Hi friends, it's me Josh, and for this week's s Y s K Select, I've chosen our episode on amnesia. I'm not gonna make any sort of joke here. You can just insert your own instead. I will describe this as a great, thick episode that um is about an astoundingly interesting topic. And it's one of those topics where the movies actually get their depictions of this stuff right, because amnesia is just that bizarre. So sit in, buckle up and listen to this, possibly again, possibly for the first time. Who can remember these things? Sorry? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry and uh, it's Stuff you Should Know the Rodeo. Yeah. Ironically, I asked if we've done a podcast on memory, and neither one of us could remember. And I'm looking it up on our site and I don't see it anywhere. I gotta feel like it doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't anything. It's tough now with six and thirty forty plus, Yeah, I mean, we'll like delve into a subject, but it's not necessarily what the whole podcast is about. And every once while we come up with one of those stupid non how X works titles, so that just throws it off even further. Right, Like we may have like named it like a a podcast to remember boom boom mnemonic device bitching. Yeah, we totally did one on memory. Wow, good job, thank you. That was real time. I just worked it out all right. Well, we're definitely gonna go over memory some because you can't talk about amnesia without talking about memory, so we'll just you know, reinforce that knowledge. I'm excited about this one. I thought it was pretty good. Amnesia's uh sometimes it's like TV and movies, but not usually, Uh it can be. Yeah, but yeah, that's a very rare case. So rare that, um, whoever has that kind of amnesia gets to be the intro for our podcasts. Who a guy named Clive Wearing? Yeah? Man, this dude, Yeah, I feel sorry for him. Did you see the cover of the book. He has this look at his face like what are you doing? That's because he wakes up again every twenty seconds and goes what just happened? Yeah, there's a poor man named Clive wearing. He's a musician and a musicologist, and he is the He is the man with the world's poorest memory, which means Oliver Sacks sleeps on his couch. Yeah you know, um, and he has a memory that refreshes itself every few seconds. He comes out and goes, who's that guy on my couch? Yeah, and he goes, I'm Oliver Sacks. And he goes, oh, hey, Oliver, tattooed on your forearm. And then he goes, Oliver, what are you doing here? That's how it is. But it refreshes like that. So um, this guy, Uh, there was a New Yorker profile in him. That conger who wrote this article um cites saying that eating an apple is kind of like a magic trick to this guy. Like one second, like he's got the apple in his hand and it's intact, and then he'll look down again and it's just the core. A few seconds later, he has no memory whatsoever of eating the apple. Um, he may not even he probably he doesn't remember getting the apple, right, He just knows there's an apple core in his hand now, so he must have eaten it. Yeah, his uh. And we'll go over this later he has a journaling system because you kind of have to. Um, like in the movie Memento, uh, and it had some excerpts and it was literally like nine o five woke up, feeling refreshed, nine oh eight, completely awake, now feeling really good nine tin I am fully awake at this point. And he scratches through previous entries just to to keep track right on where he is in the day. And then it takes like a really jarring turn. Once in a while, I'll be like n twelve, I no longer trust my wife. Yeah, there's some weird guy on my couch here. She's out to get me. She could really mess with this guy. Yeah, you know, she could be like Joey Pants and Memento. Yeah. I mean, how many times in an argument do I s I don't know what you're talking about. That would be so great if that was actually affecting. I mean, an argument would just stop after a few seconds, would be like, but that would be one of the horrible side effects sure of having m nisa, like Clive wearing has UM. Imagine coming to and you're a genneral and still pumping, and you feel the sensation of anger. You have no idea. Why. Yeah, that that is what happens to this guy. Yeah, so we should say that. Um, he's not just like a a walking noodle like he does have some memories. He has Uh. He has the ability to still play the piano, which is amazing. He was an accomplished piano player. Um, but he can he can play the piano if you ask him to, and he'll play it well. But then when he finishes, you can say, oh, what was that piece? And he will say what peace? And that's that. Yeah. He he has both retrograde and in tarro grade amnesia, which is pretty rare to have both of those at once. Um, and what we'll get to what all that means. But uh, and we'll get to why as well that he can go make a cup of coffee. We're going to get to it. You know, we already have. Oh that's a nice tease. Apparently one of the symptoms that he first exhibited was he couldn't remember his daughter's name, though really one of his earliest symptoms was the headache. And then all of a sudden, he's like, what's your name kid? Right? And then he thought maybe something's not right here. Well, and this is one of the things about amnesia that it's different for everyone, and it's all dependent on uh, what happened to you and the extent of whatever damage you may have suffered. Right, And even two people who have identical types of amnesia, it's going to be different for them. And here's why memory is different for everybody. Exactly, we all four memories following similar um constructs. But for each individual person, what we remember, what makes us remember something, um, all of that is highly individualized, highly personalized, so much so that, Chuck, have you ever wondered if we all see the color green the same? No, you've never wondered. Now, I never wondered that, but now I am, And it's fascinating. You haven't never wondered that? Really? Oh yeah, like if like our visual cues are subjective, well, I mean, like I see green and you see green and it's similar. But haven't you ever wondered if like the shade is slightly different or I never wondered that just because of our the information coming to our optic terms, our eyes are slightly different, Like all of those little nuances, like what's green to me? It's not necessarily green to you, even though it really is because we both say lights green. Yeah, but there if you think about there will be no way to really describe that because if it's all subjective, what do you say? Green is like a combination of these two colors? Like, but what are those two colors? Yeah, it's easier to just point and be like that's green. You go, now that's not green. Yeah, we should do one on color blindness. I have it on the list, but it's, um pretty tough, believe it or not. I did. Uh, don't be dumb on color blindness. Dogs being color blind? Right, they're not. They're not. No, No, they see how to prove that they see a spectrum? I can't remember. You'll have to watch. They don't be dumb on it. Um. Okay, So let's talk about the memory process that humans typically follow, even though it is highly individualized. Yeah, there's a couple of types of memory we all know and love as short term and long term. Um. If you long short term is good because you remember what you want and you get rid of what you don't if you if you didn't, you would be like Mary lou Henterer from Taxi. Oh did she have like an amazing memory? She has a condition that only another dozen people have in the US called h Sam highly superior autobiographical memory. And they just discovered it in two thousand six period, not just in her. And it's only autobiographical, though, but for these people, you say June one, six and Merrily Lou Henner can go, oh, well, that was an off day for taxi. We weren't shooting, and I went shopping at Sacks and bought the scarf and had a cop salad. And uh, like I said, though it's only autobiographical, they can't necessarily remember like everything, just about details of their life. But it's just nuts, Like she literally members everything that's ever happened to her. So that's cool that she remembers that cops salad because it was probably pretty good, pretty tough to screw up the cops salad. Uh, Sacks trip. That's fun. So that's good. But if she were if she had um a low lighting inhibition where all of the things like the click of of UM, a lightbulb turning on, the buzzing from somebody's electric razor next door, the sound of water rushing, the look of everything, the feel of everything, all of that information was coming in and flooding her memory and asking for her attention to crazy. Yeah. So one of the roles of short term memory, specifically the hippocampus, is to say keep that, keep that, throw that away, throw that away, throw that away. This one seems kind of important. Oh, this one has an emotion attached. We definitely need to keep that. That's what's going on with short term memory. Apparently we keep about seven pieces of informa ation up to thirty seconds, which sounds to me like a statement that is going to be utterly debunked as ridiculous in ten years. You understand memory more for the time being. That's our concept of short term memory. It does seem sort of like a stab. Yeah, a stab at something. It's overly concise. Yeah, you know, agreed. So that's short term memory and short term memories basically just holding immediate information in the front of your mind, um figure totively in literally yeah. Uh. And if it's sorted, it's sorted into long term memory. That's right. How we store memories, how we make memories. The first thing that happens is we have something called sensory memories. So you see a uh, you hear josh past gas, and you hear a sound. You might smell something you would not hear that. That's true, you're an sp D guy. Uh. Or Let's say you see a strawberry and you taste the strawberry and you see what it looks like, that it's red, and you taste it and you know it's tart. Those are sensory memories, and our nerve cells detect that. They send that as an electrical electrical impulse along to the end of a nerve um. It turns on the little neurotransmitter, which sends a chemical message that hops. We've talked about synapses, those gaps between nerve cells. The neurotransmitter sends it across that little great divide to the neuron, which is your brain cell, and immediately your brain registers that as a short term memory. Uh. And whether or not it becomes a long term memory is whether or not you need to remember that and encode it. And that encoding process is what moves it to the deep freeze. You know what I'm curious about. I wish I thought to look this up. How does science quantify the present? Like? Can you as the present? You know point eight nanoseconds? Is it the thirty seconds that you're you're working memories, chewing on something. I mean, how quickly does a sensation or an experience become the past? That's nanosecond after it happens, I guess. But why a nano second? Why not a micro second? Why not five seconds? Whatever the smallest amount of time is. Yeah, technically probably, I guess. So that's pretty deep thought though after that, green, it's like I took acid earlier. Sweet? Uh so um. Encoding for long term memories where we were right, All of this stuff is coming to the hippocampus, and the hippocampus works in concert with some other parts of the brain, the amygdala, the thalamus. The amygdala is big on emotion, the thalamus is big on um routing sensory stuff and pairing it with emotion. Emotions play a big role in memory, yes, because if you pair an experience with an emotion, it's going to have that much more of a an impact on our neural pathways that are formed. Yeah, that's what encoding is. Like the things you remember most, you're you're you're basically leaving a trail of bread crumbs along this pathway. If you want to retrieve a memory, and the stronger like you said, if it's tied to emotion, it might be stronger and more reinforced. Or if it's something you have to remember a lot, that bread crumb trail is going to be with larger pieces of bread. Yeah. The more spot, the more times it's traversed, the the more well worn the path grows, the stronger that memory is UM. And that's that's a UM A mechanism called long term potential action where an initial sensory experience becomes a hard encoded memory in our long term memory. And you could crack open like one of our brains and say, see this this neural circuit right here, that's my memory of my last birthday. Yeah. See that doughnut that's just there. It just started growing a few years ago. I'm waiting for it to fully mature before I harvest it. That was always a one of the early Simpsons had that. I think it showed people's like thought bubbles at one point, and Homer's is just a donut. Yeah, that was pretty good. I can see that. Uh So, like you said, this this is all part of the limbic system. I don't think we said that. No, we didn't, which which is uh, you know your reward system, you experience emotions through it. Yeah, learning memory all that is tied to the limbic system and um, are our thoughts are being stored in the cerebral cortex? Are I should say, are episode or is it our episodic well short term that's in this in the cerebral cortex. Yeah, okay, um so if a yeah, that's right. Because if you take a specific type of memory, which we'll get to in a second, it usually gets stored in the region that's responsible for processing it as it happens in the first place. So like Broker's area responsible for processing language, there's also your your language related memories are stored there. Yeah. Yeah, you know the time that guy shouted at you in Spanish you didn't know what he was saying. You can crack open the Broker's area and there it is. Yeah. So the cortex is where you temporarily put it. It works with the hippocampus to send it to like you said, whatever part of the brain. I didn't know that. That's interesting though. It lives where it was originated. Mixed total sense. Yeah again, I really just I have a feeling that are understanding of memory is tenuous enough that like a lot of this stuff is going to change in ten years, five years, fifteen years, but for the time being, this is our understanding. Well, like with anything of the brain, it's just like there's still so much mystery, you know, it's shrouded in it the gray area. Uh. All right, So there's many types of long term memory. Uh. They are as follows, and these will come up throughout the show. Your explicit or episodic memory is what we do we study for a podcast. Basically, it's like facts and information specific stuff. Right, we read it, we learn it, we know it. Yeah, cramming for an exam, that's how you do it. You've got procedural or implicit Uh. These are sensory and motor memories. That's how you know how to make a cup of coffee. And it's it's like muscle memory. Yeah, it becomes less of memory and more something that you've done by repetition over and over. That's why, uh, Clive make that cup of coffee, or can play the piano. Still, Yeah, he does remember how to play the piano. His fingers just do it from muscle memory. Right, he doesn't consciously remember. He does have procedural memories exactly. Um, you've got semantic memory, which is organized and categorized memories. So it's kind of like a meta version of type of memory, right, where like you, um, if you're thinking about what your favorite bands are something, right, you have a file of all the bands you ever listened to that and maybe there's a subfolder in that file of the ones that you've ever heard that you like, right, and all of those are based on your experiences of listening to led Zeppelin or you know, um Boogie Down Productions or the Carpenters. I can go on. So when someone asks you what your favorite band does, you're scrolling through that folder, right, and what you're doing is accessing your semantic memory. Right. Or you could just say Pavement. You could be like, look at the T shirt, but you just default and say Pavement and you're good to go. Pixies for you, probably, huh uh. Yeah. I would say these days, I would go more with Morrissey. Oh yeah, yeah, whoa Oh he's always been up there, yeah, nipping at the Pixies heels. But I would say Morrisey may have taken the lead recently. Yeah, I remember we're hearing the Smiths for the first time in like ninth grade, I was like, man, who are these guys? They still hold up? But if you and if you listen though, it's like, well, no, you mean the Smiths. No, I love the Smiths. But if you listen to Morrissey's career, like all it was was the evolution of Morris. He started with the Smiths and he just kept going and he just hit his stride even more after the Smiths. Morris even more than the Smith's man all right, and it felt good to get off my chest. You won't find me dissing Mars under any circumstances. Why would. He's the man. So you've got emotional long term memory that those are um well emotional like superintense memories about something that may have happened to you. Uh. And then spatial which are just the spacing of an area. I remember that in the dark when I go to the bathroom that I have to walk around my nightstand. Oh yeah, that's the good one, running right into it. Man, that'll break your toe. Although that happens, and I kind of I don't necessarily take issue with emotional memories being broken out as their own thing, but it seems like emotion is one of the drivers of memory formation, even if it's just the slightest feeling. It seems like emotion is attached to all memories, like it's a it's a signal like remember this, and it's also a way it's it's an aspect of memory as well, like when you recall a memory strawberry. Um, if you have your first strawberry after somebody mashes it in your face and like twist your nipples and walks away, right, you're probably going to associate that bad feeling with strawberries for a while. There's nothing worse than strawberry tuffs. So so all all memories have some amount of emotion to him, which means all memories are emotional. But Chuck, that doesn't mean that for the rest of your life you're gonna have kind of a sour taste in your mouth when you're eating a sweet strawberry because of that initial experience, because memories are subject to change because of neural plasticity. That's right, although you may as well like you might remember it, but I'll you don't have the emotional experience of it over and over again. If you eat enough strawberries and experience them in different situations and settings. Right, I guess you're right. Like, if something has made me sick in the past, I have an aversion to it, but I don't power through it, like I just leave it there. I won't drink Milwaukee's Best beer anymore. Really get sick off that man like years ago, and just the smell of it now immediately, I'm just like bo. That's funny, you know, Um, if you wanted to, you could power through it and after enough times, what you would be doing is activating that neural circuit, that long term potential ation and refreshing it a little bit, changing your idea of what Milwaukee's Best is all about. But that's a commercial. They should send us some beer and I'll get over it. You. But I won't get so drunk that I pass out and forget, because we'll get to that. That's a real thing. Yeah, it's a kind of amnesia. It is literally, you can get amnesia tonight if you want things. I'm going to see Stephen Maltamus tonight full circle. You want to remember that? And then the third type of memory is where you combine short term memory with long term memory and you come up with working memory. UM. One example I saw during research is when you're looking at a menu, you're going down a menu to decide what you want to eat. You're taking in that information from that menu, UM, and you're creating a little bit of an episodic stimulus in your short term memory, and then you're accessing your long term memories, maybe from having pork chops before, UM, and you're comparing the two. That's your working memory. So that's a that's a huge aspect of memory as well. And they think, as it stands right now, that it's basically a combination of short term memory and long term memory, mixing them together. And there you have your menu choice and that's just your day to day kind of deciding things. That's what you're working memory is. Yeah, that's a very dumb way to say it, but you know what I mean, your day to day all right. So I guess we can talk about an amnesia a little bit now, right, Yeah, Uh, forgetfulness is good. It's not a bad thing to forget. Um. You should remember the important things. But like we said, it frees up your brain of the the stuff we don't need. And amnesia is nothing more than a really bad case of the forgets brought on by It can be brought on by a lot of things, but a lot of time it's literally an injury to your brain. Yeah. Well that's neurological amnesia. Yeah, which is the first kind that we're talking about here. It can come on from a stroke. Yeah, it can come on from your you're just not having enough oxygen for a little while. Drug Yeah, drugs can bring it on. Drugs can bring in alcohol. Yeah. What else? Uh, any like blunt force trauma, Yeah, electro convulsive therapy. That was another good episode he did. Yeah. In the case of Clyde Wearing, he had a he had her pies encephalitis, a viral infection that can do it. It It destroyed his basically cut the chord of the hippocampus and the cortex. We'll give him that. The analogy. That's a great analogy, the telephone cord. Uh. Yeah. Then this is thanks to Kristen Kongner who wrote this. I don't know if we mentioned that. Um, if your memories a telephone, the hippocampus is the phone chord, and the synapsis that we talked about are the in the cortex. Those are the voicemail messages. So in his case, he had damaged to his cortex, I believe, and the hippocampus, right, Yeah, he has one of the more severe versions of amnesia. So because the phone cord was cut in the hippocampus, that's why he has no ability to form any long term memory because there's just no pathway. And the voice messages are erased essentially because of the damage to the cortex, and there's no way they may be they're still but there's no way for him to access his voicemail account any longer. So he has a really bad case of neurological amnesia and analogy. I had Mr Telephone Man in my head that New Addition song. Oh yeah, yeah, boys, to go listen to it. It worked too, So when you die your baby's number and you get a click every time, Mr Telephone Man, it's a good song. It is a good song. Neitherdition was pretty good. Yeah, and well we gone over Bill Bidevo when I've dropped a couple of references over the years. Yeah that very few people notice. Were you a Bell Bidevo fan? Okay a little bit? I mean, you know, that wasn't really my music, but I'm a new addition man myself. That was a big Bobby Brown guy. So, UM, with this, with neurological amnesia, there is damage to the structure. Um, and it just shuts down the whole system right cuts that chord and um we talked about all of the different ways you can you can get that. Yeah, and it can be, like we said, depending on how severe the injuries are. It's not always completely cut, but it just may be damaged. So you may have either really bad amnesia like c live wearing, or maybe not so bad right and um. Neurological amnesia is very often permanent, but it's also very often stable unless it's associated with the degenerative brain disease. It's usually like after whatever event happened to you, whatever you come to remembering, or maybe after you fully recover, um, after you hit that point where you're like I don't remember anything else or I can't form new memories after X number of minutes or seconds or whatever. Um, it's gonna stay like that. M So, Chuck, we're talking about neurological amnesia. That's one type and uh the other type, and there's different ways to break them out. But the other main type is dissociative amnesia, which is brought on by intense amounts of stress. Yeah, it's um, it can be a trauma. The good news is it's usually temporary and it can associate. Uh, it can come to light in a couple of different ways. UM. Let's say you had some super traumatic event that can either damage your memory as a whole because of massive amounts of corticol from stress. Or it could just be the one event that you blocked out, like a really bad mugging that scared you, or a car accident or something. You might not have any memory just of that. Right. That's actually how they divide um or subdivide dissociative amnesia. There's a global dissociative amnesia, which is autobiographical, which is like who am I? What happened? After witnessing your family be murdered or something horrific like that, you don't remember anything about anything. Um. The other type of situational dissociative amnesia, where you remember yourself, you remember who you are, your address, out, everything except that that murder that you witnessed. Yeah, which can be a good thing. Yeah, it can be get rid of that memory. You know, you could definitely interpret it as like a safeguard by the brain, you know. Um. Either way, though, what's happened is, like you said, cortisol has been released, which has been shown to affect the hippocampus. Uh. And it also affects the brain's plasticity, or its ability to form new memory. So basically, one way to put it, especially with situational dissociative amnesia, is the brain says, this is so stressful, yeah, that I'm overwhelmed with cortisol and I can't form new memories right now. Therefore this never happened. Yeah. You know. One thing that was interesting is hippopotamus is um. I saw this on Animal Planet the other day. They are so stressed out, um, especially sadly little babies that are orphaned because of poaching for rhino horns. Did I say, hippopotamus rhinoceros. Yeah, they they they feel for the rhinoceros, the rhinoceros I was thinking hippocampus, I think, yeah, um, they can die from too much cortisol, from being stressed so sad like a little baby rhino might die because their parents died just from cortisol, Like massive amounts of cortisol we have to update or can you die of a broken heart episode? Then I think we just did. Okay, we can check that off the list. That's right. Okay. Yes, stressed is a killer. You know this? Yeah? Literally, um, and it can cause amnesia and this is not um. I think a lot of people suspect that when it's not neurological, when there's not an organic cause like a brain injury for amnesia, that it's possibly somebody faking or something like that. No. There, there, they are so stressed out that the chemicals, the chemical composition in their brain has prevented new memories from forming. Not plastic anymore. No. Uh. The thing is is that that the associative amnesia is very frequently temporary. Um. There might be something that triggers a memory that leads to a cascade of memories that restores the person's memory fully. Um. You see that in movies too. That's a big popular one for fiction. Yeah, it's crazy that there's like I mean, it's in movies that happens far more frequently, um than in real life. But it's not terribly far off, not because the movie these are really kind of keeping it close to reality. Just that amnesia is like, can be that crazy, right, right, Yeah, you can kind of do anything, and someone's probably had that kind right. So he mentioned weaving um wearing. Clive Wearing has both retrograde and antiro grade, and that is a couple of other ways that that doctors can um categorize. It is by the type of memory he has. Both retro grade means you can't remember the past and a taro grade means you can't make the new memories. And since he has both, he's in big trouble. Uh. Antro grade is a little more like the movie Memento when every thirty or forty seconds you're born anew but even still, Uh, if you haven't seen Memento, just go ahead and fast forward through this part. Yeah. Um, but he he wrongly remembers his own past. Yeah, which is a symptom of um retrograde amnesia that you can fabulate. You basically come up with imaginary things your mind us to fill in the gaps, and you believe them to be real, but they're not real. It's imagined. Remember that's how he turned out at the end. Like he wasn't the insurance adjuster. That wasn't a case like that was his life. Yeah. And uh also very especially in that movie, very easily to be taken advantage of the one scene with this when he was paying rent, when he kept paying rent, like I was like, hey, your rents do and yeah, I think I was a jerk, But he has a system. We'll talk about that coming up to So let's let's talk about in taro grade. And taro grade is the inability to form new memories. Uh, And it's pretty simple. Basically, there's something wrong with the hippocampus right then. Could be permanent, in which case you end up like Clive Wearing and you can't form new memories, or it could be temporary, could be drunk. That is why uh and tarograde amnesia is far more common than retrograde. It's one reason we can easily assault our hippocampus through booze. Yeah. And as an example of how procedural memory still stays intact, you can walk and talk and move around and everything, and then wake up the next morning be like how did I get here? And no matter how hard you try, you're not going to remember specific details if you fully blacked out, because when you were fully blacked out, your hippocampus was no longer taking all this information and forming memories like they just don't exist. And that's saying tarograde amnesia. And it depends on who you are. Some people like might have an alcohol blackout way easier than others. But if you're blacking out from alcohol, you're drinking too much, you know. Yeah, even if you're someone with a super low tolerance and blacks out really easily. Yeah, blacking out, it's blacking out. It's a line for everyone. That doesn't mean you're passing out. You're still doing stuff right and saying stuff you're blacked out, you're blacked out. But um, it can be kind of tricky because if you think about it, you wake up the next morning and you're like, how did I get here? What happened? And by that time, last night was the past, which makes you think, oh, that's retrograde amnesia. Know that amnesia is related to your ability to form memories or access old memories. So with antaro grade, your ability to form new memories in the present, which was while you were drunk and blacked out, right, that was antaro grade amnesia. That's right. Retrograde amnesia is totally different because it is the destruction of those voicemail messages of your past, yes, which is super sad um. Yeah, because what's life of It's not a collection of memories you know and hope for the future. Look at you and this micro second right now. Uh. With retrograde, it's um if it's severe, basically your new memory or your most recent memories which aren't as strong and reinforced yet, are the ones to go first. And then depending on how severe your retrograde at amnesia as it'll go further and further back in your little memory file and start destroying them. Or if you're the case of wearing, if you have a super bad you might not remember your past at all, right, but you just remember his wife. He does remember his wife. And that theory um or that it's called is that Ribot's law, r I bot I would say, Ribo rebo. It looks pretty French. It does look French. Uh. That is that that pattern of destroying those newer memories first and then going back and back depending on how severe it is. And there's a there's a reasoning to it behind the whole thing. It's that you're your more recent memories haven't had years to potentiate and become these well worn paths, so they're easier to wipe out than your longer term ones. But it's totally different retrograde amnesia because it it can attack those parts of your brain where um those memories are stored, So it might not have anything to do with any kind of damage to your hippocampus. It can say, attack the part of your brain where um again, the language memories are stored in your broker's area. Yeah, like if you have a stroke, you might not remember how to speak, and that means that broke his area has been damaged via lack of blood flow and oxygen. That might be different. That might be like your you lose your ability to speak. I wonder if it does have to do with memory, though, now that you mention it, I don't know, huh. Like when my grandfather had a stroke, he still talked, but they weren't words, but he thought he was talking, like in his head he was saying, now you turn left up here to go to the gas station to his wife, but it came out as walking walking duke and walking by super bark and walking all. But that was unsettling. It was sad and unsettling. How how long did he looks like the frustration too? Because in his head he was saying the right words, But could he hear himself like what was coming out of his I don't know, because he couldn't tell us or he could see on your faces that he wasn't saying what he was saying. I don't. I mean I was pretty young, so this is all kind of distant. But how long did he live like that? Um? I feel like a few years? Yeah? Yeah? Did he could? He? Right? I don't remember that. Usually that's separate. Oh yeah, so buddy could write still you should find out. I'm curious. Yeah, I should ask my mom? Was he a good guy? I used the best? Yeah? Well, I'm sorry, Chuck. That's right. It happens. It's in my bloodline too, so I'm sure the same thing will happen to me. Is it really? Well, I will prop you up in front of the microphone and we'll do a podcast like that and you'll just translate for me. Yeah, that's very enough to be like I think he's saying he likes paved me. Uh, you could just default to that and not always be sort of happy, and that's fine. I was really saying I was hungry, but you go welcome. Yeah. Um it was weird though, Like his language was very consistent. It had that saying the familiar, like there's a lot of walking walking like that sound like he made up his own language sort of. It's really interesting. That's interesting. And the thing is that's how they figured out that different parts of the brain are responsible for different Um, I guess different aspects of our personality your life, Like speaking is different than hearing yeah and writing right. And it's like if you're just because you can't talk or form words, doesn't mean you can't hear and understand words or write words right, or think in your head the right words, even whether they're not coming out right. Uh So, with both of these kinds of amnesia, uh, we should point out that your explicit or episodic memory is what you're losing, but you're implicit or procedural memory is usually still intact as long as you're cerebellum is good. That's why you might be able to make the cup of coffee or ride a bike, these things that are just ingrained in your in your brain right, And that's why clid Waring can play the piano, but he can't remember who his favorite composer is now, So wearing is a really good example of how somebody can live with amnesia. Number One, he has an amazing caretaker, his wife, who you know, basically she takes care of him. Yeah. I bet she does little things though, like just where she wants to eat that night, right, Like, no, we ate there last night, I'm not going there again, Right, He's like we did. Or she can really get him going where every time he looks at he's like her, she's kiss right, she's kissed, you know, just to just to delight him a little bit. It would be fun to do that, Yeah, exactly. Um. But yes, he has a good caretaker, which is important. Yes, because there's no treatment for amnesia. There's no right. They can't inject you with something all of a sudden your memories come back. So most, um, most treatments for amnesia deal with figuring out how to navigate life under this the new change to the way you remember things. Yeah, it's all about systems. You have to have a system in place that you don't deviate from. Um. In Clive's case and the case of a minto, he's tattoos and polaroids, yeah, and notes for himself, Yeah, sticky notes. And that's what weiring does. Basically keeps a journal and like I said, he crosses things out as he goes, so he knows where he is in the day. Right. He also can look at his journal and says, now, I woke up three times already. I don't need to stop writing that. Um He Also the other aspect of UM forming routines is that they involve habits, and the habits remember your procedural memory still intact, so you end up like just knowing. How does he know to get up and go to the journal if his memory refreshes every few minutes, for every few seconds, it's because he's formed a habit, a procedural memory of there's a journal and you should go to it. So he knows what we would call instinctively um through his procedural memory of using the journal over and over again. He's formed a habit. So that helps big time. Also, smartphones help big time too, because he can access all sorts of stuff, set reminders. He's got a calendar right there, basically what most of us do, except taken to the nth degree. You know, like I rely I have a terrible memory, you know this, So I rely heavily on calendars and notes and reminders. Um, and I don't even have amnesia as far as I know. Can't you imagine like every time he pulls his iPhone out, he's like, wow, right, look at this thing. You know, it's reminding me and it's a computer in my hand. Yeah, the future is here. His wife is so sick of hearing him say the future is here. We really pooked fund of this guy a lot. Yeah. I hope he's not listening to this so he won't remember anyway. Oh, there it was. Uh. Psychotherapy, if you have dissociative amnesia, can help out. I imagine that's a tough case to tackle because not only do you have to get to the root of this, like you have to, you have to figure out everything else first, you know, and then then then sort through this lost you have regenerate the bio autobiographical information and then figure out which part of it is the real problem. So it's like this huge, massive layer on top of a normal case that's already a very pronounced one because the stressful event was so bad that it wiped out their ability to form memories. Yeah, that's a good point. That's got to be. I'm sure not every psychiatrist can handle that. I would say you'd go to a specialist or something like that, an amnesia specialist. Uh do you think there are those? Sure? Well, I'd like to hear from you if you listen to the podcast and early shout out. Uh. If you have amnesia from drinking too much, uh coursaicov syndrome, you should quit drinking so much and maybe take some B one because because what is it called thiamine deficiency? Yeah, that's all it is, is vitamin B. Don't you remember you said that? Um? I can't remember which episode it was, but we were talking about hardcore alcoholics degenerate basically physically mentally. Yeah, that's that yea. And part of it is a thiamine deficiency which leads to amnesia, which can be treated by laying off the sauce and taking B one. It's so sad. Have you ever known someone that was truly like pickled themselves? No, it's sad, especially when you know it's from drinking. You know, it's a it's like a form of dementia really, yeah, from booze and I like to drink. You know, I'm not like poopling the whole thing, but like when you're blacking out and forgetting things and getting the d t s, yeah, that's like, that's bad news. I know that's obvious, but we should point that out because we have kids that listen to this. It's true, you know, all right, So Chuck habits Oh, I wrote another one. I wrote a review of a woman who who wrote a memoir and she had amnesia, huge, big time amnesia. Was it short? Um? No? But her the first line is something like everything you're about to read, I don't remember. It was told to me. She was playing with her kid, and the kid she was spinning him around, and I guess he knocked the ceiling fan loose and it was like poorly installed, and it came down on her head and it was like Gilligan's Island level amnesia. She gets bond and forgets things everything. Yes, she has like world class amnesia, almost done a Clive Wearing level. Um. And she wrote this, this memoir and in it she's basically saying like how she navigates through life with amnesia and a lot of it is just faking it. Yeah, she didn't lose her ability to pick up on social cues, so she can pick up on what's expected of her and she can kind of guess. Um. Yeah. She says she has no idea why people celebrate birthdays or holidays or anything, but she still does it because she realizes she's expected to. So she's no, it's not with her. Surely there probably is confabulation. She doesn't believe what she's imagining. She's faking it, okay, and apparently she's so good at it that people forget she has amnesia. Right, Um, but she's saying like, no, I really genuinely don't remember. I'm just good at making it seem like I do so I can fit in. I must be so weird and frustrating. It sounds pretty weird, like if to have to sing Happy Birthday at a birthday party and she's like, I'm singing this song. I know I'm supposed to do it, but I don't know why these people do this. Yeah wow, um, all right, well let's take another break and then we'll come back with some more amnesia. Alright, So, Chuck, you want to talk about amnesia detection, which seems like, oh, that person can't remember any think they have amnesia or they just got hit on the head with a coconut right, well for wearing. Uh, he had a headache. That was the first thing that happened. The next thing that happened a couple of days later, Like you said earlier, he could remember his daughter's name, So warning signs flashing at that point, and it really spiraled out of control from there in his case. Uh, sometimes is super obvious. Um, Like you said, if you injure your head and you can't remember things, then you've got some form of amnesia. Um. Can you recall your past events? Uh? Do you confabulate? Do you confabulate? And the difference between a confabulation alive, by the way, is there's intent with a lie. Right, this person honest intent, Like it doesn't realize they're filling in the gaps with imagined stuff, or if they do, they don't want to think about it. There. Yeah, there's no malice and all. They're just trying to be normal. Uh. You might have tremors or be uncoordinated. You might be confused and disoriented, could be in a fugue state, which is where you're wandering around. Yeah, that's with the disassociative identity that can be present for sure. You remember when John McCain entered that fugue state in the two eight debate against Obama. Did you see that? Yeah? Man, I couldn't believe it. Even Obama was like, what is this guy doing? He even he made that face and I think he pointed his thumb off to this time he would to a different place state. Uh. One thing you want to do is get a cat scan or an m r I or both and see a doctor immediately, you know, and find out what the heck is going on. Yeah, Like, don't don't If you can't remember things that you usually can, don't mess around. It could be a sign of early Alzheimer's. UM, it could be a sign of mild cognitive impairment. They're both kinds of dementia, Yeah, which I want to mess around with that. You can get amnesia from the thos or it can be a symptom of dementia, but UM, dementia and amnesia are not one and the same. Um. So, Chuck, why don't you see people wearing like, uh prevent amnesia t shirts on like a five k run walk to fight amnesia? I don't know. Because there's no way to prevent it, aside from maybe wearing a helmet when you're riding a bike, avoiding trees with loose coconuts, UM, doing what you can to prevent a stroke or cut down on your risk of stroke uh, and steering clear of highly stressful events. Apparently, there's really not a lot you can do with amnesia. It's bad luck. Is something pretty much something that happens to you that causes it, that's right, UM. But again, there are possible they're working on some treatments. There's no pill now, but they're working on treatments in the the cutting edge field that's starting to yield possibly results that could be used to treat amnesia. Are UM are studying fear extinction the opposite. They're trying to induce s amnisia and PTSD patients, which I think we talked about this in our PTSD episode. I think so. If you've ever seen the movie Eternal Sunshine in the Spotless Mind, that was one of the greatest no And I actually had people say, how was that not on there? That was a good movie. It was a good movie. We'll call it one on one, okay, UM. And in that movie, Uh, people would pay money to have certain in the in the case of the movie, certain people remove from their mind, like a former girlfriend that was so painful you just wanted no trace over in your memory. Um. But they are researching that at La Doo Laboratory at n y U in New York. UH. They did an experiment where with rats where they would associate a sound with him being shocked, and they found that in adult rats um when they heard that sound, of course, they would freeze up like they were going to get shocked, but in baby rats they didn't UM. And what they learned was after about three weeks of age, a sort of a molecular sheath would form around the cells in the amygdala. So they found a drug that would dissolve that sheath and basically leave it prone to UH manipulation replasticization. Yeah. And then they basically found that if that sheath has gone and dissolved, that they could erase fear memories and the adult rats were not affected any longer by that sound, the buzzing sound. And they don't know about humans yet, but they're there. That's obviously why they're studying it. Well, they there just don't want to learn about rats in their memory, right, Um, and we we know a pretty decent amount of human in memory formation, um, thanks to a specific patient named well. For many many years, until just a couple of years ago, he was known only as h. M. Yeah, and he was a man who now that he's died, his identity has been revealed as Henry Mollison. Yeah. He was a lot like Clive Wearing. His memory didn't refresh quite as frequently. But um, he was the initial memory patient. Yeah. He was had a bike wreck when he was a kid and was epileptic from then on. In those siezures to relieve those seizures, they removed part of his amygdala, I'm sorry, all of his amigdala and most of his hippocampus and it stopped the seizures, which is great. But then they found out, hey, we've got a really good memory patient on our hands now, right, because he just couldn't remember, and he was also a very good, easy going guy. Yeah. They studied him for life, Yes, from like nineteen fifty three on, I think in nineteen fifty five on. Yeah, and by on we mean to two thousand and eight. He just died semi recently and they're still slicing his brain apart and sending it out to people to study UM, and he also his brain, I should say, proved that memory is not long circuit. The processes in one long circuit, where like with a string of Christmas lightbulbs, if one bowl burns out, the whole thing does. Because he could remember stuff from his past up to the time when he got the surgery, he just couldn't form new memories. So they figured out that UM long term memory storage and retrieval was distinct from new memory formation, which, as we've seen you and I explained fully. Yeah, they should do. I wish more people like Henrietta Axe and and h M were honored, Like these people should have like statues in front of hospitals, these people who suffered for the greater good, you know, as far as research and scientifics yea, or like those twins that were separated by the New York Um Family Services for Twins studies. Yeah, yeah, those kids need some statues or and some move on the box. The girl in the box. Now the awful the most awful case ever be a Skinner's kid was that the one that they they sasically tortured as a child, oh, very recently, like she was recently discovered. I think it was a boy. I heard about a girl who was kept in a closet for her whole life and then in Texas and I remember that too, Yeah, but not to study as abuse, right, yes, it's total abuse. Now, there was some I know we've talked about it before, some boy who was purposefully sort of abused for the purposes of research. Oh are you talking about? And like they didn't have his real name and know who it was. And for me, little Albert, little Albert, where they they studied fear extinction in him by making him scared of things. Yeah, yeah, he definitely observes a statue. See you remember that and I didn't. So let's um, you said something that that they couldn't remember his name I think is what triggered it. Yeah, so uh and that is uh, that's part of encoding. I encoded it. It's right with the idea little Albert. They didn't remember his original name. Your trail of bread crumbs is more solid. So let's talk pop culture real quick man, good movies, Memento. You mentioned internal sunshine, this potherus mine what else? Um? One of my favorites is Maholland Drive. I don't remember amnesia of being a part of that, but yeah, the the one girl couldn't remember anything, is it the main character? Yeah, the burnette Vanilla Sky. Yeah. I did not care for with it. I know everybody didn't like him, not I didn't like it. There was original open my eyes. I think it was the original Spanish language film that was based on It was really good. At what else I don't know, I don't Oh, well, Jason Bourne, Yeah he had amnesia. Yeah. Um, fifty first Dates. That was a cute one about amnesia. It's a cute movie. I didn't see it. And if you I used to see it, okay. Um, And if you reverse your perspective a little bit groundhog Day where Bill Murray has a tremendously excellent memory and everyone else has amnesia. Yea. And I think this is a great time to acknowledge the great, great Harold Ramos of on hog Day and Stripes and Animal House and Caddyshack and Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters. Yeah, what a loss. He defined comedy for our generation. He died at sixty nine, which is so young, so young, and check there's no way we could do an amnesia episode without mentioning Benjamin Kyle. You remember him. He was found in two thousand four in a dumpster, naked and unconscious in Richmond Hill, Georgia, and he came. We've talked about him before and like one of those one minute bs things um and he cannot remember anything. He has complete autobiographical, episodic amnesia, retrograde amnesia, and nothing is helping. They've put him on MPR, they put him on CNN, they put him on ABC, they put him on News Channel. They've done stories on him around the world. He has a website called Finding Benjamin b E N j A m A n dot com and they want to figure out who this guy is. He wants to know who he is. They have not figured it out. The case is still cold, so he's not faking it. No, if he's faking it, he has totally given himself over the idea that he will never be found out because he has put himself out there. He lives in a bureaucratic limbo because he doesn't have a Social Security number. He can't get a new one because he's he's like sixty years old, and the Feds are like, what do you need a new use your old one. We gave you one before. Um. And he has no idea there's a documentary that's coming out about him or that might be out now. Um. But yeah, it's totally legitimate case of full retrograde amnesia waking up in a dumpster naked in Georgia. And the reason he's called Benjamin Kyle is because he's pretty sure his first name was Benjamin. But um, when he was taken to the hospital, there was already a John Doe there, so they called him b K because they was found behind a Burger king, So he took the name Benjamin Kyle. It's his name, could have been Mickey d could be anything. Wow, Well, faking it is a thing, I think. Um. I think Hess, Rudolph Hess, the Nazi. I didn't look this up, but I think I remember somewhere that he faked amnesia to get out of his war crimes for a period. I believe it. That guy was s ob all around. Yeah, here's a Nazi, I know. I think he did fake amnesian. I think he even fooled his doctors for a time, but then later admitted that he had faked it. I might be wrong. Did generate. I didn't do specific research on that, so we'll see he was a black shirt though, No way, he was a brown shirt. I got it wrong again. Brown shirts with the German black shirts were Italian. Okay, all right, Uh, well that's amnisia. You got anything else, sir man, If you want to read more about it, you should type amnesia into the search bar at how stuff works dot com and it will bring up this article. Since I said search parts time for a listener mail. Uh. This is from a termite expert. He was a pest control operator for seven and a half years and on the board of the New York State Pest Management Association. Hey guys, when you talked about a termidicide treatment, you stated it is injected into the colony. Uh. This isn't quite right. Could be misleading to the average homeowner. Uh, it makes them think that the colony will be killed off. What really happens is that termidicide is injected to form a barrier on a few inches of treated soil around the foundation of the house. When termites come into contact with it, they shortly die. Eventually, the colony realizes something is wrong and send out alarm pheromones to uh, for the others to avoid it. As to the bait, you stated, it might leach into the soil. This makes for good radio or podcasting, but again it's an alarm to the homeowner. Uh, that's not necessarily true. Bait is solid and small and it will not leach, but it will explode. When I was in the business, there were two types of bait. The first was a poison like bait for mice you put in your home. We didn't use that, but it is a but that's about it and simple to understand. H. The idea is hopefully they will realize something is wrong and not come back. The second type of bait, which we used, interfered with the molting process. You could actually see them turn a milky white. As young termites could not grow. The colony died as a nation would die if no new children were born. Like the movie Children of Men, that's a good movie. This program was the only one at the time that would eliminate a colony. I hate to nitpick. You guys run a good show, and I just want to see it done right. And that is from Sean Duffy of Pittsburg, a termite expert who likes to pick knits. Hey, thanks Sean, Right, yeah, uh, we appreciate that. Actually, I'm just teasing. Uh. If you want to tell us something we misstated, slightly or otherwise, you can let us know. Join us on Twitter at s y s K podcast is our handle. Join us on Facebook, dot com slash Stuff you Should Know, check out our YouTube channel just search Josh and Chucky, and as always, join us at our home on the web, The Luxurious Estate Stuff you Should Know dot Com Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H