the way that it's defined, it's that you have this perfect recall, perfect recollection of something that you've seen potentially only once.

00:14:23 Speaker_04
And if it's in the context of say reading, you're talking about like remembering page numbers and all of that. The evidence that that exists historically is slim to none.

00:14:33 Speaker_04
There's maybe a very small handful of cases of savant syndrome where somebody could legitimately make the claim for a true photographic memory. But aside from that, there's no real evidence that photographic memory, to this sense, exists.

00:14:49 Speaker_04
That said, there's really, really, really good memory, and there's really, really, really bad memory. There's a whole spectrum. And a lot of times, when we're thinking about photographic memory, it's not exactly that, but it's close.

00:15:02 Speaker_04
It's really good memory, where you're memorizing where things are laid out on the page, where you may be memorizing things like the page numbers and where the figures were, where the pictures were, all that kind of stuff.

00:15:13 Speaker_04
To the extent that we can tell whether or not that's actually helpful in a day-to-day learning experience, it's not clear whether or not that actually helps you.

00:15:21 Speaker_07
And while a true photographic memory is at this point just flim-flam, there is such a thing as eidetic memory, where someone can see a visual and look at it, or sometimes hear something, and once it's removed, they can recall it in great detail.

00:15:35 Speaker_07
It's as if visually they're still looking at it, but it's not 100% faithful, and it does not last a lifetime. Your brain's like, I don't really need that fancy of a feature.

00:15:46 Speaker_04
Because remember, what we're trying to learn and remember on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily the details of the exact words on a page or the exact details of what happened. It's the gist. It's sort of the overall experience kind of abstracted.

00:16:01 Speaker_04
It's whatever knowledge I can abstract from that experience and be able to use it to guide my future decision making.

00:16:06 Speaker_04
So if you start to think about memory a little bit differently, that it's not really about the past, it's all about the future, this is no longer uncomfortable.

00:16:13 Speaker_04
It's okay to sit with that, that there's no photographic memory, because there's no rationale, there's no reason for it to exist.

00:16:20 Speaker_07
So though we debunked learning styles in part one, what about people who don't retain things as well visually but through sound, hey?

00:16:28 Speaker_07
First-time question askers Kimberly, Kirsten Cornell, as well as E. Jordan, Sean Thomas Kaye, Matthew Walcher, Lisa Gorman, Maria Kay, Josh Walden, Sidoni S, Vanessa Adams, Daniel, Ben Voren, Jennifer Froh, Deb Does Science, Alicia Clarkson, and Sam wanted to know about sound and memory, including song lyrics.

00:16:44 Speaker_07
Well, I know because we have obviously a lot of listeners who learn by auditory memory. Are some people better at recalling things if they hear it?

00:16:56 Speaker_04
Yes.

00:16:57 Speaker_07
Okay.

00:16:57 Speaker_04
Yes. And this takes us back to the conversation about learning styles. So I want to be very clear, right? It is a myth. Learning styles is a myth. There is no one way to be able to get to your brain and it could be visual for you or auditory for you.

00:17:10 Speaker_04
That said, People do have individual differences in how much they learn visually and how much they learn through their ears auditorily and how much they learn through other senses.

00:17:21 Speaker_04
But at the end of the day, the most effective learning is the one that combines the most senses. So as a species, we are far more visual, as a species, collectively.

00:17:32 Speaker_04
If you look at rodents, for example, rats, they have a much stronger sense of smell than we ever would be motivated by, right?

00:17:40 Speaker_04
That does not diminish our sense of smell, does not diminish our other senses, but it says that primarily because we are not nocturnal, we operate usually in daylight and the sunlight, visual information seems to be really important to us. We tend to

00:17:52 Speaker_04
kind of prioritize that. We have a lot more real estate in our brain dedicated to processing of the visual sense than to other senses.

00:17:59 Speaker_04
So when somebody says, well, I learn better if I hear it, I'll say, I'm willing to bet that you'd learn better if you heard it and saw it at the same time. So don't just rely on, oh, I just want to hear it. So for example, if you're reading,

00:18:13 Speaker_04
And you say, I'm just not a reader. Well, try reading out loud so you're also hearing it. And listening to yourself say the words. And you'll notice that that is a bimodal kind of learning, and things will stick a lot more.

00:18:24 Speaker_07
We did a reading episode recently, and there was a big question as to whether or not audiobooks were reading, whether they count, whether you can count them in your book.

00:18:31 Speaker_04
Oh, I sure hope they count. Yeah, I know.

00:18:33 Speaker_07
Me too. So we talked about this in the recent Anagnosology episode, all about reading. And I'll just give you an excerpt from that with Dr. Adrian Johns, who is a professor and a historian, and who authored the book, The Science of Reading.

00:18:47 Speaker_02
It's actually interesting that e-books, or actually audio books more, the idea that you could, as it were, read a novel or something by having it read to you by machine.

00:18:56 Speaker_02
There are schemes for those going back as far as pretty much the origin of recording, so the late 19th, early 20th century. There were visionary schemes for having

00:19:06 Speaker_02
Things like vending machines where you could put your money in and there would be a speaking trumpet that would speak a book to you. It's not like there's something that is that radically new about audiobooks per se.

00:19:20 Speaker_02
Having said that, my own sense of it crudely is that I think with audiobooks, it's really that you're having something read to you rather than reading. Part of that has to do with the control of the pace of it.

00:19:33 Speaker_02
So you can slow down recordings, you can pause it, and all of that kind of thing.

00:19:40 Speaker_02
But it's not the same as doing what one does with one's mind's eye all the time in reading a page where you're constantly shifting the speed and considering things and going back without even necessarily thinking about it.

00:19:51 Speaker_02
You don't have to press a button or something. E-books, on the other hand, I think are just reading. I mean, I don't have any issue with those at all.

00:19:58 Speaker_07
So Dr. Johns is a reading scholar, and I am a lady recording this while not wearing a bra, but whose entire life revolves around reading to people. So we'll have to arm wrestle for dominance.

00:20:08 Speaker_07
But I will say that per an ancient study from the late 1960s titled Retention and Recall, Incidental Learning of Visual and Auditory Material in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, that visual memories tend to be better for recall

00:20:23 Speaker_07
But there is, quote, a decline with age for recall of visual material, but virtually no deterioration in performance on the auditory task. So I'm going to amplify that data in my favor. Now, what about smell?

00:20:36 Speaker_07
Cody Burdock, Vanessa Adams, Christine Hurley, The Dork Next Door, Amanda Regan, Guy Hutchinson, Eating Dark Hair for a Living, Renee Vandenhoven, Jess H. Fiona, Elizabeth Caro Young, Anastasia Press,

00:20:46 Speaker_07
all wanted to know about smell and memory and Susan Singley asked, why do some aromas bring back such clear and nostalgic memories like cut grass, old books, coconut sunscreen, ocean waves, and that smell after rain?

00:21:00 Speaker_07
But yeah, earlier Mike mentioned that rodents have a much stronger sense of smell than us and I wonder if they feel nostalgic for smelling certain garbage. I bet they do. Well, you mentioned smell and rats.

00:21:12 Speaker_07
We have an excellent Urban Rodentology episode about rats that made me cry with affection for rats. But Amanda Regan wanted to know, why do smells or sounds trigger memory sometimes? And I have heard that it's difficult to really know what a smell is.

00:21:30 Speaker_07
You have to have a memory of that smell, that it goes straight to some memory center. What's up with that?

00:21:36 Speaker_04
Couple things. So let me break this down because you asked a couple of really, really interesting questions, but they're a little bit different from each other. So the first one is maybe whether or not we can sort of label smells.

00:21:46 Speaker_04
You can label a sound and people that have perfect pitch can tell you exactly what note it is and so on. And you can certainly label visual things. objects, we have things, colors, right? But with smells, it's a little bit different.

00:21:58 Speaker_04
And we don't have a great lexicon for smells. A lot of times we're relegated to kind of like lavender, kind of like, and fill in the blank, right? Something that you're familiar with. But that's the rub.

00:22:08 Speaker_04
You have to go back to something that you're familiar with. So it reminds you of something else. It reminds you of something that you might have smelled or sensed before.

00:22:16 Speaker_04
And that may be just an evolutionary thing, like we haven't really evolved to prioritize this kind of information, smell information.

00:22:23 Speaker_04
We don't use it typically to navigate around the world, although if you've got a nice baking cake in the kitchen, you might navigate your way there. So in some situations maybe it's helpful, but we tend to navigate mostly based on visual information.

00:22:35 Speaker_07
So our sense of smell isn't keen enough to save us, essentially, so it remains pretty mid. And think back to any time you've tried to describe a smell.

00:22:44 Speaker_07
You've probably said it smells like and thought of the last instance or the strongest instance of smelling something like that thing.

00:22:52 Speaker_04
we tend to kind of know what we need to do based on visual information. So because it was never prioritized, we never sort of bothered to create robust labels for it.

00:23:00 Speaker_04
And when you don't have labels for things, your brain sort of struggles to kind of store it with that fidelity because you don't have that verbal thing that you can attach to it.

00:23:09 Speaker_04
I know what a coffee mug is because I have a verbal label for those coffee mugs, right? So that's one piece. The other piece, which I think is fascinating, is that especially smells can trigger memories, sometimes long-lost memories.

00:23:23 Speaker_04
There's certain smells that will remind me of my grandmother's house, certain smells that remind me of specific people in my past, because that might have been the perfume or cologne they wear or something like that, or similar to it.

00:23:34 Speaker_04
And then the experience of going back sort of, it like washes over you. You kind of go back in time, you're immersed, you're exactly in that moment.

00:23:43 Speaker_04
The sense of smell almost has this incredibly privileged capacity to do this, and we don't know why this happens, but we suspect that it's possible part of it is the fact that your sense of smell, unlike all of the other senses, it has direct access to your hippocampus, your memory bits of the brain.

00:24:03 Speaker_04
And it's not clear why that is, but it's sort of co-evolved that way.

00:24:06 Speaker_04
The sensory systems in the brain that are outside of smell, so vision, audition, all have to go through the thalamus, which is this sort of major hub in the brain, before they get to the memory parts of the brain.

00:24:18 Speaker_04
There isn't like this direct access, whereas everywhere else, this happens, for our sense of smell, it doesn't happen. Our sense of smell doesn't go through the thalamus. It directly has this revolving door straight into our memory bits of the brain.

00:24:33 Speaker_04
And we have no clue why the hell that is. It's just this weird, quizzical thing, and I don't know to what extent that means it's truly privileged, and that's the reason why we remember things so vividly.

00:24:43 Speaker_04
But it seems plausible that it's at least a contributing factor, that you don't have to gate through somewhere else before you get to the hippocampus. It's right there.

00:24:50 Speaker_07
It's like an express train.

00:24:52 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:24:53 Speaker_07
So exciting. What about as someone who has had a nasty concussion, Hope, Lauren Galerio, Addie Capello, Adam Foote's wife, Anna, a bunch of people wanted to know how studying concussions or TBI has influenced work or influences our memory.

00:25:11 Speaker_04
You know, it's challenging with concussions or TBI, traumatic brain injury, because there's no two injuries that are the same. So that is a particularly difficult set of conditions.

00:25:21 Speaker_04
It depends on the severity of the concussion, the location, all sorts of things. And we're learning a lot more about this. Clearly, it impacts a variety of different memory systems, memory being one of the key ones that gets impacted.

00:25:32 Speaker_04
But depending on the kind of injury, whether it's a coup-contrecoup kind of injury where there's sort of stretching and shearing of some of the brain's white matter pathways, the connections between different regions, all of those things tend to happen.

00:25:46 Speaker_04
There's inflammation, there's sometimes Frank injury, you can actually see evidence of that. But it's not clear how much of that is, first of all, common across individuals, because, again, the extent of the injury is different.

00:25:58 Speaker_04
The etiology, the root of the injury, the cause, it can be very, very different. But the fact that memory is impacted almost in all concussive injuries is an interesting phenomenon.

00:26:09 Speaker_04
And I always go back to our memory system is, or at least the hippocampal memory system, is one of the most vulnerable systems in the brain. It tends to feel the brunt of pretty much anything.

00:26:21 Speaker_07
Patrons Rye of the Tiger, Heidi, Brenda Palencia, and Christine Hurley asked about what is loathsomely called mom brain, or in Tim Farr's words, I don't feel like I know things anymore, and it's horrible.

00:26:34 Speaker_07
I myself do not have kids, but I have damaged my brain with a hospital grade blow to the head. I feel for you.

00:26:41 Speaker_04
and not just concussions, but even if we're sleep deprived, even if we're anxious or depressed or anything that's happening to us tends to impact the system. It is one of our most primitive systems in the brain.

00:26:53 Speaker_04
It's one that we share with all the mammalian species and many others. Even though it's tucked in the middle of the brain, it seems like it would be like nice and enveloped and covered up. It has kind of weird positioning.

00:27:04 Speaker_04
The vasculature around it is quite vulnerable. The white matter is quite vulnerable.

00:27:09 Speaker_04
It's also very close to the most porous parts of the blood-brain barrier, so toxins can get into those limbic structures much more easily than in other places in the brain.

00:27:20 Speaker_07
So remember from part one that memories are stored all over the brain, kind of like coins hidden in the sand. But the hippocampus, that seahorse-shaped organ, acts as a sort of metal detector to find and retrieve those memories.

00:27:35 Speaker_07
So the hippocampus is this wicked combination of really important and very delicate.

00:27:41 Speaker_04
Just be careful. So it's just a hub of vulnerability. And it's one of the reasons why we study it so extensively in my lab across a variety of different conditions, because we believe that it is very vulnerable.

00:27:52 Speaker_04
And if we develop ways to be able to protect it or treat it, that will generalize across a number of different conditions.

00:27:58 Speaker_07
And is it rather new that we even know that the blood-brain barrier is permeable at all?

00:28:05 Speaker_04
Yeah, I would think. I mean, we've always known that it's permeable to some things. We know this because there's a lot of things that are in our blood that get through the blood-brain barrier very quickly and get into our brain easily.

00:28:15 Speaker_04
Alcohol is one of those, right? That gets straight from the blood to the brain. So there are things that we've known about for quite some time that can traverse that barrier with great ease.

00:28:24 Speaker_04
But there are new things that we're learning about now that we didn't realize can get through the blood-brain barrier easily, that seem to get through. And some of these things may be inflammatory in nature, some of them may be toxins.

00:28:37 Speaker_04
So when we talk about the connection between the body and the brain, that is...

00:28:41 Speaker_04
real, and it's always been there, but we've only really started to study the sort of mind-body or brain-body connection much more in recent years, and trying to understand how our gut, for example, influences our brain, how our brain influences our gut.

00:28:54 Speaker_04
This back and forth, which has to be able to kind of get through some of those barriers, and the blood-brain barrier being the key one.

00:29:01 Speaker_04
One of the most interesting things that happened in terms of technology recently is there is actually an approach, a technique, using what's called focused ultrasound to open up the blood-brain barrier to be able to transmit things through.

00:29:13 Speaker_04
Because it's always been a challenge for us in developing drugs and interventions, sort of pharmacological interventions, how to package something just right to get it through the blood-brain barrier. And this may be this other approach.

00:29:24 Speaker_04
It seems a little scary, I know, but with focused ultrasounds and what's called microbubbles, we can actually open up the blood-brain barrier and get some things that maybe are larger macromolecules that normally wouldn't get through actually to go through the blood-brain barrier.

00:29:36 Speaker_04
So, lots of fun activity these days in research on the blood-brain barrier.

00:29:40 Speaker_07
Well, you mentioned something about the gut connection, too. People are talking a lot about the vagus nerve. Yes. Just a quick background on that vagus nerve.

00:29:47 Speaker_07
So it's the longest nerve in your body, and it plays this key role in your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the chill side, the rest, and digest, as the vagus nerve carries messages between your heart and your brain and your guts.

00:30:00 Speaker_07
And according to this 2017 study, childhood trauma and lifetime syncope burden among older adults, researchers say that vasovagal syncope, where your heart rate and blood pressure fall suddenly, which can cause dizziness and sweating or fainting, according to the study, it's governed by the autonomic nervous system.

00:30:18 Speaker_07
And it's often precipitated by a highly salient emotional situation. And researchers found that the report of childhood abuse was independently associated with frequent syncope in youth. So what role does this physiology have?

00:30:32 Speaker_07
Does that vagus nerve play a role in memory at all?

00:30:36 Speaker_04
It certainly does. One easy way to think about that is, and it's been known for quite some time, is that this is one of the ways by which the adrenal hormones can impact the brain.

00:30:46 Speaker_04
So when we think about cortisol and cortisol release, when we think about epinephrine, those kinds of things do have a way to be able to impact the brain through its impact on the vagus nerve. But it's way beyond that now.

00:30:57 Speaker_04
There's a lot of literature now suggesting that vagal stimulation, for example, could have some really interesting effects therapeutic in some ways. And we're starting to understand a little bit more about how that mode of communication is operating.

00:31:12 Speaker_04
But it's certainly there, and it's, again, one that we stand to learn a lot more about.

00:31:16 Speaker_07
I feel like this is all a really good endorsement for meditation and deep breathing also.

00:31:21 Speaker_04
Well, I mean, that should be endorsed right off the bat all the time. Yeah, yeah.

00:31:26 Speaker_07
You know, you were mentioning toxicity in the brain, blood-brain barrier, alcohol. Many people wanted to know,

00:31:33 Speaker_07
Matthew Walker, Allie and Julian and Neil Anderson asked about different opinions of alcohol affecting memory, but others have more herbal questions, such as Allie Meyers, Adam, Michael James, Storm, Sericity, and Olympia Rempel, and first-time question askers Craig Steinberg and Zach Gary, and

00:31:49 Speaker_07
Chris Bullock asks, why does marijuana make memory so shitty? Asking for a friend. Winky face.

00:31:55 Speaker_04
Okay. Asking for a friend. I see.

00:31:58 Speaker_04
Well, answering for a friend, I can't say that I've had firsthand experience of this, but I can say that, first of all, there's different kinds of memory that are made, you know, shitty to different extents by marijuana.

00:32:11 Speaker_04
So it doesn't impact all kinds of memory. It might impact your recollection for things that you were doing, you know, previously or sort of around that same time.

00:32:20 Speaker_04
Not exactly clear why that happens, but I can tell you that one of the things that's really interesting about marijuana is that when you think about how it impacts the brain, there are particular receptors in the brain, what we call endocannabinoid receptors.

00:32:35 Speaker_04
that are specifically geared to responding to cannabinoids, which is essentially the active species in marijuana. But the interesting thing is that endocannabinoid receptors are involved in long-term potentiation in memory, in plasticity.

00:32:49 Speaker_04
So, in some ways, it's not surprising that it impacts your memory. It's surprising if it's always shitty, because I think there's probably an optimality. I'm not telling you that you should use it to improve memory.

00:32:59 Speaker_04
But there may be some realm in which you can actually improve plasticity as opposed to make it worse. That's very difficult to get at an individual level.

00:33:08 Speaker_04
But the fact that you have receptors in your brain, and especially in your memory systems, that are specifically geared to responding to the impact of marijuana, I think is a very, very cool thing.

00:33:17 Speaker_04
And it also tells us that we need to invest a lot more energy and a lot more time and a lot more resources in understanding exactly how it's impacting the brain, how that changes from individual to individual, on what background, in what context, with everything else that's happening in the brain.

00:33:32 Speaker_04
So recreational use versus use for, you know, depression, anxiety, other things. some more sort of therapeutic uses.

00:33:38 Speaker_04
All of those are really interesting questions and now that we are seeing the legalization sort of, you know, across many states and a desire from the National Institutes of Health to really support research on this front, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to have a lot more answers.

00:33:53 Speaker_04
A lot of my colleagues here actually are studying this exact thing.

00:33:56 Speaker_06
Would there be a difference between the CBD component and the THC component?

00:33:59 Speaker_04
Definitely, so they're different chemicals and they have different potency and different binding properties and so on. I don't know that there's as much evidence for CBD in terms of brain active kinds of things or psychoactive kinds of things.

00:34:14 Speaker_04
There may be a little bit out there, but certainly the impact of THC has been the one that's studied much more and there's a lot more literature on that.

00:34:21 Speaker_07
So a 2023 paper in the journal Biomolecules titled, Effective Cannabis on Memory Consolidation, Learning, and Retrieval, and its current legal status in India, acknowledges that, quote, the role of cannabis on cognitive functions is a matter of long debate.

00:34:37 Speaker_07
but that generally THC is responsible for cognition-related deficits, while non-psychoactive CBD has been shown to elicit neuroprotective activity.

00:34:50 Speaker_07
However, because it's a restricted substance, there's not enough research on it, they say, and contradictions exist. And some reports showed low THC dose improved learning and cognition. So I guess keep an eye out for emerging studies.

00:35:05 Speaker_07
And as discussed in the recent surgical angiology episode on veins and arteries, smoking is not the best way to ingest it, if you're going to. So remember to protect your blood plumbing for the long term.

00:35:18 Speaker_07
Oh, patrons Lila Weller, Carleen DH, and Barb Miller had questions about the long and the short of it all.

00:35:26 Speaker_07
Well, you know, I feel like some people talk about short-term versus long-term when it comes to that, but the difference between short-term memory and long-term, when does it become a long-term memory? When does it get filed?

00:35:37 Speaker_04
Yeah, great question, Carlene. I'm gonna get ready to bust another myth here. When I talk to people about long-term and short-term memory, typically they're complaining about their long-term memory, and they're saying, my short-term memory is okay.

00:35:49 Speaker_04
So I can remember things from yesterday or the week before, but it's like, you know, long-term memory that's impaired. Or my mother, if they're talking about maybe their mother with developing Alzheimer's or early dementia, it's the opposite.

00:36:01 Speaker_04
It's her long-term memory is okay. She can remember her past, her childhood, but everything in the last few years, her short-term memory is what's impaired.

00:36:09 Speaker_04
And I kind of have to stop and say, okay, let me just clear up the terminology so that when you're talking to a physician or talking to somebody, they understand what you're talking about. Both of those are long-term memory.

00:36:19 Speaker_04
You're talking about recent versus remote memories. Short-term memory is very, very short. We're talking the span of seconds. So that's at least the way that these things are defined in psychology and neuroscience. Short-term memory is extremely short.

00:36:34 Speaker_04
It's what we also call working memory.

00:36:37 Speaker_04
If I were to give you a phone number, not that you would have to dial a phone number these days, but if I were to give you a phone number and say, hey, hold on to this phone number, and then you have to dial it, you might sort of rehearse that phone number to yourself for a few seconds, and then you dial it, and then what happens to that number?

00:36:52 Speaker_03
goes away, right?

00:36:54 Speaker_04
So you stored it very briefly in your short-term memory store, your working memory, which is there to be able to help you store things for a very short period of time. You can get distracted out of it very quickly.

00:37:06 Speaker_04
And also I can exceed your span very quickly if I just yell out a whole bunch of numbers at you, things are going to fall out, right? So it's not intended to store any more than just a few, a handful of items.

00:37:17 Speaker_04
People used to say seven plus or minus two, but that number is likely closer to three or four.

00:37:21 Speaker_07
Okay, he just threw a whole bunch of numbers at you, but seven plus or minus two means that brain scientists used to think we can hold five to nine items in our short-term memory, but turns out we don't even have that much room.

00:37:34 Speaker_07
It's like three or four things at a time.

00:37:36 Speaker_04
Three or four things. And the reason why phone numbers work is because we chunk them into three bits. Yep. So then everything beyond that is actually long-term memory storage.

00:37:44 Speaker_04
But when we think about memory for yesterday or last week or the month before versus years ago, we're talking about recent long-term memories versus remote long-term memories.

00:37:56 Speaker_04
And as we get older, our memory for things that happened way in the past could be very preserved, because we talked about how memory over time gets strengthened and kind of linked to a whole bunch of different regions of the brain, so it becomes more robust.

00:38:09 Speaker_04
more resilient to forgetting, those are typically the last memories to go. say for a patient experiencing dementia, they're going to remember those memories much later in the progression.

00:38:21 Speaker_04
But memories of the last few months, the last year, the last few years, they're going to be the ones that are the earliest to go. Because they have not been solidified as much.

00:38:31 Speaker_04
They have not been stored in all of these parallel networks in the brain and made kind of more resilient to forgetting. They're still somewhat dependent on the hippocampus, And the hippocampus is kind of the culprit in early dementia, right?

00:38:42 Speaker_04
It's one of the places that's changing very early. So, as we think about long-term versus short-term, that's typically what people are thinking about.

00:38:49 Speaker_04
Why am I not remembering as much of the recent things, but I remember memories in the past for longer? We experience that as we get older, but much more dramatically in the context of dementia. Yeah, so it's just a little bit of a misnomer, but I think

00:39:03 Speaker_04
you know, being able to kind of divide it into recent versus remote covers the same question.

00:39:09 Speaker_07
Yeah. Oh, I had no idea. And I do want to ask about dementia and Alzheimer's as well, but a quick detour with short-term memory. Many people mentioned having the memory of a goldfish.

00:39:20 Speaker_07
Jasmine Patino, first-time question asker, whose dear, wonderful boyfriend is a goldfish in that capacity, and Caitlin Tyndale, who compared themselves to a fish cognitively.

00:39:31 Speaker_07
True or false, goldfish remember for two minutes and then they don't know why they're in a bowl?

00:39:37 Speaker_04
You know, I'm trying to remember finding Nemo now and thinking about whether it was truly two minutes. You know, I don't know if it's exactly two minutes, but it is very short. It is thought to be one of the shortest memory spans.

00:39:49 Speaker_04
How do they test that on a goldfish? It's difficult. I think that whenever you're testing things with animals, you have to be clever, right?

00:39:56 Speaker_04
So you have to figure out a way that the animal can kind of indicate to you whether or not they recognize something. Maybe it's by the amount of exploration or the amount of time they spent in the vicinity of that thing.

00:40:08 Speaker_04
If they're more familiar with it, maybe they'll navigate to something that's newer.

00:40:11 Speaker_04
So you can position things in the environment in a way where you can see how much they explore one over the other and be able to tell, oh, yeah, their memory is shot or maybe their memory is really good.

00:40:21 Speaker_06
I love the idea that they're like, you know this guy? And they're like, ah, no, no.

00:40:26 Speaker_04
The name is not coming to mind. I remember the face, though, anywhere. But yeah.

00:40:30 Speaker_07
We're in luck because, yeah, people study this. Of course they do.

00:40:32 Speaker_07
And according to a recent paper, Distance Estimation in the Goldfish in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Bee of Biological Sciences Journal, goldfish can accurately estimate distance after learning it.

00:40:45 Speaker_07
And another study in the journal Animals titled Visual perception of photographs of rotated 3D objects in goldfish trained six goldfish to tap either a photo of a frog or a turtle for a treat.

00:40:58 Speaker_07
And researchers report that all the fish had successful performance, showing that they were able to distinguish between the turtle and the frog photographs, which is evidence of object constancy. So, flim flam, goldfish memories are not trash.

00:41:13 Speaker_07
They can be trained to do things, and it should be noted that in five years of having my daughter, who's a poodle mix named Gremlin, I have never successfully trained her to do anything. So lay off the goldfish, and lay off yourselves.

00:41:27 Speaker_07
Although, when it comes to future fears and caring for loved ones, many patrons had questions about Alzheimer's and dementia, including Lisa Gorman, Deb Does Science, Stephanie Halfrey, Maddie Cakes, Two Stones with One Check.

00:41:39 Speaker_07
Miae, Meg McDaniel, Ken Edmondson, Erin White, Camellia Bee, Brian Reisinger, Sarah Crocker, and Stephanie who wrote, there are cases of dementia on both sides of my family.

00:41:49 Speaker_07
Is there actually anything we can do to stop or slow down this awful disease? A lot of people, obviously, concerned about dementia, concerned about Alzheimer's, that deserves its own two-part episode. Certainly.

00:42:02 Speaker_07
Can you describe, when it comes to memory, the difference between dementia and Alzheimer's? Is Alzheimer's a disease and dementia is the symptom of it, or how does it, exactly what's happening?

00:42:14 Speaker_04
Yeah, so the easiest way to think about it is that dementia is a larger umbrella term and Alzheimer's disease is one of the principal causes of dementia.

00:42:24 Speaker_04
You're right that dementia is a set of symptoms and Alzheimer's is a little bit more about the biology that leads to those symptoms. And there are many other types of dementias. So Parkinson's disease can lead to dementia.

00:42:34 Speaker_04
There's frontotemporal lobar degeneration or frontotemporal dementia.

00:42:38 Speaker_04
Huntington's disease can lead to dementia, so there's a number of different causes for dementia, but the most prevalent one, the one that most people are really concerned about is Alzheimer's dementia.

00:42:48 Speaker_04
So yeah, dementia is the umbrella term, Alzheimer's is the subcategory or the set of causes that lead down the path to dementia, and it's among many others, but Alzheimer's is the chief one.

00:42:57 Speaker_04
When we think about how do we differentiate between dementia and, say, healthy aging, that's another question that pops up a lot, is as I'm getting to a certain age, I feel like I am losing my memory.

00:43:10 Speaker_04
I'm starting to lose my way when I navigate, or I'm having some memory issues and being forgetful. And some of that happens as we all get older. And the majority of it is okay, right? That's just the natural part of a normal aging brain.

00:43:23 Speaker_04
But when it becomes pervasive and noticeable to not just to the person, but to others around them, and people are sort of missing doctor's appointments or getting lost around their neighborhoods and they're wandering, then it becomes a real concern.

00:43:38 Speaker_04
And when that's happening, already things have changed so much in the brain. that now it's really unable to compensate for it, because we tend to compensate so much for any sort of brain deficit for the longest time.

00:43:50 Speaker_04
So for many years, a patient with Alzheimer's disease wouldn't technically be a patient, because they're not reporting symptoms, they're not experiencing anything. Neither patient nor doctor can say anything is wrong with the brain.

00:44:02 Speaker_04
But already, the pathology is changing the brain.

00:44:06 Speaker_04
And one of the challenges for us in research is trying to develop ways that we can detect that pathology, maybe with brain imaging, with brain scans and so on, very early, even at a time when the patient and the doctor don't really know that anything is wrong.

00:44:20 Speaker_04
But when it comes to memory deficits experienced at that older age, you know, the question is always, how do I know when it's really kind of tipped over, how do I know when it's really problematic?

00:44:31 Speaker_04
And a good rule of thumb to think about is that if somebody's forgetting things, all natural and fine, especially if they can remember it later on.

00:44:38 Speaker_04
If they're reminded and they go, oh, now I remember, so it's tracked somewhere, it's there, you know that it's okay. Maybe that's a challenge as we're getting older, that just changes to some extent.

00:44:49 Speaker_04
But if they're really never able to piece it back together, and no reminder is helping them, that they may be kind of over that cliff, and they're going down the path to Alzheimer's disease.

00:44:59 Speaker_04
The somewhat more crass example is if you forget where you placed your car keys, it's okay, but if you forget that you drove the car, then that may be a challenge.

00:45:08 Speaker_07
Is that because of plaques in the brain? Is that parts of the brain atrophying into almost spaces where there used to be more white or gray matter? What's happening biologically?

00:45:21 Speaker_04
We used to have this idea, and the idea took the field by storm and actually resulted in, I think, an overinvestment of resources into clinical trials that try to get rid of those plaques. We used to think that plaques were sort of evil, right?

00:45:37 Speaker_04
And the two pathologies of Alzheimer's disease are plaques and tangles. Plaques are made up of amyloid protein, tangles are made up of what's called tau protein.

00:45:47 Speaker_04
And for the longest time people thought if you have amyloid and tau or plaques and tangles in the brain, that's Alzheimer's disease and we should be trying to break up those pathologies somehow to restore the brain or prevent it from getting worse.

00:45:59 Speaker_04
But the reality is the idea never really fully panned out because just having amyloid in the brain is not sufficient for you to experience memory problems. It's not sufficient for you to have dementia.

00:46:08 Speaker_04
There's about a third of everyone with amyloid in their brain will likely never experience dementia. So clearly by itself it's not sufficient.

00:46:16 Speaker_04
But something else that you mentioned turns out to be sufficient and really important, which is neurodegeneration. Actual atrophy, actual loss of cells. That doesn't happen naturally as we age. We lose synapses, we lose connections.

00:46:30 Speaker_04
As we get older, it becomes more difficult to make them, difficult to maintain them. That happens for sure.

00:46:36 Speaker_04
But cell loss in these massive amounts doesn't really happen unless there's a progressive neurodegenerative illness, which is what Alzheimer's disease is.

00:46:45 Speaker_04
So when we find evidence of neurodegeneration, say for example in MRI scans, we see a very close connection, a close link or a relationship between the extent of that neurodegeneration and memory symptoms or memory loss, and cognitive symptoms down the line that are not memory also.

00:47:01 Speaker_04
So executive function gets disrupted, all of our cognitive faculties, right, because it's progressive. But in the absence of that neurodegenerative change, it's very difficult to see associations with actual cognitive or clinical decline.

00:47:15 Speaker_04
which has created a bit of a dilemma for the field. Even though the FDA has been approving anti-amyloid therapeutics, these drugs have some nasty side effects. And it's not clear that clearing amyloid is going to be the solution in the long run.

00:47:31 Speaker_04
Coupled with that, also the complexity that Alzheimer's disease is extremely heterogeneous. So if I were to get it, and hopefully not, but if you were to get it, it may look very different in your brain than it does in my brain.

00:47:42 Speaker_04
We may have a lot of variability. So that means you may respond to a drug or therapy that I may not respond to and vice versa.

00:47:49 Speaker_04
So the idea of like a one-size-fits-all kind of solution is also kind of falling away by the wayside and people thinking about the complexity of maybe Alzheimer's disease is actually diseases and we need to be able to tailor therapeutics to the individual.

00:48:03 Speaker_07
Obviously, dementia, once again, deserves its own episode. It's a complex condition with a lot of emerging research. But there are some pharmaceutical treatments that can involve modulating neurotransmitters in the brain like glutamate.

00:48:17 Speaker_07
There are dietary modifications that can ease some related symptoms and psychopharmaceuticals that can help with depression and anxiety related to the progression of dementia.

00:48:28 Speaker_07
And Robert G. O'Day and Isabel LeClercq mentioned Lewy body dementia in their questions. And it is the second most common cause of dementia after Alzheimer's. And it's caused by aggregations of proteins in the brain called Lewy bodies.

00:48:41 Speaker_07
And some symptoms of it can include visual hallucinations, trouble with sleep, including sleepwalking, mood changes, and stiffness. And Isabel, whose mom had it, asked why public awareness of Lewy body dementia was low.

00:48:53 Speaker_07
But there's a little bit of background on it. And we're going to get to more questions about how you can avoid dementia and memory loss in yourself per an expert. But first, let's donate to a cause of his choosing.

00:49:03 Speaker_07
And he opted to send it to a fund at his center called the Junior Scholars Fund, which goes to supporting graduate students and their professional development.

00:49:11 Speaker_07
Because he says they are the next generation of talent, and he wants to do whatever he can to support them. And there's a link in the show notes for more on the Junior Scholars Fund at the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

00:49:22 Speaker_07
So thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. OK, back to the million dollar question here, which honestly, I think is eating away at everyone listening.

00:49:35 Speaker_07
But it was asked by Stephanie, Christina Manuj, Who Loves Saunas, Margaret Onuska, Kirat Singh, Shushanjha Gettinger, Nicole Deejee, Carol Young, and Jenny Hoover. So let's go.

00:49:46 Speaker_07
Well, I think last listener question that we got so much obviously is, every day I feel like we're all getting older. It's nuts. Wow. Time. We're going to get old eventually if we're lucky, right?

00:49:58 Speaker_07
What actually does help us stay sharp and retain our memories? Is it Sudoku? Is it going to Zumba classes? Is it reading?

00:50:09 Speaker_04
Yeah, you know, the challenge of brain aging and sort of body aging is an interesting one. I think everybody wants to, you know, live longer and live happier and healthier lives and so on.

00:50:20 Speaker_04
And the trick is to make sure that our brain aging is sort of consistent with our body aging. You really want to kind of maintain health across both of those. So mind longevity is something that we think about a lot. And there are some answers.

00:50:32 Speaker_04
So we know, for example, that maintaining levels of physical activity, regular physical activity, hopefully not just undertaken when you're 80, right?

00:50:41 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:50:41 Speaker_04
So starting kind of in midlife and continuing, regular levels of moderate physical activity seem to be helpful, seem to be preventative. They are associated with reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease.

00:50:52 Speaker_04
If people get it, they tend to get it later in life, but they're protected from it for some period of time.

00:50:57 Speaker_07
So, exercise.

00:50:59 Speaker_07
And for more, you can see the paper Exercise and Dementia Prevention from the journal Practical Neurology, which notes that around a third of dementia cases are attributable to modifiable risk factors, such as physical inactivity, smoking, and hypertension.

00:51:16 Speaker_07
And they say that with the rising prevalence of dementia, there is a renewed focus on prevention strategies, and exercise has emerged as a key intervention for influencing cognition positively, including reducing the risk of age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

00:51:33 Speaker_07
So use ologies as walking time, dance around your kitchen, get a dog to walk, take a break dancing class, do some arm stretches, just keep it moving, folks. Okay, what else, Doc?

00:51:46 Speaker_04
The other thing that people have identified in these large-scale, not just trials, but also epidemiological studies, what seems to help, well, social activity.

00:51:55 Speaker_04
And this was a challenge in the pandemic, actually, and I got to hear a lot about that from folks who felt that they had social structures and Zoom was no replacement for it. It just did not help as much.

00:52:06 Speaker_04
You really wanted to be around people, and being around people in older age is really key. Now, we see this all the time when people retire. There's sort of a fork in the road.

00:52:16 Speaker_04
You are very socially engaged in your job and other settings, and then when people retire, in some cases they become very isolated and they're spending a lot of time at home, maybe with just a 24-hour news cycle and all that kind of stuff, and not going out and being around people.

00:52:32 Speaker_04
And others have planned appropriately and said, these are going to be my post-retirement plans, I'm going to spend more time in my community center, in my church, in my whatever it is, to maintain that social level of activity.

00:52:43 Speaker_04
And those individuals tend to do better cognitively over time.

00:52:47 Speaker_07
And of course, not everyone is able to get the same levels of physical activity. And we have an entire episode about disability sociology that discusses accommodations and attitudes toward disability.

00:52:58 Speaker_07
So talk to a doctor or a physical therapist about what you can do and how your activity level is. And we also have an episode on chronic pain with some biopsychosocial interventions that have helped some folks.

00:53:09 Speaker_07
And as this is being released right before the crush of holiday travel and flu season, likely a spike in more COVID cases, it's always good to take precautionary measures against infection. If I'm on a plane, I'm in a mask. So do what's right for you.

00:53:24 Speaker_07
But know that doing physical activity that works for you and staying social is incredibly important for your health. your brain," she said to herself in an aside.

00:53:34 Speaker_04
So maintaining a good level of physical activity and a good level of social activity, you know, a great exercise to do both simultaneously is dancing. So we tend to hear about that a lot.

00:53:42 Speaker_04
Like if somebody's in a dance group or does dance classes a couple times a week, they are much happier. You know, you get a lot of endogenous sort of dopamine boosts that happen when you do that.

00:53:52 Speaker_04
But the social exposure and the physical activity seem to be key. Then we go on to other things that people are really curious about. What about brain games? What about Sudoku? What about this and this and that?

00:54:03 Speaker_04
You know, the evidence there is a little bit shaky, right? So there's some evidence to suggest that maintaining sort of cognitive engagement, of course, is very helpful.

00:54:12 Speaker_04
But most of it is based on cognitive engagement, again, in a social setting, right?

00:54:17 Speaker_04
So if you're playing chess out in the park with somebody and having discussions and all that, that seems to be more helpful than playing chess against the computer avatar. at home, right?

00:54:26 Speaker_04
You might think, well, cognitively it's the same, I'm playing chess, but it turns out to be different if you're doing it with a human, right, and actually having conversations and actually being out and about.

00:54:35 Speaker_04
So again, I go back to the two things that are kind of tried and true and I think are very helpful.

00:54:39 Speaker_04
The third thing that seems to be helpful has to do with diet and being able to have sort of a heart-healthy diet, because we know that heart health is really important for brain health.

00:54:49 Speaker_04
So maintaining something that looks close to something like the Mediterranean diet,

00:54:53 Speaker_04
smaller amounts of red meat and things like that, high levels of leafy greens and fruits and vegetables and those kinds of things, that also seems to be associated with better longevity and higher levels of cognition into that longevity.

00:55:06 Speaker_04
Those are massive studies that were done where they randomized people to either the Mediterranean diet or sort of your typical American diet, and they see, you know, some really decent results for something like the Mediterranean diet.

00:55:16 Speaker_04
But the brain game stuff is the one that I'm sort of tentative about. It's like, I don't know if it'll hurt you, but I'm not sure it's helping you all that much.

00:55:22 Speaker_07
You know, my husband's grandfather played a lot of video games in his later years and he would play multiplayer.

00:55:29 Speaker_06
So he would be on the headset with his grandkids across the country while he was playing like World of Warcraft or League of Legends or whatever.

00:55:36 Speaker_04
And we've heard that from a number of folks who were involved even in our studies said, you know, I started playing video games and I started to, and they felt like even the learning experience was a really good thing for them.

00:55:47 Speaker_04
And some others just said, nope, not for me. I don't know what you're talking. There's no way I could ever do that. There was just kind of a block.

00:55:53 Speaker_04
So, while it's challenging, there's no doubt that incorporating the social aspect into this has made a huge difference.

00:55:59 Speaker_04
This is why I was also reluctant to tell my kids not to play games and do things, because I felt like if they're doing it with their friends, and it's sort of communal, then it's a little bit different than just droning in front of the computer and playing a game by yourself against the computer.

00:56:12 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:56:13 Speaker_07
I love that you're not only researching this on the daily, but also seeing it as your children are growing up and watching how memory might change. But I imagine there are some difficult things about your job or studying it. I always ask, what sucks?

00:56:28 Speaker_04
What sucks the most about your job? Oh, what sucks the most? Let's see. I think sometimes the pace by which things move frustrates me.

00:56:42 Speaker_04
And in research, you know, I think in science in general, there's this notion that we're going to do the best science that we can, we're going to put it out there, we're going to publish our work, and then hope that somebody else is going to come and take that work and build on it and then be able to translate things and get them to be helpful to somebody out in the real world.

00:57:01 Speaker_04
That takes forever. And it's so frustrating that it takes forever. And so one of the things that I've started to do in recent years and get my lab more involved in is say to hell with that. We're not going to wait.

00:57:11 Speaker_04
We're actually going to try to do it ourselves. So I've started to bridge a little bit between sort of the academic environment and more of the industry. But for the longest time, it sucked. It felt like we were so removed.

00:57:24 Speaker_04
as academics doing the science, and there's not enough of that science that's getting out there and helping people, even though it has the potential to help people.

00:57:32 Speaker_04
And then the other thing that's frustrating, I will say that, you know, you can't change everything. You always want to do what you feel is

00:57:45 Speaker_04
scientifically very rigorous, and also like morally and ethically right, and you have kind of a code by which you operate. But there are certain systems in place that are really, really difficult to change.

00:57:58 Speaker_04
And some of them you can change, and you have to kind of figure out who to work with to make sure the message is communicated very well outside of academia to be able to influence people.

00:58:07 Speaker_04
But I'm very fortunate that I'm surrounded by people who are equally frustrated and also believe that that sucks. So at least we can kind of riff off of each other a little bit and commiserate slash come up with ways that we can try to address it.

00:58:20 Speaker_06
Well, there's that community aspect too, right? Exactly. That's helping your brain.

00:58:23 Speaker_04
And that's the thing, also science, you know, when it started out hundreds of years ago when people were doing science, it really was kind of a solo practice.

00:58:31 Speaker_04
When you look at Nobel laureates, it was always sort of singular winners, and that's not a thing anymore. Science is so communal now.

00:58:40 Speaker_04
It really requires teams and communities of people that are dedicated to solving these big, you know, challenging questions. They're not very simple at all. They're extremely challenging.

00:58:50 Speaker_04
And I think that's one of the reasons why things have been exponentially growing in recent years, right? It's not just that we have better technology.

00:58:56 Speaker_04
We have smarter people and hordes of them that are dedicated to answering these questions and doing it together. So when you look at the number of authors on a paper or the number of co-investigators on a grant, those numbers have also shot up.

00:59:09 Speaker_04
So that community aspect of it, I think, is what keeps a lot of us at the table, and it's what makes it worthwhile despite the occasional sucking.

00:59:18 Speaker_07
Well, if someone wanted to go into this field or just curious, what is the best thing about your job?

00:59:25 Speaker_04
Oh my gosh, there's so many things. I mean, I'm like a kid in a candy store most of the time. I can tell you that for someone who is naturally very curious and inquisitive, this is like heaven, right?

00:59:36 Speaker_04
Because you're learning new things every day and it never stops. And there's no real retirement also for people like me. Like you retire, but you're still on recall, you consult, you do things. You're constantly continuing to learn.

00:59:48 Speaker_04
So if that's something that appeals to you, being a constant student, man, science is like the best place to get into. The other thing also is being an academic, I have incredible freedom to pursue the questions of my interest and my lab's interest.

01:00:03 Speaker_04
If tomorrow I decided I wanted to study fruit flies, I will not lose my job. I can do that. I have to go support that effort somehow. But no one tells me what to study. No one tells me what science to do. I get to decide that.

01:00:15 Speaker_04
And I do it communally with my lab because we're all collectively in it. So we get to decide on the science that we want to do. We get to write the grants and papers together. So that's liberating.

01:00:24 Speaker_04
And I don't know of any other job out there where you can decide what you want to do at any given day and just go do it. That's incredibly empowering.

01:00:35 Speaker_04
You can continue to do what you want to do and continue to be in love with it for as long as you want to.

01:00:41 Speaker_07
This has been such a journey into my own brain and anyone listening. So thank you for just inspiring us also to treat our brains a little better.

01:00:50 Speaker_04
You're very welcome. This was so much fun.

01:00:52 Speaker_06
Thank you so much. This is great.

01:00:56 Speaker_07
So once again, ask neuroscientists neurotic questions, if you are me. And thank you to Dr. Michael Yassa and everyone down in Irvine for helping arrange this. There's more links to their lab and his work.

01:01:07 Speaker_07
They're in the show notes and up on our website at alleyward.com slash pneumonology. And we're at ologies on Instagram and now blue sky where everyone seems to be headed. See you over there.

01:01:17 Speaker_07
We also have smologies which are shorter kid friendly episodes that you can find anywhere you get podcasts. We put them in a new feed so it's easier for parents and teachers or anyone who's looking for shorter.

01:01:28 Speaker_07
clean language versions of ologies to find them. You can look for the new green artwork and the smologies logo. Thank you also to Erin Talbert for admitting the ologies podcast. Facebook group Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

01:01:40 Speaker_07
Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our birthday girl this past week and she's our wonderful scheduling producer.

01:01:46 Speaker_07
Susan Hale, managing directs it all, Jake Chafee edits and lead editor, and another great brain is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, with some assists the last couple weeks from Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media when I'm late on things.

01:01:58 Speaker_07
Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. If you stick around until the end, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's that I have a theory that if you have a good friend who has a party, like they're close buds,

01:02:09 Speaker_07
you should either be the first one there to help set up and just kind of like set the mood so they're not worried about when people are going to start showing up, or you should be the last one standing to help tidy up and say, hey man, great party.

01:02:22 Speaker_07
Relatedly, I love ice. I love having any cold beverage with an absolutely egregious amount of ice. So much so that our freezer could not keep up with my ice consumption. Our ice maker was like, I don't know what to tell you.

01:02:35 Speaker_07
Now during early quarantine, there were a lot of cafes that were closing and Jared surprised me when I was out of town. I was helping my dad and he bought an ice machine.

01:02:43 Speaker_07
from a closing cafe, we have it in our garage, and I use it every single day, even in winter. Now, what does this have to do with parties? So we have become the friends who show up first with a giant bucket of ice, and it feels heroic.

01:02:59 Speaker_07
So if you are someone who goes to bed early, be the first to show up at a party. Pick up some bags of ice on the way. Everyone will love you forever. You get to bed early. Okay, just in general, be safe out there, okay?

01:03:12 Speaker_05
Bye-bye! Let's make some memories, huh?