Understand & Improve Memory Using Science-Based Tools
02:07:06 Share

Welcome to the huberman in lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and am a professor of neutral logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing memory, in particular how to improve your memory.

Now the study of memory is one that dates back many decades. And by now there's a pretty good understanding of how memories are formed in the brain. The different structures involved in some of the neurochemicals involved.

We will talk about some of that today. Often overlooked, however, is that memories are not just about learning. Memories are also about placing your entire life into a context.

And that's because what's really special about the brain, and in particularly the human brain, is its ability to place events in the context of past events, the present and future events, and sometimes even combinations of the past in present or present in future and so on. So when we talk about memory, what we're really talking about is how your immediate experiences relate to previous and future experiences. Today, i'm going to make clear how that process occurs, even if you don't have a background in biology or psychology.

I promised to put IT into language that anyone can access and understand. And we are going to talk about the science that points to specific tools for enhancing learning and memory. We're also going to talk about unlearning and forgetting. There are, of course, instances in which we would like to forget things.

And that, too, is a biological process for which great tools exist to, for instance, eliminate, or at least reduce the emotional load of our previous experience that you really did not like, or that perhaps even was traumatic to you. So today you're going to learn about the systems in the brain and body that establish memories. You're going to learn why certain memories are easier to form the others.

And i'm going to talk about specific tools that are grounded in not just one, not just a dozen, but well over one hundred studies in animals and humans that point to specific protocols that you can use in order to stamp down learning of particular things more easily. And you can also leverage that same knowledge to Better forget or unload the emotional weight of experiences that you did not like. We are also going to discuss topics like dasya vu and photographic memory.

And for those of you that do not have a photographic memory, and I should point out that I do not have a photographic memory either, well, you will learn how to use your visual system. In order to Better learn visual and auditory information. There are protocols to do this grounded in excEllent peer reviewed research.

So while you may not have a true photographic memory by the end of the episode, you will have tools in hand, or I should say, tools in mind, or in is in mind, to be able to encode and remember specific events Better than you would otherwise. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I like the thanks sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is in all in one of vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that their sponsor in the podcast, the reason I started taking athletic Greens, on the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day, is that IT helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs to make up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, IT has probiotics, which are vital for microbial ome health.

I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With deleted Greens, I get the vitals I need, the minerals I need and the probiotic to support my microbial. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and claim a special offer.

They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin d 3， k two are ton of data now showing that vitamin three is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still efficient, inviting. D three and k two is also important because IT regulates things like cardigans, cute function, calcium in the body and so on.

Again, go to athletic Green dot coms huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vital three k two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electoral like drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means the exact ratios of electrolier ts are an element, and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium. But IT has no sugar. I've talked many times before in this podcast about the key role of hydration and electro r lights for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues in organ systems of the body.

If we have sodium anisim in pattani and present in the proper ratio, all of those cells functions properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. Ed, if the electro lights are not present in a hydrogen is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone and systems go off.

Our ability to get in the physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electoral lights. If you d like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element t dot com slash huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase.

They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element, element t docomo slash human. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, eda, recessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols.

I started to using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga ea about a decade ago, my dad mention to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate.

And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions. Those you don't know.

Yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or n sdr, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up APP, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial again, that's waking up that com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Okay, let's talk about memory and let's talk about how to get Better at remembering things. In order to address both of those things, we need to do a little bit of brain science.

One of one review, and I promise this will only take two minutes. And I promise that even if you don't have a background in biology, IT will make sense. We are constantly being bombarded with physical stimuli. Atterson have touch on our skin, light to our eyes, light to our skin, for that matter, smells, taste and sound waves. Fact, if you can hear me saying this right now, well, that's the consequence of sound waves arriving interiors through headphones, a computer or some other speaker device.

Each one of, and all of those sensory stimuli are converted into electricity and chemical signals by your so called nervous system, your brain, your spinal cord, and all the connections with the organs of the body, and all the connections of your organs of the body back to your brain. And final court, one of the primary jobs of your nervous system, in fact, is to convert physical events in the world that are non negotiable, right? Photo of lighter photons of light.

Sound ways are sound ways. There's no changing that. But your nervous system does change that. IT converts those things into electrical signals and chemical signals, which are the language of your nervous system. Now, just because you're being bombarded with all the sensory information has been converted into a language that neurons and the rest your nervous system can understand does not mean that you are aware of at all. In fact, you are only going to perceive a small amount of that sensory information.

For instance, if you can hear me speaking right now, you are perceiving my voice, but you are also most likely neglecting the feeling of the contact of your skin with whatever surface you happen to be sitting or standing on. So IT is only by perceiving a subset, a small fraction of the sensory events in our environment, that we can make sense of the world around us. Othe wise, we would just be overwhelmed with all the things that are happening in anyone given moment.

Now, memory is simply a bias in which perceptions will be replyed again in the future anytime you experience something that is the consequence of specific chains of neurons that we call neural circuits being activated. And memory is simply a bias in the likelihood that that specific chain of neurons will be activated again. So for instance, if you can remember your name, and I certain ly hope that you can, well, that means that there are specific chains of neons in your brain that represent your name.

And when those neurons connect with one another and communicate electrically with one another in a particular sequence, you remember your name. Were that particular chain of neurons to be disrupted, you would not be able to remember your name. Now, this might seem immensely simple, but IT raises this really interesting question, which we talked about before, which is, why do we remember certain things and not others? Because according to what i've just said, as you go through life, you're experiencing things all the time.

You're constantly being bombarded with sensory stimuli. Some of those censors similar you perceive, and only some of those perceptions get stamped down as memories. Today i'm going to teach you how certain things get stamped down as memories, and i'm going to teach you how to leverage that process in order to remember the information that you want far Better.

Now, even though I told you that a memory is simply a bias in the likelihood that a particular chain of neurons will be activated in a particular sequence again and again, IT doesn't Operate on its own. In fact, most of what we remember takes place in a context of other events. So for instance, you can most likely remember your name.

And yet you're probably not thinking about when IT was that you first learned your name. this. You generally happens when we are very, very Young children.

And yet i'm guessing you could probably remember a time when someone mispronounced your name or made fun of your name. Or as the case was for me, I got to the third grade and there were two Andrews. And sadly for me, I lost the coin flip that allowed me to keep Andrew.

And from about third grade until about twelve grade, people called me andy, which I really did not prefer. So if you call andy in the comments, i'll delete your comment. Just kidding, doesn't bother me that much.

But eventually I reclaimed Andrew as my name. Well, IT was mine to begin with and throughout. But I started going by Andrew again, why do I say this? Well, there's a whole context to my name for me, and there may or may not be a whole context to your name for you.

But presumably, if you ask your parents why they name you, you, you're given name, you'll get a context at sea. That context reflects the activation of other neural circuits that are also related to other events in your life, not just your name, but probably your sibling's names and who your parents are and on and on and on. And so the way memory works is that each individual thing that we remember, or that we want to remember, is link to something by either a close, a medium or very distant association.

This turns out to be immensely important. I know many of you will read or will encounter programs that designed to help you enhance your memory. You know that you have these phenomena can remember fifty names in a room for of people where they can remember a bunch of names of novel objects, and maybe even in different languages, and often times that's done by association.

So people come up with little mental tricks to, you know, either linked the sound of a word or the meaning of a word in some way that's meaningful for them and will enhance their memory. That can be done in is impressive when we see IT. And for those of you, you can do that.

congratulations. Most of us can't do that, or at least he requires a lot of effort in training. However, there are things that we can do that leverage the natural biology of our nervous system to enhances learning and memory of particular perceptions and particular information.

Let's first just talk about the most basic ways that we learn and remember things in how to improve learning and memory. And the most basic one is repetition. Now, the study of memory and the role of repetition actually dates back to the late nineteen hundreds, early one thousand nine hundreds, when ebing house developed the first so called learning curves.

Now, learning curves are simply what results when you quantify how many repetitions of something are required in order to remember something. In fact, it's been said that ebing house liberated the understanding of learning from the philosophers by generating these learning curves would mean by that. Well, before eating house came along, learning and memory were thought to be philosophical ideas.

Living house came along and said, well, let's actually takes some measurements. Let's measure how well I can remember a sequence of words or sequence of numbers if I just repeat them. So what ever else did is he would take a sequence numbers where words on a page, and he would read them, and then he would take a separate sheet of paper.

And we have to presume he didn't cheat, and he would write down as many of them as he could, and he would try and keep them in the same sequence. Then he would compare to the original list, and he would see how many errors he made do this over and over and over again. And as you would expect, early in the training and the learning, IT took a lot more repetitions to get the sequence correct.

And over time, IT took fewer sequences. And he referred to that difference in the initial number of repetitions that he had to perform versus the later number of repetitions that he had to perform as a so called savings. So he literally thought of the brain is having to generate a kind of a currency of effort.

And he talked about savings as the reduction in the amount of effort that he had to put forward in order to learn information. And what he got was a learning curve. And you can imagine what that learning curve look like was in a very sharp peak at the beginning that dropped off over time.

And of course, he remembers all this meaningless information. But even though the information might have been meaningless, the experiment itself and what living house demonstrated was immensely meaningful. Because what I said was that with repetition, we can activate particular sequences of neurons, and that repeated activation lays down what we call a memory.

And that might all seem like a big duck. But prior to eating house, none of that was known. Now I should also say ebing house, because of when he was alive, was not aware of these things that we called neural circuits.

IT was in one thousand nine nine six, that gold gian ave. Got the nobel prize for actually showing that neurons are independent cells connected by synapses, these little gaps between them, where they communicate. So he may have been aware of that, but the old notion of neural circuits didn't really come about.

Nevertheless, what the eating house learning curves really established was that sheer repetition, just repeating things over and over and over again is sufficient. 这个 something that no doubt had been observed before， but had never been formally quantified. Now if we look at that result, there is something really important that lies a little bit cryptic, that's not so obvious to most people, which is the information that he was trying to learn wasn't any more interesting.

The second time that I was, the first probably was even less interesting and less and less interesting with each repetition. And yet IT was sheer repetition that allowed him to remember. Now, sometime later, in the early to mid ninety twenty years, a psychologist in canada named Donald heb came up with what was called hibs postume.

And hobs postulated, broadly speaking, as this idea that if a sequence of neurons is active at the same time or at roughly the same time, that that would lead to a strengthening of the connections between those neurons. And many, many decades of experimental later, we now know that post ate to be true. Neurons themselves are not smart.

They don't have knowledge. So every memory is the consequences I told you before of the repeated activation of a particular chain of neurons and what ebing house showed through repetition. And what Donald have proposed, and was eventually verified through experimenting on animals and humans, was that if you encourage the co activation of neurons, meaning have neurons fire at roughly the same time, they will strength in their connections.

IT leads to a bias in the probability that those neurons will be active again. Now this is vitally important because now that is, we hear a lot about how memories are the consequence of new neurons added in the brain, or that every time you learn something, a new connection in your brain forms. Well, sorry to break IT to you, but that simply not the case most of the time.

And I want to emphasize most, not all, but most of the time when we learn something, it's because existing neurons, not new neurons, but existing neurons, strength in their connections through coctivor, over and over and over, through repetition or, and this is a very important or or through very strong activation once and only once. In fact, there's something called one trial learning, whereby we experience something, and we will remember that thing forever. This is often most associated with negative events and all explain wine a few minutes.

But I can also be associated with positive events, like the first time you saw your romantic partner or something that happened with that romantic partner were the first time that you saw your child, or any other positive event, as well as any other extremely negative event. So again, both repetition and I guess we could labelled intensity. But we're really mean when we say intensity is strong activation of neurons can lay down these traces, these circuits that are far more likely to be active again then had they're been repetition or not, some strong activation of those circuits.

So with that in mind, let's return to the original contrary question that I raised before, which is, why do you remember anything? Every day you wake up, your neurons in your brain and body are active. Different neural circuits are active.

And yet you only remember a small fraction of the things that happen each day. And yet you retain a lot of information from previous days, in the days before those and so on. IT is only with a lot of repetition or with extremely strong activation of a given neural circuit that we will create new memories.

And so in a few minutes, i'll explain how to get extremely strong activation of particular neural circuits. Repetition is pretty obvious. Repetition is repetition.

But in a few minutes i'll illustrate a whole set of experiments and a whole set of tools that point to how you can get extra strong activation of a given neural circuit as IT relates to learnings, so that you will remember that information perhaps not just with one trial of learning, but certainly with far fewer repetitions that would be required otherwise. Before we go any further, I want to prefer the discussion by saying that there are a lot of different kinds of memory. In fact, we're you to take a voyage into the neuroscience and psychology of memory.

You would find an immense number of different terms to describe the immense number, different types of memory that researchers focus on. But for sake of today's discussion, really just want to focus on short term memory, medium term memory and long term memory. And while there is still debate, as is always the case with scientists, Frankly, about the exact divisions between short term, medium and long term memory, we can broadly define short term memory and long term memory, and we can describe a couple different types of those that I think you can relate to in your everyday life.

The most common form of short term memory that were going to focus on is called working memory. Working memory is your ability to keep a chain of numbers in mind for some period of time. But the expectation really isn't that you would remember those numbers the next day and certainly not the next week.

So a good example would be a phone number, but I were to tell you phone number four, nine, three, two, nine, three, eight. Well, you could probably remember IT four, one, three, two, nine, eight. But if I came back tomorrow, asked you to repeat that chain of numbers, most likely you would not, unless, of course, we use a particular tool to stamp down that memory into your mind and committed to long term memory.

Now, of course, in this day and age, most people have phone numbers programmed into their phone. They don't really have to remember the exact numbers is usually done by contact, identity and so forth. So a different example that some of you are probably more familiar with would be those security codes. You try to log on to an APP or a website. And I ask you for a security code that's been sent to your text messages, and then you can either plugged that indirectly in some cases.

Are you after, remember that short sequence of anywhere, usually from six to seven, sometimes eight numbers, your ability to do that, to switch back and forth between web pages or apps and plug in that number by remembering the sequence and plug in in by texting or key IT in on your keyboard, that's a really good example of working memory. Long term memory of the sort that we're going to be talking a lot about today is your ability to commit certain patterns of information, either cognitive information or motor information, right? The ability move your limbs in a particular sequence over long periods of time, such, such that you could remember IT a day or a week or a month, maybe even a year or several years later.

So we got shorter memory in long term memory. And we ve got this working memory, which is kind of keeping something online, but then discarding IT. Okay, not online on a computer, but online within your brain.

There are also two major categories of memory that i'd like you to know about. One is explicit memory. So this is not necessarily explicit of the sort that you're used to thinking about, but rather the fact that you can declare you know something.

So you have an explicit memory of your name. Presently, you have an explicit memory of the house for the apartment that you grew up in, you know, something and you know, you know, IT, and you can declare IT. So I can ask you, what was the color of the first car that you own, or what is the color of your romantic partners hair, these sorts of things.

That's an explicit declaration memory. But you also have explicit procedural memories. Now, procedural memories, as the name suggests, involve action sequences. The simplest st one is almost ridiculously simple, is walking.

If I say, how is IT that you walk from one room to the other? You'd probably say, well, I go that direction, I turn, I say, no, no. How is that exactly that you do IT so well, I move my left foot foot on my left fit, and you could describe that.

So it's an explicit procedure, memory, so much so that if you were going to teach her Young total ler how to walk, you would probably say, okay, good, good try. okay. And you you know probably that can be free language for the toddler, but you are going to encourage them to move one leg than the other.

You're going to encourage and reward them for moving one leg than the other because you have an explicit procedural memory of how to walk. Okay, almost ridiculously simple may even truly ridiculously simple. But nonetheless, when you think about in the context of neural circuits and neural firing, pretty amazing, even more amazing is the fact that all explicit memories, both declaration and procedure, explicit memories, can be moved from explicit to implicit.

What do I mean by that? Well, in the example of walking, you might have chuckle a little Better and shook your head. And so this is a ridiculous thing to ask, how do I walk from one room to the next? I just walk.

I just do IT. Well, what is just do IT. What IT is, is that you have an implicit understanding, meaning your nervous system knows how to walk without you actually having to think about what you know about how to walk.

You just get up out of your chair, you get up at a bed and you walk in the brain. You have a structure. In fact, you have one on each side of your brain. It's called the hippo campus. The hippo campus literally means seahorse analysts like to name brain structures after things that they think those brain structures resemble.

When I look at the hyp amps, Frankly, IT doesn't look like a sea horse, which either reflects my lack of understanding of what a sea horse really looks like a visual deficit, or I think it's fair to say that those anonymize, we're using a little bit of creative elaboration when thinking about what the hippocampus looks like. Nonetheless, IT is a curved structure. IT has many layers.

It's been described by my colleague, Robert t. Suppose scheme by others as looking more like a jelly roll or a cinnamon roll is what IT looks like to me. And if you were to take one cinnamon roll, chop IT down the middle.

So now you've got two half cinema roles. And rather than put them back together in the configuration they were before, you just slide one down so that you got essentially two c two shaped haves of the cinema all, and you push them together, right? Slightly offset from one another.

Well, that's what the hippocampus looks like to me. And I think that's a far Better description of its actual physical structure. But I guess if you were to use that physical structures, the name, or then you'd have to open up a brain at, listen, IT would be called two half sea cinnamon roll stuff, ed, halfway together.

So that's not very good. So I guess sea horse will work. Hippo campus is the name of the structure.

And IT is the site in your brain. And again, you have won on each side of your brain in which explicit declaration memories are formed. IT is not where those memories are stored and maintained.

IT is where they are established in the first place. In contrast, implicit memories, right? These subconscious memories are formed and stored elsewhere in the brain, mainly by areas like the cereBellar, but also the neocortex, the kind of outer shell of your brain.

The cereBellar is IT literally mini brain, and IT doesn't fact look like a mini brain and is in the back of the brain. And the new cortex is the outer part of the brain that covers all the other stuff. So the hippocampus is vitally important for establishing these new declaration memories of what you know and what you know how to do.

Now, in order to really understand the role of the hippocampus in memory, in particular explicit, declarative and explicit procedure memory, and to really understand how that's distinct from implicit, declarative and implicit procedural memories, we have to look to a clinical case. And the clinical case that referring to is a patient who went by the name H. M.

Patients go by their initials in order to maintain confidential of their real identity. H. M. Had what's called intractable epilepsy. So he would have these really dramatics called grand mall seizure or drop seizure.

For those of you that know somebody with apple etsy or that have apple elpsy, you might be familiar with this. You can have pet mall seizures, which are minor seizure. You can have tonic clinic seizure, which are sometimes not even detectable.

You can have absent theatres where people will just stop, almost as if their brain goes on pause, they'll just stop. There was reported actually the einstein had absence seizure, although I don't know that, that ever really been confirmed. Neurologically grand mall seashores are extremely severe, and that's what H.

M. Had so he could just be going about his day and maybe even cooking or doing something, driving, Operating any kind of machinery, and then all of a sun, he would just have a drop seizure. So he would just physically drop and go into a grand male seizures as a, convulsing in the whole body, loss of conscious ness sa, or he would feel IT coming on.

Often times, people that apple eps, he can feel the applet season coming on can like wave from the back of the brain. And sometimes they can get to a safe circumstance, but not always. And so the frequency and the intensity of the seasons were so robust that the neurosurgeons and neurologists decided that they needs to locate the origin, what they call the foci of those seasons res, and remove that brain tissue, because the vases work as they spread out from that focus on that full of brain tissue.

And unfortunately for H. M, the focus of his seizure was the hippocampus. So after a lot of deliberation, a neurosurgeon, in fact, when the most famous neurosurgeons in the world at that time made what I called electronic lesions, actually burned out the hip campus in the brain of H.

M. And as a consequence, he lost all explicit memory. Now, the consequence of this was that he could exist in Normal everyday life like most people.

So he had to live mostly, not, not entirely, but mostly in a kind of hospital setting. And i've talk to several people who have, who I should say, who met hm directly, because he's no longer alive. But an interaction with him might look like the following.

He would walk up to you just fine. You wouldn't know that he had any kind of brain damage. He could walk fine, he could speak fine and he'd say, hi, i'm Andrew and he d say, hi, i'm whatever his name happened to be. He wouldn't say H, M, but he proceed his real name. And then perhaps someone knew would walk into the room.

He might turn around, look at that person, as any of us I do then turn around back to me and say, hi, what's your name and if I were to say, well, I just told you my name and you just told me your name, do you remember that you would say, i'm sorry, I don't remember any of that. What's your name? So you to go through this over and over again.

So a complete lack of explicit declaration memory. Now, he did have some memory for previous events in his life that dated way back. okay.

Again, hinting at the idea that memories aren't not necessarily stored in the hip camis. They're just formed in the hip campus. So once we've moved out of the hippocampus to other brain areas, he could still keep those memories.

They're in a different data abase, if you will. There are a different pattern of firing of other neural circuits, but he couldn't form new memories. Now there's some very important and interesting twist on what hm could and could not do in terms of learning and memory that teach us a lot about the brain attack.

I think most neuroscientists would degree that this unfortunate case of hm, epogen, sy and the subsequent new surgery that he had taught us much of what we know, or at least think about in terms of human learning and memory. For instance, as I mentioned before, he still had implicit knowledge. He knew how to walk.

He knew how to do certain things like make a cup of coffee. He knew the names of people that he had met much earlier in his life and so on, and yet he couldn't form new memories. Now in violation to that last statement, there were some elements of h emotionality that suggests that there was some sort of residual capacity to learn new information.

But IT wasn't what we Normally think of as explicit declare or procedure memory, for instance. It's been reported or it's been said, I should say, because I don't know that the studies, wherever done with intense physiological measurements, that if you were to tell hm a joke and he thought he was funny, he would laughter really hard. So he like joke.

So he told me you to H. M, I want to tell you a joke. He told a joke, and you d laugh really hard. Then you could leave the room, come back and tell them the same joke again.

Now, keep in mind, he did not remember that you told him the joke previously, and the second time he would laugh a little bit less and then you leave the room, come back again, say, hi, i'm Andrew he say, nice to meet you because as you were, no, as you recall, because you can recall things, but he couldn't recall things. He didn't know that he just met you, or at least he couldn't remember that you told the joke a third time or a fourth time. And with each subsequent telling of the joke, he found IT a little less funny.

Just as keep this in mind, folks, if you tell a joke and you get a big a laugh, don't tell IT again, at least not immediately, not to the same person or the same crowd, because the second time is a little less funny and the third time is a little less funny. That actually has to do with the whole element of doped and relationship to surprise. And it's the topic of a future podcast where we talk all about humor and novelty in the brain.

But the point being that certain forms of memory seem to exist in a kind of phantom, likely within hm sprain, what do I mean that? Well, this underscores the fact that he had an implicit memory of having heard the joke before. And IT suggests that humor, or at least what we find funny, is somehow more related to procedures similar to walking or a motorbike.

Then IT is to the precise content of that joke, right? That's a little bit of an abstract concept. But the point is that H.

M. Lacked explicit declarative memory. He couldn't tell you what he had just heard. He could not learn new information, and he couldn't tell you how to do something unless he had learned how to do that something many years prior.

Now there have been a lot of other patients besides im that i've had brain lesions due to epilepsy or I should say, due to surgeries to treat epilepsy, due to strokes, due to sadly, gunshot wounds and other forms of what we call in first. In fact, I N F A R CT in front is the word we used to describe damage to a particular brain region. And many different patients with many different patterns of infant have taught us a lot about how memory, another aspects of the brain work.

H. M. Really teaches us that what we know and what we are able to do is the consequence of things that we are aware of and learnings that have been passed off into subconscious knowledge that our body in s, our brain knows, but we don't know exactly how we know that thing. And I tell you the story about hms ability to understand a joke, but that with repeated telling of a joke, has less and less and less of an impact in creating a sense of laughter, of humor in H. M.

Not is just an antidote to flesh out his story, but because emotion itself turns out to be the way in which we can enhance memories, even if those are memories for things that are not funny, are not intensely sad, are not immensely happy, or don't evoke a really strong emotional response, or even any emotional response. And the reason for that is that emotions, just like perception, just like sensation, are the consequence of particular or chemicals being present in our brain body. And as i'm going to tell you next, there are particular neurochemicals that you can leverage in order to learn specific information faster and to remember IT for a much longer period of time and maybe even forever.

And you can do that by leveraging the relationship in your nervous system between your brain and your body and your body back to your brain. So let's talk about tools for enhancing memory. There's one tool that is absolutely clear, works.

And it's always worked. IT works now, and IT will work forever. And that's repetition. The more often that you perform something or that you recite something, the more likely you are to remember IT in the future. And while that might seem obvious, it's worth thinking about what's happening when you repeat something.

But when I say what's happening, I mean, at the neural level, what's happening is that you're encouraging the firing a particular change of neurons that reside in a particular circuit, right? So a particular sequence of neurons playing neuron, A, B, C, D played in that particular sequent over and over and over again. And with more repetitions, you get more strengthening of those nerve connections.

Now, repetition works, but the problem for most people is that they either don't have the patients, they don't have the time and sometimes they literally don't have the time because they've got a deadline on something that they're trying to remember and learn or they simply would like to be able to remember things Better in general, remember them more quickly. This process of accelerating repetition based learning, so that your learning curve doesn't go from having to perform something a thousand times, and then gradually over time. This is a thousand seven hundred and fifty times a day, five hundred times a day, three hundred times a day, and down to no repetitions, right? You can just perform that thing the first time and every time.

Well, there is a way to shift that curve so that you can essentially establish stronger connections between the neurons that are involved in generating that memory or behavior more quickly. How do you do that? Well, in order to answer that, we have to look at the beautiful work of James mega and Larry k.

hill. James mega and Larry k. Hill did a number of experiments over several decades, really based on a lot of animal literature, but mainly focused on humans that really established what's required to get Better at remembering things and to do so very quickly.

I want to talk about one experiment that they did that was particularly important. And we will provide a link to this paper at some years old now, but the results still hold up. In fact, the results establish an entire field of memory in neuroscience and psychology.

What they did is they had human subjects come into the laboratory and to read a short paragraph of a about twelve sentences. And the key thing is that some subjects read a paragraph that was pretty mundane. e.

The content, the information within the paragraph was all related to the content of the previous sentence. That was a cougar paragraph. I did just wasn't meaningless scramble of words, but IT described a kind of mundane set of circumstances. Maybe would be a story about someone who walked into room SAT down a desk, wrote for a little bit thing, got up and had lunch. You know, this kind of mundane information, not very interesting.

Another group of subjects read also a twelve sentence paragraph, but that paragraph included a subset of sentences that had a lot of emotionally intense language, or that had language that could evoke an emotionally intense response in the person reading IT. So I might have talked about a car accident or a very intense surgery, but IT also could be a positive stuff, things like a birthday party or a celebration of some other kind, or a big sports win. So in other words, you have two conditions of this study.

People either read a boring paragraph, or they read a really emotionally laden paragraph. And again, the emotions can either be positive or negative emotions. Subjects left the laboratory, and sometime later they were called back to the laboratory.

And I should say, at no point in the experiment that they know they were part of a memory experiment OK. They don't know why they were reading this paragraph. They came in either for class credit or to get paid, typically how these things are done on college campuses or elsewhere.

They come back into the lab and they would get a pop quiz. They would be asked to recall the content of the paragraph that they had read previously. Now, as is probably expected, perhaps even obvious to you, the subjects that read the emotionally intense paragraph remembered far more of the content of that paragraph, and we're far more accurate in the remembering of that information.

Now that particular finding wasn't very novel. Many people had previously destroyed. Ed, how emotionally intense events are Better remember red than none emotionally intense vents.

In fact, way back in the sixteen hundreds, france is bacon, who's largely credited with developing the scientific method, said, quote, memory is assisted by anything that makes an impression on a powerful passion, inspiring fear, for example, or wonder, shame or joy. Francis bacon said that in sixteen and twenty, so jm magan, Larry k. Hill were certainly not the first to demonstrate or to conceive of the idea that emotionally laden experiences are more easily remembered than other experiences.

However, what they did next was immensely important for our understanding of memory and for our building of tools to enhances learning and memory. What they did was they evaluated the capacity for stress and for particular neurochemicals associated with stress, to improve our ability to learn information, not just information that is emotional, but information of all kinds. So i'm going to describe some experiments done in animal models just very briefly, and then experiments done on human subjects, because mega worked mainly on animals, also human subjects.

Larry k. Hill, almost exclusively on human subjects. If you take a rat or mouse and put IT in an arena where at one location the animal receives an electrical shock, and then you come back the next day, you remove the shock of working device and you let the animal move around that arena, that animal will, quite understandably, avoid the location where IT was shocked.

So called conditioned place aversion, that effect of avoiding that particular location occurs in one trial. That's a good example of one trial learning. So somehow the animal knows that I was shocked at that location. IT remembers that IT is a hippo camp dependent learning. So animals that lack a hip campus or who have their hippo campus pharma logical or otherwise incapacitated, will not learn that new bit of information.

But for animals that do, they remember IT after the first time and every time, unless you are to block the release of certain chemicals in the brain and body, and the chemicals are referring to. Or een ef a jonson, and to some extent, the cortical of steroid things like cortisol. Now we know that the effect of getting one trial learning somehow involves at an after, at least in this particular experimental scenario.

Because if researchers do the exact same experiment, and they have done the exact same experiment, but they introduce a phonological blocker of apple, apple, so that epinephrine released in response to the shock, but IT cannot actually bind to its receptors and have all of its biological effects, then the animal is perfectly happy to trade back into the area where IT received the shock is almost as if I didn't know, or we have to assume they didn't remember that I received a shock at that location. So that all seems pretty obvious when you hear it's something bad happens in location and go back to that location. So that's a condition, place avoidance.

But IT turns out that the opposite is also true, meaning for something called conditioned place preference, you can take an animal, put IT into an arena, feed IT or reward IT somehow at one location in that arena. So you can give a hungry RAM food at one particular location, take the animal out, come back the next day, no food is introduced, but they will go back to the location where receive the food. Or you can do any vary of this.

You can make the arena little bit chilly and provide warmth, that location. Or you can take a male animal, and turns out male rats and mice will met at any point to a female animal that at the particular so called receptor phase of heating cycle, and give them an opportunity, make that to give in location theyll. Go back to that location and way and way.

This is perhaps why people go back to the same bar, the bar seat, the bar the same, rest on, wait for, because of the one time that, you know, things worked out for them. But whatever the context was, condition place preference, condition place preference, as with condition place avoidance, depends on the release of a journal in right? Not just about stress.

It's about a heightened emotional state in the brain and body. So this is really important. It's not just about stress. You can get one trial learning for positive events, condition, place preference. And you can get one trial learning for negative events.

Here I say positive, negative, and putting what's called violence on making a value judgment about whether not the animal liked IT or didn't like IT. And we have to presume what the animal like didn't like and how I felt. But this turns out all to be true for humans as well.

We know that because Megan k. Hill did experiments where they gave people a boring paragraph read and only a boring paragraph read, but one global subjects was asked to read the paragraph and then to place their ARM into very, very cold water. In fact, he was ice water.

We know that placing one's ARM into ice, ice water, eat up to the shoulder, near to IT, evokes the release of a journey in the body. It's not an enormous release, but it's a significant increase. And yes, they measured a drill in release.

In some cases, they also measured for things like court is all, etcetera. And what they found is that if one evokes the release of a journey through this army to ice water approach, the information that they read previously just a few minutes before was remembered, IT was retained as well as emotionally intense information. But keep in mind, the information that the read was not interesting at all, at least wasn't emotionally laden.

This had to be the effect of a journal and released into the brain and body, because if they blocked the release or the function of a journey in the brain and or body, they could block this effect. Now the biology of epinephrine tisa are a little bit complex, but there's some nuance there that's actually interesting and important to us. First of all, a journal in is released in the body end in the brain.

It's releasing the body from the adrin als, remember epiphone. And a journal in, or the same thing, coras all, is also released from the adrenal al glands, these two little glands that right to top our kidney's. But IT can't cross into the brain. IT only has what we call paraphrase effects. Quickening of the heart rate right changes the patterns of blood flow, changes our patterns of breathing, in general, makes up breathing more shallow and faster, in general, makes our heartbeat more quickly eeta.

Within our brain, we have a little brain area called loss ulia in the back of the brain, which has the opportunity to sprinkle the rest of the brain with the neuromodulator epa, a general, as well as no up and every related, or a modulated. And to essentially wake up or create a state of alertness throughout the brain is a very general effect. The reason we have two sides of release is because these newer chemicals do not cross the blood brain barrier.

And so waking up the body with a journal and waking up the brain are two separate, so called parallel phenomenon. Court is all can cross the blood brain berry, because it's lip phillip, meaning IT can move through fatty tissue. And we're get into the biology of that in another episode.

But cord is all in general, is released. And as much a longer term effects, and as i've just told you, can permeate throughout the brain and body. Adrenaline has more local effects, or at least a secreted between the brain and the body. This will turn out to be important later.

The important thing to keep in mind is that IT is the emotionality evoked by an experience, or to be more precise, IT is the emotional state that you are in after you experience something that dictate tes whether not you will learn IT quickly or not. This is absolutely important in terms of thinking about tools to improve your memory. And no, I am not going to suggest that every time you want to learn something, you plunge your ARM into ice water.

Why won't I suggest that? Well, IT will induce the release of a journal, but there are Better ways to get that a journal in release. Before I explained exactly what those tools are, I want to tamp down the biology of how all this works, because in that understanding, you will have access to the best possible tools to improve your memory.

First of all, mcgain k. Hill were excEllent experimentalise. They did not just establish that you could click the formation of a memory by accessing material that was very emotionally laid in or creating an emotional hydronic and state after interacting with some thing, some words, some person, some information.

They also tested whether not that whole effect could be blocked by blocking the emotional state or by blocking a generales. What did is they have people repair grass, either had a lot of emotional content, or they had people reprogram that were pretty boring, but then had them put their ARM into ice water. And I should say they did other experiments to to increase the gentleman.

There are even some shocking experiments that we're done by other groups, any number of things to evoke the release of a journey in, even people taking drugs, that increase of journey. But then they also did what are called blocking experiments. They did experiments where they had people get into a highly emotional state from reading highly emotional material, or they got people to get into a highly emotional neurochemical state by reading boring material and then taking a drug to increase the journal, or ice bath, or shock.

And then they also administered a drug called the beta blocker to block the effect of a general and related chemicals in the brain and body. And what they found is that even if people were exposed to something really emotional or had a lot of a journey in their system, because they received a drug to increase the amount of a journal in two manipulations that Normally would increase memory. Keep that in mind if they gave them a beta blocker, which reduced the response to that.

A gentleman, right? So, no quickly of the heart rate, no quickening of the breathing, no increase in the activity of locus russia in these kind of wake up signals to the rest of the brain. Well, then the material wasn't remembered Better at all.

What this tells us is that, yes, Francis bacon in was right. Megan k. Hill were right. Hundreds, if not thousands, of philosophers and psychologists and neuroscientists were right in stating and in thinking that high emotional states help you learn things. But what Megan k.

Hill really showed in what's most important to know is that IT is the presence of high a drona high amounts of Normand american and epa and perhaps court as all as well as you'll soon see that allows a memory to be stamped down quickly. IT is not the emotion. IT is the neurochemical state that you go into as a consequence of the emotion.

And it's very important to understand that while those two things are related, they are not one in the same thing. Because what that means is that were you to evoke the release of eyes, effet nor epinephrine court is all, or even just one or two of those chemicals. After experiencing something, you are stamp down the experience that you just previously had.

This is fundamentally important and far and away different than the idea that we remember things because they're important to us or because they evoke motion. That's true. But the real reason, the neurochemical reason, the mechanism behind all that is these neurochemicals have the ability to strengthen the neural connections by making them active.

Just wants. There's something truly magic about that neo chemical cocktail that removes the need for repetition. Okay, so let's apply this knowledge.

Let's establish a scientifically grounded set of tools, meaning tools that take into account the identity of the neurochemicals that are important for enhancing learning and the timing of the release of those chemicals in order to enhance learning. When I first learned about the results of Megan k. Hill, I was just blown away. I was also pretty upset, but not with them. I was upset with myself because I realized that the way that I had been approaching learning and memory was not optimal.

In fact, he was probably in the opposite direction to the enhanced protocol for learning and memory that i'm going to teach you today, my typical mode of trying to learn something while I was in college, or I was in graduate school, or is a junior professor, even tenure professor, was to sit down to whatever is I was going to try and learn property and memorize, or if there was a physical scale, move to whatever environment I was going to learn that physical skill in, and prior to that, to make sure that I was hydrated, because that's important to me, and certainly can contribute to your brain's ability to function in your body's ability to function and general patterns of alertness. But also to caffeine, I would have a nice strong cup of coffee or a spress. So I would have a nice strong cup of your body, and I still drink coffee or your bounty.

Very regularly, I drink them in moderation, I think, certainly for me. But typically I would drink those things before I would engage in any kind of attempt to learn or memorize or to acquire a new skill. Now, caffeine in the form of coffee, but motive, or any other form of caffeine, does create a sense of alertness.

Ss, in our brain body. And IT does that through two major mechanisms. The first mechanism is by blocking the effects of a deny.

The Denny y is a molecule that builds up in the brain body the longer that we are awake. And it's largely what's responsible for our feelings of sleepiness and fatigue when we ve been awake for a very long time. Caine essentially acts to block the effects of identity.

It's a competing agonist say not to get technical, but IT back to the receptor for a dense for some here to time and prevents a deny from having its Normal pattern of action and thereby reduces our feelings of fatigue. But IT also increases state of alertness. So while it's reducing fatigue is also pushing on neurochemical systems in order to directly increase our alerts.

That does that in large part by increasing the transmission of epinephrine renal in the brain and body. IT also has this interesting effect of up regulating the number and or efficiency where we say the efficacy of doping factors such that when dopamine is present and as a molecule that increases motivation and craving and pursuit, that dopamine can have a more pot effect than IT would otherwise. So caffeine really hits these three systems.

IT hits other systems too, but mainly he reduces fatigue by reducing identic, increases alertness by increasing economic release or general in release, I should say, both from the advances in your body and from locus is within the brain. And IT can, in parallel all that increase the action or the efficacy of the action of doping. So my typical way of approaching learning a memory would be to drink some caffeine and then focus really hard on whatever is that i'm trying to learn, trying to eliminate distractions, and then hope, hope, hope, or try, try, try to remember that information as best as I could.

Frankly, I felt he was working pretty well for me. And typically, if I leverage other forms of pharmacology in order to enhance learning a memory, things like alpha gpc or fast potito syrian, I would do that by taking those things before I SAT down to learn a particular set of information, or before I went off to learn a particular physical skill. No, for those of you out they're listing in this, you're probably thinking, well, okay, the results of gk hill pointed to the fact that having a journey released after learning something enhanced learning of that thing.

But a lot of these things, like caffeine or alpha gpc, can increase epiphone and a drill in, or dopamine or other molecules in the brain body that can hance memory for a long period of time. So that makes sense to take IT first or even during learning, and then allow that increase to occur. And the increase will occur over a long period of time and will enhances learning a memory.

And while that is partially true, IT is not entirely true and IT turns out it's not optimal work that was done by them. A goal laboratory and other laboratories evaluated the precise temporal relationship between news chemical activation of these pathways and learning in memory. What they did is they had animals and people, depending on the experiment, take a drug, could be caffeine, could be in pal, form something that would increase a journal or related molecules that create the state of alertness that are related to emotionality.

And they had them do IT, either an hour before thirty minutes before ten minutes before five minutes before learning, or during the belt of learning, right? The reading of the information are the performing of the scale that one is trying to learn, or five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, it's afterwards. So they looked very precisely at when exactly is best to evoke this, a journal release.

And IT turns out that the best time window to evoke the release of these chemicals, if the goal is to enhance learning in memory of the material, is either immediately after, or just a few minutes, five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes, after you're repeating that information, you're trying to learn that information. again. This could be cognitive formation, or this could be a physical skill.

Now this really spits in the face of the way that most of us approach learning and memory. Most of us, if we use stimulus like caffeine or alph a gpc, we're taking those before or during in an attempt to learn, not afterwards. These results point to the fact that this is after the learning, a memory that you really want to get that big increase in apple fan and the related molecules that will tamp down memory.

So what this means is that if you are currently using caffeine or other compounds and will talk about what those are and safety issues and so forth in a moment, if you're using these compounds in order to enhance learning and memory by taking them before or during a learning episode, well then I encourage you to try and take them either late in the learning episode or immediately after the learning episode. Now, given everything i've told you up until now, why would I say late in the learning episode or immediately after? Well, when you adjust something by drinking IT or you take IT in capsule form, there's a period of time before that gets absorbed into the body.

And different substances, such caffeine, alpha gpc at a, are absorbed in from the garden into the blood streaming, reached ed, the brain and trier. These effects in the brain of body at different rates. So it's not instantaneous. Some have effects within minutes, others within know tens of minutes and so on really going to depend on the pharmacology of those things. And it's also going to depend on whether not your food and you're gut, what else you happen to have circulating in your bloodstream at set a but at a very basic level, we can confidently say that there are not one, not dozens. But as I mentioned before, hundreds of studies in animals and in humans that point to the fact that trigger ing the increase of a drennen late in learning or immediately after learning is going to be most beneficial.

Al, if your goal is to retain that information for some period of time and to reduce the number of repetitions required in order to learn that information, I want to acknowledge that on previous episodes of this podcast and in appearing on other podcast, i've talked a lot about things like non sleep, deep breast and nps, and sleep as vital to the learning process. And I want to emphasize that none of that information has changed. I don't look at any of that information differently is the consequence of what i'm talking about today.

IT is still true that the strengthening of connections in the brain, the literal neuroplasticity, the changing of the circuit, occurs during deep sleep and on sleep, deep breast and IT is also true. And i've mentioned these results earlier that two papers were published in cell reports per journal, excEllent journal, over the last few years, showing that brief nps, about twenty to up to ninety minutes, some in some period of time after an attempt to learn, can enhance the rate of learning and memory. However, those bouts of sleep, the deep sleep that night, I should say, or those brief naps, are even the so called n.

Sdr, as we call IT non sleeve deep press that was used to enhance the learning and memory of particular pieces of information, are the cognitive or physical information, or both, that still can be performed, but I can be performed some hours later, even an hour later. IT can be performed two hours later, four hours later. Remember, it's in these names and in deep sleep that the actual reconfiguration of the neural circuits occurs, the strengthening of those neural circuits occurs.

IT is not the case that you need to finish about of learning to drop immediately into a nap or sleep. Some people might do that. But if you really trying to optimize and enhances and improve your memory, the data from Megan k.

Hill and many other laboratories that stemmed ed out from their initial work really point to the fact that the ideal protocol would be focused on the thing you're trying to learn very intensely. There are also some other things like arrow rates, sea PC are episode learning. We have a news letter on how to learn Better.

You can access that he women lambda comment as zero cost news letter. You can grab that PDF IT list out the things to do during the learning about still trying get excEllent sleep. Again, fundamental important for mental, physical health and performance. And we can now extend from performance to saying, including learning and memory nap. If IT doesn't interpret your nighttime sleep nap of anywhere from ten to ninety minutes or non sleep, deep press protocols will enhances learning and memory.

But we can now add to that that spiking a journey providing can be done in a safe way is going to reduce the number of repetitions required to learn, and that should be done at the very tail and or immediately after a learning about which is comparable with all the other protocols that I mentioned. And the reason i'm revising the stuff about sleep and on sleep depressed, is I think that some people got the impression that they need to do that immediately after learning. And today i'm saying to the contrary, immediately after learning, you need to go into heightened state of emotionality and alertness.

Now IT is vitally important to point out that you do not need pharmacology, you don't need caffeine, you don't need alpha gpc, you don't need any pharmacologic substance to Spike a journey unless that something that you already are doing, or that you can do safely, or that you know that you can do safely. And I always say, and i'll say IT, again, i'm not a physicians. I'm not prescribe bing anything on a professor.

So I professor, things you need to do, what safe for you? So if you're somebody who is not used to drinking caffeine and you suddenly drink for espresso after trying to learn something, you are going to have a severe increase in alertness and probably even the anxiety. If your panic attack prone, please don't start taking stimulants in order to learn things Better, please be safe.

I don't just say that to protect me. I say that to protect you. And I should mention that if you're not a customer to taking something, you always want to first check with your doctor, of course, but also move into that gradually, right? Start with the lowest effective dose dose, the minimal effective dose and sometimes the minimal effect dose is zero milligrams. It's nothing.

Why do I say that? Well, we already talked about results where they put people's arms into an ice bath in order to a vocal and release. You are welcome to do that if you want.

In fact, that's a pretty low cost. Um zero format ology at least exogamous for matos gy, way to approach this whole thing. That's a way of evoking your own natural epa re.

And that turns out also dopamine release. You could take a cold shower, you could do a nice bath or get into a cold circulating bath. We've done several episodes on the utility of cold for health and performance. You can find those episodes at human lab dot com, also the episode with my colleague at stanford from the biology department, doctor crag heller.

Lots of protocols, in particular, in the episode on cold for health and performance, that describe how best to use the cold shower or the ice bath or the circulating cold bath in order to evoke up an offer and doping release. The point is that the time in which you would want to do those protocols is after ideally immediately after you're learning about meaning, when you're sitting down to learn new information or after trying to learn some new physical skill. Now whether not that's compatible with the other reasons you're doing cold deliberate cold exposure and whether or not that's compatible the other things you're doing that depends on the control of your lifestyle, your training, your academic goals, your learning goals at sara.

But if your specific purpose is, is to enhance learning a memory, you want to Spike a general land afterwards. And so what i'm telling you, you can do that with caffeine. You can do that with alpha gpc.

You can do that with a combination of caine and alpha gpc. If you can do that safely. Some of you, I know, are using other forms of pharmacology.

I did a long episode all about A D, H. D I have to just really declare my stance very clearly that I am not a fan. I am actually opposed to people using prescription drugs who are not prescribe bed.

Those drugs are high in order to enhance alertness is I think there's a big addictive potential. They're also is a potential to really disrupt one's zone from ecology around the dopa energy c system. Um however, some of you I know are prescribed things like riddle at oral and modafinil and things that in order to crease alertness and focus.

So for those of you you that are perscribed those things from my board certified physician, you're going out to decide if you going to take them before trying to learn or after trying to learn. You ll have to taking to consideration that some of those drugs are very long acting, summer shorter acting and time that according to what you're trying to learn and when. So that's for my colored.

But as i've mention, there are the behavioral protocols you can use cold. And cold is an excEllent stimulus because, first of all, IT doesn't evolve from ecology. Second of all, you can generally access IT at low to zero cost, especially the cold shower approach.

And third, you can, I trade IT. You can start with warmer water. You can make IT very, very cold if that's your thing, and you're able to tolerate that safely.

You can. They get moderately cold. How cold should IT be in order to evoke renal in release? Well, IT should be uncomfortable.

Ly cold, but cold enough that you feel like you really want to get out, but can stay and safely. That's going to evoke a journalist release. If IT quickens you're breathing, if IT makes you go wide ede, that's increasing a general and release.

In fact, those effects of wide died in quickening of the breathing and the chAllenges and thinking. Clearly, those are the direct effects of a journal on your brain and body. And of course, there are other ways to increase the you could go out for a hard run.

You could do any number of things that would increase a gentleman in your body, which things you choose is up to you. But from a very clear, solid grounding in research data, we can confidently say that spiking a journal and after interacting with some material, physical or cognitive material that you're trying to learn is going to be the best to Spike that. A journalist.

Now I realized that i'm being a bit redundant today or perhaps a lot redundant in repeating over and over that the increase in epiphone should occur either very late in an attempt to learn something or immediately after an attempt to learn something. I also want to emphasize the general control of pharmacologic effects and a behavioral tools to create a general what do I mean by that sentence? What I mean is that mcgain colleagues explored a huge number of different compounds and approaches, everything from the hand into the ice bat to injecting a journey, to caffeine, to drugs that block the effects of a journey.

And caffeine drugs like muscle and peaker talks, please don't take those. These are drugs that reduced or enhance the amount of a drink. And the overall take away is that anything that increases a gentleman will increase learning in memory and will reduce the number of repetitions required to learn something, regardless of whether not that something has an emotional intensity or not, provided that that Spike in the journal in occurs late in the learning or immediately after.

And anything that reduces epa and a journal in will impair e learning. And that's the key and novel piece of information that are matting now, which is if you're taking beta blockers, for instance, or if you're trying to learn something and it's not evoking much of an emotional response and you're not using any pharm, macos, gy or other methods to enhance a journal in release after learning that thing, well, you're not going to learn IT very well. In fact, mcgain k.

Hill did beautiful experiments in humans looking at how much a journey is increased by varying the emotional intensity of different things that they were trying to get people to learn, or by changing the dosage of epinephrine, by changing the amount of epinephrine locker that they injected, lots and lots of studies. The key thing to take away from those studies is that, for some people, a journal in was increased six hundred to seven hundred percent, so six to seven fold over baseline in the amount of circulating epinephrine journey. And keep in mind, sometimes that increase was due to the actual thing they were trying to learn, being very emotional, positive or negative emotion.

And sometimes that was because they were using a pharma logic approach or the ice bath approach. I don't think they ever used to cold shower approach, but that would have been a very effective one. We can be sure, however, other people had a zero to ten percent increase, a very small increase in appen effort. What we can confidently say on the basis of all those data is that the more epinephrine lease, the Better that people remembered the material over and over again. This was shown whether not IT was for cognitive materials.

Are learning a language, learning a passage of words, learning mathematics, or rather us for physical learning, I want to emphasize something about physical learning, because I know a number of you are probably drinking a cup of coffee or having a cup of your remote or maybe an energy drink and taken some alpha gpc or something before physical exercise. I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do or that you wouldn't want to do that, but that's really to increase alertness. IT won't enhance learning, at least not as well as doing those things after the physical exercise.

Now again, many of you, including myself, exercise for sake of the musical benefits of that exercise of cardio asked lar resistance training. But we're not really focused on learning and memory. So I emphasize this just so it's immensely cleared.

Everybody, if you want to use those approaches of increasing a tournament prior to or during physical training or cognitive work for that matter, be my guess. I think that's perfectly fine, provided that safe for you. It's only by moving IT too late or after the learning that you're really shifting the role of that a journal increase to enhancing memory specifically.

And as a cautionary note, don't think that you can push this entire system to the extreme over and over again or chronically as we say, and get away with that. In other words, you're not going to be able to take a alpha gpc and a double spress. So do your focus out of work, cognitive, physical work and then Spike a general again afterwards and remember that stuff.

I've been Better, right? I'm not encouraging. In fact, i'm discouraging you from chronically increasing a general in both during and after a given out of work. If the goal is to learn, why do I say that will work from a goin k hill and others have shown that is not the absolute amount of a journal and that you released in your brain body that matters for enhances memory.

It's the amount of a gentle that you release relative to the amount of a gently that was in your system just prior in particularly in the hour or two prior. So again, it's to the deltas. We say it's the difference. So if you're gonna onic's increase the general, you're not gona learn as well. The real key is have a general in modestly low, perhaps even just as much as you need in order to be able to focus on something, pay attention to IT and then Spike IT afterwards.

This is immensely important because, well, much of what we're talking about is actually a form of inducing a neurochemical acute stress ming, a brief and rapid onset of stress, well, chronic stress, the chronic elevation of epinephrine court is all is actually detrimental to learning. And there's an entire category of literature, mainly from the work of the great and sadly, the late Bruce mccain from the rocket vela university, and some of his scientific offspring, like the great Robert supposedly showing that chronic stress, chronic elevation of evenement actually inhibits learning in memory, and also an inhibitive mon system function, where as acute right, sharp increases in a journal and court is all actually can enhances learning energy. Can the immune system.

So if you really want to leverage this information, you might consider getting your brain and body into a very calm and yet alert state, to a high attentional state that will allow you to focus on what IT is that you're trying to learn. We know focus is vital for encoding information and for trigger ing neuroplasticity, but remaining calm throughout that time and then afterwards, spiking a journal and allowing a journal and to have these incredible effects on reducing the number of repetitions required to learn. So if you're like me, you're learning about this information, this beautiful work of Megan k.

Hill and others, and thinking, wow, I should perhaps consider spiking by herrendeen in one former another at the tail end, or immediately following an attempt to learn something. And yet we are not the first to have this conversation, nor were Megan k. Hill or any other researchers that i've discuss today, the first to start using this technique.

In fact, there is a beautiful review that was published just this year, may of twenty twenty two, in the journal neuron self press journal, excEllent journal, called mechanisms of memory under stress. And I just want to read to you the first opening paragraph of this review, which is, as the name suggests, about memory and stress. So here i'm reading, and I quote, in medival times, communities throw Young children in the river when they wanted them to remember important events.

They believe that throwing a child in the water after witnessing storage proceedings would leave a lifelong g memory for the events in the child. And believe or not, this is true. This is a practice that somehow people arrive at.

I don't know if they were aware of what a gentleman was, probably not. But somehow, immediately, times IT was understood that spiking a journal or creating a robust emotional experience after an experience that one hoped a child would learn, would encourage the child's nervous system. And they even know a nerve system was.

But I would encourage brain and body, that child to remember those particular events. Very counterintuitive. If you ask me, I would have thought that the kid would remember only being thrown into the river. My guess is that they remember that, but that they the idea here anyways that they also remember the things that preceeded being thrown into the river. So both interesting and amusing and somewhat um I should say, thought stimulating really that this is a practice that has been going on for many hundreds of years.

And we are not the first to start thinking about using cold water as a genuine stimulus, nor we the first to start thinking about using cold water induced to general as a way to enhance learning a memory. This has been happening since medieval times. So up until now i've been talking about pretty broad countour of these experiments, have been talking about the underlying from ecology, the role of that and f.

And so what haven't really talked a lot about the underlying neal mechanisms. So just can take a minute or two and describe those for you because they are informative. We all have a brain structure called the amygdala. Lot of people think it's associated with fear, but it's actually associated with threat detection. And more generally, and I should say more specifically, with detecting what sorts of events in the environment are novel and are linked to particular emotional states, both positive emotional states and negative emotional states.

So the neurons in the amiga are exquisitely good at figuring out, right? They don't have their own mind, but a detecting correlations between sensory events in the environment that triggered the release of a journal and what's going on in the brain. And because the immigrant is so extensively interconnected with other areas of the brain, I basically connects to everything and everything and connects back to IT.

The omegle is in a position to strengthen particular connections in the brain very easily, provided certain conditions are met. And those conditions are the ones we've been talking about up, up until now. Emotional silences that results in increases in ef court is all or circulating up an offer in court is all being much higher than IT was ten minor fifteen months before.

And the net effect of the amiga in this context is to take whatever patterns of neural activity preceded that increase in the journal in cortical and strengthened those synapses that were involved in that neurotic activity. So the amiga doesn't have knowledge, it's not a thinking area. It's a correlation detector, and its correlation to a chemical states of the brain and body with different patterns of electrical activity in the brain.

This is important because IT really emphasises the fact that both negative and positive emotional states and the different, but somewhat overlapping chemical states that they create, or the conditions, as we say, the end gates through which memory is laid down, and gates will be familiar to those of you who have ve done a bit of computer programing. And an end gate is simply a condition in which you need one thing and another to happen in order for a third thing to happen. So you need appendant elevated and you need robust activity in a particular brain circuit.

If, in fact, that brain circuit is going to be strengthening, it's not sufficient to have one or the other. You need both, hence the name and gate. And the immigrant is very good at establishing these and degree contingent iena es.

It's also a very generic brain structure in the sense that IT doesn't really care what sorts of sensory events are involved, provided they correlated in time with that increase in a journal. And tea on this has a wonderful side and a kind of dark side. The dark side is that P, T, S, D and traumas of various kinds often involve a increase in a drennen.

Because whatever IT was that caused the p tsc wasn't deed. Very stressful cause these big increases in these chemicals and because the amiga la is rather general in its functions, right? It's not tuned or designed in any kind of way to be specifically active in response to particular types of sensory events or perceptions.

Well then what that means is that we can start to become afraid of entire city blocks where one bad thing happened in a particular room, of a particular building in a city block. We can become fearful of any place that contains a lot of people if something bad have to us in a place that contain a lot of people. The amiga is not so much of a split ter.

As we say in science, we talk about lumpers and split ters. Lumpers are kind of generalize generalizers, if that's the even a word. And I think IT is someone i'll tell me when where you're the other and split ters are people that are ultra precise and specific and nuances about every little detail.

The amiga is more of a lumper than a splitter. When IT comes to sensory events, other areas of the brain only become active under very, very specific conditions, and only those conditions. And similarly, evenement is just a molecule. It's just a chemical that circulating in our brain.

Ian body, there's no epinephrine fiction for a cold shower that is distinct from the up and f, an associate with a bad event, which is distinct from the ueno ron associate with a really exciting event that makes you really alert. Eenie phone is just a molecule, is generic. And so these systems have a lot of overlap.

And that can explain in large part why when good things happen in particular locations and in the company of particular people, we often generalize to large categories of people, places and things. And when negative things happen in party lar circumstances, we often generalize about people, places and things associated with that negative event. So now i'd like to talk about other tools that you can leverage.

Have been shown in quality per reviews, studies to enhance learning and memory. And perhaps one of the most potent of those tools is exercise. There are numerous studies on this in both animal models, and fortunately, now also in humans, thanks to the beautiful work of people like Wendy's uka from new york university.

When ney's lab has identified how exercise works to enhances learning and memory and other forms of cognition, I should mention, as well as things that can argument, can enhance the effects of exercise on learning, a memory and other forms of cognition. When he is going to be a guest on this podcast is actually the episode that follows this episode and includes a lot of material that we have not covered today. And she's an incredible scientists and has some incredible findings that I know everyone is going to find immensely useful.

In the meantime, want to talk about some of the general effects of exercise on learning a memory that she's discovered in the other laboratories have discovered, if you recall earlier, I mentioned that learning and memory almost always involves the strengths of particular synapses and neural circuits in the brain, and not so much the the increase in the number of neurons in the brain. There is one exception, however, and we now have both animal data, some human data, to support the fact that cardiovascular exercise seems to increase. What we call deng's s neurogenesis neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons.

The dentist gift s is a sub region of the hippocampus that is involved in learning and memory of particular kinds, right? Certain types of events, in particular contextual learning, but some other things as well, sometimes involved in space al learning. There's a lot of debate about exactly what the dented drivers does.

But for sake of this discussion, and I think everyone in the neuroscience committee would agree that the dented gives is important for memory formation and consolidation. The dental virus does seem to be one region of the brain, certainly in the road in brain, but more and more IT seeming also in the human brain, where at least some new neurons are added throughout the lifespan. And as IT turns out, that cardiovascular exercise can increase the proliferation of new neurons in the structure, and that those new neurons, excuse me, are important for the formation of certain types of new memories.

They're wonderful data showing that if you use X A radiation, which is a way to eliminate the formation of those new cells, or other tools and tricks to eliminate the formation of those cells, that you block the formation of certain kinds of learning and memory. What does this mean? Well, there are a lot of reasons for the statement i'm about to make that extend far beyond neurons is is in the hip campus learning and memory.

But it's very clear that getting anywhere from one hundred and eighty, I should say a minimum of one hundred and eighty to two hundred minutes, so so called zone to cardioscopes erc's. So this is cardioscopes erc's that can be performed at a pretty steady state, uh, which would allow you to just barely hold a conversation. So breathing hard, but not super hard as in sprints, are high intensity interval training.

But doing that for a hundred eighty to two hundred minutes per week total is IT appears the minimum threshold for enhanced some of the longevity effects associated with improvements in car dia vascular fitness. And we believe that IT is indirectly, I should say, indirectly through enhancements in cardiovascular fitness, that there are improvements in hip camden's givers nor genesis. What does that mean? The improvements in cardiff, asked.

Lar function are indirectly impacting the ability of identity jars to create these neurons to mine knowledge. There's no direct relationship between exercise and stimulating the production of new neurons in the brain. IT seems that it's the improvements in blood flow that also relate to improvements in things like limp atic flow, the circulation of limb fluid within the brain that are enhancing neurogenesis, and that neurogenesis is IT appears is important.

Now, in fairness to the landscape of neuroscience and my colleagues at stanford elsewhere, there is a lot of debate as to whether not there is much, if any, neurogenesis in the adult human brain. But regardless, I think the data are quite clear that the hundred and eighty to two hundred and minutes minimum of cardy vascular exercise is going to be important for other health metrics. Now IT is clear that exercise can impact learning in memory through other non neurogenesis, non new neuron type mechanisms.

And one of the more exciting one that has been studied over the years is this notion of hormones from bone traveling in the bloodstream to the brain and enhancing the function of the hip campus. If the words hormones from bones is surprising to you, i'm here to tell you that, yes indeed, your bones make hormones. We call these underground effects.

So in biology, we hear about audit in perrin and indicate in those different terms referred to over what distance a given chemical hasn't effect on a cell principle. Cell can have an effect on itself. IT can have an effect on immediately labouring cells, or you can have an effect on both itself immediately neighbor cells and cells far, far away in the body.

And that last example of a given chemical or substance having an effect on the cell that produced IT, plus neighboring cells, plus cells far away, is an Green effect. And a lot of hormones, not all, work in this fashion. Hence why we sometimes hear about, indicate and hormone is kind of anonymous terms.

Your bones make chemicals that travel in the bloodstream and have these underground effects are are effectively acting as hormones. And one such chemical is something called ostia calls. Now these findings arrived us through various labs, but one of the more important labs for sake of this discussion today is the laboratory of eric endell at columbia medical school.

Eric is now, I believe, in his ID to late nineties, still very sharp, and has studied learning in memory. IT also turns out that he is an abbott swimmer. Now I happen to know that eric swims anywhere from a half a mile to a mile a day.

And again, this is anew data. This is, i'm not referred to the publish data just yet. But he credits that exercise as one of the ways in which he keeps his brain sharp and has indeed kept his brain sharp for many, many decades.

And as I mention before, he's well into his ninety. So pretty impressive. His laboratory has studied the effects of exercise on hyp a campo function in memory, and other laboratories have done that as well.

And what they found is that cardiovascular exercise, and perhaps other forms of exercise, too, but mainly cardiovascular exercise, creates the release of ostia colson from the bones that travels to the brain and to sub regions of the hippo campus, and encourages the electrical activity and the formation and maintenance of connections within the hip campus, and keeps to hit the campus functioning well in order to lay down new memories. Now, ostia colson has a lot of effects besides just improving the function of the hip campus. Ostia cousin is involved in bond growth itself.

It's involved in hormonal regulation. In fact, there's really nice evidence can regulate testosterone and estrogen production by the tests and lovers and a bunch of other facts in other organs of the body because, again, atacinus this underground manner, arriving from bone to a lot of different organs to have effects. Load bearing exercise, in particular, turns out to be important for reducing the release of ostia elson.

And when you think about this, IT makes sense. A nervous system exists for a lottery in the sense perceive. It's that are you ve got taste, you ve got smell, you ve got hearing.

But the vast majority of brain real estate, especially in humans, is dedicated to two things. One, vision. We have an enormous amount of brain real estate devoted to vision, certainly compared to other senses, and to movement. The ability to generate course movements of the body, the, the, the ability, excuse me, to generate fine movements of the body like the digits, or to wink one eye, or to till your head in a particular way, or move your lips and move your face and do all sorts of different things in a very nuanced and detailed way.

So much of our brain real state is devoted to movement that it's been hypothesize for more than a half century, but especially in recent years, as we've learned more about the function of the brain at a really detailed circuit level, that the relationship between the brain and body and the maintenance, and perhaps even the improvement of neural circuitry y in the brain depends on our body movements and the signal from the body that our brain is still moving. So think about that, how would your brain know if your body was moving regularly? And how would you know how much IT was moving? How would you know which limbs IT was moving? Well, you could say if the heart rate is increased, then the blood flow will be increased and then the brain will know ah, but how does your brain know that its increased blood flow due to movement and not to, for instance, just stress, right? Maybe you actually can't move and you're very stressed about that.

And so they increase blood flow is simply a consequence of increased stress. The fact that osorio colson is released from bone, and in particular can be released in response to load bearing exercise. So this will be running again.

Weight lifting hasn't been tested directly, but one would imagine anything involves jumping in landing or weight lifting or body body wave movements and things of that sort. That's a signal to release hostile calls, and we know that signal occurs. That is directly reflective of the fact that the body was moving and moving in particular ways.

In fact, you could imagine that big bones like your fema are going to release more osric casson or being a position to release more osteotomy than five, five movements like the movement of the digits. And this idea that the body is constantly sid link to the brain about the status of the body and the varying needs of the brain to update its brain circuitry is a really attractive idea that fits entirely with the biology of exercise ostia callin and hippocampus function. I do want to mention, i'm not the first to raise the hypothesis.

The hypothesis actually was discussed in the fair amount of detail by john rady, who is a professor in harvard medical school. He wrote a book called Spark, which was one of the early books, these from an academic about brain plasticity and the relationship between exercise and movement and plasticity. And john, who I have the good fortune to know, has described to me experiments, or I should say, observations of species of ocean dwelling animals that have, at least for the early part of their life, a very robust and complicated nervous system.

But then these particular animals are in the habit of plopping down onto a rock. They find a kind of a safe company space, and they actually stick to that rock. And they don't move anymore for a certain portion, I should say, the late portion of their life. And IT is at the transition between moving a lot and being stationary, that those animals actually digest their own brain.

They literally metabolize a good portion of their nervous system because they don't need this anymore and gobble IT up, use IT for its nutritional value, and then sit there like a moron version of themselves with a limited amount of brain tissue because they don't need to move anymore. Now, I certainly don't want to give the message that just moving, just exercise, is sufficient to keep the neural architecture of your brain healthy, Young and able to learn. Well, that might be true.

It's also important to actually engage in attempts to learn new material, either physical material, so new types of movements and skills, endor, new types of cognitive information, languages, mathematics, history, current events, all sorts of things that involve your brain. Nonetheless, it's clear that physical movement and cognitive ability and the potential to enhance cog into ability and the ability to learn new physical skills are intimately connected. And ostia colson appears to be at least one way in which that brain body relationship is established and maintained.

So given the information about osorio cousin and movement, and given the information about spiking a journal late or after a period of attempt to learn, you might be asking, when is the best time to exercise? Now unfortunately, that has not been addressed in a lot of varying detail, where every sort of variation on the theme has been Carried out. And yet when he suzuki I lab has done really beautiful experiments where they have people exercise, generally IT was in the morning, but at other periods of the day as well.

And what I find is that at least as late as two hours after that exercise, there is an enhancement in learning in memory. Now I want to be clear, we don't know whether not that exercise LED to big increases in a trentine IT. May be that those forms of exercise were modest enough or didn't chAllenge people enough, that they merely got a lot of blood flow going and that the improvements in learning a memory were related to blood flow, and we presume increases in ostia calton.

However, you could imagine a couple of different logical protocols based on what we've talked about. Let's say you were gonna a form of exercise that was going to Spike a drinking in a lot. So this would be exercise that really chAllenges your system and forces you kind of push through a burn, right? So here are mainly talking about cardiff asked lar exercise.

But IT could be IT could even be yoga IT could be resistance training. If it's going to give you a big Spike in the general, it's gna take some serious effort. Then logically speaking, you would want to place that after a learning about in order to increase learning a memory.

However, if you are using the exercise in order to enhance blood flow and to enhance ostia cousin release in efforts to augmented the functioning in your hip campus, I think IT stands to reason that doing that exercise, sometime within the hour to three hours proceeding an attempt to learn, makes a lot of sense. And they are on basing IT on the human data from when he lab, on basing IT on the studies from where can deal and from others labs. Again, right now, there hasn't been an evaluation of a lot of different protocols to arrive at the peer reviewed laboratory super protocol.

However, since what we're talking about is using activities like exercise that most of us probably perhaps all of us should be doing regularly anyway. And I do believe most, if not all of us should really regularly be trying to learn and keep our brain functioning well and acquire new knowledge, because it's just a wonderful part of life. And there is evidence that that actually can keep your brain Young, so to speak.

Well then, exercising either before or after a learning about makes a lot of sense with the emphasis on after a learning about if the form of exercise spice, a lot of a gentleman for all the reasons we talked about before. okay. So we've talked about two major categories of protocols to improve memory that are grounded in quality per reviewed science.

And there is yet another third protocol that will talk about in a few minutes. But before we do that, when a briefly touch on an aspect of memory, in fact, two aspects of memory that I get a lot of questions about. The first one is photographic memory.

To be clear, there are people out there who have a true photographic memory. They can look at a page of text, they can stand up with their eyes, and they can essentially commit that to memory with very little, if any, effort. Well, in my team that having a photographic memory is a very attractive skill to have should caution you against believing that because turns out that people with true photographic memory are often very chAllenging, ed, at remembering things that they hear.

And often times are not so good at learning physical skills. It's not always the case, but often that's the case. So be careful what you wish for. If you do have a photographic memory, there are certain professions that lend themselves particularly well to you.

And indeed, a lot of people with photographic memory have to find a profession and have to move through life in a way that is in concert with that photographic memory. So again, it's a super ability, is a hyper ability. And yet it's not necessarily one that a is desirable for most people.

There's also this category of water called super recognizers. These people are, I should mention, highly employable by government agencies. These are people that have an absolutely astonishing ability to recognize faces into match faces to temperature. They can look at a photograph, I say somebody on a most wanted list, and then they can look at video footage of, let's say, an airport or a mall or city street at fairly low resolution.

And they can spot the person whose face matches that photograph that they looked at, even if that video or other footage is of profiles or even the tops of their heads in just a portion of their forehead. These people have just an incredible ability to recognize faces them to template match. And again, these people often will take jobs with agencies where this sort of thing is important.

Um some of you out there probably are super recognizers and mayor may not notice IT if you ever have the experience of watching a movie and thought yourself how her mouth looks so much like my cousins mouth or you look at a character in a movie here, television show, and you think how they look almost like the Younger sister of so and so. Well then it's very likely that you have this, or at least a mild form of the super recognized ability that is not memory per say, that is the hyper functioning of an area of the brain that we call the future form givers. The fuse form givers is literally a face recognition area in a face tempt matching area and in harbors, in neurons that respond to faces generally.

So as humans and other non human primates care a lot about faces in their emotional content, and the identity of faces is super important to us for all the kinds of reasons that are probably obvious, knowing whose friend, whose full, who do you know well, who's famous, who is not famous at seta, that is not memory persue. And yet, if you're super recognized or or I guess we could call IT a moderate face recognized or not very good at recognizing faces because indeed, there are some people that are kind of face blind. They don't actually recognize people when they walk in the room.

I used to work with somebody like this. I'd walk into his office and he d say, are you rich or are you Andrew? I say, what my rich, rich like, you know, wealth rich, no. And you say, no.

Are you Richard or are you Andrew? And I say, i'm Andrew. We know each other really one. So I am sorry.

I am kind of face blind and that actually tend to be Better worse on depending on how much he was working. Um ironically, the more arrested he was, the more face blind he would become. So IT wasn't a sleep deprivation thing that exists that's out there.

There's the full consultations of people's ability recognized faces that's not really memory. And yet visual function is a profoundly powerful way in which we can enhance our memory is so whether not you're a super mizer of faces, whether not you are face blind or anything in between. Next, someone to tell you about a study which points out the immense ve value of visual images for laying down memories.

And you can leverage this information. And this involves both the taking of photographs, something is actually quite easy, easily done these days with your phone, as well as your ability to take mental photographs by literally snapping your eyelid shut. So I just briefly wanted describe this paper because IT provides a tool that you can leverage in your attempt to learn and remember things Better. The title of this paper is photographic memory, the effects of our volitional photo taking on memory for visual and auditory aspects of an experience.

I really like this paper because IT refers to photographic memory, not in the context of photographic memory that we Normally hear about, where people are truly photographic, look at a patient somehow absorb that information and committed to memory, but rather the use of camera photographs, or the use of mental camera photographs, literally looking at something in deciding blink and snapping a sort of speak, snapping a snapshot of whatever IT is that you are looking at, and remembering the content. The reason I like this paper and the reason i'm attracted to this issue of mental snapshots is this is something that I be doing since I was a kid. I don't know why I started doing IT, but every once in a while, I would say maybe twice a year, I would look at something and decide to just snapp a mental snapshot of IT.

And i've maintained very clear memories of those visual scenes. Two years ago, I was in an uber, and I looked out the window, and he was a street sea. I was actually in new york at the time, and I decided, for reasons that are still unclear to me to take a mental snapshot of the city freedom and even though nothing interesting in particular was happening and um I do recall that there was a guy wearing a yellow shirt walking.

There was some construction that I can still see that image in my minds eye, because I took this mental snapshot. This paper addresses whether not this mental snapp shooting thing is real, and this is something that I think a lot of people will resonate with, whether not the constant taking of pictures on our phones or with other devices is either improving or degrading our memory. You can imagine an argument for both.

A lot of people are taking pictures that they never look at again. And so in a sense, they're outsourcing their their visual memory of events into their phone or to some other device, and they're not ever accessing the actual image and they're not looking at IT, right? You're not printing out those photos.

You're not scanning through your phone again. Sometimes you might do that, but most of the time people don't. Most of the photographs of people taking, they're not revising again. So the motivation for this study was that previous experiments had shown that if people take photos of the scene, or a person or an object, that they are actually less good at remembering the details of that scene or object at seta.

This study chAllenges that idea and raise the hypothesis that if people are allowed to choose what they take photos of, that taking photos, again, this is with a camera, not mental snap, shouting, that taking those photos would actually enhance their memory for those objects, those places, those people, and in fact, details of those object places in people. And indeed, that's what they found. So in contrast to previous studies where people had been more less told, take photos of these following objects, are these following people, are these following places? And then they were given a memory test.

At some point later in this study, people were given violation control, right? They were given agency in making the decision of what to take photos of and i'll just summarized the result will provide a link to this study. Should say that some of the stuff that they test IT was actually pretty chAllenging.

Some of them were uh pottery and other forms of ceramics that um are of the sort that you see if you go to a big museum in a big city and if you've ever done that, you see all the different objects. There are a lot of details in those objects, and lot, those objects look a lot alike. And so, you know, some will have two handles, what someone have one handle, the position of the handles, how? How broad or narrow these things are.

You allow, this is pretty detailed stuff. They also took photos of other, other things. So basically what they found was that if people take pictures of things and they choose which things they are taking pictures of right up to them, it's voluble that there is enhanced memory for those objects.

Later on, however, IT degraded their ability to remember auditory information. So what this means is that when we take a picture of something or a person, we are stamp down a visual memory of that thing. And that makes sense.

It's a photograph, after all. But we are actually inhibiting our ability to remember the auditory, the sound components of that visual scene. What the person was saying very interesting, and points to the fact that the visual system can now compete.

The auditory system, at least in terms of how the hip campus is encoding this information. The other finding I find particularly interesting within this study is that IT didn't matter whether not they ever looked at the photos again, so they actually had people take photos or not, take photos of different objects. They had some people keep their photos, and they had other people delete their photos.

And turns out that whether not people kept the photos or deleted those photos had no bearing on whether not they were Better or worse at remembering things. They were always Better remembering them as compared to not taking photos them. What does this mean? That means, if you really want to remember something, or somebody take a photo of that thing or person, pay attention while you take the photo. But IT isn't really matter.

If you look at the photo agains somehow the process of taking that photo, probably looking at IT, you know, that camera, typically, we say, through the view finder now because of digital cameras on the the stream, on the back of that camera or on your phone, that framing up of the photograph stamps down a visual image in your mind that is more robust at serving a memory than had you just looked at that thing with your own eyes. Very interesting and raises all sorts of questions for me about whether or not it's because you're framing up a small a small portion of the visual scene. And that's one logical interpretation.

Although they didn't test that, I should also say that they found that whether not you looked at a photo that you took, or whether not you deleted IT and never looked at IT again didn't just enhance visual memory or the or the memory for those for the visual components of that image. But IT always reduced your ability to remember sounds associated with that experience. So that's interesting.

And then last but not least, and perhaps most interesting at least to me, was the fact that you didn't even need a camera to see this effect. If subjects looked at something and took a mental photograph of that thing, IT enhances their. Visual memory of that thing significantly more than had they not taken a mental picture. In fact, IT increased their memory of that thing almost as much as taking an actual photograph with an actual camera. And the reason I find this so interesting is that a lot of what we try and learn is visual, and for a lot of people, the ability to learn visual information feels chAllenging and will look at something and will try create some detailed understanding of IT, will try and understand the relationships between things.

And that seen IT does appear based on the study that the mere decision to take a mental snapshot, like, okay, i'm going to blink my allies and i'm going to take a snapshot, whatever is I see can actually stamp down a visual memory much in the same way that a camera can stamp down a visual memory. Of course, through vastly distinct mechanisms, no discussion of memory would be complete without a discussion of the ever intriguing phenomenon known as djvi. This sense that we've experience something before, but we can't quite put our finger on IT.

Where and when did that happen? Where the sense that we've been some place before or that we are in a familiar state or place or context of some kind. Now i've talked about this on the podcast before, at least I think I have.

And the way this works has been defined largely by the wonderful work of susumu ono, goa. At massachusets institute of technology. MIT assume collected nobel prize, quite appropriately, for his beautiful work on immunology.

And he's also a highly accomplished neuroscientist who studies memory and learning and deja vu. And I should also mention the beautiful work of mark method at the script institute and uc. Sandy ago, beautiful work on this notion of dye ovo.

Here's what they discovered. They evaluated the patterns of neural firing in the hip campus as subjects learn new things. Okay, so neuron a fires than neuron b fires, then there on c fires in a particular sequence. Again, the firing of neurons in a particular sequence, like the playing of keys on a piano in a particular sequence, leads to a particular song on the piano and leads to a particular memory of an experience within the brain. They then used some molecular tools and tricks to label and capture those neurons, such that they could go back later and activate those neurons in either the same sequence or in a different sequence to the one that occurred during the formation of the memory.

And to make a long story short and to summarize, multiple papers published in incredibly high tier journals, journals like nature and science, which are extremely stringent, found that whether not those particular neurons were played in the precise sequence that happen when they encoded the memory, or whether not those neurons were played in a different sequence, or even if those neurons were played activated, that is all at once with no temporal sequence, all firing in concert, all at once evoke the same behavior, and in some sense, the same memory. So at a neural circuit level, this is dasha vu. This is a different pattern of firing of neurons in the brain, leading to the same sense of what happened, leading to a particular emotional state or behavior.

Now, whether not the same sort of phenomenon occurs when you're walking down the street and suddenly you feel as if, wow, I feel like i've been here before you meet someone and you feel like wash, I feel like I know you I feel like there's some familiar here that I can't quite put my thing wrong. We don't know for sure that that's what's happening, but this is the most mechanistic and logical explanation for what has for many decades, if not hundreds of years, has been described as stage ou. So for those of you that experienced stage ovo often just know that this reflecting Normal pattern of encoding experiences and events within your hippo campus.

I know not aware of any pathological situations where the presence of dasya vu inhibits daily life. Some people like the sensation of deja vu. Other people don't. Almost everybody, however, describes IT as somewhat ery.

This idea that even though you're in a very different place, even though you're interacting with a very different person, that you could somehow feel as if this has happened before and just realized this, that your hip campus, well IT is exquisitely good at encoding new types of perceptions, new experiences, new emotions, new contingencies and relationships of life events. IT is not infinitely large, nor does IT have an infinite bucket full of different options, of different sequences for those neurons to play. So in a lot of ways, that makes perfect sense that sometimes we would feel as if a given experience had happened previously.

I'd like to cover one additional tool that you can use to improve learning in memory. And I should mention this is a particularly powerful one, and it's one that i'm definitely going to employ myself. This is based on a paper from none.

Then when dis zu ki at new york university, we talked about her a little. And again, she's going to be on the podcast in our next episode and is just an incredible research i've known only for a number of years. And it's only in the last, I would say, five or six years that she's really shifted her laboratory toward generating protocols that human beings can use.

And she's putting that to great effect, great positive effect, I should say, publishing papers of the sort of the mobile to describe, but also incorporating some of these tools and protocols into the learning curriculum and the lifestyle curriculum of students at N Y U, which I think is a terrific initiative. So you don't need to be an end why you students, in order to benefit from her work. I'm going to tell you about some of that work now, and you'll tell you about this and much more.

In the episode that follows this one, the title of this paper will tell you a lot about where we're going. The title is brief daily meditation in enhances attention, memory, mood and emotional regulation in non experience ed meditators, if ever there was an incentive to meditate IT is the data contained within this paper when a briefly described the study. And then I also want to emphasize that when you meditate is absolutely critical, i'll talk about that just at the end.

This is a study that involve subjects aged eighteen to forty five, none of whom were experienced meditators prior to the study. There were two general groups in the study. One group did a thirteen minute long meditation, and this meditation was a fairly conventional meditation. They would sit or lie down.

They would do somewhat of a body scan, evaluating, for instance, how tents were relaxed they felt throughout their body, and they would focus on their breathing, trying to bring their attention back to their breathing and to the state of their body as the meditation progressed. The other group, which we can call the control group, listen to, of all things, a podcast. They did not listen to this podcast.

They listen to radio lab, which is a popular podcast, for an equivalent amount of time, but they were not instructed to do any kind of body can or pay attention to their breathing. Every subject in the study either meditated daily or listen to her equivalent duration podcast daily for a period of eight weeks. And the experimenters measured a large number of things of variables.

As we say, they looked at measures of emotion regulation. They actually measured cortisol, a stress hormone. They measured, as the title suggests, attention and memory and so forth. And the basic takeaway of the study is that eight weeks, but not four weeks of this daily thirteen minute day meditation had a significant effect in improving attention, memory, mood and emotion regulation.

I find this study to be very interesting and in fact, important, because most of us i've heard about the positive effects of meditation on things like stress reduction or on things such as improving sleep. And I want to come back to sleep, uh, in a few moments because IT turns out to be very future of this study. This particular study.

I like so much because they used a really broad array of measurements for cardinal function, things like the wisconsin hard sorting task and nothing going into this, things like the stroop task. And they also, as I mentioned, measured court is all and many other things, including, not surprisingly, memory and people's ability to remember certain types of information, in fact, very types of information. And the basic takeaway was, again, that you could get really robust improvements in learning and memory mood in attention from just thirteen minutes a day of meditation.

Now there's an important twist in this study that I want to emphasize. You read into the discussion of the study, it's mentioned that somehow meditation did not improve, but actually impaired sleep quality compared to the control subjects. You might think, wow, why would that be? I mean, meditation supposed to reduce our stress, stressed, exposed to inhibit sleep.

And therefore, why would sleep get worse? Well, what's interesting is the time of day when most of the subjects tended to do their meditation. Most of the subjects in the study did their meditation late in the day.

This is often in the case and experiments. I know this because we run experiments with human subjects in my laboratory, and people are paid some amount of money in order to participate, or they are given something is compensation for being the study. But often times the meditation, or in the case of my lab, the aspiration work or other kinds of things that they are signed to do are not their top, top priority.

And we understand this. But in this study, the majority of the subjects you are am reading completed their meditation sessions from eight to somewhere between eight and eleven P. M.

And sometimes even between twelve and three A M. Think probably were a lot of college students enroll in the study and their hours often are late, shifted that impaired sleep. And this raises a bigger theme that I think is important many times before on this podcast, and certainly in the episode mastering sleep and conquer or mastering stress.

Those episodes we talked about the value, again, of these non sleep deep breast protocols and S, D, R, for reducing the activity of your sympathetic nervous system. That's the alertness, so called stress. ARM of your automation ic server is the moment that makes you feel really alert.

N, S, C, R, superb for reducing your level of alertness, is increasing your level of communist and putting you into a so called more parasympathetic relaxed state. Meditation does that too? But IT also increases attention.

If you think about meditation, meditation involves focusing on your breath and constantly focusing back on your breath and trying to avoid the distraction of things you're thinking, your things that you're hearing and coming so called back to your body, back to your breath. So meditation is actually has a high attentional load. IT requires a lot of prefrontal cortical activity that involved in attention, which then logically relates to the one of the outcomes of the study, which is that attention abilities improved in daily meditators.

IT also points out that increasing in the level of attention and the activity of your profondo cortex may, and I want to eat size me because i'm here, I am speculating about the underlying mechanism, inhibit your ability to fall asleep. So while we have meditation, on the one hand, that does tend to put us into a calm state, but IT is a calm, very focus state. In fact, attention and focus are inherent to most forms of meditation.

Non sleep deeper, as such as yoga, eja as some of, you know, IT to be or n sdr. There's a terrific sdr script that's available free online that's put out by made force. You go to youtube n sdr made for you can also just do a search for n sdr.

The number of these available out there, again at no cost. Those N S, D R protocols tend to put people into a state of deeper relaxation, but also very low attention. And we have to assume very low activation of the prefrontal cortex.

So the takeaway from the study are several. Ld, first of all, the daily meditation of thirteen minutes can enhance your ability to pay attention and to learn. You can truly enhance memory.

However, you need to do that for at least eight weeks in order to start to see the effects to occur. And we have to resume that, you have to continue. Those are meditation training sessions.

In fact, they found that if people only did four weeks of meditation, these affected show up. Now, eight weeks might seem like a long time, but I think that thirteen minutes today is not actually that big of a time commitment. And the results of this study certainly incentivize me to start adopting a i'm going for fifteen minutes a day now.

I've been on enough meditator for a number of years. I've been pretty good about IT lately, but I confess i've been doing far shorter meditations of anywhere from three to five or maybe ten minutes. I'm going to ramp that up to fifteen minutes a day, and i'm doing that specifically.

You are trying to access these improvements in cognitive service and our abilities to learn also based on the data this paper. I'm going to do those meditation sessions either early in the day, such as immediately after waking or close to IT. And I get my sunshine first, as you all know, very big, on getting sunlight in the eyes early in the day as much as one can and as early as one can once the sun is out, but certainly doing IT early in the day, and not past five P.

M. Or so, in order to make sure that I don't inhibit sleep. Because I think this result that they describe of meditation, inhibiting quality sleep compared to controls, is an important one to pay attention to.

No one intended. Today, we covered a lot of aspects of memory and how to improve your memory. We talked about the different forms of memory, and we talked about some of the underlying neural circuitry of memory formation.

And we talked about how the emotional silencer and intensity of what you're trying to learn has a profound impact on whether not you learn in response to some sort of experience, whether not that experience is reading or mathematics or music or language or a physical scale doesn't matter. The more intense of an emotional state that you're in, in the period immediately following that learning, the more likely you are to remember whatever IT is that you're trying to learn. And we talked about the newer chemicals that explain that effect about een efron and cortical stones like cortisol, and how adJusting the timing of those is so key to enhancing your memory.

And we talk about the different ways to enhance those chemicals, everything ranging from cold water to pharmacology, and even just adJusting the emotional state within your mind in order to stamp down and remember experiences Better. We also talked about how to leverage exercise, in particular load bearing exercise, in order to evoke the release of hormones like osteopath son, which can travel from your bones, your brain and enhance your ability to learn. And we talked about a new form of photographic memory, not the traditional type of photographic memory, in which people can remember everything they look at very easily, but rather taking mental snapshots of things that you see, again, emphasizing that that will create a Better memory of what you see when you take that mental snapshot, but will actually reduce your memory for the things that you hear at that moment.

And we discuss the really exciting data, looking at how particular meditation protocols can enhance memory, but also attention and mood. However, if done too late in the day, can actually disrupt sleep, precisely because those meditation protocols can enhance attention. Now I know that many of you are interested in newer chemicals that can enhance learning and memory, and I intend to cover those in deep detail in a future episode.

However, for sake of what was discuss today, please understand that any number of different, newer chemicals can evoke or can increase the amount of a journal that circulating in your brain and body. And it's less important how one accesses that increase in a journey, right? Again, this could be done through behavioral protocols, or through assuming that those behavioral protocols and pharma logy are safe for you.

IT really doesn't matter how you evoke the adrenaline release, because, remember, a gentleman is the final common pathway by which particular experiences, particular perceptions, are stamped into memory, which answers are very first question raised at the begin of the episode, which is, why do we remember anything at all, right? That was the question that we raised. Why is that? That from morning till night, and throughout your entire life, you have tons of sensory experiences, tons of perceptions.

Why is that? That some I remembered that, others or not? While I would never want to distill an important question such as that down to a one molecule type of answer, I think we can confidently say, based on the vast amount of animal and human h data, that epa a journal and some of the other chemicals that IT acts with in concert is, in fact, the way that we remember particular events and not all events, if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our youtube channel.

That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to our podcast on spotify and on apple. And now on both spotify and apple, you can leave us up to a five star review.

Please also leave us comments and feedback in the comments section on our youtube channel. You can also suggest future guess that you'd like us to cover. We do read all those comments.

Please also check out the sponsors mentioned the ginning of today's podcast that a terrific, perhaps the best way to support this podcast. We also have a patron, its patron, dot com slash Andrew huberman. And there you can support this podcast at any level that you like.

During today's episode and on many previous episode of the human lab podcast, we discuss supplements. While supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like enhancing sleep and focus, and indeed for learning and memory. For that reason, the huberman lab podcasts is now partnered with momentous supplements.

The reason we partner with momentous as several fold. First of all, we wanted to have one location where people could go to access single ingredient, high quality versions of the supplements that we were discussing on this podcast. This is a critical issue.

A lot of supplement companies out there cell l excEllent supplements, but they combine different ingredients into different formulations, which make IT very hard to figure out exactly what works for you and to arrive at the minimal effective dose of the various compounds that are best for you, which we think is extremely important. And that certainly the most scientific way, a rigorous way, to approach any kind of supplementation region so momentous has made these single ingredient formulations on the basis of what we suggested to them. And i'm happy to say they also ship internationally.

So whether or not you're in the us. Or abroad, they are ship to you. If you'd like to see the supplements recommended on the human lab podcast, you can go to liberal to stock com slash huberman. They've started to assemble the supplements that we've talked about on the podcast.

And in the upcoming weeks, they will be adding many more supplements such that in a brief period of time, most, if not all, of the compounds are discussed on this podcast will be there again in single ingredient, extremely high quality formulations that you can use to arrive at the best supplement protocols for you. We also include behavioral protocols that can be combined with supplementation protocols in order to deliver the maximum effect. Once again, that live moment is not come slash huberman.

And if you're not already following us on twitter and instagram, it's huberman lab on both twitter and inserm. There I described science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the content of the huberman lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content of the huberman lab podcast. We also have a newsletter called the huberman lab neural network.

That newsletter provides summary protocols and information from our various podcast episodes. IT does not cost anything to sign up. You can go to huberman and lab dot com, go to the menu and click on newsletter.

You just provide your email. And I should point out, we do not share your email with anyone else. We have a very clear privacy policy that you can read there.

And that newsletter comes out about once a month. You can also see some sample news letters, things like the tool kit for sleep, for for neural plasticity and for various other topics covered on the huberman lab podcast. Once again, thank you for joining me today to discuss the neurobiology of learning a memory and how to improve your memory using science space tools. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.