Hi am Kate Hudson, and my name is Oliver Hudson. We wanted to do something that highlighted our relationships and what it's like to be siblings. We are a sibling, railvalry, No, no, sibling. Don't do that with your mouth, revely. That's good. Every time we do a podcast like this where we bring on an expert or someone who's written a book about something that we find really interesting, I just like, we need to do this all the time. It was so fun. We spoke to Lisa Genova, she wrote a book about memory, and yeah, I know, I know, I don't I don't remember. I wasn't expecting that joke. That was such a stupid, great joke. I like love. Oh my god, Oh I've been I've been talking about this interview to every everybody, by the way, Yes, it was fascinating for me. I know this idea that we're all we're just living a lie pretty much. Yeah, we're all in We're all living in our own weird perception that no one else is living in right, right, totally, we all have our own versions of reality. Yeah, I will remember this podcast way differently than you will. And if we didn't actually have it to go back and remind ourselves. We'd both be wrong, right, But we have it, and we have we can go back to the tape because this actually exists. I think we can keep this short and sweet because we get into so much good stuff. This is an awesome episode. We talked a lot about the way that our brains work. She gives us so much information. It was like a great course in understanding, as Oliver said, like how we're just living in our own weird reality that doesn't really exist anywhere. Oh yeah, it just it's almost scary honestly, because you just sort of think, oh my god, I mean I'm crazy. I'm living my own reality. And she's so exuberant and she was so passionate about the subject and a really really fun giving interviewer interviewee. Her book is called Remember, The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. So enjoy this episode about your memory. What I'm so excited to talk talk to you. I know, Uh, me too, I can't remember shit. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for having me as a guest, even though my my dumb little brother wouldn't agree to do it with me. So thank you. It's fun for us like sometimes we do siblings obviously, and then sometimes, especially with this, you know, to talk about memory because this is one of the things that this is what your your book is focused on. And all I could think about when I was like, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna interview Lisa today is how everyone has a different memory of an argument like that, like you know, and it's like, that's not what I said, and it's like, no, that is what you said. And there's always this moment or a memory of your childhood. It's like we're not meant to remember everything, you know. I but you, being the smarty pants that you are, miss Harvard graduate of neuroscience, you know, you actually study these things and we can get some real answers. Oh god, I don't even know where to start. I don't even know where to start. Well, I want to say something first. First of all, you've written books that people love, so you know, Still Alice is a book that was made into a movie with Julian Moore. You wrote that and the movie was great too, so and then the new book, the new book, the nonfiction right, the Science of Memory in the Art of Forgetting. Yeah, yes, because I forget everything how do I remember my lines? Because I'm horrible at it. I'm horrible at it. We don't have to go through this now. I need question. I just need to I'm going through a scene right now. I've got thirteen pages. I've got to put myself on tape. I've had it for four days, and I can't remember a goddamn thing. Well, I think that means you probably shouldn't get the part. Yeah, you have an issue remembering your lines. I do. I don't know if it's nerves or what it is. But we can get all We can get into that later. There's there's so much There's so much tis Yeah, there are techniques for learning information, like how do we how do we get that information in your brain in a really strong way so that it's very easy to get it back out. Let's start with what got you fascinated with the brain? What drew your attention to I want to know and understand more about our brains. So I was always that geeky science kid like I liked math and science, and I actually all I liked acting in storytelling too. But as the scientist was so strong in me, I really didn't feel like I had permission to go do those other things. So I was all about the math and science. And my second year in college I took a course in what is now called neuroscience. I'm old enough that it was called physiological psychology back in the day, and so it was the study of the brain, how does the brain affect our behavior, thinking, memory, moods, desires. And at the same time I read a book by Oliver Sachs called The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and that was a collection of neurological patients he had over the years who presented really interesting, weird neurological conditions and there's like short stories. And between those two things, I was so in I just my mind was blown. I was so excited and passionate about this part of our body. Right, so the heart is a pump, the kidney's a filter, but your brain, it's in charge of all of these magical things. It seems impossible that your biology can, you know, be what is behind your personality, your mood, your ability to remember. So yeah, I was fascinated, and all in a magical is a great word, because there's so much that we know and there's still so much that we don't know about the brain. This idea that our brains are a muscle is something that people don't think about very often. How we can actually we can work our brains to build a stronger mechanism. Right, Yeah, And I think you're so right, Kate. I think that we've all been sort of socialized to believe that we have some influence over our health from the neck down. So right, we wear the fitbits and we count our number of steps, and we know that exercise is good for our heart health. Ladies, we're used to getting our lady parts checked, like we're used to like health from the neck down. But I think that we haven't yet gone to the next frontier, which is, hello, your brain is connected to your body, and we do have a massive amount of influence over our health and optimal functioning of this thing in your head called your brain. Your grandma had Alzheimer's, I mean that must have been a very kind of prominent You know, there's a scientist in you, and then there's the person that understands the brain but sort of propelling you to really kind of understand more about Alzheimer's as well. Yes, So my experience with my grandmother is why I became a novelist. I was the neuroscientist in my very big Italian family. I am. My dad is one of nine, I'm one of the youngest of thirty something grandchildren. My grandmother had Alzheimer's. I it's my responsibility to understand this disease and pass that education along to my family. And so I read everything I could find about Alzheimer's. And so I learned about the molecular biology. I learned about the disease presentation and management, the anatomy, the physiology, all of that. I read books written by neuroscientists, clinicians, caregivers, social workers, hm but they were all lacking the perspective of the person with it. I My grandmother's Alzheimer's was so upsetting to me. I was twenty eight at the time. I loved her so much. I miss her. I felt so bad for her. I mean, she forgot who we all were. She had no connection to this beautiful life that she had lived. And I felt heartbroken and sad and bad for her and for us. It was sympathy. I didn't know how to get to empathy. I didn't know how to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I didn't know how to sit with my grandmother's Alzheimer's, and I remember thinking, well, this perspective of the person who has it is missing, Like that's how we get to empathy, right, That's how when you read fiction, when you read a story, when you see a movie, that's what we're doing. We're experiencing what it's like to be you. Right. So that was that intuitive AHA moment for me was like, Oh, I need to write a story about a woman with Alzheimer's and tell it from her perspective, and that's how I'll get to understand what it feels like to live and breathe with Alzheimer's. But did you have to sort of create ideas in your mind of what that experience might be given the fact that you didn't actually experience it, so it's almost your perception of what it might be. It was some of that, But before that was a lot of research. And so what I didn't have at my fingertips when my nana had Alzheimer's, but what I sought out as a novelist was I went and did my homework, and I came to know twenty seven people living with early onset or early stage Alzheimer's who could still communicate what it feels like to have it. And I was in touch with these folks every day for the year and a half that I was writing the story. So the book isn't about any one of them. I didn't borrow their personal stories and all of that vulnerability that they shared with me, but it did inform the truth under the imagined circumstances. I mean, that's amazing. It feels like a very basic quest but important. What is memory? I love, No, this is a great question because I think a lot of people don't know. Right. So we have this misconception that memory is a video camera recording a constant stream of every site and sound and you know, smell and emotion and information, and it's not. We have this idea that there's a memory bank located somewhere in your brain and that's what gets activated and stores everything like it's in a file cabinet. That's not memory. Memory is the constellation of connected, linked neurons that can be located all over your brain that represent the sites, the sounds, the smells, the feelings, the information, the language of what you paid attention to, you cared about and remembered in the first place. So it's the reactivation of the connected neural circuit that represents the information contained in that memory. If I'm thinking of a brain like that, of all these little memories floating around, like how do you reach for a memory? Yeah, so it's not they're not floating around. So there's you know, you you see in the back of your head. That's called your occipital cortex, your visual cortex. You hear in your auditory cortex, you feel in your limbic system, you think things in languages in your frontal cortex. So okay. So if I'm remembering the first night of summer a couple of years ago now, and my memory of that night is I remember the new Lady Gaga song playing on the portable speaker at the kids playing soccer on the beach. We had wine, bonfire, s'mores, oysters. One of the kids got stung by a jellyfish. So this is my memory of that night. And so what is it? It's I began with. The first memory was Lady got the New Lady Gaga song first night of summer. So Lady Gaga song in my brain is connected to a jellyfish sting, which is connected to the smell of the bonfire and the taste of the wine. So all of these things are connected and associated with each other such that if I think of the Lady Gaga song, it will trigger the activation of this linked circuit. So in your brain, Lady Gaga has nothing to do with a jellyfishting. Our memories can be unique because they are the connected neural circuits based on what we experience. Right, but then you have these sort of flash bulb memories that are seared into your brain lack of a better word. And what is that from a sort of neurological standpoint that allows these memories to stand out so specifically and vividly? How does that what's happening in that moment? I love this question. Okay, so let's go over a few things. So what do we remember, like, what is your brain design to remember? Your brain me what is surprising or new? What is emotional? What is meaningful? And what you repeat? Okay, it does not remember same old, same old hohum, unemotional boring stuff. So tell me everybody you texted and who texted you four days ago? Tell me about your morning shower eight days ago? Right, tell me? Right? We don't remember these routine day to day ho home things. But give me something emotional, pulse zapping, give me something surprising, Oh my god, that's never happened before. Memory our human brains are really really phenomenal at remembering those moments and that information. And so flashball memories you're talking about. For folks who don't know these are these moments. They can be personal, but they can also be these shared public events for things that were highly surprising, emotional, meaningful. So for some people, this is they remember exactly where they were, who they were with, time of day, how they felt about it. When JFK was killed, when a space shutter, Space Shuttle Challenger blew up, when the Twin Towers collapsed on nine to eleven. These moments shocked us and it was very emotional. And so you have these memories called flashball memories, which feel very vividly and confidently remembered even decades later. Right, I don't remember anything right now. I don't remember anything about September twelfth, two thousand and one, or September ninth, but I remember tons about September eleventh. The weird thing is, though, folks, just because you remember it, vividly and confidently doesn't mean it's accurate, right, Yeah, I know, and we think it is. We're so sure because they feel so vividly remembered, but they're not. But do you think, just from a an evolutionary standpoint, a mankind standpoint, that there is a primal reason for this, for these flashbulb memories, for us to actually have these vivid memories, whether realized correctly or not, to stay with us. Yeah, it makes tons of sense to me. And it's not just flashbulbs, right, it's memories, the stuff that we remember, the narrative of our life, like the we remember lots of first right, because they're again new and surprising and usually meaningful and emotional. So you remember your first kiss, but not your tenth. Right. So, and with respect to you remember where you were? Like, that's interesting? Why is that an important thing? I remember where I was when I learned about nine to eleven. I remember where I was when that Space Shuttle challenger blew up. Why is that? Well you can imagine that evolutionarily, it was super important for us to remember where the food is, where the predative, where home is. Right, So our brains are very much to designed to remember visually where they things are in space. So we can take ad like that happens naturally and you can take advantage of that. If you're trying to memorize something, can you attach a visual image to that and place it somewhere familiar to you in your mind's eye. That will help build, Like remember the Lady Gaga story. You want to build neural connections that become linked, and the more encoding, the more associated neurons that you can collect into that memory, the better chance you're going to have of retrieving it because you have more data points, more points of entry into that memory to then trigger the full recollection. I would also think, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, because this is just you know, coming up. This is up from my heine. But I would also think that there is just based on our evolution and our as Homo sapiens being the surviving human species or species, that we would that our storytelling ability, our ability to remember stories, to attach to them, to carry them on, and to connect is a huge part of how we survive. Yes, I love that you put that together. Yes, So the ability to tell the story. So this is memory for what happens, right, So We've got your memory for stuff, information, the facts. This is like what you learned in school, right, So who was the first president of the United States? What's your birthday? What are the colors of the rainbow? What's six times six? That's stuff you know. Then there's the memory nice job. Then there's the stuff that happened. So you know I was born in Waltham, Massachusetts. You know, I went to Bates College, I went to Harvard, like all the things that happened, and that's where your storytelling comes in. So I'll get back to that. Then there's the memory for how to do things. It's called muscle memory, but it doesn't live in your muscles. It lives in your brain. The core, the memory of the choreography, the procedure for how to do things is in your brain, and your brain tells your muscles what to do. So this is how to brush your teeth, how to ride a bike, how to type an email, how to play guitar, how to swing a golf club. So your memories for stuff that happened are the story it creates your your the story of your life. Right, this is the who you are and it's interesting. Right, So most of us don't remember anything that happened before the age of three, So three and younger you don't really remember that much. Six and younger is pretty fuzzy. It's kind of like sort of random moments. If you do remember something, it's probably because it was so shocking and emotional, right, So the death of a family member, or you moved or or your family told you the stories over and over again. But the reason that we think that you don't remember anything from when you're really young is because you don't have You don't have you've not developed the language yet to tell the story of it in your brain. Once you've developed the ability to tell the story of what happened, that's when we start to have these memories. My my first memories are actually quite young. Like are they just individual moments or is it the story of the The Life starring Kate Hudson? Right? Like, right, it's more the story of like Abisa. No, I mean, I have those memories too. Abisa is like a big time But but I wonder why. I feel like maybe something traumatic happened right before that that we don't remember, but we remember the trip. We'll get on the next episode of what Happened before Abisa. But but but it's so it's so interesting, there's so much to talk about it. It's like almost my brain is swirling. But we are nothing without memory. We we don't exist or or you're just you're just living literally in the moment, like all most other animals. So what I think memory would be, uh, except for animals have memory? Don't they? Well some do, I think some do, but but I think that a lot, don't you know they don't have right? Well, I mean, think about the squirrel who's buried all the nuts, right and then has to go remember where they are to dig them up. And actually I listened to Sarah Sarah Silverman do stand up on this once and the squirrels are like terrible at this and it actually helps us like plant trees. So thank you, chol because they have such terrible memories. But so we I love I love I love what you bring up, Oliver, because it's I actually talk about this at the end of the book. And this is my take on it, that it's kind of a paradox. I think that memory is everything and it's also nothing, So stay with me. So you're right, it's like we need memory for pretty much everything we do from the moment we wake up, Like how do I get dressed? How do I brush my teeth? Memories? How do I have a conversation? Memories? Like do I you know what did I do yesterday that I can continue through today? Memory? It's all memory, and then yet it's also your memory is while it's genius, it's also kind of stupid because it's gonna forget most of what you experience today because most of what you experienced today is routine. Ho hum, ben there done that? Like I will remember this podcast, so thank you, because this is I don't get to talk to you all every day, so this is new for me, so I'll remember this. But most of what we do every day, like of the sixteen hours that you're awake, you're doing a lot of routine, same old, same old stuff, and your brain won't You won't pay attention to it. And what you don't pay attention to, you cannot you cannot remember. The first necessary ingredient in forming a memory is attention. So we don't pay attention to most of our day, really, and so we don't remember it. So in that sense, memory can't be that big of a deal because we don't remember most of it, and it's wrong a lot of the time. It's highly fallible. And then there's this if you've known someone with Alzheimer's, like my nana, it's devastating. It is, you know it is in that sense. Memory is everything, but it's also not because it doesn't rob you of your ability to feel emotions. So she still loved us. You know who we were, but we loved her and she felt it, and she loved us back. So it Alzheimer's which robs you eventually of all of your memories. You will forget how to brush your teeth, you will forget everyone you love, you'll forget all of your history, but you will still know how to feel joy, lonely, anger, love, connection, Right, that's human. Do you think there's a with your nana and other people who are experiencing Alzheimer's. Do you think there's a moment where that person has to ultimately just let go? Because in order to love, you have to have some sort of I would think you would have to have some sort of connection, some sort of memory of why you love, of who that person is, unless you just say let go and just experience love in the most purest form. I don't know if it's a conscious letting go. I don't know that there's necessarily control over. There could be thumb and for others, it's just here I am now. I don't know. I don't know where I am. I don't recognize this as my home. I don't know who these people are, but I am, like Kate said, I'm in the moment and I'm experiencing the energy that's in front of me as love, and we respond to that. Right. Our babies don't know who the hell we are, and they respond to love. So I think, as humans, it is our birthright to be more than what we can remember. Do we have a cap on how much we can store? I know that now, and that's a lot of people think that too. It's like, oh, I only use ten percent of my brain. Oh I'm going to run out of room, So it's good that I forget things that I have room for more. No, you have trillions of connections, and I mean you just literally do not run out of space. You always have the ability at any age to learn a new instrument or language. To the example I used in the book is Heikia Akira Harogucci at the age of sixty nine, a retired engineer with a normal, healthy brain, not a genius, not a mathematical savant. He decided he wanted to memorize pie out as many digits as he could, and he memorized one hundred and eleven thousand digits of a non repeating patternless number. Like amazing, So you can you're limitless and what you can remember if you decide you want to including that's script Oliver. That's exciting. That makes me excited. That in a minute. But so just going just going back just for a second about sort of mind body because it's very interesting to me, and not to get into my whole story, but I'm it's just from a neuroscience standpoint. I went off of my lexapro and I'm going through these withdrawals and I'm experiencing anxiety that doesn't really it's not even circumstantial. It's just there when I wake up and something is up with the chemistry. Okay, getting into the mind body connection, how powerful is that? How powerful is our mind in order to actually heal our body? It's so powerful. I mean, your mind and body are not separate, they're very much connected. And so with stress and anxiety, for example, massive influence on each other. So let me give you a little quick example here. So stress and an acute stress or a stress that happens once we experience and then it's gone not bad for us, and our brain responds, our body responds in a way that's healthy. So if I perceive so kind of threat or danger or emergency, my brain perceives this, I release adrenaline and cortisol into my blood stream, mobilizes my body for action, and then the cortisol actually acts on receptors in your brain to shut that whole thing off. It's a negative feedback loop. And so this is good. So I can, you know, I can hit the brakes if the car in front of me stop short. I compriy myself out of bed in morning, in the morning to face the day. I can get ready for the zoom the zoom conversation, right, So I can? I can. It's not just fight or or running away. It's also like am I this is my brain and body aroused and ready to meet the challenge of what I'm being presented with. That's normal, and it's it's really good for memory. Like you need a certain amount of stress and activation to like learn something we were just talking about, like the good stresses and then the yeah. But so chronic stress, which can be anxiety, right, and so a lot of us tick all these boxes. So it's not like, you know, it's not like back in the day where you know, lying is chasing us, trying to eat us in the savannah. It's you know, it's more like our thoughts are our predators now, right, And so it's like the top three psychological stressors are uncertainty, a perceived lack of control, and social isolation. Oh hello, the past year, right, it's like tick tick. So when that happens, when you're under chronic, unrelenting stress and anxiety, the receptors in your brain that cortisol ax on that normally shut the whole thing off, become desensitized and down regulated, and so the shut off valve breaks, and so cortisol just keeps dumping into your brain and body. And this this messes you up in lots of ways. So it's you'll have trouble thinking clearly because your frontal lobe will kind of be offline. Because when you're in fight or flight, you don't want to be like, well, I wonder what I should do. Let me, let me wagh the pros and cons of acting right now. It's like, no, don't think run. But if you're not running from anything and you can't think, not good. You'll have trouble creating new memories in the state. You'll have a really hard time retrieving memories of stuff you've already learned. And you're actually gonna shrink your hippocampus, the part of your brain that's required for the formation of new memories. You'll inhibit neurogenesis there, so you'll stop the birth of new neurons and you'll have a smaller hippocampus. This is if you don't manage the stress and anxiety. So the good news is we know that practices like yoga, mindfulness, meditation, and exercise can all restore the shut off valve, restore the cortisol levels, and restore the size of your hippocampus. So not all is lost. And I want to give this example because I think it's super helpful for folks, and it's like all of us. So some people are really intimidated by meditation, like I don't have time, how to do it? I don't I'd have to go to a retreat or something to learn, and so they just don't do it. So here's what I want folks to do. If you're finding yourself feeling really overwhelmed and stressed, this is nine seconds. Ready, close your eyes if you can, if you're not in front of a bunch of people and it wouldn't be too weird, close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose to the count of four. Hold it for one second, and then breathe out through your nose to the count of four. And notice how you're feeling. Because here's the deal. If something really threatening is happening and it's activating the stress and anxiety response in my body, if I have to run for my life, I am running like this. I am never breathing slowly in and out through my nose. So while these the circumstances of the world can impact my brain and body, I can also reverse that. So by breathing in and out slowly through your nose, you are informing your brain and body. You're informing your physiology that you're safe, and so you can like kind of trick your body into believing that it should should should shut down the cortisol levels like everything's okay, the stress response will quiet and so this is nine seconds. We have time for nine seconds. That'll help. Yeah, it's so interesting because you know, my mom's been doing this curriculum called mind up for twenty years now and a huge part of it is breathwork for kids. And in the beginning of it one hundred years ago, people sort of rolled their eyes at it. Before. You know, my mom was always very keyed into a lot of neuroscientists and people like child psychologists who are at the you know, really researching all these things for many, many, many years. And now it's so nice that people are able to kind of have the science and the research to back that up. Because the younger we understand that about our brain's response is to stress or anxiety, that that we a simple breath can actually trick our brains to let us know that we are safe. Like, the more we have that as a foundation in our kids, I think the better, the better there, you know, upbringing will be Yeah, absolutely, yeah, the younger you are, this becomes sort of a way of life. Right, So this is part of what we're up against with older folks who are afraid of Alzheimer's, who are if you're over forty and you start to worry about your memory, you may already have a lot of life habits that are kind of getting in your way of optimal brain health. But if you're if you can start when you're young, this just becomes a way of life. Okay. So I'm really excited about this ad because I am actually basically related to the founder's daughter. It's all in the family. So my sister in last Yan Fujikawa's dad, he was one of the founders of Bumble of Bumble, these are the founders. They have created a product that is amazing. It's called hair Story. They have been in the industry for fifty years. They've got fifty years of experience and they decided to create a line of hair products that leave your hair clean, shiny, and heal fear forcing you to leave your shampoo behind. Now here's how they do this. So hair Stories New Wash is a sulfate detergent and shampoo free hair cleanser. Well, here's the thing. Traditional shampoo. Okay, there's detergent, there's parabins, there's chemicals, and that strips your hair and your scalp of its natural oils. This is why I honestly don't wash my hair. I washed my hair once a week. Yeah. But so they made a natural hair cleanser that is filled with these essential oils and it gives it provides moisture and hydration and it's this healthy hair. You don't need conditionery again. Yeah, it removes the access oil and dirt, but not the good stuff so that it keeps your hair hydrated. So you have six over six thousand and five star reviews. It's a new wash. Yeah, it's a new kind of wash. Baby. And let'say, I'm gonna explain how this works for a second. Okay, because there's a quiz. You take the quiz and that's how you create your custom starter kit. So based on your hair type and routine, it'll create the perfect combination of products that will transform your hair. You can have curly hair, you have straight hair, thick, thin, whatever, you know. Your hair can be colored or gray. New Wash it will give you your healthiest, most touchable hair since childhood. What the way that they formulated it balances your oil production so you can go longer between washes. They also do they also have styling stuff, so you can you know they have hair bomb, their air drying cream. So this kind of gives you the ability to have a more poly finish and we love it. This is this is a must try. Okay, So check out Hairstory at hairstory dot com and use our promo code sibling to get fifteen percent off your first purchase. That's h A I R S T O r Y dot com and use our code sibling to get fifteen percent off Hairstory dot com. Each and every I literally just put on a new scent today, Oliver Well, summer is coming. You know what that means, Kate heat. You know what happens when it gets hot, Your armpits sweat. Oh, and this is what's going on. So pick up your each and every right now. Each and every needs to be on your shelf, in your bathroom, in your car. My each and every is in my is in my glove compartment. Actually I love the citrus and vettiveil because it's a personal thing. I used to wear a cologne called Vetti Vee when I was a kid, and it's got this Vetti Vee sense, So essentially my deodorant becomes nostalgic. So boom, I love it. I love it, but let's talk about what this is. This is natural deodorant. It's just six simple, safe ingredients dead sea salt, coconut oil, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on smooth, it won't irritate your skin. I really do love this deodorant. And as someone who has been a natural deodorant person for a long time, they've gotten so good at it. Each and every is one of my faves and olive resta. Make the switch to each and every it'll be one of the best decisions you'll make this summer, maybe your life. All right, And we have an amazing deal to get you started. Thirty percent off your first purchase. That's right, thirty percent off. Just go to our special urlach every dot com slash sibling and use promo code sibling thirty. Trust us, you don't want to miss out on thirty percent off. Use promo code sibling thirty at each and every dot com slash sibling. Well, let's talk about optimum brain health. Like, what's the number one thing that you would tell people to do to ensure that they're at least doing one thing good for their brain. M Okay, it's kind of a toss up between exercise and sleep. And so these are not super sexy. It's like, I'm not like people want the supplement, right, they want the magic pill. They want to be like, here take this and you're done now. But let me tell you why, because I think the why can help rather than just you need to sleep and exercise. It's okay, so sleep. So the sleep science is very clear. Our human brains need seven to nine hours of sleep a night for optimal health body brain memory. With respect to memory, let me give you three things that are happening while you're asleep. So I used to think before I knew anything, that you're not doing anything while you sleep. It's a big waste of time. Right, I'll sleep when i'm dead, But you're very biologically busy while you sleep. And so, okay, what's going on in your brain with respect to memory, So while you sleep, the information, the sites, the sounds, the experience is the knowledge that you paid attention to that was new and meaningful to you during the day gets consolidated into a stable, lasting alteration and neural connections. It gets consolidated into a memory by your hippocampus while you're asleep. So if you don't get a full night sleep. When you wake up the next day, your hippocampus might not have had enough time to do its job fully and so you might not your memories from yesterday might not be fully formed or is strongly formed, or they some might be missing, they might not have been formed at all. So that's one reason. The second reason is if you don't get it, if you've had a terrible night's sleep, your frontal cortex is going to be dragging itself to its day job tomorrow. And it is like, this is the part of your brain that is in charge of paying attention. And if I can't pay attention today, then what am I not going to be able to make today new memories? The first necessary ingredient in creating a new memory that can be consciously retrieved later is attention, So you need it for that. And then the last the third thing I want to talk about that is super important that's going on while you sleep with respect to memory has to do with Alzheimer's. So while you sleep, when you're in slow wave deep sleep, there are cells in your brain called glial cells. These are the janitors the sewage and sanitation department of your brain. They get busy clearing away all the metabolic debris that accumulated in your brain while you were in the business is being awake, and one of the things that clears away is a protein called amyloid. Now, amoid is sticky, and if it doesn't get cleared away, it binds to itself informs plaques, and if enough of these plaques accumulate over time, you will get Alzheimer's. The good news is it takes fifteen to twenty years of that accumulation before you reach a tipping point and get to Alzheimer's, So we've got time. If you had a bad night's sleep last night does not mean you're getting Alzheimer's tomorrow. But so for me, this has meant that I've made sleep a priority. Like I try to stop scrolling mindlessly on Instagram at the end of the night and like go to bad Lisa, like stop it. Caffeine. Caffeine's awesome for your memory. It helps you pay attention, which helps you form new memories. But it also can keep you awake. So it competes with a molecule called a denisin, which a denison is a molecule that helps you get drowsy and fall asleep and caffeine counters that. So the half life of caffeine is five hours. So if I have a cup of cappuccino after dinner at seven pm, I'll still have thirty two milligrams of caffeine buzzing around my brain at midnight. It might keep me from falling asleep. So if you're having trouble, like, maybe back up your caffeine consumption to earlier in the day if you make it a priority. There are lots of tools and tips for improving your sleep. Yeah, what constitutes a good night of sleep? Though? I know that sounds like a simple question. But I can get in bed at ten o'clock and maybe I fall asleep, well, and then I'm just tossing and turning, and you know it's not a good night's sleep. But we're talking about deep ram sleep. I mean what all? Right? So all of it so different things happen in different phases, and they all are They're not useless there, they have specific functions and so this is again where you can get involved in your health. Right. So they have wearable apps now that keep track of like how many times are you waking up in the night? If you drink alcohol right before bed, it will interfere with REM sleep and you'll be restless when you would normally be in REM. You also might have to get up to pea a few times. So there are things that we might be doing that are like getting in the way of the best night's sleep and knowing that information. If you feel exhausted when you wake up in the morning, like maybe you have some sleep apnia. We don't know, but there we can now look into that and say, okay, how do I address it? I mean basically evolved. There is sort of like a rule rules of thumb for good sleep, and it's you don't eat like two hours before you go to bed, even more I think probably three hours. You don't drink two or three hours before you just sleep anything but water like a tea, an herbal tea. Your room should be cold, you should have it should be like anywhere from sixty nine to seventy one degrees. You should have your blackout curtains and then they're and no kids and no kids, I know, and then you get out of your things. It can help aide you, like you can have any sort of like sleep calm, magnesium or things that can help with supporting the drowsiness. The drowsiness right, the black out shades are perfect, like you want. If you're staring at your screen until the moment you go to bed, your brain doesn't say melatonin levels. Like, I don't know what to do. I've been up for a lot of time, hours, but the bright light is telling me the south. What about? What about? What about weed? You know? I mean everyone is smoking weed, eating weed to go to sleep these days. It's it's you know, this is what's happening. I know the science isn't quite there on cannabis. I know it is on alcohol and sleep. I've read a couple of things. So what what do you know about that? Like, I don't know. I don't know enough to speak intelligently about that. I do know that, you know, it helps with anxiety, and anxiety can keep people awake. I don't know if it interferes with any of the sleep suck cycle. It might not, it might be okay. I do know that the you know, the the sleep aids, the sleeping pills that are on the market right now are not good. You're getting the quality of your sleep is it's got to knock you unconscious, But the quality of your sleep. You're not going to get the restorative and all of the biological goodness. What about like melatonin? Melotone's good, Okay, you want to know how much and the timing of it, and so, you know, I would ask my primary care doctor like, hey, I want to supplement with melatonin, or you know, find find someone who understands when and how much to take to go. It's not gonna hurt you if you do it wrong, but you might not be getting the optimal results if you're taking it the wrong time in the evening. I mean, I love hearing this because it just sort of it's one of those things where everybody, like you said, wants the easy way out. I get asked all the time about these things, and I'm like, you know, how do you lose wait, how do you balance your life? How do you stay happy? How do you stay less anxious? How do you stay balanced? And you're like, guys, none of this, there's no like little pill that's going to help you. Do you have I don't. I don't. I don't know how to hell anything. No. But the thing it's like, at the end of the day, like you actually have to make it happen. You have to work out. Let's talk about activity too. I want that's really important. So let's hit exercise because again I have some specifics around this, like like the nine second breathing thing, like you know what you can do to get better sleep and making it a priority. I think there's some things here that we can unpack that can be helpful, because again I think everybody knows they're supposed to be exercised, but they fight it. They fight out. So we know that people who exercise regularly are decreasing their risk of Alzheimer's by anywhere from a third to a half. Now, if I told you I had a pill that will reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by a half, would you take it? Heck? Yeah? So here's the deal. So, so what do I mean by exercise? And there's lots of kinds of exercise that will work, but at a minimum, a brisk daily walk for four to five days a week will be enough to reduce this risk of Alzheimer's. What it is walking like you're in a hurry, like you late for a meeting. Here's another interesting thing. We know that being socially isolated is stressful and bad for your memory and risk of Alzheimer's. We know that that increases your risk. So if you can add to your daily walk walking with a friend, you'll be in conversation, a conversation that has never happened before. So it's new and interesting, possibly emotional and meaningful. So oh, I'm giving my brain a chance to remember something today. So I'm I'm combating social isolation. I'm exercising. I'm giving my brain something to do. And you could combine it with walking somewhere new. Because if you're in your neighborhood, you've already seen it all. You've already been there, done that. You're not going to pay attention really to any thing in your route. But if you go, oh, let's go downtown today and walk. Let's go to the beach and walk. Let's go to a different neighborhood and look at the houses, something different, You're giving your brain lots of really interesting, complex, nuanced information and activating lots and lots of connections. Fun. And how long is a good amount of time for that brisk walk. Thirty minutes is kind of what we're saying is minimum. But then there's other opportunities to like you know, so I grew up playing sports, so I like to play stuff. So like right now I'm playing pickleball with friends, and I love to dance and I like to be active. But for people who don't have that as a way of life, like, how can you even introduce like small amounts of new movement in your day? Right? So, like can you dance while you're folding the laundry, Like put on your favorite songs and move. See if there's something fun that you can play in your community. Pickleball. I used to call it elderly tennis before I ever played it, and I just started playing this year and it is it's so fun. Oh it's it's it's huge right now, I mean, pickleball is blowing up. Everyone is playing pickleball. If I could, real quick just go back to sort of memory and how it exists and then why sometimes it goes away when talking or experiencing talking about or experiencing trauma. You know, how that something happens, some abuse or whatever it is, and boom that memory is now gone, at least not gone, but you do not remember it. Why and what happens, So we don't entirely know all of the reasons for this, but we have very good hypotheses, and so it can actually go either way. So on the one hand, it can be repressed and it's a memory that you don't have easy access to it anymore and might actually be pruned away to some extent, or the converse can happen, which is you can't stop remembering it. Right, This is what pe TSD tends to be, is like I can't stop perseverating on that memory. I can't stop reliving the emotional content of that memory. So for the folks who can't remember what happened, it's because so we remember, we remember what we repeat. Okay, So if I you know, if I got divorced and the situation's horrible and he cheated on me and he's a terrible person, and I just keep talking about it to all my girlfriends and my mother and everybody, I'm just reinforcing and strengthening every sort of detail of this memory. Right, if I have the willpower to leave it alone, I'll remember that I got divorced, but I will actually forget a lot of the details of it because I haven't revisited those those neural connections, and so they're kind of weak and wimpy. Now, if it's really really traumatic, then there is probably a lot of shame attached to it. It's I may never have spoken of it. If I never speak, it has never had a chance to be repeated. So it might be kind of very, very isolated as a memory. There's no associations beyond that thing that happened, and I've never revisited it. It's super hard for me to get to recall that memory again. Is there some sort of protective mechanism there, some sort of president like you know, to like your preserving self? In some way, it can also have to do with if you don't tell the story of what happened, either to yourself or allowed to others, then you're not It doesn't really form as a full memory in some ways, like if you don't have the language to describe what happened, if you don't attach things to it, it becomes something that's very difficult to access again. And so we've all had these moments. I mean for those who haven't had trauma, who might be wondering how this could happen, And it's like if you don't find the right like if you in therapy you find the right cues, you find the right context, the information that can trigger the recall of that memory might seem somewhat magical and specific to trauma, but for everyone else, it's like, Okay, say you grew up somewhere different than you live now. Say, just to be vivid about it, say you grew up in rural Vermont, but you spent your entire adult life living in New York City and someone asked you to you know, what was your childhood like? And you know it's weird. I don't really remember much of my childhood at all. I don't remember my childhood. I couldn't really tell you much of anything. I don't know. Your life today is surrounded by skyscrapers and taxi cabs and lots of suits and tons of crowds. If you were to go back to your childhood neighborhood, the memories would just they would start coming. It's like, oh, there's there's the weeping willow tree, or I had my first kiss under that tree, or there is where Joey broke his leg, and that's my neighbor missus daily. And so without those cues, without the like if your therapist is asking you the right question, if the right associated neuron gets activated, it might then. Now, but this is an important question because what's happening is, as I'm hearing all of this, I'm having all of these very interesting, kind of a little concerning thoughts because if memory can deceive us, if we have a memory but it's not, it's not the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me, God. You know, there's so much and so many things that can happen that are perceived differently from both sides. You know. So when we're talking about a time when we're in the middle of all of the Me Too movement and women are coming out after twenty years saying this was my experience, and then you have a man saying I would never I don't know. You know, how do we know that someone's experience really is exactly what happened? So this is a big question, and I have I think I have a really good answer for you, and it is concerning. Is troubling. So here's the deal, right, So our memory, we all think that memory is this perfect thing, or we're striving to have perfect memory, but nobody has perfect memory, and in fact, the memory for what happened is particularly vulnerable to editing. So your memory for stuff you know is solid through stable over the years. So if you memorize six times six is thirty six when you were in third grade, when you're eighty, it's not at risk for becoming six times six is seventy five. Like, it's still going to be the same muscle memory, super stable over time. So if I learned this is where the expression just like riding a bike, right, So if I learned how to ride a bike, I could go twenty years without riding a bike. I'll get on that bike and I'll still know how to do it right, So I'll know how to type my whole life once I've learned. Your memories for what happened are strange. So it turns out that every time I recall a memory for something that happened, it has the ability to add information leave out information. If I'm twenty years older and I have different perspective and opinion now than I did, then if my brothers are available and he says, oh no, no, this also happened. Oh yeah, that's right. I believe in my ad that it has the ability to be morphed in some way. And then when I go to restore that memory, it writes over the original, the previous version. So now you've got version two point zero and version one is gone. So you memories for what happened can drift further and further away from the slice of reality that you originally paid attention to and remembered. So this is why I witness testimony alone is not ideal. I mean, the studies have been shown it's like it's our memories for what happened are very much influenced by language of the people questioning us. There's a gray area that you're sort of like, you know, how how are you able to really kind of determine someone's memory as being one hundred percent? You know, it's not it's not one hundred percent, And so we can be helped by you know, did someone else witness the same event? Do you keep a diary? Because again, if if I'm writing down at least what I think I remember what I experienced from you know, a few hours ago, that can be relied upon more than what I remember thirty years from now. But yeah, even in the moment, there's so many studies on this. There's a psychologist name Elizabeth Loftis who studies this in great detail. And so if I were to show you a video of a car accident and five minutes later ask you how fast. If I asked you, Kate, how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other, and then Oliver, I asked you how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other. Kate you would say they were going twenty miles an hour, and Oliver you'd say they were going forty. My substitution of that single verb can influence your recollection of what you saw, your memory of what happened. So it's super easy to manipulate memory for what happened. Did memory experts like yourself ever get called to testify in trials and stuff? I mean a lot of them do, yes, Yeah, And it makes sense. It's like, there's so many studies that show that we get confused and if we listen to someone else's version of what happened, we might incorporate some of that into our own memory, so our flash full memories. Right. So the So there was a study I included in the book of the Spatial Challenger explosion, and at Emory College the psych professors gathered the psych one oh one students. So these are nineteen and twenty year old brains, not elderly brains. These are young people. They asked, Okay, where were you, who were you with? You know, what time of day was it, and how'd you feel? And they asked them this twenty four hours after the explosion. They had these same kids back two and a half years later, gave them the same questionnaire. Seventy five percent of them didn't even remember taking this quiz, none of them, None of them gave answers to this questionnaire that one hundred percent matched their original answer. Wow. And then when the wower part of this is then when shown their original answers in their own handwriting, they couldn't. It completely stumped them. It was like, how can that be? But that's not what I remember happening. And they believed the version that lives in their brain now because that's your memory. So this must This is great news because when Oliver tries to tell me again that like, that's not what happened, I'm gonna be like, all right, I just you know what, you don't know what they're talking about. It goes both it goes both ways. Yeah, you don't know. Basically, we're all living a fucking lie. I mean, that's basically what this comes down to. We're all living a lot. I guess the question is like, I don't remember what really happened? Well, yeah, right, So there's this sort of like disturbing, alarming aspect of this, especially if you get into sort of legal issues, but just if you're thinking about your day to day relationships, right with your sibling, with your spouse, if you guys are lock torns over a memory of something that happened. I like knowing this because I let go of my death grip bought it and go eh, we're probably both wrong. Who cares? Yeah? Right, well, I mean honestly, it's great therapy for relationships because fights are always like I did not say that, and then they're like, yes you did, and no I didn't do. Well, that's why they say stay out of content and stick with your feelings, right yeah, because you're all wrong. You're all wrong, none of you are right. Great courses plus is one of my go tos in the car and then even before bed, when I'm in bed, throw my headphones and throw my headphones on and listen to this. It's really an amazing experience, and they've got an app for this as well. I feel like I'm going back to college without all the bullshit curriculum honestly, so the Great Courses plus what it does is it basically provides you thousands of hours of content across hundreds and hundreds of topics, you know, travel, photography, cooking, whatever it is. So I'm gonna explain what I'm listening to right now, Kate, this is real. It's a course called Understanding the Mysteries of Human Being Behavior and this actually pertains to even our podcast. They answer questions like why siblings are so different? Is it nature or nurture? What makes people happy? How much do many really differ. It's fascinating, it is. And there's also as simple as like I was driving, you know, I love to go out to the desert and it's about a two hour plus drive and I was listening just to American history. You know, there's some great professors around the country that are on there and they give these lectures and I was just like, this is awesome, and they're fun bites, you know what I mean. It's these It's like thirty minutes and you know, you can try it out. And they're like, ill listen to two or three of these, not into it, Let's move on to the next. It's really fluid. It's a great interface. It's the feeling of learning something new, and it's making it easy. I really love this. It's a streaming service and we've got this incredible deal for our listeners. You get a free trial, plus you get twenty percent off when you sign up for the annual membership. But you got to go to our special URL and that's the Great Coursesplus dot Com slash Sibling. Okay, that's a world of knowledge for less than what most of us pay on coffee each month. Think about that for a second. So again, that's the Great coursesplus dot Com slash Sibling. Let me say one more thing. So you have access to video, audio and guidebooks. You can switch from video to audio if you want to listen to it if you're in your car. There's new content that's added every month. You can listen watch anywhere with the Great Courses plus app. Go get it, Go get it now. You'll love this. I prompt so rider. Actually, so he's been using it. Hold on, Kate, Kate, tell the audience what he's been using so oh oh curoology. It's a it's basically a custom skincare formula made for your team. And Rider is pretty lucky, Like he has a pretty pretty good skin, but you know, like most teens, he's got a combination of Sometimes he's got a lot more pimples than he'd like. He's gonna kill me for talking about this, but I'm gonna do it anyway. The licensed dermatology provider evaluates the skin profile, skin type, medical history, and then prescribes a custom mix of three active ingredients. So whether the teen is up against acne, dark spots, uneven texture, they sort of get a simplified, all in one solution made for them and no offer us visit, no copay. Your teens provider has their back. They can adjust the formula as their skin changes. This is so great. Yeah, it's really cool. God, I wish we had this one when when when we were teenagers. You're you got to get your child's treatment plan right, okay, And the way to do that you start by answering questions online about their skin and then sending in a couple photos to cuology. You know, I think, I think, honestly, this is one of those things like when rider's been using it, you can see a difference. As a part of your teen's trial, they'll get a month's supply of custom skincare formula along with a cleanser and moisturizer designed by Cuology dermatologists. As the end of the trial period approaches, you're gonna have the option to adjust the plan now. After that, you'll receive your supply every two months, hassle free and delivered to your door. Pause or cancel any time you say, I just pause there m hm exactly. So go to curroology dot com slash sibling for a free thirty day trial. Just pay for shipping and handling four ninety five. That's c U R O l O g Y dot com slash sibling To unlock your free thirty day trial, see croology dot com for all the details. There have to be moments where someone might say something to you and you're like, that's that's nuts, Like you're that's not even that doesn't even fit into the narrative of what was happening in the moment. Absolutely absolutely, And this is this is part of how the memories for stuff that happened, your episodic memory can drift further and further away from what actually happened over time. So if the person who's talking to you talked about this story and thought about it a lot and gabbed about it in line with the telephone game, it's gonna become something totally weird. Or it's like histrionic by nature, like con going over something you know, rather than trying to be right, like in terms of whose memory is? Right? Am I right? Or are you right? It's almost like you can when you're locked horns like this, you can kind of toss it out the window and say, well, memory is probably this kind of memory is probably wrong. And what I'm looking and what I'm looking for from you is the emotional validation. Right, That's the disconnect. The disconnect isn't really about what happened is about right, It's not even about the actual physical memory. It's more about, well, this is how I felt in that moment. Yes, aside from what the read the truth is of what the exact memory was, I know that this feeling is real, which is what people latch onto, and they latch onto the problem. I mean, this is a problem because this was what I'm latching onto and I have to hold this and you're like, but like it. I don't. I don't see it that way. I can't hold onto that memory because it's not mine. So what's the solution. I find that more people get into arguments and relationships end because they remember something that happened versus they're actually working through something through feelings. Does that make sense? It does. So you give these people my book and you tell them that you're praying for what happened is inaccurate, and we're going to talk about how we feel right exactly. I I have a question off topic from this blackout drunk. Yeah, oh what goes on? Because it is about memory and I, by the way, I don't. I do not have this, but I know a lot of people who do. And you know, it's boom they wake up. I don't remember anything. I can't pull it back. Yeah. So your hippocampus goes offline when you're that truck, when your blood alcohol level reaches a certain point, and it's very varies in different people. When your hippocampus is soaking in booze, when your hippo campus is soaking in booze, it goes offline. It shuts down and I don't know the molecular mechanisms of that. I don't know if anybody does, but I do know that much. And so what does that mean? That means that you cannot consolidate or form any new memories. So what that means is that everything that your eyes are seeing that you're conscious of, because you're still moving through the day and night, you're still doing all the things, but your hippocampus can't consolidate any of those sites, sound, smells, feelings, or information into a consciously held lasting memory. So you're doing all of this with no ability to remember any of it. Sure, what was the most shocking kind of realization when you're doing all your research on memory that for yourself, Like, what was the one thing that you were like, I would have never thought that our brains had this capacity. I mean, I think the most fact fascinating thing was learning about the people who have highly superior autobiographical memory. These are people who do remember the details of every day, even if it's boring, unemotional, and not significant. Mary Lou Henner I think her name is Mary Lou Henner. Yes, yes, So I interviewed her for the book. She's in the book and I could. I could not stump her. It was hysterical. I was giving her all these dates. Wow, instantly knew the day of the week, Here was the weather, Here's what I was doing, Here's what I was wearing, like all of it. Here's what was happening in the news. Oh my god, that's so fun. Yeah. And so for her, it's really a superpower. And in part it's a superpower because she's such an optimistic, positive person. It's okay, ready again, you remember what you pay attention to. This isn't just like, oh, where'd I put my phone? Where'd I put my glasses? My keys? Where'd I park my car? Right? Those things go missing not because you have Alzheimer's. It's because it's a symptom of distraction, not a symptom of memory loss. Like I didn't pay attention to where I put it, can't find it. But it also has to do with like are you an optimist? Do you pay attention to do you practice gratitude? Do you pay attention to the abundance and the joy and the awe and the magic? Or are you focused on all the things you don't have and the scarcity and the injustices and all of the you know, horrible moments, the breakups and the bad days. So Mary Lou is an optimist and so she doesn't mind remembering every day because she really just she focuses on the ones that were great. Some people with highly superior autobiographical memory can't stop reliving the worst days of their life in vivid, specific detail, and for them this is a curse. So that translates to all of us though. So right, so I don't have highly superior, highly superior autobiographical memory. I can't remember what happened last Wednesday. But I also the memories that I do keep tend to be the ones I pay attention to, are the ones I pay attention to, and these tend to be really positive, joyful, good stuff. Let's talk about lines for a second, because it's sort of an interesting Some people have to learn that they can learn their lines and they know them like the back of their head, and they remember them because they've just they've had to really within within two seconds, like some people can read it and boom it. Well, what I'm saying is there's people who learn them and really learn them and have to learn them intensively, and they remember them for long periods of time. Then there's people like me who if you could give me a whole monologue, I could memory this, memorize it this morning, and shoot it in an hour. But then if you tell me two days later, hey, let's do that scene again, it's like I'll have to recall. It'll take me a second. You know, the same thing, but it's not like ingrained in my brain. Then there's people like Oliver who just like have such a hard time actually memorizing. And is that is that because what you were saying that it's it's the visual, it's the visual connection to it can be So for a memory, for this kind of memorizing, we got to get the information into the brain and then we have to be able to get it out. And there are different strategies for both of those steps. And some people are really good at some aspects and some people are better at others. So one way to get it in is to just hammer it over and over, repeat it, repeat it, repeat it so neurons that neural connections that are repeatedly activated becomes stronger. So this the better way, though, actually isn't just to put the information in to memorize it. It's to reverse it and get the information out. So this is self testing. Self testing works better than just passively rereading the information over again. So this is like flash cards, so Oliver, it's it's like, okay, what's the next line? Do I know it? Try to recall it, try to retrieve it. So go and reverse like, fetch that memory and then if you were able to do it, ooh, that's stronger than just reading the line again. If the information that you're trying to remember is somehow you can make it visual. So if a lot of people do this very easily, Oh, I can imagine that. I can see it and then relate it to you. So you're more likely to remember something that's personal. Then that's not personal. So right, you remember every time you wash the dishes, but you might not remember every time your your spouse or your kid wash the dishes. Right, so you remember what's personal too. So if you can make the material associated with other memories in your brain that are already strong, it's going to help you. So the more you can identify with the material and make it about you and your life and things that you know visual put it in his place, like, oh, I can picture this in my own house, So the more that you can attach to this, Oh, this reminds me of a song when I was sixteen when I was seeing that girlfriend and oh I lived in Washington, d C. And oh, like so like it can it'll help you remember the lines. Some of us don't need all of that. You can just like hammer it over and over and your neurons will do it. But then, like Kate just said, so maybe that's good at getting the memory in, but I haven't really created a lot of robust, interesting, rich details associated with it, So now it might be kind of tough to retrieve it because it just kind of exists on its own, Whereas if I had a lot of attachments to it, right, lots of embellishments, things that are associated with it, it might then really help me retrieve it later. I think that's a really great thing for anyone in school, or for anyone in the arts, that you know what I mean. Even for remembering names. It's like sometimes when I remember when i I've always in my mind, I tell myself I'm terrible at names. And then someone said, we'll just when someone says what their name is, just like think of it as someone that you know or if it sounds like someone you know, remember like connect it to something else, and now that's you know. It's actually a really good tool for It's one of those things when people are talking about, you know, everyone, when you read those books like How to Succeed, remember people's names. Speak their name when you're talking to them. So like if someone says, Hi, my name is Sarah, you're like, oh, Sarah, it's so nice to meet you. Yes, yes, you're hitting all of this exactly right. So this is so wise because yes, when you say it out loud, you're giving your brain another experience with it. Oh you're hearing it again. Oh, there it is again, Sarah. So it's going it's activating those neurons again. Proper nouns are super hard for our brains to remember. So you can think like proper nouns like names, movie titles, book titles, cities. They're kind of they're abstract, made up concepts. You can think of them as living in a house in a neurological cul de sac in your brain. You know, they might be associated with other things, but ultimately there's only one way to get to that house at the end of the street. Super hard to retrieve it and once you've put once you've made the memory. Whereas common names, common nouns like spoon, dish, phone, computer, those live in main street USA, millions of intersections in and out. There's a lot of ways to get there. This is why we often have that tip of the tongue like, oh my god, what's his name? Oh my gosh, Yeah, I can't get there. What is it? It'll come to me, It'll come to me. That's what I'm got to let go. And then you gotta let go, and you know, you do, like that's the best. The best strategy when that happens actually is either google it and it's okay too. You will. It's not cheating, It does not make you dumber, and it's not making your memory worse. It is. This is a normal Glitchen memory retrieval. It's not Alzheimer's. Actually, leaving it alone is great because here's what's going on. If you don't leave it alone, you've probably landed on a loosely related word, something similar in sound or meaning, or has the first the same first letter, and your brain is like hooked into that. We call it the ugly sister of the target and it's searching that other neural nameighborhood. Now. So like one time I couldn't come up with the name of the famous surfer and I said, oh, is his name Lance Laird Hamilton. It's Laird Hamilton. But I came up with Lance, which sent Actually it was my boyfriend sent his brain to Lance Armstrong. And so now we're like, you know, we're in that neighborhood of cycling tour de fonts. Their brain's everywhere, so you gotta so you gotta like stop it because like call off the hunt, and then your brain can stop perseverating in the wrong neighborhood. And that's why later on, like hours later, it'll just oh, there it is. What about multitasking? So I my thing was is that women are always like, oh, we're great multitaskers and we're this, and we're that, and I when people say that to me, I'm like, I am the worst multitasker. I don't want to do it. I'm not interested in doing it. Kate is on the phone, texting or whatever. That's it. You can't be like hey Kate, Hey Kate, Hey Kate. It's almost like her ears just shut off. Yeah, how everybody don't bother me when I'm doing I'm not listening. I am totally engaged in something else. What are your thoughts on multitasking? And is it good? Is it bad? Is it harmful for our memory? So here's the deal. Like again, it's this misconception that's out there. We tend to brag about our ability to multitask, like this is this amazing superpower, and yet what we're doing, we're short changing ourselves in a number of ways. But with respect to memory, again, you can only remember what you're paying attention to. That's the gateway to memory. Okay, So I can't remember anything about this present moment for more than fifteen to thirty seconds. If I don't pay attention to it, then I'll just go into the ethers. It's gone. I can drive over a really big bridge, right. I can drive over the bridge with my eyes open and not remember having driven over it. I can be ten minutes down the road and be like, where am I did I go over the bridge because I wasn't paying attention to it. I was lost in thought. I was listening to an audiobook. I've seen that bridge before. It's not interesting. Wow, Right, So you can't remember what's right in front of you if you don't pay attention to it. So, if you're trying to do five things at once, you are spreading your attention thinly over each of those things. You're giving each of them a little bit of your attention, but not really powerfully to any single one. And so if you remember any one of those things later, it won't be very strong. It will be those connections will be weak. That memory might be really tough to retrieve, it might not last forever and ever so you might not remember it at all. So if you really want to remember what you're doing, it's about being present, It's about paying attention to one thing at a time. It really is, so yay yeah for you. I think that's really interesting. I think people will love to hear that, because you know, I know, for me, restructuring my days to actually spend on one thing, you know, knowing that everything's going to be focused on that has been so much more help to everybody benefits of journaling. So I I it's one of those things for me that I've always loved doing. I have a ton of journals. I'm terrible at being diligent about it. I wish I was more. I wish I was. I was more strict with myself about journaling. Does that help us with our memory? Is that a great thing to be doing for our brains? Yes? It is, And so it's interesting though, So when you write something down about what, So, I'm gonna try if I'm gonna go to before I go to bed tonight, I'm gonna journal what happened today. I'm choosing certain parts of what happened today. I'm not writing everything right. I'm not the courtroom stenographer. Again, your brain is not a video camera. I am selecting certain details of today and how I felt about it to write down. In doing so, I will make it more difficult for me to remember what I did not include, But I will better remember what I included the act of writing it down That reinforces my experience and the knowledge and how I felt about it to begin with. And I'll probably go back and read that journal at some point. So every time I do that, I am now reinforcing those neural connections and making that memory stronger. But anything I left out is now going to be tougher for me to if I need a detail I didn't include later. Some's like oh remember we you know, we went to dinner in the North End that night, but I didn't write that in my journal for some reason. I'll be I don't remember that. Actually, oh I don't think that happened. So but it does help. And this is why, you know, social media has a lot of dark side, but on the upside, it can really help with memory because it is somewhat like journaling. Right, we have the chronology of what happened. If you post regular Lisa on Instagram, you get the photos. You might geotag your location, I'll write some details about what happened. And now if you scroll through your own profile, your own page, you have a nice little photo album and little sort of visual journal of what of your memory is. That could help help you keep those It's also it's also technology can probably help with the memory. Like if you really wanted to journal every day in a way where you remembered things that throughout the day, if you just you could just dictate it into your notes. You know, talk with Lisa had the most amazing conversation about memory and her new book. You know, the next little thing happens, you love it. You sit in the car, You're like, oh, my little girl just said this. It was the cutest thing on the planet, you know, and then go back at night and write it down. That's also if you're someone who really wants to focus on that. I have a quick question our brains. I guess. I guess we can say that our brains have been evolving over the last three hundred thousand years. Am I correct about that? There's an evolutionary process to that organ definitely? Okay, So given the fact that we are in a new age as far as as technology, technology goes, as far as the screens that we're looking at and our children, our brains are probably evolving some way good or bad into something different. I mean, have you studied this at all or have any hypothesis as to sort of what might be happening. Because I'm concerned with my not concern but I look at my kids and they're on their phones, and they're on there, they're so deep in I mean, is this changing chemistry at all? Yeah? And so you don't even have to think about this in terms of evolution. You can just think of it in terms of your your own individual life and your kid's own individual life. So your brain again, brain body connection like, so we know we influence our heart health. We know we can influence you know, our reproductive parts. We know we can influence our brain, and so what we do changes our brain. Every time you make a memory, you are changing your brain. You are making long lasting, stable alter rations and neural connections that did not exist before. Your brain is different every single day based on what happens and how you live. So how we live now is really different than how we lived one hundred years ago. And so it does affect our brain. So does it hurt it or help it? You know, in some ways we could argue both sides of that fence. So our attention spans are definitely decreasing. Our brain's ability to sustain lasting attention as a culture is diminishing. So you know, when ted talks first started, they were around twenty minutes long. I just gave one the other day and they told me that my time had to be within seven minutes, so right, like bite sized chunks, Like, God bless the podcasts out there, because we're reaching people who still know how to pay attention for more than five minutes at a time. But so a lot of our are the advertising, the way we use social media. The way you tube works is it's quick, it's snappy, it's you know, can we hold your attention for five minutes? So it's different than when we were growing up, right, or when I was growing up and you had to wait once a year to watch the Wizard of Oz and you sat in front of that TV and you watched all the commercials and the whole thing. Oh now, yeah, I know. So now it's different. And so your brain is not a static blob of pink goo in your head. It is a very dynamic organ that changes in response to everything we experience. I just wonder if we're breeding narcissists, because we're just we're constantly looking at ourselves, these kids and of reevaluating themselves on videos and pictures, and it's so immediate, and how is that? How are we not breeding a bunch of little bastard narcissists. There are mental health consequences to social media, for sure, and for some people this has become a very vulnerable place for depression and anxiety mood disorders. And you know, maybe some narcissism is on the uptick as well. I don't know, but I think that it does that here in lies like the dilemma for every parent to have to look at that, and it's our job to hopefully create an environment where, yes, our children are connecting to each other and everybody puts their phones down, and you have traditions and you know, whether that be through your religion or through just your family traditions like that that we remain connective and off of our off of our tablets. I mean, but that's a whole other podcast. Yes, and it's actually it's like to reel it back into memory for a second. So like if I'm constantly on my phone, so you know, if I if you want to build, if you want to create rich, deep, amazing memories of what has is happening in your life, then you've got to be available to what's happening in the three dimensional world world. So if I'm in Starbucks line on my phone scrolling through Facebook, my best friend from kindergarten could be in the line behind me, but I don't notice her because my head is in my phone. So even just a simple example like that, like can you be available to the life you're living? Yes, side of the screen, love it because then you will remember more I am available to the life I'm living before we go. Any tips for people out there for boosting their memory, strengthening their hippocampus, you know, and obviously get throwing the read your book, but anything that you could just gift out to our listeners. Yeah, so we've already talked about some of these, but super quick, get a good night's sleep, exercise every day. If you can eat a healthy whole food's colorful diet, eat the rainbow. Manage your stress, breathing it out through your nose. Count of nine people. You have time for that. If you want to remember more of what's going on, what you're studying, what happened, make it meaningful, feel it. We better remember something that's emotional versus not emotional, So don't be afraid to feel things. Repeat it, rehearse it, so say it again, do it again, look at it again, put it on write down in your journal. We practice, So if you're trying to learn how to do something, practice makes perfect. That saying actually works, So do it again and again and you will remember it better. You'll remember it even better after a night's sleep. So if you're learning to play for release on the piano and you're struggling and each step is labored, and you have to look at the sheet music. You will improve just after a good night's sleep. It will consolidate those that memory into a choreography that's memorized while you sleep. What else, visualize it, make it and make the visualization weird. So again we we we remember what's surprising and new, and what surprising can be kind of bizarre or disgusting or sexy or like not just plain old, plain old. So I tell people I love this one. So okay, I need to remember to buy milk at the store and say I don't write it down, which I should, because you should always write down what you plan to do later. So your memories for what you need to do later suck. Write it down people. That's not cheating, that's good practice. But say, don't I need to buy milk and I'm gonna forget to buy it probably if I don't write it down or attach some visual image to it, make it weird and put it somewhere that I know. So here's what I imagined. I imagine Dwayne the Rock Johnson milking a cow. It's standing on my kitchen table, and Tina Fey is lying on the table with her mouth open and the milk is just like overflowing, and this is very weird and I don't even want to get into so I did not forget. I know it's kind of gross. I did not forget the milk that day, So yeah, make it. Make it a little embarrassing, right, I made you feel something right now, right, You're like, oh right, so you're gonna look at that milk very differently. I know you just felt something and that will make it memorable. By the way, that should be a milk commercial, because yes, because I will definitely buy that milk. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Lisa. This was awesome and so amazing, so great, so much fun. It's so grateful for you coming on. And I can't wait to talk to you more because I have so many more questions. So I hope we get to do this again at some point. I know, me too, Hey, me too, that would be fun. Thank you so much. Yay, thank you, thank you. Sibling. Revelry is executive produced by Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. The producer is Alison President, editor is Josh Wendish. Music by Mark Hudson aka Uncle Mark. If you want to show us some love rate the show and leave us a review. 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