Andrew Budson
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
Do you remember all the different parts of the cars and what goes in a 57 Chevy versus a 2002 Toyota? I was like, oh, well, that stuff's easy. That's not hard. And it's like, ah, I see. So you're able to remember the things that are important to you. And that's a pattern that we really do see.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
For me, for example, it's very easy for me to listen to a patient tell an entire, say, 30-minute story of all the different problems that they have related to their thinking and memory. And I can remember it with very high fidelity and write that in my note with no problem. And the medical students that I work with, their jaws drop on the floor.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
They don't see how I could remember all that information. But it's because it's information that's important, that I'm used to acquiring, that I put in a framework, so it's not difficult for me. One example that was studied in the scientific literature are chess masters. And chess masters can generally glance at a chess board and be able to remember exactly where all the pieces were on the board.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
But if you took those chess pieces and put them in a random assignment that could not have occurred throughout the playing of a game, then those chess masters are not as good as anybody else at remembering where they are. So it all has to do with sort of fitting into context. But I did want to comment on your remembering those numbers from long ago.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
We all are particularly good at retaining pieces of information that we learned as young adults. And this is something that's a little bit mysterious. People don't really know why there's this sort of privileged period of young adulthood that we tend to remember all the songs and our friends and the phone numbers and what we were doing during that period of our life more than
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
But that is an interesting little fact.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
I love the examples that you used because it has been studied what is the strongest form of memory. And for the vast majority of people, even people who might say, oh, I'm an auditory learner, people remember pictures better than they remember any other material. And I think this is biological. We as human beings are visual animals, and this is our strongest sense.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And this strong visual memory goes beyond individual preferences. But having said that, these other sensations like hearing and smelling are also very powerful memory cues. And smells and tastes can also be highly linked to memory. And there's sort of an interesting little story there, which is that
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
our memory system for events of our life, for episodes of our life, we feel actually evolved with our sense of smell. And this is one reason that senses of smell can trigger particularly powerful memories.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And I love the way you use that metaphor of a doorway. That's the way I think about all these different memory cues, whether it's going back to the same house that you perhaps grew up in or had other strong association with, or you're looking at a picture, perhaps of a face of someone you know, or you're hearing a song that you haven't heard for a long time, those do act as doors.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And all of a sudden, you find yourself transported back, and you can step into that prior world.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
That's a great question. And the answer is that your example shows that we have so many more memories than we're able to access at a particular instant of time. The only way that we may be able to access some of those are to have the right key to fit in the lock and open the door to continue this metaphor of the right cues opening doors.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
So on the one hand, there are a lot of memories that we have that we just have to find the right cue to retrieve. But having said that, even though there absolutely are memories that you did not know were there, it's not anywhere close to remembering everything. Most of the time, we really are just remembering a few things, a few of the things that are important.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
There are good ways to do it. There are four F-O-U-R things that you should do to remember things for a long time. First is the F, which is you should focus your attention on whatever it is you want to remember. The O is organize. You want to organize whatever it is that you're trying to remember in a logical, coherent way. The U is understand what it is that you want to remember.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
So especially for all those students out there, you want to make sure that you really understand it. But even if it's an event that you're experiencing, make sure you understand the implications and what's going on. And the R in the four is to relate this new information that you're learning to things that you already know or care about. And you do that, for example, by doing what?
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
For example, if you're studying for a test, you want to try to focus your effort on it. You want to, for example, don't just read the textbook, but copy down key points and organize it in a way that makes sense. You want to make sure that all the material that you're studying
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
that you really understand what it means, and then you want to relate it to things that you may have learned in other courses or other parts of your life.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
Alcohol, even having a single drink, can decrease your ability to remember things. Is it even true if you're having that drink a few days after you've remembered something?
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
Thanks so much for having me.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
Well, everyone is a little bit different in what they are good at remembering, but almost everybody is good at remembering some things. I think it seems as if some people's memories are sort of good in general because they're good at remembering things like people's names or dates or things that are often tested. But in fact, we're all good at remembering things that are important to us.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
You know, there are some changes that are normal as people get older. And three of the most common changes in normal aging are that people often need to hear something more than once in order for it to get into the memory store. The second change that often occurs is that it may take them a little bit longer to retrieve the information that they're looking for.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And the third change is that sometimes people need a little hint or a cue in order to retrieve that memory. But importantly, in normal aging, as long as the information got into the memory store, it should be able to be retrieved, even if it takes a little bit of time or a hint or a cue.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
It turns out that our memories are not built to remember like a snapshot or a photograph of what we're seeing. Our memories were actually evolved to remember sort of the parts that are important to us. And often they remember the gestalt or the gist of that information. So that's one reason that we may not remember the same thing verbatim.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
The other reason that sometimes our memories are not a perfect picture of reality is anytime that we retrieve a memory and we may think about it in a certain way, it actually can change the memory in a subtle way and we can incorporate false information into our memories.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
Absolutely. That is one of the keys, which is that being intentional about your learning, whatever it is, whether you're at a cocktail party and you're meeting new people and you're trying to remember everyone's names. having the intention is absolutely key because it makes you focus your attention on the information.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And focusing attention is probably the first thing that we need to do in order to remember something.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
What memory is really good at is being able to take this information that happened in the past and allow us to flexibly and creatively put it together in new ways to envision different possible futures. And we think that that is why memory is so easily mixed up and distorted, because it did not evolve in order to remember things perfectly from the past.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
Memory evolved in order to have us use that past information to plan for the future.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
No, I think that's totally correct. And one of my favorite examples of this is if you, let's say, are watching a movie, and let's say you started off watching this movie yourself, but now your spouse comes home and you enthusiastically describe the movie to your spouse. And then there's this memory of your spouse that is getting mixed up with your memory of watching the movie.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And so then when you talk about this movie with your friend, say a month later or a year later, you may now have incorporated your wife into this memory as well. And when you think about watching the movie and remember it, you say, oh, right, and I watched it with my wife.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
So alcohol, although I want to preface my comments by saying there's not evidence that one alcoholic beverage a day is harmful in any sort of permanent way to your brain or another part of your body, but even having a single drink can decrease your ability to remember things.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And one of the somewhat perhaps depressing aspects of that statement I just meant is it's even true if you're having that drink a few days after you've remembered something. So if you do what I used to do in college, which is I would study during the week and then I would enjoy having fun on the weekends with my friends and drinking some alcohol.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
It turns out that that weekend drinking can actually interfere with my ability to consolidate and really store in a deep permanent way the things I was learning during the week. So the things you now know as an adult that you wish you knew or maybe are glad you didn't know when you were a kid.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
It's also known that cannabis, marijuana, the THC in it, the sort of ingredient that makes you high, that also does interfere with memory. So there's a lot of different substances out there that can interfere with memory. Almost all sleeping pills, except for melatonin, whether they're over-the-counter sleeping pills or prescription sleeping pills, they can also interfere with memory.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
So there's a lot of things out there that can interfere. But let me just mention a couple of the things that can actually make things better. Getting enough sleep is beneficial for your memory.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
paying attention more and if that means that you're stimulated either endogenously because you're excited about the learning that's taking place or you're excited about whatever you're doing, that's gonna help you remember things better.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
And there's nothing wrong with using a little bit of a stimulant like a cup of coffee or tea or another caffeinated beverage that can help you to be more alert and pay attention a little bit better and things that you pay attention to better, you'll remember better.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
Most of those supplements do not work, particularly the ones that are advertised for memory loss. I can say fairly confidently that there's no supplement or herbal remedy that is advertised on TV or other media that has any proven efficacy for people who have memory loss.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
there are some supplements that have some type of stimulant uh in it and as i just mentioned you know if if you take a stimulant whether it's in a supplement or in a cup of coffee you know that can be beneficial as long as it's not too high because just like if you drink
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
too many cups of coffee and you are sort of hyperactive and you can't pay attention to anything, the same thing can happen if you took too much of any stimulant, including those sold in supplements.
Something You Should Know
Why We Forget & The Amazing Story of Your Body’s Atoms - SYSK Choice
I really think the more that I talk with people, you know, I speak with a lot of people about memory. And sometimes people say, oh, my memory is terrible. I can't remember anything. And then I'll say, well, you know, what do you do for a living? Oh, well, I'm a mechanic. You know, I fix cars. And I'm like, well...