Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Davis, Charles W Chuck Bryant. I remembered your name, and this is stuff you should know. Lizzy, had you cracked up there? If that makes it into the gut, it's not going to because that was pre hay and welcome to the podcast. Everything before that I always gets cut out. You know that. I don't think a little giggle beforehand might be in. We would be fired if we didn't cut out everything that came before that, right, maybe, Chuck, you ever heard of a guy named Nicolas Carr? Yeah? Sure, I know you. Have you ever heard of a little rag called The Atlantic? Yes? I have. Back in two thousand and eight, those two things collided, Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic and he had a very great UM headlined article called his Google making Us Stupid and Nicholas Carr. He went on to write a book. He followed that normal process where like you're writing the book and you're like, I need some extra cash, so I'll excerpt this or rewrite you know, like fifteen pages of it, celts to the Atlantic or whatever. We need to get in that gig. Well, we have to write a book or be writing a book. I write a book. We should do that. But it was I can't remember what the book was was called. But the article actually made a bigger splash than the book. Din But basically he was saying, like, we are re configuring the way we learn through our interactions with the internet. Um, Like, there's constantly things trying to get our attention on a web page. You know, it's not like a book with with without pictures or um, you know, flashing lights, that kind of thing. We we read horizontally he put it, rather than vertically, meaning you know, we just kind of skimmed the surface of a bunch of different stuff rather than really deeply get into one thing. Action which helps flex the imagination. Um is pretty much non existent on the web unless you're like into live journal, you know, Harry Potter erotica. Right. So, but at the basis of his argument is Google making a stupid was the idea that it's actually reforming the way we form memories that Google he chose Google, You know, just to get a headline, as the editor did. But um, the the idea that the internet, the way we read, is re changing or changing the way that we absorb information and therefore form memory. It says a lot that he was asking if it's making as stupid because we here in the West equate memory a good memory, too, intelligence, too smart. Um, I guess what I'm trying to drive at, very clumsily, is how does memory work? I thought that was a great set up, And who knows what the heck we're gonna look like in a hundred years as a species, how our brains are gonna be firing, and what the effect it's gonna have on us. We're gonna have mighty humps. Yeah, well that's the thing. I mean, you can you can debate all all day long. Is it stupid? Or are we just in the middle of evolution? Probably in the middle of an evolution. I don't think we're gonna end up like a in idiocricy. You although never possibility, you never know. I watched Idiocracy, so that might mean I'm on that road myself. It's a great movie. Did you like it? I did. I thought it was what it was, But like the one joke premise of most most times when a movie has the one joke premise, that kind of gets old for me. What one joke? Sort of the one joke everybody's stupid? Yeah, it worth than all right? Moving on, memories, Josh, are what makes us who we are if we you know, I imagine if someone has complete amnesia, they usually don't have a sense of self. Well, yeah, you know, it depends if you remember h M. Henry Mullison. No. So he was the patient that proved there's this big debate over when we think of memory, whether there's like one part of the brain that's responsible for memory or whether it's a bunch of different parts of the brain. And he proved that the multiple memory systems works because they used to think like, oh, you just got a big old filing cabinet and your brain just sticks it in whatever filet belongs in and then you go and pull it out when you need it exactly. And that's very it's very sesame street way of putting it. It is, um, But you know, they were working with what they had to work with at the time, and they were wrong. But Hm, like age twenty three, this guy UM who became known as HM. Patient HM had temporal labectomy to cure his epilepsy. Oh, that guy also removed his hippocampus so he could tell you, you you know, where he went to high school, who his oldest friend was, that kind of thing. But he couldn't tell you what he had for lunch that day because he lost the ability to form new memories. So the fact that he could maintain old memories but couldn't form new memories proved that there's multiple systems involved for different types of memory, like Memento. Right, great movie that he would have proven it to a memento did not have Ellen page. No it didn't, So it's on your list of acceptable films. She would have written in by now Um or not. She may just be like, I hate those guys so much. Maybe so uh so, let's let's talk a bit about memory, josh Um. Let's say we were talking about breakfast this morning. If you remember what you had for breakfast, you might think that that is a very simple thing that happened, when in fact, it is very complex reconstruction from different parts of your brain putting together. Maybe the smell of your eggs, of your eggs bacon is octuating you didn't need that slab of ham. What it looked like, maybe, what it felt like, um in your mouth, how it tasted. So you're recalling all these different parts, but not complex thing, not and even just that. I mean, there's so much more to it, the the tablecloth, whether you were angry at the weather guy, to remember even what eggs are. Yeah, you know these memories that go way back, but we we conceive of it as this one little snapshot of a memory called what what you had for breakfast? Right? Um? But all of those different things put together are called neural projections, right chuck, Okay, so go ahead. Well the other instance too, that they always mentioned is riding. You never forget how to ride a bike, and it seems like a very easy thing, but there are so many things going on when you ride a bike. How you get on the bike, how you mount the bike, where your feet go, how you move it forward? Where should I put my hands? Um? What about this car barreling down? I should probably not ride in the center of the road going the wrong way. So it's just like hundreds of memories. I can't put a number on it, you know how many there are? Well, the reason why it's so difficult is because it's this is all a seamless process, right exactly. It ding a bike as if it's one single file that you pull out of your cabinet called ride a bike. Yeah. And at times it's so it's so second nature, it's so natural to us that we kind of detach ourselves from it and call it things like muscle memory. So just things muscle memory. Your muscles are there, they don't have a capacity for member remembering anything well, and we don't even know how we recall still, even though we have a better handle on storage of memory and now, and we should we should disclaim this episode by saying that there is a lot of there's a This is the rough sketch of what we know right now about how we form and retrieve memory, which is more than we've ever known. Yeah, and I think we're hot on the trail. It's really starting to come together and make sense. So should we start with encoding, Yeah, which is basically your senses. It's rooted in your senses. Encoding is the first step to create a memory. It begins with perception. And when we talk about perception, we're talking about your sensory perception, um, right, which like, right now you appear to me as you know, a little scruffy looking good. You've got your braves cap on, almost smile right the the ikea lights gleaming off of your eye, about eyeballs a little bit. All of this is visual information, right, But in my brain it's nothing more than electrical impulses traveling through the optic nerve to my hippocampus. Right right. You might smell me, um, you might. You know. The example they use in the article is the first girlfriend. But that's right on the money, man. I mean, I still remember all that stuff. But when you when you see that first girl that you fall in love with, you know what she looked like, what she smelled like, the first time she shook your hand. I hate to say this, but it's the exact same thing as breakfast this morning or riding the bike. Well true in a way, but there's also a point made later on that we'll talk about that things that are more important to you are more likely to be rooted in your long term memory. So oh yeah, yeah, okay, breakfast is pretty important to me, right? True? Is that that is that that's something been your long term memory though I remember every breakfast I've ever eaten. Okay, it's because you've only had breakfast four times. Uh So where are we within the hippocampus, Well, yeah, we're with encoding. So basically what just happened is the light bouncing off of you that gives you shape, and all that is coming into my eyes and be in transforming into electrical information. It doesn't matter what it is. Like, that's the language of the brain, right, translates information and stores it in the hippocampus initially. Right, that's like the big processing, sorting, routing hub. Yeah. So your hippocampus is like this, uh, this region of the brain shaped like a sea horse, which hence the name um that basically says, okay, so I don't get that part hippocampus. It's not shaped like a hippopotamus, shape like a sea horse. And why Plus the name hippocampus means seahorse. I did not realize that, man, I hope it does. That's how I've always taken it. So let's call it the seahorse a campus. But basically, what the hippocampus does is it takes in all this information, including stuff that I have no idea I'm taking in at the moment um and says this is important, this is an important you can leave this out. Let's send this over here, let's send this over there. Let's create this neural projection by by combining this, this, and this, and it's like basically, the the the man behind the curtain. The hippocampus is the sent center of forming new memories, and along with the frontal cortex, they work in hand in hand at this Yeah, okay, and it's a really efficient way to deal with your surroundings, Chuck, because consider this. Let's say you or I, um, well, let's say we're doing it together. We're coming out of the woods into a meadow and it is um a primal area, and we're scared of bears, so we're scanning the meadow for bears. Right we don't see any bears, but there's birds, there's flowers, there's butterflies, and we're kind of taking in all of these things, but we're not really taking it in because none of them are the bear, which is what we're tasked with finding. Right then, So the the hippocampus isn't in forming any memories of the butterfly or the daisies or whatever. Maybe we would know, oh, well, there's a splash of white against the green, so there are flowers there. If we were asked later on what kind of flowers were in that meadow, we couldn't say. So it's just filtering that what we would consider unnecessary information out exactly. Okay, Um, it travels while we said this perception and encoding is where it starts. But then you have to it has to go somewhere from there, and this is where the chemistry of the brain comes in, which is endlessly fascinating to me. Yes, Josh, we have nerve cells, neurons and these uh, these connect with other cells, not a point called the synapse, right well, which is actually that's funny that the author of this article put it like that because it's actually not a point. It's a gap. You think that all these things connect, but there is a gap, and the leap to the other side. The leap of the gap is uh performed via neurotransmitters that right, and then latched onto by a dentrite. The little feathery things on the cells collect. Yeah, they accept the transmission. Come on in transmission. Welcome to my cell. So Chuck I'm going to give a couple of stature quick. Okay, there's possibly as many as a hundred billion neurons in your brain. It's a lot um. Each of them have many tens of thousands, are many, many thousands of connections up to UM which are synapsis, yes, which are which leads to as many as a quadrillion synapses in the human brain. And they can connect. Is it an infinite amount of times if need be? What do you mean is there any limit to the amount of neural connections these cells can make? Well, I think ten thousand is the high end that I've heard, But I love that you had an answer for that. UM. And they're constantly going to and forming new connections. I think it's something like thirty to sixty times the second. Near neurons are firing all over your head and they're not sentence down. They're always changing, always forming new connections. The more that you do something, the stronger the connection is going to be. We might know that in the real world as practice or repetition, right, but the another word for it is plasticity, where the brain you're the organizational structure of your brain actually changes shape it as as you're saying, like, through practicing something like the repeated firing of a neural connection, right, which is just an electrical impulse that triggers the release of neurotransmitters that crosses synapse are accepted in the den drite right, and the neurotransmitters are the message carried like a certain type of neurotransmit or like dopamine says hey, everything's just ire right um, And this information has just passed along from one neur onto another if the the impulse is strong enough. Right. But then when you do it again and again and again, more channels that allow the neurotransmitters to to be released from one and accepted by another are dug which means that this thing fires more efficiently and all of a sudden after firing them. By practicing your violin this one piece of music slowly over and over again, you get faster and faster and faster at it until you can play it perfectly. That's exactly what's going on your your neural connection is is that top performance, peak performance practice makes perfect How to play uh the intro to Stairway to Heaven. When I first got my guitar and I played it over and over and over and over until I learned it. Give me a guitar. Today, I can monkey through about a third of it very clumsily because I forget or I can't write in cursive anymore. I can't either. I mean, I'd really have to concentrate. And they're definitely letters that I would forget how to write. That was a jarring realization for me, that, like, how do you make the cue? And whatever happened to that Z? That weird Z like it's all gone and even like the S and the R and all that like normal stuff, it's just gone. Yeah, you don't want to see my cursive writing. So what what you're talking about is a while you can refine the organization of your brain to peak performance, your neural connections also have a kind of use it or lose it aspect to them as well. Remember that study with the kittens. No, this the really sad study. I think it's funny that you're asking me how much I remember and I keep saying no. Um. There was this study that um that involved kittens having one eye so and shut from birth, and they would they were allowed to frolic and play and do whatever, but they just had one eye so and shut UM. And then after I think like eight or ten or twelve weeks, the eye was um released opened up again, and the kittens were blind for life. And I guess they killed the kittens and looked at what was going on in the brain and they found that that they say, the left eye had been so and shut during the stage of development. UM. The neural connections had all traveled to the right eye, which was seeing, and the ones that had been there on the left eye that formed the optic were withered and dead. You know what they called that experiment, They called the saddest experiment in the history of the world. It's pretty bad. It's a pretty bad experiment, but it basically goes to show you that not only will neural connections wither and die if they're not used, they'll also migrate to places where they can be used. There's kind of like a survival of the fittest, like um jungle grab for firing, because the more fired a neural connection is, the more important it is, the stronger it's going to be right, right and f I I Giraffe neurons can grow up to three ft in length. Really, are they all in the neck. Isn't that cool? That is pretty cool. Uh. So we were talking about encoding, Um, you have to really be paying attention to properly encode, and we also talked about filtering things out. What they don't know again, is this maybe the first time we've said it, is are we screening this stimuli out during the first initial sensory stage or are we literally processing it and saying no, we don't need this, get rid of it. Yeah, it would make sense to me that it comes afterward, but they don't know. Yeah, it makes sense to me too, Like the hippocampus is like, that's not a bear, so forget it. Yeah, forget that. So are we at short term and long term? Josh? Yeah, you have to store all memories, even if it's just for a blip, you're going to be storing it, or it's not a memory, even the shortest of short term memories as a memory. And there are three ways they believe that we store these memories. We've already talked about the sensory stage. Then you have the short term if it's deemed important enough to remember at least for a little while, and then eventually long term. Yeah, if it's really important to you, which there's different ways to look at long term memory. The way that I found is that long term memory is this dormant neural projection, all the all the different neural connections that make up that rich memory you know from long ago. Um that it's there, like it can be activated again. It's long term memories, short term memories when it's active, and then working memory, which isn't in this article. Working memory is like bringing something to mind and then the action of consciously keeping it in mind, like repeating a phone number over and over again that you knew before, but you're having to to remind yourself you're keeping it in your working memory. Well, it's funny you mentioned phone number because short term memory is really limited. UM. I love the status. It says that short term memory can hold about seven items for no more than twenty or thirty seconds at a time. So that's why when you see something like a phone number, you shouldn't be able to remember that. So what you do is you break it down, or it's already broken down usually for you UH into three sets of three or two sets of three and one set of four. I would be missing a digit. And that's how you remember things and then saying it over and over. And there's all sorts of exercises you can do to remember things, like when you meet somebody. That's where I'm bad. You know. You know how I am with remembering names. I can never remember names. But you're also very friendly. You can be like, hey, I I recognize your face. What's your name? Well, yeah, and I might remember. You could say you met this girl Francis at this thing that we did, and I'd say who. I'd say, oh, that the lady who wore the overalls in the flip flops. Like I'll remember things like that forever. Names forget about it. That's why you have all the names of everyone you've ever met written down on your hand. That's why I have no friends. But long term memory can store everything forever if you wanted to. Yeah, that seems like a ge whiz we don't really know exactly what's going on kind of statement, you know, I totally agree. When I read that, I was like, really, yeah, I don't know about that one, but it is I would agree that it's um at least as much as we need or another way to look at it is, what if we are all operating pretty much a capacity. How much more incredibly intelligent would we be if we had even like more memory storage. But like we mentioned earlier, things that are important to you, you're more likely to remember. Um. And then when you're encoding how you're perceiving things. That's why I probably when I meet someone, I look at their shoes and they're wearing I guess, and and and I'm distracted. I'm not thinking of the fact that they said their name when they shook my hand. Well, you just hit two big points. One that's something that is meaningful to you. You're going to remember more. That's because emotion is usually attached the emotion. The seat of emotion is the amygdala, and it is directly connected to the hippocampus. It's got like a direct line to the hippocampus, like up coming through I'm first right the saddle on the sea horse, if you will, Yes, and that's great. Um, the uh, that's really good, and the there's a I guess. The one of the big theories behind what emotions are, why we have them, is they're basically like learning guides. They're teaching guides Like you feel fear, um, you're going to remember that you feel fear when you see a bear, and you're going to stay away from bears. Um Or joy makes us all you know, what makes us feel familiar with other people groups, which is which is right away from it keeps bears away. You know, eight people could beat up a bear rather than just one. So we have emotions, and we learned from our emotions, which is why we managed to remember things so much more clearly when there's an emotion attached. And if you examine most of your memories, there's probably going to be some sort of emotional memory. I guess beneath the surface there. Like have you ever watched the movie and you know, it's really dramatic and intense and that scene ends and you kind of come out of it like you were just totally sucked in, and you kind of come out of it because the next scene started and it's it's you know, the build up hasn't happened yet for that scene, but you realize you have this kind of um remnant, uneasy feeling that you have no idea what it belongs to any longer. And then you realize, wait a minute, I was just identifying with the movie, So I that's I think that's kind of the the same kind of underlying emotional memory that can be attached to anything, and that makes it more poignant and more likely to be remembered. Yeah, exactly, and that and and that may be more important to one person than another. So it's typical to say I have a good memory or a bad memory. And what's probably more likely is that you might be really good at remembering some things but not others, you know what I'm saying. And if you're having trouble remembering something, it's not like your entire memory system is is not working. It's probably like one part. Because I think there's three stages to actually keeping a memory around, and it just means one of those is not working quite well. Uh, why don't you tell me? Okay, Well, basically that you can say that when well, let's take an example of eyeglasses. Um, would you neither one of us were right, But let's say we did, and we're going to bed. Right, You're going to bed in a separate from me, okay, And um, you're you take your glasses off and you you toss them, you know, off to on the nightstand and go to sleep. Right, if you looked at your eyeglasses where you set them, you were, you would be perceiving their placement encoding, right, which is going to make it likelier for that memory to be retained. And then when you wake up, since the memory is retained, you'll be able to retrieve it. So those are the three steps. It's awareness, retention, and then retrieval, and any of those three is where the breakdown can occur. Yeah, and I've heard you know, there's all sorts of tips, like if you say out loud as you're as you're doing it, I'm putting my eyeglasses on the nightstand, that might help you. You might seem a little weird, but that will help you remember it. So Chuck, what about aging, Like there's this underlying fear among everybody that as we get older, our memories are going to go. And that's that's true in a lot of cases, but it's not necessarily you know, it's often associated with Alzheimer's or dementia or something that's not necessarily the underlying mechanism. It's not the mechanism, but it does happen. Um, there is a breakdown that starts with the onset of sexual maturity. Oddly, it's linked to that then you start forgetting things. Um and it uh, I think it gets worse and worse until we reach our fifties. It's like twenties to fifties is when you're you really have some trouble initially, right, But the brain isn't changing it it's structure or anything. It's the connections that start to fail. Is that right? That's what I understand. Although they did say the brain in the in hippocampus shrink in your seventies. It depends, yes, I think. Um. What they're finding though, is that a lot of it has to do with the lack of stimulation. Well that's huge. Yeah. Um. They found that rats that are raised with lots of toys or they are given lots of toys and stimulating environment later on in life have literally fatter, healthier cells, brain cells, neurons um then their counterparts, and the same as in humans as well. At the very least, we know that our neurons shrink as we get older, like you said. But they found they found that stimulating environments, like you know, if you're in a nursing home and and there's a lot going on, rather than just like go sit in your room, right, the people at the lots going on nursing home are going to be a lot more um I guess intelligent later in life, or at the very least they're going to have better memories, is another way to put it. Yeah. Well, Emily's grandmother, as you know, is ninety and she is uh has a very robust personality and memory and she is I think it's all due to the fact that she exercises that muscle quite a bit. She does word puzzles every day, she's she's on the internet more than I am. She's on all of our Facebook page and she just you know, that's how you stay vital. If you don't Facebook, I'd be a heck of a endorsement. Facebook let you live forever. But it's true though, I mean, anyway you want to go about it, if you're exercising that noodle, it's gonna stay strong and and you can regenerate and stay vital and not not slip darkly into the night. And also they're they're pretty sure that a reduction in production of acetal colin, which is a neurotransmitter that's strongly associated with um memory formation. Yeah, they kind of pinpointed that. Yeah, they're not exactly sure how that works, but they know that like if you the more a setal colin you have, the better memory you have and vice versa. But they can you can actually reverse that, right what through the mental exercises? Yeah, yeah, I think you can boost production like that, and I'm sure pretty soon they'll have a setal coline shots where you can just shoot right into our brains like memory junkies. If you're a smoker or a drinker or generally unhealthy, it's gonna you know, impact your memory too. And then last, sadly, this is the this is the one that um I find the most fascinating about memory. There's something called sleep dependent memory consolidation. And basically what happens, remember when we were talking about sleepwalking, Your brain goes through your your you go through two phases, one where your body is active but your brain is out, and then the R E M sleep, the deepest sleep, which where your body can't move but your brain's going. It's basically taking advantage of your you napping so that it can do some paperwork or whatever, and it goes through and fires all the neural connections that were used that day. Maybe some are kind of fading a little bit here there, fires those and um, while you're sleeping, your brain is basically creating perception again, right, got by firing your your neural projections, which I think is probably the best explanation for dreams I've ever heard. Yeah, that's it. Uh. Well, I will just close by saying if I have ever met you and I don't remember your name, please don't be offended, because I guarantee you I recognize your face. Who was it, Tammy with the overalls and the flip flops. I'll remember all that stuff. I remember. I feel like last time I was, last time I was in New York, Emily marveled at I saw I think two different people that I said, Hey, that person was at our our trivia night, you know, a year and a half ago or two years ago or whatever. She said? You remember that? I want? Yeah, so I remember all those faces. That's very good, just not the names. And if you think your memory is going try paying more attention. Distraction is one of the greatest threats to memory formation. And if you don't form a memory properly, you're not gonna remember it. I mean it sounds that sounds so basic, but yeah, proper encoding requires concentration, and really, you know, look at the glasses as you set them next to the alarm clock and think I just put the there. Yeah, so obey humans boom. If you want to learn more about memory type memory, you should probably type human memory because I'm pretty sure if you just type memory, a lot of computer stuff is gonna come up in the handy search bar how stuff works dot com And you don't want to read any of that. It's uh well, I'm yeah, uh now it's time for a listener made Josh. I'm gonna call this uh maggot mania. Yeah, that really got to people. I always find it like, um I opening when I just tell a story from my life and everybody's like, oh my god, I couldn't eat. Yeah I'm I'm like, oh sorry, all right. This is from cath in Australia. Oh hello, guys. I have done the exact same thing as you, Josh. I put some meat in a plastic bag in the kitchen garbage bin, which also had a lid, and woke up to a moving floor. Or only I was was not wearing my glasses so she might forget where she laid them. Um I was doing a little cleaning, and it's slowly dawned at me what had happened. I had begun my morning by sweeping. I had made cookies a night prior and was noticing all these little balls of dough on the floor. They were very hard to sweep up. I became more and more confused at the huge amount of tiny balls of dough until I had bent down and had a closer look. It was like a horror movie. My blood went cold, and I crouched an utter panic. I then looked across the floor and these little dough balls had made their way across the entire apartment, and they made it to the bedroom carpet. I was totally disgusted and horrified. I think I was even doing that half panic cry, swearing quietly to myself thing I'm not aware of that. I got rid of them by patiently sweeping them up. I couldn't bear to squish them and have to clean up that mess, and I put them into a plastic bag that I left sitting outside. I sprayed the bag with disinfectant and bug spray after every dump of maggots, but there were still they were still squirming. I will never ever ever leave meat unattended Again, I live in Australia, where I should have been aware of this. I thought she mc cookies, she need meat cookies. Was that just unrelated? I think it was unrelated and that maybe explained that why she thought there was dough on the floor. Now she's said a meat cookies night before. This is Australia. Maybe have meat cookies down and there. I want some meat cookie. That's it. That's from cat. Wow. That was a weird exposition there, Chuck, that was cat. Yeah from Australia. Well thanks Cat the maggot hata h you're just Cat k A t h cant short for Katherine or Cat. Well, thanks a lot. We appreciate it. Um, I imagine you've moved by now and and um, very sensible of you. Yes, if you've ever made meat cookies or anything that sounds equally awesome, we want to hear it. And if you've got a recipe, cool, and if you're willing to send us some of these things even better, right right so you can get our mailing address by sending us an email right right at Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Davis, Charles W Chuck Bryant. I remembered your name, and this is stuff you should know. Lizzy, had you cracked up there? If that makes it into the gut, it's not going to because that was pre hay and welcome to the podcast. Everything before that I always gets cut out. You know that. I don't think a little giggle beforehand might be in. We would be fired if we didn't cut out everything that came before that, right, maybe, Chuck, you ever heard of a guy named Nicolas Carr? Yeah? Sure, I know you. Have you ever heard of a little rag called The Atlantic? Yes? I have. Back in two thousand and eight, those two things collided, Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic and he had a very great UM headlined article called his Google making Us Stupid and Nicholas Carr. He went on to write a book. He followed that normal process where like you're writing the book and you're like, I need some extra cash, so I'll excerpt this or rewrite you know, like fifteen pages of it, celts to the Atlantic or whatever. We need to get in that gig. Well, we have to write a book or be writing a book. I write a book. We should do that. But it was I can't remember what the book was was called. But the article actually made a bigger splash than the book. Din But basically he was saying, like, we are re configuring the way we learn through our interactions with the internet. Um, Like, there's constantly things trying to get our attention on a web page. You know, it's not like a book with with without pictures or um, you know, flashing lights, that kind of thing. We we read horizontally he put it, rather than vertically, meaning you know, we just kind of skimmed the surface of a bunch of different stuff rather than really deeply get into one thing. Action which helps flex the imagination. Um is pretty much non existent on the web unless you're like into live journal, you know, Harry Potter erotica. Right. So, but at the basis of his argument is Google making a stupid was the idea that it's actually reforming the way we form memories that Google he chose Google, You know, just to get a headline, as the editor did. But um, the the idea that the internet, the way we read, is re changing or changing the way that we absorb information and therefore form memory. It says a lot that he was asking if it's making as stupid because we here in the West equate memory a good memory, too, intelligence, too smart. Um, I guess what I'm trying to drive at, very clumsily, is how does memory work? I thought that was a great set up, And who knows what the heck we're gonna look like in a hundred years as a species, how our brains are gonna be firing, and what the effect it's gonna have on us. We're gonna have mighty humps. Yeah, well that's the thing. I mean, you can you can debate all all day long. Is it stupid? Or are we just in the middle of evolution? Probably in the middle of an evolution. I don't think we're gonna end up like a in idiocricy. You although never possibility, you never know. I watched Idiocracy, so that might mean I'm on that road myself. It's a great movie. Did you like it? I did. I thought it was what it was, But like the one joke premise of most most times when a movie has the one joke premise, that kind of gets old for me. What one joke? Sort of the one joke everybody's stupid? Yeah, it worth than all right? Moving on, memories, Josh, are what makes us who we are if we you know, I imagine if someone has complete amnesia, they usually don't have a sense of self. Well, yeah, you know, it depends if you remember h M. Henry Mullison. No. So he was the patient that proved there's this big debate over when we think of memory, whether there's like one part of the brain that's responsible for memory or whether it's a bunch of different parts of the brain. And he proved that the multiple memory systems works because they used to think like, oh, you just got a big old filing cabinet and your brain just sticks it in whatever filet belongs in and then you go and pull it out when you need it exactly. And that's very it's very sesame street way of putting it. It is, um, But you know, they were working with what they had to work with at the time, and they were wrong. But Hm, like age twenty three, this guy UM who became known as HM. Patient HM had temporal labectomy to cure his epilepsy. Oh, that guy also removed his hippocampus so he could tell you, you you know, where he went to high school, who his oldest friend was, that kind of thing. But he couldn't tell you what he had for lunch that day because he lost the ability to form new memories. So the fact that he could maintain old memories but couldn't form new memories proved that there's multiple systems involved for different types of memory, like Memento. Right, great movie that he would have proven it to a memento did not have Ellen page. No it didn't, So it's on your list of acceptable films. She would have written in by now Um or not. She may just be like, I hate those guys so much. Maybe so uh so, let's let's talk a bit about memory, josh Um. Let's say we were talking about breakfast this morning. If you remember what you had for breakfast, you might think that that is a very simple thing that happened, when in fact, it is very complex reconstruction from different parts of your brain putting together. Maybe the smell of your eggs, of your eggs bacon is octuating you didn't need that slab of ham. What it looked like, maybe, what it felt like, um in your mouth, how it tasted. So you're recalling all these different parts, but not complex thing, not and even just that. I mean, there's so much more to it, the the tablecloth, whether you were angry at the weather guy, to remember even what eggs are. Yeah, you know these memories that go way back, but we we conceive of it as this one little snapshot of a memory called what what you had for breakfast? Right? Um? But all of those different things put together are called neural projections, right chuck, Okay, so go ahead. Well the other instance too, that they always mentioned is riding. You never forget how to ride a bike, and it seems like a very easy thing, but there are so many things going on when you ride a bike. How you get on the bike, how you mount the bike, where your feet go, how you move it forward? Where should I put my hands? Um? What about this car barreling down? I should probably not ride in the center of the road going the wrong way. So it's just like hundreds of memories. I can't put a number on it, you know how many there are? Well, the reason why it's so difficult is because it's this is all a seamless process, right exactly. It ding a bike as if it's one single file that you pull out of your cabinet called ride a bike. Yeah. And at times it's so it's so second nature, it's so natural to us that we kind of detach ourselves from it and call it things like muscle memory. So just things muscle memory. Your muscles are there, they don't have a capacity for member remembering anything well, and we don't even know how we recall still, even though we have a better handle on storage of memory and now, and we should we should disclaim this episode by saying that there is a lot of there's a This is the rough sketch of what we know right now about how we form and retrieve memory, which is more than we've ever known. Yeah, and I think we're hot on the trail. It's really starting to come together and make sense. So should we start with encoding, Yeah, which is basically your senses. It's rooted in your senses. Encoding is the first step to create a memory. It begins with perception. And when we talk about perception, we're talking about your sensory perception, um, right, which like, right now you appear to me as you know, a little scruffy looking good. You've got your braves cap on, almost smile right the the ikea lights gleaming off of your eye, about eyeballs a little bit. All of this is visual information, right, But in my brain it's nothing more than electrical impulses traveling through the optic nerve to my hippocampus. Right right. You might smell me, um, you might. You know. The example they use in the article is the first girlfriend. But that's right on the money, man. I mean, I still remember all that stuff. But when you when you see that first girl that you fall in love with, you know what she looked like, what she smelled like, the first time she shook your hand. I hate to say this, but it's the exact same thing as breakfast this morning or riding the bike. Well true in a way, but there's also a point made later on that we'll talk about that things that are more important to you are more likely to be rooted in your long term memory. So oh yeah, yeah, okay, breakfast is pretty important to me, right? True? Is that that is that that's something been your long term memory though I remember every breakfast I've ever eaten. Okay, it's because you've only had breakfast four times. Uh So where are we within the hippocampus, Well, yeah, we're with encoding. So basically what just happened is the light bouncing off of you that gives you shape, and all that is coming into my eyes and be in transforming into electrical information. It doesn't matter what it is. Like, that's the language of the brain, right, translates information and stores it in the hippocampus initially. Right, that's like the big processing, sorting, routing hub. Yeah. So your hippocampus is like this, uh, this region of the brain shaped like a sea horse, which hence the name um that basically says, okay, so I don't get that part hippocampus. It's not shaped like a hippopotamus, shape like a sea horse. And why Plus the name hippocampus means seahorse. I did not realize that, man, I hope it does. That's how I've always taken it. So let's call it the seahorse a campus. But basically, what the hippocampus does is it takes in all this information, including stuff that I have no idea I'm taking in at the moment um and says this is important, this is an important you can leave this out. Let's send this over here, let's send this over there. Let's create this neural projection by by combining this, this, and this, and it's like basically, the the the man behind the curtain. The hippocampus is the sent center of forming new memories, and along with the frontal cortex, they work in hand in hand at this Yeah, okay, and it's a really efficient way to deal with your surroundings, Chuck, because consider this. Let's say you or I, um, well, let's say we're doing it together. We're coming out of the woods into a meadow and it is um a primal area, and we're scared of bears, so we're scanning the meadow for bears. Right we don't see any bears, but there's birds, there's flowers, there's butterflies, and we're kind of taking in all of these things, but we're not really taking it in because none of them are the bear, which is what we're tasked with finding. Right then, So the the hippocampus isn't in forming any memories of the butterfly or the daisies or whatever. Maybe we would know, oh, well, there's a splash of white against the green, so there are flowers there. If we were asked later on what kind of flowers were in that meadow, we couldn't say. So it's just filtering that what we would consider unnecessary information out exactly. Okay, Um, it travels while we said this perception and encoding is where it starts. But then you have to it has to go somewhere from there, and this is where the chemistry of the brain comes in, which is endlessly fascinating to me. Yes, Josh, we have nerve cells, neurons and these uh, these connect with other cells, not a point called the synapse, right well, which is actually that's funny that the author of this article put it like that because it's actually not a point. It's a gap. You think that all these things connect, but there is a gap, and the leap to the other side. The leap of the gap is uh performed via neurotransmitters that right, and then latched onto by a dentrite. The little feathery things on the cells collect. Yeah, they accept the transmission. Come on in transmission. Welcome to my cell. So Chuck I'm going to give a couple of stature quick. Okay, there's possibly as many as a hundred billion neurons in your brain. It's a lot um. Each of them have many tens of thousands, are many, many thousands of connections up to UM which are synapsis, yes, which are which leads to as many as a quadrillion synapses in the human brain. And they can connect. Is it an infinite amount of times if need be? What do you mean is there any limit to the amount of neural connections these cells can make? Well, I think ten thousand is the high end that I've heard, But I love that you had an answer for that. UM. And they're constantly going to and forming new connections. I think it's something like thirty to sixty times the second. Near neurons are firing all over your head and they're not sentence down. They're always changing, always forming new connections. The more that you do something, the stronger the connection is going to be. We might know that in the real world as practice or repetition, right, but the another word for it is plasticity, where the brain you're the organizational structure of your brain actually changes shape it as as you're saying, like, through practicing something like the repeated firing of a neural connection, right, which is just an electrical impulse that triggers the release of neurotransmitters that crosses synapse are accepted in the den drite right, and the neurotransmitters are the message carried like a certain type of neurotransmit or like dopamine says hey, everything's just ire right um, And this information has just passed along from one neur onto another if the the impulse is strong enough. Right. But then when you do it again and again and again, more channels that allow the neurotransmitters to to be released from one and accepted by another are dug which means that this thing fires more efficiently and all of a sudden after firing them. By practicing your violin this one piece of music slowly over and over again, you get faster and faster and faster at it until you can play it perfectly. That's exactly what's going on your your neural connection is is that top performance, peak performance practice makes perfect How to play uh the intro to Stairway to Heaven. When I first got my guitar and I played it over and over and over and over until I learned it. Give me a guitar. Today, I can monkey through about a third of it very clumsily because I forget or I can't write in cursive anymore. I can't either. I mean, I'd really have to concentrate. And they're definitely letters that I would forget how to write. That was a jarring realization for me, that, like, how do you make the cue? And whatever happened to that Z? That weird Z like it's all gone and even like the S and the R and all that like normal stuff, it's just gone. Yeah, you don't want to see my cursive writing. So what what you're talking about is a while you can refine the organization of your brain to peak performance, your neural connections also have a kind of use it or lose it aspect to them as well. Remember that study with the kittens. No, this the really sad study. I think it's funny that you're asking me how much I remember and I keep saying no. Um. There was this study that um that involved kittens having one eye so and shut from birth, and they would they were allowed to frolic and play and do whatever, but they just had one eye so and shut UM. And then after I think like eight or ten or twelve weeks, the eye was um released opened up again, and the kittens were blind for life. And I guess they killed the kittens and looked at what was going on in the brain and they found that that they say, the left eye had been so and shut during the stage of development. UM. The neural connections had all traveled to the right eye, which was seeing, and the ones that had been there on the left eye that formed the optic were withered and dead. You know what they called that experiment, They called the saddest experiment in the history of the world. It's pretty bad. It's a pretty bad experiment, but it basically goes to show you that not only will neural connections wither and die if they're not used, they'll also migrate to places where they can be used. There's kind of like a survival of the fittest, like um jungle grab for firing, because the more fired a neural connection is, the more important it is, the stronger it's going to be right, right and f I I Giraffe neurons can grow up to three ft in length. Really, are they all in the neck. Isn't that cool? That is pretty cool. Uh. So we were talking about encoding, Um, you have to really be paying attention to properly encode, and we also talked about filtering things out. What they don't know again, is this maybe the first time we've said it, is are we screening this stimuli out during the first initial sensory stage or are we literally processing it and saying no, we don't need this, get rid of it. Yeah, it would make sense to me that it comes afterward, but they don't know. Yeah, it makes sense to me too, Like the hippocampus is like, that's not a bear, so forget it. Yeah, forget that. So are we at short term and long term? Josh? Yeah, you have to store all memories, even if it's just for a blip, you're going to be storing it, or it's not a memory, even the shortest of short term memories as a memory. And there are three ways they believe that we store these memories. We've already talked about the sensory stage. Then you have the short term if it's deemed important enough to remember at least for a little while, and then eventually long term. Yeah, if it's really important to you, which there's different ways to look at long term memory. The way that I found is that long term memory is this dormant neural projection, all the all the different neural connections that make up that rich memory you know from long ago. Um that it's there, like it can be activated again. It's long term memories, short term memories when it's active, and then working memory, which isn't in this article. Working memory is like bringing something to mind and then the action of consciously keeping it in mind, like repeating a phone number over and over again that you knew before, but you're having to to remind yourself you're keeping it in your working memory. Well, it's funny you mentioned phone number because short term memory is really limited. UM. I love the status. It says that short term memory can hold about seven items for no more than twenty or thirty seconds at a time. So that's why when you see something like a phone number, you shouldn't be able to remember that. So what you do is you break it down, or it's already broken down usually for you UH into three sets of three or two sets of three and one set of four. I would be missing a digit. And that's how you remember things and then saying it over and over. And there's all sorts of exercises you can do to remember things, like when you meet somebody. That's where I'm bad. You know. You know how I am with remembering names. I can never remember names. But you're also very friendly. You can be like, hey, I I recognize your face. What's your name? Well, yeah, and I might remember. You could say you met this girl Francis at this thing that we did, and I'd say who. I'd say, oh, that the lady who wore the overalls in the flip flops. Like I'll remember things like that forever. Names forget about it. That's why you have all the names of everyone you've ever met written down on your hand. That's why I have no friends. But long term memory can store everything forever if you wanted to. Yeah, that seems like a ge whiz we don't really know exactly what's going on kind of statement, you know, I totally agree. When I read that, I was like, really, yeah, I don't know about that one, but it is I would agree that it's um at least as much as we need or another way to look at it is, what if we are all operating pretty much a capacity. How much more incredibly intelligent would we be if we had even like more memory storage. But like we mentioned earlier, things that are important to you, you're more likely to remember. Um. And then when you're encoding how you're perceiving things. That's why I probably when I meet someone, I look at their shoes and they're wearing I guess, and and and I'm distracted. I'm not thinking of the fact that they said their name when they shook my hand. Well, you just hit two big points. One that's something that is meaningful to you. You're going to remember more. That's because emotion is usually attached the emotion. The seat of emotion is the amygdala, and it is directly connected to the hippocampus. It's got like a direct line to the hippocampus, like up coming through I'm first right the saddle on the sea horse, if you will, Yes, and that's great. Um, the uh, that's really good, and the there's a I guess. The one of the big theories behind what emotions are, why we have them, is they're basically like learning guides. They're teaching guides Like you feel fear, um, you're going to remember that you feel fear when you see a bear, and you're going to stay away from bears. Um Or joy makes us all you know, what makes us feel familiar with other people groups, which is which is right away from it keeps bears away. You know, eight people could beat up a bear rather than just one. So we have emotions, and we learned from our emotions, which is why we managed to remember things so much more clearly when there's an emotion attached. And if you examine most of your memories, there's probably going to be some sort of emotional memory. I guess beneath the surface there. Like have you ever watched the movie and you know, it's really dramatic and intense and that scene ends and you kind of come out of it like you were just totally sucked in, and you kind of come out of it because the next scene started and it's it's you know, the build up hasn't happened yet for that scene, but you realize you have this kind of um remnant, uneasy feeling that you have no idea what it belongs to any longer. And then you realize, wait a minute, I was just identifying with the movie, So I that's I think that's kind of the the same kind of underlying emotional memory that can be attached to anything, and that makes it more poignant and more likely to be remembered. Yeah, exactly, and that and and that may be more important to one person than another. So it's typical to say I have a good memory or a bad memory. And what's probably more likely is that you might be really good at remembering some things but not others, you know what I'm saying. And if you're having trouble remembering something, it's not like your entire memory system is is not working. It's probably like one part. Because I think there's three stages to actually keeping a memory around, and it just means one of those is not working quite well. Uh, why don't you tell me? Okay, Well, basically that you can say that when well, let's take an example of eyeglasses. Um, would you neither one of us were right, But let's say we did, and we're going to bed. Right, You're going to bed in a separate from me, okay, And um, you're you take your glasses off and you you toss them, you know, off to on the nightstand and go to sleep. Right, if you looked at your eyeglasses where you set them, you were, you would be perceiving their placement encoding, right, which is going to make it likelier for that memory to be retained. And then when you wake up, since the memory is retained, you'll be able to retrieve it. So those are the three steps. It's awareness, retention, and then retrieval, and any of those three is where the breakdown can occur. Yeah, and I've heard you know, there's all sorts of tips, like if you say out loud as you're as you're doing it, I'm putting my eyeglasses on the nightstand, that might help you. You might seem a little weird, but that will help you remember it. So Chuck, what about aging, Like there's this underlying fear among everybody that as we get older, our memories are going to go. And that's that's true in a lot of cases, but it's not necessarily you know, it's often associated with Alzheimer's or dementia or something that's not necessarily the underlying mechanism. It's not the mechanism, but it does happen. Um, there is a breakdown that starts with the onset of sexual maturity. Oddly, it's linked to that then you start forgetting things. Um and it uh, I think it gets worse and worse until we reach our fifties. It's like twenties to fifties is when you're you really have some trouble initially, right, But the brain isn't changing it it's structure or anything. It's the connections that start to fail. Is that right? That's what I understand. Although they did say the brain in the in hippocampus shrink in your seventies. It depends, yes, I think. Um. What they're finding though, is that a lot of it has to do with the lack of stimulation. Well that's huge. Yeah. Um. They found that rats that are raised with lots of toys or they are given lots of toys and stimulating environment later on in life have literally fatter, healthier cells, brain cells, neurons um then their counterparts, and the same as in humans as well. At the very least, we know that our neurons shrink as we get older, like you said. But they found they found that stimulating environments, like you know, if you're in a nursing home and and there's a lot going on, rather than just like go sit in your room, right, the people at the lots going on nursing home are going to be a lot more um I guess intelligent later in life, or at the very least they're going to have better memories, is another way to put it. Yeah. Well, Emily's grandmother, as you know, is ninety and she is uh has a very robust personality and memory and she is I think it's all due to the fact that she exercises that muscle quite a bit. She does word puzzles every day, she's she's on the internet more than I am. She's on all of our Facebook page and she just you know, that's how you stay vital. If you don't Facebook, I'd be a heck of a endorsement. Facebook let you live forever. But it's true though, I mean, anyway you want to go about it, if you're exercising that noodle, it's gonna stay strong and and you can regenerate and stay vital and not not slip darkly into the night. And also they're they're pretty sure that a reduction in production of acetal colin, which is a neurotransmitter that's strongly associated with um memory formation. Yeah, they kind of pinpointed that. Yeah, they're not exactly sure how that works, but they know that like if you the more a setal colin you have, the better memory you have and vice versa. But they can you can actually reverse that, right what through the mental exercises? Yeah, yeah, I think you can boost production like that, and I'm sure pretty soon they'll have a setal coline shots where you can just shoot right into our brains like memory junkies. If you're a smoker or a drinker or generally unhealthy, it's gonna you know, impact your memory too. And then last, sadly, this is the this is the one that um I find the most fascinating about memory. There's something called sleep dependent memory consolidation. And basically what happens, remember when we were talking about sleepwalking, Your brain goes through your your you go through two phases, one where your body is active but your brain is out, and then the R E M sleep, the deepest sleep, which where your body can't move but your brain's going. It's basically taking advantage of your you napping so that it can do some paperwork or whatever, and it goes through and fires all the neural connections that were used that day. Maybe some are kind of fading a little bit here there, fires those and um, while you're sleeping, your brain is basically creating perception again, right, got by firing your your neural projections, which I think is probably the best explanation for dreams I've ever heard. Yeah, that's it. Uh. Well, I will just close by saying if I have ever met you and I don't remember your name, please don't be offended, because I guarantee you I recognize your face. Who was it, Tammy with the overalls and the flip flops. I'll remember all that stuff. I remember. I feel like last time I was, last time I was in New York, Emily marveled at I saw I think two different people that I said, Hey, that person was at our our trivia night, you know, a year and a half ago or two years ago or whatever. She said? You remember that? I want? Yeah, so I remember all those faces. That's very good, just not the names. And if you think your memory is going try paying more attention. Distraction is one of the greatest threats to memory formation. And if you don't form a memory properly, you're not gonna remember it. I mean it sounds that sounds so basic, but yeah, proper encoding requires concentration, and really, you know, look at the glasses as you set them next to the alarm clock and think I just put the there. Yeah, so obey humans boom. If you want to learn more about memory type memory, you should probably type human memory because I'm pretty sure if you just type memory, a lot of computer stuff is gonna come up in the handy search bar how stuff works dot com And you don't want to read any of that. It's uh well, I'm yeah, uh now it's time for a listener made Josh. I'm gonna call this uh maggot mania. Yeah, that really got to people. I always find it like, um I opening when I just tell a story from my life and everybody's like, oh my god, I couldn't eat. Yeah I'm I'm like, oh sorry, all right. This is from cath in Australia. Oh hello, guys. I have done the exact same thing as you, Josh. I put some meat in a plastic bag in the kitchen garbage bin, which also had a lid, and woke up to a moving floor. Or only I was was not wearing my glasses so she might forget where she laid them. Um I was doing a little cleaning, and it's slowly dawned at me what had happened. I had begun my morning by sweeping. I had made cookies a night prior and was noticing all these little balls of dough on the floor. They were very hard to sweep up. I became more and more confused at the huge amount of tiny balls of dough until I had bent down and had a closer look. It was like a horror movie. My blood went cold, and I crouched an utter panic. I then looked across the floor and these little dough balls had made their way across the entire apartment, and they made it to the bedroom carpet. I was totally disgusted and horrified. I think I was even doing that half panic cry, swearing quietly to myself thing I'm not aware of that. I got rid of them by patiently sweeping them up. I couldn't bear to squish them and have to clean up that mess, and I put them into a plastic bag that I left sitting outside. I sprayed the bag with disinfectant and bug spray after every dump of maggots, but there were still they were still squirming. I will never ever ever leave meat unattended Again, I live in Australia, where I should have been aware of this. I thought she mc cookies, she need meat cookies. Was that just unrelated? I think it was unrelated and that maybe explained that why she thought there was dough on the floor. Now she's said a meat cookies night before. This is Australia. Maybe have meat cookies down and there. I want some meat cookie. That's it. That's from cat. Wow. That was a weird exposition there, Chuck, that was cat. Yeah from Australia. Well thanks Cat the maggot hata h you're just Cat k A t h cant short for Katherine or Cat. Well, thanks a lot. We appreciate it. Um, I imagine you've moved by now and and um, very sensible of you. Yes, if you've ever made meat cookies or anything that sounds equally awesome, we want to hear it. And if you've got a recipe, cool, and if you're willing to send us some of these things even better, right right so you can get our mailing address by sending us an email right right at Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you