← Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies with Alie Ward
Mnemonology (MEMORY) Part 2 with Michael Yassa
01:03:34
Remembering names! Preventing dementia! Photographic memories! Weed! Goldfish! It’s the thrilling conclusion of Mnemonology with Dr. Michael Yassa, the Director of UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. We talk long vs. short term memories, how smells can pack a wallop of emotions, prosopagnosia (“facial blindness”), the fog of new parenthood, Alzheimer's and other causes of dementia, and tips to keep your brain in tip-top shape. Let’s make some mems.
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- [00:00]
Ellie
The holidays are all about sharing with family. Meals, couches, stories, Grandma's secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also share a cart. With Instacart's family carts, everyone can add what they want to one group cart from wherever they are. So you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce or whether you should get mini marshmallows for the yams or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then share the meals and the moments. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and terms apply.
- [00:31]
Alie Ward
Oh hey, it's still the fountain at the mall that's never on A.L.I.E. ward. You are here for part two of memory. Please tell me that you started with part one. Even if you don't remember it, start with part one because this is the thrilling conclusion with professor, researcher and the director of UC Irvine's center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. He's amazing. We're going to get into it, but first, this is a wall to wall episode of questions from patrons and if you'd like to submit some time, you too can join for as low as a buck a month. And upper tiers can submit audio questions. Thank you also to everyone getting ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com and thanks to everyone leaving us reviews which boosts the show so much. And each week I remember to read them all and I pick a just written one such as this one from Sula Singh who wrote this podcast. Saved my life. It's like spending an hour at the most amazing library ever where you find exactly the right book that you didn't know that you needed. Sula Singh and everyone who has ever left a review. I have read it and thank you. Welcome to the library. Okay, on to part two where we answer your questions about how to remember names and faces, what causes Alzheimer's, photographic memory, short term versus long term memory, how to prevent dementia, cannabis and memory, goldfish brains, and why smelling sunscreen makes you want to cry sometimes with neurobiologist, professor, researcher and memory expert pneumonologist Dr. Michael Yassa.
- [02:17]
Summer
Oh, I have questions from listeners. Can I ask you one million?
- [02:19]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Of course.
- [02:21]
Summer
You're the best.
- [02:22]
Alie Ward
Okay, so this question was on the minds of patrons. ESO party Elsa T. Who's a first time question asker and face name forgetter, Diana Stareznik, Dean Lily B and audio.
- [02:33]
Summer
Question Submitter Summer wanted to know.
- [02:36]
Ellie
Hi, Ellie Summer from New Zealand here. What I find really interesting is that I remember faces, but sometimes I can't remember where I've seen that person before, even in what country I've seen them. And I'm wondering why we're so good at recognizing faces and remembering knowing a face but knowing none of the details around that face.
- [03:02]
Summer
What is it about remembering certain aspects of a person or a connection? I know some people have total face blindness as well, either evolutionarily or how do we look at faces where we blank and say, who is that person?
- [03:18]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yeah, that's a fantastic question, Summer. So you've already mentioned one version of this, which is face blindness, right? And I'm not saying that Summer has faced blindness at all. In fact, I think all of us struggle with faces to an extent.
- [03:32]
Alie Ward
So this condition is medically known as prosopagnosia. And a 2023 study in the general cortex titled what is the prevalence of developmental Prosopagnosia? An empirical assessment of different diagnostic cutoffs found that developmental prosopagnosia, meaning it's lifelong and not caused by injury to the brain, is more common than previously thought, and that it lies on a spectrum of severity. And I was doing some reading on it from people who have it to try to figure what it feels like. And I've read it described as seeing a tree and then trying to pick out that specific tree in a forest or telling the difference between two different cows in a field. And if this sounds like you, and if you watch movies wondering, wait, is that the same guy or is that a different guy? You may be 1 in 33 people who have it, which is cool, but also awful. So don't let anyone make you feel too bad about it.
- [04:28]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Now, faces are a very important piece of information. When you look at somebody's face, you can tell by their expression whether they're a threat to you, whether they're a friendly person you can choose to approach or avoid. You can base a lot of your decision making based on a face. If somebody's face has an expression of fear and they're looking behind you, they might warn you to something and you might react accordingly. So we evolved, and not just our species. Many social species have evolved to try to always interpret faces and facial expressions. But recognizing a face and remembering whether a face belongs to a certain name is this thing that happened much later in evolution. And I don't think our brains are just very good at it yet. I think we're developing that, but we're still sort of half baked when it comes to connecting names and faces. So number one complaint that I hear from everybody is I remember faces, but I could never connect them with when did I see this person, what their name is? Or sometimes I'll hear the name and I can't recall the face, but then I connect when I see it. So face names, associations like that, they tend to be the most challenging for us humans. But one of the reasons why faces are really important is because of this evolutionary survival sort of significance. Things around fear, things around pleasure reward all of that. We get our cues, a lot of our cues from faces.
- [05:45]
Summer
I learned a trick once on a film set where one guy I worked with, it was Adam Savage from Mythbusters. He knew everyone's name on this huge set we were on. How do you do that? He was like, okay, I have this trick where that woman's name is Dorothy. And I think of Dorothy from the wizard of Oz. That person's name is Ben and I have a brother in law named Ben. And so as soon as they said their name, you had to pay attention, but then you made a connection.
- [06:08]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Absolutely. You know, there's lots of folks out there who try to train you on how to make your memory system better. And many of them, you might know, they're memory champions out there. There's sort of memory grandmasters out there, and they've learned tricks that have been used by the Greeks for a long time, Ancient Greeks, I should say, like mind palaces and so on. And all of these methods are based on forming strong personal associations. So if you have never seen the wizard of Oz, it wouldn't have made sense to you to associate it. Right? But if you've seen it and you can picture the Dorothy in the exact movie, right. That makes it much more personal. So they tell you to try to be able to remember people's faces and names, make that something that is emotionally significant to you. But making those connections and making them as vivid as possible seems to be the trick that works for most people.
- [06:59]
Summer
So I hope that helps.
- [07:00]
Alie Ward
Clay Trover, Sarah McEachern, Eric Gidzegg, Jennifer Fro, Elise Webel, Hannah Nolan, Jacqueline Church, Nomes, Lorimer, Bennett Vanderbosch, Eileen Lands, Kent Durbin, Liss Zuleika, Pevic, Kelly Fong, Kelly Larson, Carleen D.H. and Connor. They them, all of whom say that they are garbage at remembering names. It's okay. Obviously, based on that list, you are not alone. And patron Jackie G. Said that a tour guide shared this tip with them that you introduce, then you can actually listen when other people say their names instead of mentally rehearsing your own introduction. And Jackie G. Says, it's amazing and has worked wonders for me, so perhaps that'll make some of you less anxious. Oh, speaking of anxiety and trauma and emotions in general, many, many of you, Little Miss Particular, Camila Gamino, Susan Singley, Maddy Cake's Popsicle, Emperor, Joshua Towson, Sarah Argueda, Rowan Tree, Michelle Gregos, Ali Brown, Patricia Evans, Katie Hammond and Rachel Prosteco wanted to know how emotions affect retention. And Nick Allen asked, what's the chemistry behind emotional memories? And also patron Ryan asked.
- [08:03]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Hi, this is Ryan from Los Angeles. I was wondering if you could speak to the effects that negative emotions such as shame and guilt have on working memory and long term memory.
- [08:14]
Summer
Are people who experience heightened emotions either with anxiety or pretty happy people? Do they keep those memories more because there is more of an emotional connection?
- [08:25]
Dr. Michael Yassa
There's no doubt that having an emotional connection strengthens the way that you store a memory. So certainly if you tend to have much more emotional reactions to things or the experiences that you're having are much more emotional, they will have the capacity to be stored for longer, to be able to influence your actions and decisions for longer. And again, there's the evolutionary significance for that. Of course, more emotional things may be a little bit more involved in your survival, right? That said, emotion doesn't always improve your ability to store things. It colors the experience for sure, but it also kind of zooms in on certain aspects of the experience and zooms out from others. So you may recall certain details incredibly well, but there may be other things that are kind of lost on you because of the emotionality. So it creates this competition between some central features of the experience and then a lot of the peripheral stuff kind of doesn't win out in that competition and that can be forgotten.
- [09:25]
Alie Ward
Many of you wondered about what is normal given our very chaotic and technological world, such as Ologist from the Karabology episode, Megan Lynch, Amelia Frank, Ginny Bateman, Katie Brick Klein, Margaret Anouska, Miranda Panda, Regular K Wasps, Ologist, Eric R. Eaton, Rachel M, Megan Walker, Tiny Nature and first time Question, Julie Williams, Chelsea loves Chocolate, Theo Klein, Tara Villanova and some folks who are distracted by stress. Dawn Ewald, Holly Cole, Eric Masterson and Helen Langiel.
- [09:54]
Summer
I wonder if our lack of presence because we were distracted a lot with our phones and Internet stuff, I wonder if that lack of presence is making our memories a little bit more Swiss Cheesy.
- [10:07]
Dr. Michael Yassa
I like this Swiss Cheesy It's a good way to think about it. Certainly every time that I've lifted up my phone and tried to record a video of my daughter playing basketball, as opposed to put the phone down and actually watch her play, I feel like I have Swiss cheese in my brain.
- [10:20]
Summer
Yeah.
- [10:21]
Dr. Michael Yassa
So 100%, I think that you're right. When we replace actually experiencing something in its full glory, three dimensionality and all of that with some 2D version of what we're recording on the phone or being distracted by looking at something at the same time and not being fully aware, fully cognizant of what's happening. Of course it's going to change how these memories are stored and how they're represented. And I do worry about that. I think that, you know, there's no doubt that there's value to having the electronics and having. I mean, look at us, we have, our devices are out all the time and that's just the nature of what we have to do to be able to deal with the situations around us and the rapidly kind of evolving world and all of the stimulation. But I think it misses something about experiencing something fully and truly with all of its four dimensionality, I should say, and with all the emotional contexts that come with it. Right. And to be able to have that genuinely, you have to be there. So immersion, I think, is really key for good memory storage.
- [11:24]
Alie Ward
So those four dimensions are like a 3D object on the X, Y and Z axes, but with the added dimension of time.
- [11:32]
Summer
It's interesting because we're experiencing it less in the moment, but we're able to recall it more with that video footage. And it's such a weird trade off that it's like, well, I can remember it later as long as I don't fully experience it now.
- [11:45]
Dr. Michael Yassa
It is a weird trade off because what you remember based on the video is this weird sort of, you know, two dimensional version on a screen and you're never able to piece back being there fully in three dimensions. But if that was your experience, that's what you piece back. So it comes back with all of the pleasure, the sensory experience that came with it as opposed to if you're looking at the screen, that's your version of that reality and that's what comes back. It's just that two dimensional, more impoverished version.
- [12:12]
Summer
Yeah.
- [12:12]
Dr. Michael Yassa
And that to me, I think is the big concern.
- [12:15]
Summer
That's funny because my husband and I got married three years ago and a good friend of mine was like, let's watch the video on your first anniversary. My husband And I can't watch the video. What we remember from it is what we remember. And both of us have like the ick when it comes to watching it. For some reason we're like, I don't want to remember it any differently because we are kind of always, like you said, reconstructing those memories based on input.
- [12:37]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Right. And you don't want to change the version that you have in your brain, especially if that version was beautiful and something that you want to hold on to. Now I have the ick anytime anybody tells me to watch a video of myself. So I just can't do it categorically. That's just something I don't want to do. But I can totally resonate with what you're saying if you've experienced it fully, being there, being able to piece it back together in this two dimensional version and looking at it on a video, it's just never the same. And it kind of alters your actual recollection of that experience.
- [13:05]
Alie Ward
And a University of Chicago study recently recruited users of this app called One Second every Day to hop at an MRI and look at quick video videos of strangers lives versus one second clips that they had recorded themselves using that app. And the study found that different parts of the brain light up if it was their own memory versus just intaking a stranger's video. And other neurobiologists at the University of Toronto are exploring how video diaries like that could help Alzheimer's patients connect more to their own past. So to patrons, Aunt Tiffa and Rosalie de laforet, who recall more when prompted by photos and videos, that's some real science right there for you. Everyone else, that app was called One Second Every Day. If you want to log little chunks of your whole life now, what if you don't need physical memorabilia or pixels to jog your memory? What if your mind is a camera? So Alia Myers and Erica Periandri, among others, had questions about that.
- [14:06]
Summer
Well, on the topic of photographic memory, many people asked. Mariah K Said, this question has been on my mind for so long, all caps. I know there's photographic memory, but are there different versions or levels of it? Reid Barry wants to know what actually is photographic memory. This question was asked by Cyber Manns, Erica Harry Andre, Rachel McGill, Earl of Grammelkin. What is photographic memory? Exactly.
- [14:28]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Okay, fellas, this is myth bust in time. Okay, Ready? Yeah. Photographic memory does not exist.
- [14:36]
Summer
How, how?
- [14:38]
Dr. Michael Yassa
And it's so uncomfortable to hear that. Well, so photographic memory, or what we sometimes refer to as eidetic memory, you know the way that it's defined, it's that you have this perfect recall, perfect recollection of something that you've seen potentially only once, right? And if it's in the context of say, reading, you're talking about like remembering page numbers and all of that, the evidence that that exists historically is slim to none. We've been lied to. There's maybe a very small handful of cases of savant syndrome where somebody could legitimately make the claim for a true photographic MEM memory. But aside from that, there's no real evidence that photographic memory to this sense exists. That said, there's really, really, really good memory and there's really, really, really bad memory. There's a whole spectrum. And a lot of times when we're thinking about photographic memory, it's not exactly that, but it's close. It's really good memory where you're memorizing where things are laid out on the page, where you may be memorizing things like, you know, the page numbers and where the figures were, where the pictures were, all that kind of stuff. To the extent that we can tell whether or not that's actually helpful in a day to day learning experience, it's not clear whether or not that actually helps you.
- [15:52]
Alie Ward
And while a true photographic memory is at this point just flim flam, there is such a thing as eidetic memory where someone can see a visual and look at it or sometimes hear something, and once it's removed, they can recall it in great detail. It's as if visually they're still looking at it, but it's not 100% faithful and it does not last a lifetime. Your brain's like, I don't really need that fancy of a feature because remember.
- [16:19]
Dr. Michael Yassa
What we're trying to learn and remember on a day to day basis is not necessarily the details of the exact words on a page or the exact details of what happened. It's the gist, it's sort of the overall experience kind of abstracted. It's whatever knowledge I can abstract from that experience and be able to use it to guide my future decision making. So if you start to think about memory a little bit differently, that it's not really about the past, it's all about the future. This is no longer uncomfortable. It's okay to sit with that that there's no photographic memory because there's no rationale, there's no reason for it to exist.
- [16:51]
Alie Ward
So though we debunked learning styles in part one, what about people who don't retain things as well? Visually, but through sound. Hey, first time question. Kimberly Kirsten Cornell, as well as E. Jordan, Sean Thomas Kay, Matthew Walter, Lisa Gorman, Maria Kay, Josh Walden Sedoni S. Vanessa Adams, Daniel Van Vooren, Jennifer Fro Deb does science. Alicia Clarkson and Sam wanted to know about sound and memory, including song lyrics.
- [17:15]
Summer
Well, I know because we have obviously a lot of listeners who learn by auditory memory. Are some people better at recalling things that they hear it?
- [17:28]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yes.
- [17:28]
Summer
Okay.
- [17:29]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yes. So, and this takes us back to the conversation about learning styles. So I wanna be very clear, right? It is a myth. Learning styles is a myth. There is no one way to be able to get to your brain, and it could be visual for you or auditory for you. That said, people do have individual differences in how much they learn visually and how much they learn through their ears auditorily and how much they learn through other senses. But at the end of the day, the most effective learning is the one that combines the most senses. So as a species, we are far more visual as a species, collectively. If you look at rodents, for example, rats, they have a much stronger sense of smell than we ever would be motivated by. Right. That does not diminish our sense of smell, does not diminish our other senses. But it says that primarily because we are not nocturnal, we operate usually in daylight and the sunlight. Visual information seems to be really important to us. We tend to kind of prioritize that we have a lot more real estate in our brain dedicated to processing of the visual sense than to other senses. So when somebody says, well, I learn better if I hear it, I'll say, I'm willing to bet that you'd learn better if you heard it and saw it at the same time.
- [18:38]
Alie Ward
Ah.
- [18:39]
Dr. Michael Yassa
So don't just rely on, oh, I just want to hear it if you can. So, for example, if you're reading and you say, I'm just not a reader, well, try reading out loud so you're also hearing it and listening to yourself say the words. And you'll notice that that is a bimodal kind of learning, and things will stick a lot more.
- [18:55]
Summer
We did a reading episode recently, and there was a big question as to whether or not audiobooks were reading, whether they count, whether you can count them in your book.
- [19:03]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Oh, I sure hope they count. Yeah, I know.
- [19:04]
Alie Ward
Me.
- [19:05]
Summer
Me too.
- [19:06]
Alie Ward
So we talked about this in the recent anagnosology episode All About Reading. And I'll just give you an excerpt from that with Dr. Adrian Johns, who is a professor and a historian and who authored the book the Science of Reading.
- [19:18]
Unnamed Speaker
It's actually interesting that ebooks or actually audiobooks, more the idea that you could, as it were, read a novel or something by having it read to you by a machine. There are schemes for those going back as far as the pretty much the origin of recording, so the late 19th, early 20th century, there were visionary schemes for having things like, oh, you know, vending machines where you could put your money in and there would be a speaker's, you know, like a speaking trumpet that would speak a book. It's not like there's something that is that radically new about audiobooks per se. Having said that, I mean, my own sense of it, kind of crudely, is that I think with audiobooks it's really that you're having something read to you rather than reading. And part of that has to do with the control of the pace of it. So you can slow down recordings, you can pause it and all of that kind of thing, but it's not the same as doing what one does with one's mind's eye all the time. In reading a page where you're constantly shifting the speed and considering things and going back without necessarily thinking about it, you don't have to press a button or something. Ebooks, on the other hand, I think are just reading. I mean, I don't have any issue with those at all.
- [20:29]
Alie Ward
So Dr. Johns is a reading scholar, and I am a lady recording this while not wearing a bra, but whose entire life revolves around reading to people. So we'll have to arm wrestle for dominance. But I will say that per an ancient study from the late 1960s titled Retention and Incidental Learning of Visual and Auditory Material in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, that visual memories tend to be better for recall, but there is quot a decline with age for recall of visual material, but virtually no deterioration in performance on the auditory task. So I'm going to amplify that data in my favor. Now, what about smell? Cody Murdoch, Vanessa Adams, Christine Hurley, the dork next door, Amanda Regan, Guy Hutchinson, eating dark hair for a living. Renee Vandenhoven, Jess H, Fiona Elizabeth Caro, Young, Anastasia Press, all wanted to know about smell and memory. And Susan Singley asked, why do some aromas bring back such clear and nostalgic memories, like cut grass, old books, coconut sunscreen, ocean waves, and that smell after rain. But yeah, earlier Mike mentioned that rodents have a much stronger sense of smell than us, and I wonder if they feel nostalgic for smelling certain garbage. I bet they do.
- [21:41]
Summer
Well, you mentioned smell and rats. We have an excellent urban Rodentology episode about rats that made me cry with affection for rats. But Amanda Regan wanted to know, why do smells or sounds trigger memory sometimes? And I have heard that it's difficult to really know what a smell is. You have to have a memory of that smell that it goes straight to some memory center. Yeah, what's up with that?
- [22:07]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Couple things. So let me break this down because you asked a couple of really, really interesting questions, but they're a little bit different from each other. So the first one is maybe whether or not we can sort of label smells. You can label a sound, and people that have perfect pitch can tell you exactly what note it is and so on. And you can certainly label visual effects things. We have objects, we have things, the colors. Right. But with smells, it's a little bit different. And we don't have a great lexicon for smells. A lot of times we're relegated to kind of like lavender, kind of like. And fill in the blank. Right. Something that you're familiar with. But that's the rub. You have to go back to something that you're familiar with. So it reminds you of something else. It reminds you of something that you might have smelled or sensed before. And that may be just an evolutionary thing. Like, we haven't really evolved to prioritize this kind of information. Smell information. We don't use it typically to navigate around the world, although if you've got a nice baking cake in the kitchen, you might navigate your way there. So in some situations, maybe it's helpful. But we tend to navigate mostly based on visual information.
- [23:06]
Alie Ward
So our sense of smell isn't keen enough to save us, essentially. So it remains pretty mid. And think back to any time you've tried to describe a smell, you've probably said it smells like and thought of the last instance or the strongest instance of smelling something like that thing.
- [23:23]
Dr. Michael Yassa
We tend to kind of know what we need to do based on visual information. So because it was never prioritized, we never sort of bothered to create robust labels for it. And when you don't have labels for things, your brains sort of struggle to kind of store it with that fidelity because you don't have that verbal thing that you can attach to it. I know what a coffee mug is because I have a verbal label for those coffee mugs.
- [23:43]
Summer
Right, right, right.
- [23:44]
Dr. Michael Yassa
So that's one piece. The other piece, which I think is fascinating, is that especially smells can trigger memories, sometimes long lost memories. There's certain smells that will remind me of my grandmother's house. Certain smells that remind Me of specific people in my past, because that might have been the perfume or cologne they wear or something like that or similar to it. And then the experience of going back sort of, it like washes over you. You kind of go back in time, you're immersed, you're exactly in that moment. The sense of smell almost has this incredibly privileged capacity to do this. And we don't know why this happens, but we suspect that it's possible. Part of it is the fact that your sense of smell, unlike all of the other senses, it has direct access to your hippocampus, your memory bits of the brain. And it's not clear why that is, but it's sort of co evolved that way. The sensory systems in the brain that are outside of smell, so vision audition, all have to go through the thalamus, which is this sort of major hub in the brain before they get to the memory parts of the brain. There isn't like this direct access, whereas everywhere else this happens. For our sense of smell, it doesn't happen. Our sense of smell doesn't go through the thalamus. It like directly has this, you know, revolving door straight into our memory bits of the brain. And we have no clue why the hell that is. It's just this weird quizzical thing. And I don't know to what extent that means it's truly privileged and that's the reason why we remember things so vividly. But it seems plausible that it's at least a contributing factor that you don't have to gate through somewhere else before you get to the hippocampus.
- [25:21]
Summer
Right there, it's like an express train.
- [25:24]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yeah, yeah.
- [25:24]
Summer
So exciting. What about as someone who has had a nasty concussion, Hope Lauren Gallerio Addie.
- [25:31]
Alie Ward
Capello Adam Foote's wife Anna.
- [25:34]
Summer
A bunch of people wanted to know how studying concussions or TBI has influenced work or influences our memory.
- [25:43]
Dr. Michael Yassa
You know, it's challenging with concussions or tbi, traumatic brain injury, because there's no two injuries that are the same. So that is a particularly difficult set of conditions. It depends on the severity of the concussion, the location, all sorts of things. And we're learning a lot more about this. Clearly, it impacts a variety of different memory systems, memory being one of the key ones that gets impacted. But depending on the kind of injury, whether it's a coup contre coup kind of injury, where there's sort of stretching and shearing of some of the brain's white matter pathways, the connections between different regions, all of those things tend to happen. There's inflammation. There's sometimes frank injury. You can actually see evidence of that. But it's not clear how much of that is first of all common across individuals because again, the extent of the injury is different. The etiology, the root of the injury, the cause, it can be very, very different. But the fact that memory is impacted almost in all concussive injuries is an interesting phenomenon. And I always go back to our memory system is, or at least the hippocampal memory system is one of the most vulnerable systems in the brain. It tends to feel the brunt of pretty much anything.
- [26:52]
Alie Ward
Patrons Rai of the Tiger Heidi, Brenda Palencia and Christine Hurley asked about what is loathsomely called mom brain, or in Tim Farr's words, I don't feel like I know things anymore and it's horrible. I myself do not have kids, but I have damaged my brain with a hospital grade blow to the head. I feel for you.
- [27:12]
Dr. Michael Yassa
And not just concussions, but even if we're sleep deprived, even if we're anxious or depressed or anything that's happening to us tends to impact the system. It is one of our most primitive systems in the brain. It's one that we shared with all the mammalian species and many others. Even though it's tucked in the middle of the brain, it seems like it would be like nice and enveloped and covered up. It has kind of weird positioning the vasculature around. It is quite vulnerable. The white matter is quite vulnerable. It's also very close to the most porous parts of the blood brain barrier. So toxins can get into those limbic structures much more easily than in other places in the brain.
- [27:51]
Alie Ward
So remember from part one that memories are stored all over the brain, kind of like coins hidden in the sand. But the hippocampus, that seahorse shaped organ, acts as a sort of metal detector to find and retrieve those memories. So the hippocampus is this wicked combination of really important and very delicate.
- [28:12]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Just be careful. So it's just a hub of vulnerability. And it's one of the reasons why we study it so extensively in my lab across a variety of different conditions, because we believe that it is very vulnerable. And if we develop ways to be able to protect it or treat it, that will generalize across a number of different conditions.
- [28:29]
Summer
And is it rather new that we even know that the blood brain barrier is permeable at all?
- [28:37]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yeah, I would think. I mean, we've always known that it's permeable to some things. We know this because there's a lot of things that are in our blood, that get through the blood brain barrier very quickly and get into our brain easily. Alcohol is one of those. Right. That gets straight from the blood to the brain. So there are things that we've known about for quite some time that can traverse that barrier with great ease. But there are new things that we're learning about now that we didn't realize can get through the blood brain barrier easily that seem to get through. And some of these things may be inflammatory in nature, some of them may be toxins. So when we talk about the connection between the body and the brain, that is real and it's always been there. But we've only really started to study the sort of mind, body, or brain body connection much more in recent years and trying to understand how our gut, for example, influences our brain, how our brain influences our gut, this back and forth, which has to be able to kind of get through some of those barriers. And the blood brain barrier being the key. One one of the most interesting things that happened in terms of technology recently is there is actually an approach, a technique using what's called focused ultrasound to open up the blood brain barrier to be able to transmit things through. Because it's always been a challenge for us in developing drugs and interventions, sort of pharmacological interventions, how to package something just right to get it through the blood brain barrier. And this may be this other approach. It seems a little scary, I know, but with focused ultrasound and what's called microbubbles, we can actually open up the blood brain barrier and get some things that maybe are larger macromolecules that normally wouldn't get through actually to go through the blood brain barrier. So lots of fun activity these days in research on the blood brain barrier.
- [30:12]
Summer
Well, you mentioned something about the gut connection too. People are talking a lot about the vagus nerve.
- [30:16]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yes.
- [30:16]
Alie Ward
Just a quick background on that. Vagus nerve. So it's the longest nerve in your body and it plays this key role in your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the chill side, the rest and digest as the vagus nerve carries messages between your heart and your brain and your gut. And According to this 2017 study, childhood trauma and lifetime syncope burden among older adults. Researchers say that vasovagal syncope, where your heart rate and blood pressure fall suddenly, which can cause dizziness and sweating or fainting. According to the study, it's governed by the autonomic nervous system and it's often precipitated by a highly salient emotional situation. And researchers found that the report of childhood abuse was independently associated with frequent syncope in youth. So what role does physiology have?
- [31:04]
Summer
Does that vagus nerve play a role in memory at all?
- [31:07]
Dr. Michael Yassa
It certainly does. One easy way to think about that and has been known for quite some time, is that this is one of the ways by which the adrenal hormones can impact the brain. So when we think about cortisol and cortisol release, when we think about epinephrine, those kinds of things do have a way to be able to impact the brain through its impact on the vagus nerve, but it's way beyond that now. There's a lot of literature now suggesting that vagal stimulation, for example, could have some really interesting effects, therapeutic in some ways. And we're starting to understand a little bit more about how that mode of communication is operating. But it's certainly there and it's again one that we tend to learn a lot more about.
- [31:47]
Summer
I feel like this is all a really good endorsement for meditation and deep breathing also.
- [31:53]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Well, I mean that should be endorsed right off the bat all the time.
- [31:57]
Summer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you were mentioning toxicity in the brain, blood, brain barrier, alcohol. Many people wanted to know.
- [32:04]
Alie Ward
Matthew Walker, Ali and Julian and Neil Anderson asked about different opinions of alcohol affecting memory. But others have more herbal questions such as Alia Myers, Adam Michael James Storm Siricity and Olympia Rempel. And first time question askers Craig Steinberg and Zack Gehry.
- [32:20]
Summer
And Chris Bullock asks, why does marijuana make memory so shitty? Asking for a friend.
- [32:25]
Alie Ward
Winky face.
- [32:26]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Okay, asking for a friend. I see. Well, well, answering for a friend. Can't say that I've had firsthand experience of this, but I can say that first of all, there's different kinds of memory that are made shitty to different extents by marijuana. So it doesn't impact all kinds of memory. It might impact your recollection for things that you were doing previously or sort of around that same time. Not exactly clear why that happens, but I can tell you that one of the things that's really interesting about marijuana is that when you think about how it impacts the brain, there are particular receptors in the brain, what we call endocannabinoid receptors that are specifically geared to responding to cannabinoids, which is essentially the active species in marijuana. But the interesting thing is that endocannabinoid receptors are involved in long term potentiation in memory, in plasticity. So in some ways it's not surprising that it impacts your memory. It's surprising if it's always shitty because I think there's probably an optimality. I'm not telling you you should use it to improve memory, but there may be some realm in which you can actually improve plasticity as opposed to make it worse. That's very difficult to get at an individual level. But the fact that you have receptors in your brain and especially in your memory systems that are specifically geared to responding to the impact of marijuana, I think is a very, very cool thing. And it also tells us that we need to invest a lot more energy and a lot more time and a lot more resources in understanding exactly how it's impacting the brain, how that changes from individual to individual, on what background and what context with everything else that's happening in the brain. So recreational use versus use for depression, anxiety, other things. So more sort of therapeutic uses. All of those are really interesting questions. And now that we are seeing the legalization sort of across many states, and a desire from the National Institutes of Health to really support research on this front, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to have a lot more answers. A lot of my colleagues here actually are studying this exact thing.
- [34:27]
Summer
Would there be a difference between the CBD component and the THC component?
- [34:31]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Definitely. So they're different chemicals and they have different potency and different binding properties and so on. I don't know that there's as much evidence for CBD in terms of brain active kinds of things or psychoactive kinds of things. There may be a little bit out there, but certainly the impact of THC has been the one that studied much more and there's a lot more literature on that.
- [34:53]
Alie Ward
So a 2023 paper in the journal Biomolecules titled Effective Cannabis on Memory Consolidation, Learning and Retrieval and its current legal status in India acknowledges that, quote, the role of cannabis on cognitive functions is a matter of long debate, but that generally THC is responsible for cognition related deficits, while non psychoactive of CBD has been shown to elicit neuroprotective activity. However, because it's a restricted substance, there's not enough research on it, they say, and contradictions exist. And some reports showed low THC dose, improved learning and cognition. So I guess keep an eye out for emerging studies. And as discussed in the recent surgical angiology episode on veins and arteries, smoking is not the best way to ingest it if you're going to. So remember to protect your blood plumbing for the long term. Oh, patrons. Lila Weller, Carlene DH and Barb Miller had questions about the long and the short of it all.
- [35:57]
Summer
Well, you know, I feel like some people talk about short term versus long term when it comes to that. But the difference between short term memory and long term, when does it become a long term memory? When does it get filed?
- [36:09]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yeah, great question, Carlene. I'm going to get ready to bust another myth here. When I talk to people about long term and short term memory, typically they're complaining about their long term memory and they're saying, my short term memory is okay, so I can remember things from yesterday or the week before. But it's like long term memory that's impaired. Or my mother, if they're talking about maybe their mother with developing Alzheimer's or early dementia, it's the opposite. It's. Her long term memory is okay, she can remember her past, her childhood, but everything in the last few years, her short term memory is what's impaired. And I kind of have to stop and say, okay, let me just clear up the terminology so that when you're talking to a physician or talking to somebody, they understand what you're talking about. Both of those are long term memory. You're talking about recent versus remote memories. Short term memory is very, very short. We're talking the span of seconds. So that's at least the way that these things are defined in psychology and neuroscience. Short term memory is extremely short. It's what we also call working memory. If I were to give you a phone number, not that you would have to dial a phone number. These days, everybody just, you know. But if I were to give you a phone number and say, hey, hold onto this phone number and then you have to dial it, you might sort of rehearse that phone number to yourself for a few seconds, and then you dial it and then what happens to that number? Poof. Goes away. Right?
- [37:25]
Summer
Yeah.
- [37:25]
Dr. Michael Yassa
So you stored it very briefly in your short term memory. Store your working memory, which is there to be able to help you store things for a very short period of time, you can get distracted out of it very quickly. And also I can exceed your span very quickly. If I just yell out a whole bunch of numbers at you, things are going to fall out. Right. So it's not intended to store any more than just a few. A handful of items. People used to say seven plus or minus two, but that number is likely closer to three or four.
- [37:53]
Alie Ward
Okay, he just threw a whole bunch of numbers at you. But seven plus or minus two means that brain scientists used to think we can hold five to nine items in our short term memory, but turns out we don't even have that much room, it's like three or four things at a time.
- [38:07]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Three or four things. And the reason why phone numbers work is because we chunk them into three bits, right?
- [38:11]
Summer
Yep.
- [38:12]
Dr. Michael Yassa
So then everything beyond that is actually long term memory storage. But when we think about memory for yesterday or last week or the month before versus, you know, years ago, we're talking about recent long term memories versus remote long term memories. And as we get older, our memory for things that happened way in the past could be very preserved because we talked about how memory over time gets strengthened and kind of linked to a whole bunch of different regions of the brain, so it becomes more robust, more resilient to forgetting. Those are typically the last memories to go. Say, for a patient experiencing dementia, they're going to remember those memories much later in the progression. But memories of the last few months, the last year, the last few years, they're going to be the ones that are the earliest to go because they have not been solidified as much. They have not been stored in all of these parallel networks in the brain and made kind of more resilient to forgetting. They're still somewhat dependent on the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is kind of the culprit in early dementia. Right. It's one of the places that's changing very early. So as we think about long term versus short term, that's typically what people are thinking about. Why am I not remembering as much of the recent things, but I remember memories in the past for longer? We experience that as we get older, but much more dramatically in the context of dementia. Yeah. So it's just a little bit of a misnomer, but I think being able to kind of divide it into recent versus remote covers the same question.
- [39:40]
Summer
Yeah. Oh, I had no idea. And I do want to ask about dementia and Alzheimer's as well. But a quick detour with short term memory. Many people mentioned having the memory of a goldfish.
- [39:52]
Alie Ward
Jasmine Pitino, first time question asker, whose dear, wonderful boyfriend is a goldfish in that capacity. And Caitlin Tyndale, who compared themselves to a fish cognitively.
- [40:03]
Summer
True or false? Goldfish remember for two minutes and then they don't know why they're in a bowl.
- [40:08]
Dr. Michael Yassa
You know, I'm trying to remember Finding Nemo now and think about whether it was truly two minutes. You know, I don't know if it's exactly two minutes, but it is very short. Okay. It is thought to be one of the shortest memory spans.
- [40:20]
Summer
How do they test that on a goldfish?
- [40:23]
Dr. Michael Yassa
It's difficult I think that whenever you're testing things with animals, you have to be clever, right? So you have to figure out a way that the animal can kind of indicate to you whether or not they recognize something. Maybe it's by the amount of exploration or the amount of time they spend in the vicinity of that thing. If they're more familiar with it, maybe they'll navigate to something that's newer. So you can position things in the environment in a way where you can see how much they explore one over the other and be able to tell, oh yeah, their memory is shot. Or maybe their memory is really good.
- [40:52]
Summer
I love the idea. They're like, you know this guy? And they're like, no.
- [40:56]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yep, the name is not coming to my. I remember the face though, anywhere.
- [41:00]
Alie Ward
But yeah, we're in luck because, yeah, people study this. Of course they do. And according to a recent paper, distance estimation in the goldfish in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B of Biological Sciences journal, goldfish can accurately estimate distance after learning it. And another study in the journal Animals titled Visual Perception of photographs of rotated 3D objects in goldfish trained six goldfish to tap either a photo of a frog or a turtle for a treat. And researchers report that all the fish had successful performance showing that they were able to distinguish between the turtle and the frog photographs, which is evidence of object constancy. So flim flam goldfish memories are not trash. They can be trained to do things. And it should be noted that in five years of having my daughter who's a poodle mix named Gremlin, I have never successfully trained her to do anything. So lay off the goldfish, lay off yourselves. Although when it comes to future fears and caring for loved ones, many patrons had questions about Alzheimer's and dementia, including Lisa Gorman, Deb Dust Science, Stephanie Hal free, Maddie cakes two stones with one chick Mie, Meg McDaniel, Ken Edmondson, Erin White, Camelia B, Brian Risinger, Sarah Crocker and Stephanie, who wrote there are cases of dementia on both sides of my family. Is there actually anything we can to stop or slow down this awful disease?
- [42:25]
Summer
A lot of people obviously concerned about dementia, concerned about Alzheimer's, that deserves its own two part episode.
- [42:33]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Certainly.
- [42:34]
Summer
Can you describe when it comes to memory, the difference between dementia and Alzheimer's? Is Alzheimer's a disease and dementia is the symptom of it or how does it exactly what's happening?
- [42:45]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yeah. So the easiest way to think about it is that dementia is a larger umbrella term and Alzheimer's disease is one of the principal Caus of dementia. Okay, you're right that dementia is a set of symptoms. And Alzheimer's is a little bit more about the biology that leads to those symptoms. And there are many other types of dementias. So Parkinson's disease can lead to dementia. There's frontotemporal lobar degeneration or frontotemporal dementia. Huntington's disease can lead to dementia. So there's a number of different causes for dementia, but the most prevalent one, the one that most people are really concerned about, is Alzheimer's dementia. So, yeah, dementia is the umbrella term. Alzheimer's is the subcategory or the set of causes that lead down the path to dementia. And it's among many others. But Alzheimer's is the chief one. When we think about how do we differentiate between dementia and, say, healthy aging, that's another question that pops up a lot is, as I'm getting to a certain age, I feel like I am losing my memory. I'm starting to lose my way when I navigate, or I'm having some memory issues, I'm being forgetful. And some of that happens as we all get older. And the majority of it is okay, right? That's just the natural part of a normal aging brain. But when it becomes pervasive and noticeable to not just to the person, but to others around them, and people are sort of missing doctor's appointments or getting lost around their neighborhoods, and they're wandering, and then it becomes a real concern. And when that's happening already, things have changed so much in the brain that now it's really unable to compensate for it, because we tend to compensate so much for any sort of brain deficit for the longest time. So for many years, a patient with Alzheimer's disease wouldn't technically be a patient because they're not reporting symptoms, they're not experiencing anything, neither patient nor doctor can say anything is wrong with the brain. But already the pathology is changing the brain. And one of the challenges for us in research is trying to develop ways that we can detect that pathology, maybe with brain imaging, with brain scans and so on, very early, even at a time when the patient and the doctor don't really know that anything is wrong. But when it comes to memory deficits experienced at that older age, the question is always, how do I know when it's really kind of tipped over? How do I know when it's really problematic? And a good rule of thumb to think about is that if somebody's forgetting things all natural and fine, especially if they can remember it later, on if they're reminded and they go, oh, now I remember. So it's tracked somewhere. It's there, you know, that it's okay. Maybe that's challenge. If, as we're getting older, that just changes to some extent. But if they're really never able to piece it back together and no reminder is helping them that they may be kind of over that cliff and they're going down the path to Alzheimer's disease. The somewhat more crass example is if you forget where you placed your car keys, it's okay, but if you forget that you drove the car, then that may be a challenge.
- [45:39]
Summer
Is that because of plaques in the brain? Is that parts of the brain atrophying into almost spaces where there used to be more white or gray matter? What's happening biologically?
- [45:52]
Dr. Michael Yassa
We used to have this idea, and the idea took the field by storm and actually resulted in, I think, an overinvestment of resources into clinical trials that try to get rid of those plaques. We used to think that plaques were sort of the evil, right? And the two pathologies of Alzheimer's disease are plaques and tangles. Plaques are made up of amyloid protein. Tangles are made up of what's called tau protein. And for the longest time, people thought, if you have amyloid and tau or plaques and tangles in the brain, that's Alzheimer's disease. And we should be trying to break up those pathologies somehow to restore the brain or prevent it from getting worse. But the reality is the idea never really fully panned out, because just having amyloid in the brain is not sufficient for you to experience memory problems, and it's not sufficient for you to have dementia. There's about a third of everyone with amyloid in their brain will likely never experience dementia. Mention so clearly. By itself, it's not sufficient. But something else that you mentioned turns out to be sufficient and really important, which is neurodegeneration. Actual atrophy, actual loss of cells. That doesn't happen naturally. As we age, we lose synapses, we lose connections. As we get older, it becomes more difficult to make them, difficult to maintain them. That happens for sure. But cell loss in these massive amounts doesn't really happen unless there's a progressive neurodegenerative illness, which is what Alzheimer's disease is. So when we find evidence of neurodegeneration, say, for example, in MRI scans, we see a very close connection, a close link or a relationship between the extent of that neurodegeneration and memory symptoms or memory loss and cognitive Symptoms down the line that are not memory also. So executive function gets disrupted, all of our cognitive faculties, because it's progressed. But in the absence of that neurodegenerative change, it's very difficult to see associations with actual cognitive or clinical decline, which has created a bit of a dilemma for the field. Even though the FDA has been approving anti amyloid therapeutics, these drugs have some nasty side effects, and it's not clear that clearing amyloid is going to be the solution in the long run. Coupled with that, also the complexity that Alzheimer's disease is extremely heterogeneous. So if I were to get it, and hopefully not, but if you were to get it, it may look very different in your brain than it does in my brain. We may have a lot of variability. So that means you may respond to a drug or therapy that I may not respond to and vice versa. So the idea of like a one size fits all kind of solution is also kind of falling away by the wayside. And people thinking about the complexity of maybe Alzheimer's disease is actually diseases, and we need to be able to tailor therapeutics to the individual.
- [48:35]
Alie Ward
Obviously, dementia once again deserves its own episode. It's a complex condition with a lot of emerging research, but there are some pharmaceutical treatments that can involve modulating neurotransmitters in the brain, like glutamate. There are dietary modifications that can ease some related symptoms and psychopharmaceuticals that can help with depression and anxiety related to the progression of dementia. And Robert G. O'Day and Isabel Leclerc mentioned Lewy body dementia in their questions. And it is the second most common common cause of dementia after Alzheimer's. And it's caused by aggregations of proteins in the brain called Lewy bodies. And some symptoms of it can include visual hallucinations, trouble with sleep, including sleepwalking, mood changes and stiffness. And Isabel, whose mom had asked why public awareness of Lewy Body dementia was low. But there's a little bit of background on it, and we're going to get to more questions about how you can avoid dementia and memory loss in yourself, per expert. But first, let's donate to a cause of his choosing. And he opted to send it to a fund at his center called the Junior Scholars Fund, which goes to supporting graduate students and their professional development because he says they are the next generation of talent and he wants to do whatever he can to support them. And there's a link in the show notes for more on the Junior Scholars Fund at the UC Irvine center for the neurobiology of learning and memory. So thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible.
- [49:59]
Unnamed Speaker
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- [50:31]
Alie Ward
Okay, back to the million dollar question here, which honestly I think is eating away at everyone listening. But it was asked by Stephanie Christina Manuj, who loves saunas, Margaret Anouska, Karat Singh, Shoshanja Gettinger, Nicole DG Caro Young and Jenny Hoover. So let's go.
- [50:47]
Summer
Well, I think, you know, last listener question that we got so much, obviously, is every day I feel like we're all getting older. It's nuts. Wow time. We're gonna get old eventually, if we're lucky, right? What actually does help us stay sharp and retain our memories? Is it Sudoku? Is it going to Zumba classes? Is it reading?
- [51:11]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Yeah. You know, the challenge of brain aging and sort of body aging is an interesting one. I think everybody wants to live longer and live happier and healthier lives and so on. And the trick is to make sure that our, our brain aging is sort of consistent with our body aging. You really want to kind of maintain health across both of those. So mind longevity is something that we think about a lot and there are some answers. So we know, for example, that maintaining levels of physical activity, regular physical activity, hopefully not just undertaken when you're 80, right?
- [51:43]
Summer
Yeah.
- [51:43]
Dr. Michael Yassa
So starting kind of in midlife and continuing regular levels of moderate physical activity seems to be helpful. Helpful seem to be preventative. They are associated with reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease. If people get it, they tend to get it later in life, but they're protected from it for some period of time.
- [51:59]
Alie Ward
So exercise and for more you can see the paper Exercise and Dementia Prevention from the journal Practical Neurology, which notes that around a third of dementia cases are attributable to modifiable risk factors such as physical inactivity, smoking, and hypertension. And they say that with the rising prevalence of dementia, there is a renewed focus on prevention strategies. And exercise has emerged as a key intervention for influencing cognition positively, including reducing the risk of age related cognitive decline and dementia. So use ologies as walking time, dance around your kitchen, get a dog to walk, take a break, dancing class, do some arm stretches. Just keep it moving, folks. Okay, what else, Doc?
- [52:47]
Dr. Michael Yassa
The other thing that people have identified in these large scale, not just trials, but also epidemiological studies, what seems to help? Well, social activity. And this was a challenge in the pandemic, actually. And I got to hear a lot about that from folks who felt that they had social structures. And zoom was no replacement for it. It just did not help as much. You really want it to be around people and being around people in older age is really key. Now. We see this all the time. When people retire, there's sort of a fork in the road. You are very socially engaged in your job in other settings. And then when people retire, in some cases they become very isolated and they're spending a lot of time at home, maybe with just a 24 hour news cycle and you know, all that kind of stuff and not going out and being around people. And others have planned appropriately and said, these are going to be my post retirement plans. I'm going to spend more time in my community center, in my church, in my whatever it is to maintain that social level of activity. And those individuals tend to do better cognitively over time.
- [53:48]
Summer
Wow.
- [53:49]
Alie Ward
And of course, not everyone is able to get the same levels of physical activity. And we have an entire episode about disability sociology that discusses accommodations and attitudes toward disability. So talk to a doctor or a physical therapist about what you can do and how your activity level is. And we also have an episode on chronic pain with some biopsychosocial interventions that have helped some folks. And as this is being released right before the crush of holiday travel and flu season, likely a spike in more Covid cases, it's always good to take precautionary measures against infection. If I'm on a plane, I'm in a mask. So do what's right for you. But know that doing physical activity that works for you and staying social is incredibly important for your health and your brain. She said to herself in an aside.
- [54:35]
Dr. Michael Yassa
So maintaining a good level of physical activity and a good level of social activity, you know, a great exercise to do both simultaneously is dancing. So we tend to hear about that a lot. Like if somebody's in a dance group or does dance classes a couple times a week, they are much happier. You know, you get a lot of endogenous sort of dopamine boosts that happen when you do that. But the social exposure and the physical activity seem to be. Then we go on to other things that people are really curious about. What about brain games? What about Sudoku? What about this and this and that? And the evidence there is a little bit shaky, Right? So there's some evidence to suggest that maintaining sort of cognitive engagement, of course, is very helpful, but most of it is based on cognitive engagement, again, in a social setting. Right. So if you're playing chess out in the park with somebody and having discussions and all that, that seems to be more helpful than playing chess against the computer avatar at home. Right. You might think, well, cognitively it's the same, I'm playing chess, but it turns out to be different if you're doing it with a human. Right. And actually having conversations and actually being out and about. So, again, I go back to the two things that are kind of tried and true and I think are very helpful. The third thing that seems to be helpful has to do with diet and being able to have sort of a heart healthy diet, because we know that heart health is really important for brain health. So maintaining something that looks close to something like the Mediterranean diet, smaller amounts of red meat and things like that, high levels of leafy greens and fruits and vegetables and those kinds of things. That also seems to be associated with better longevity and higher levels of cognition into that longevity. Those are massive studies that were done where they randomized people to either the Mediterranean diet or sort of your typical American diet. And they see some really decent results for something like the Mediterranean diet. But the brain game stuff is the one that I'm sort of tentative about. It's like, I don't know if it'll hurt you, but I'm not sure it's helping you all that much.
- [56:24]
Summer
You know, My husband's grandfather played a lot of video games in his later years, and he would play multiplayer, so he would be on the headset with his grandkids across the country while he was playing, like, World of Warcraft or League of Legends or whatever.
- [56:38]
Dr. Michael Yassa
I mean, we've heard that from a number of folks who were involved even in our studies, said, you know, I started playing video games and I started to. And they felt like even the learning experience was a really good thing for them. And some others just said, nope, not for me. I don't know what you're talking. There's no way I could ever do that. There was just kind of a block. So while it's challenging, there's no doubt that incorporating the social aspect into this has made a huge difference. This is Why? I was also reluctant to tell my kids not to play games and do things because I felt like if they're doing it with their friends and it's sort of communal, then it's a little bit different than just droning in front of the computer and playing a game by yourself against the computer.
- [57:14]
Summer
Yeah. I love that you are. You're not only researching this on the daily, but also seeing it as your children are growing up and watching how memory might change. But I imagine there are some difficult things about your job or studying it. I always ask, what sucks? What sucks the most about your job?
- [57:33]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Oh, what sucks the most? Let's see. I think sometimes the pace by which things move frustrates me. And in research, you know, I think in science in general, there's this notion that we're gonna do the best science that we can and we're gonna put it out there, we're gonna publish our work and then hope that somebody else is gonna come and take that work and build on it and then be able to translate things and get them to be helpful to somebody out in the real world. That takes forever, and it's so frustrating that it takes forever. And so one of the things that I've started to do in recent years and get my lab more involved in is say, to hell with that. We're not going to wait. We're actually going to try to do it ourselves. So I've started to bridge a little bit between sort of the academic environment and more of the industry. But for the longest time, it sucked. It felt like we're so removed as academics doing the science, and there's not enough of that science that's getting out there and helping people, even though it has the potential to help people. And then the other thing that's frustrating, I will say that you can't change everything. You always want to do what you feel is scientifically very rigorous and also morally and ethically. Right. And you have kind of a code by which you operate. But there are certain systems in place that are really, really difficult to change. And some of them you can change. And you have to kind of figure out who to work with to make sure the message is communicated very well outside of academia to be able to influence. But I'm very fortunate that I'm surrounded by people who are equally frustrated and also believe that that sucks. So at least we can kind of riff off of each other a little bit and commiserate, slash come up with ways that we can try to address it.
- [59:21]
Summer
Well, there's that Community aspect, too, right?
- [59:23]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Exactly.
- [59:24]
Alie Ward
That's helping your brain.
- [59:25]
Dr. Michael Yassa
And that's the thing. Also science, you know, when it started out hundreds of years ago, when people were doing science, it really was kind of a solo practice. When you look at Nobel laureates, it was always sort of singular winners, and that's not a thing anymore. Science is so communal now. It really requires teams and communities of people that are dedicated to solving these big, challenging questions. They're not very simple at all. They're extremely challenging. And I think that's one of the reasons why things have been exponentially growing in recent years. Right. It's not just that we have better technology. We have smarter people and hordes of them that are dedicated to answering these questions and doing it together. So when you look at the number of authors on a paper or the number of co investigators on a grant, those numbers have also shot up. So that community aspect of it, I think, is what keeps a lot of us at the table, and it's what makes it worthwhile, despite the occasional sucking.
- [60:20]
Summer
Well, if someone wanted to go into this field or just curious, what is the best thing about your job?
- [60:27]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Oh, my gosh, there's so many things. I mean, I'm like a kid in a candy store most of the time. I can tell you that for someone who is naturally very curious and inquisitive, this is like heaven. Right. Because you're learning new things every day and it never stops. And there's no real retirement. Also for people like me. Like, you retire, but you're still on recall. You consult, you do things. You're constantly continuing to learn. So if that's something that appeals to you, being a constant student man, science is like the best place to get into. The other thing also is being an academic. I have incredible freedom to pursue the questions of my interest and my lab's interest. If tomorrow I decided I wanted to study fruit flies, I will not lose my job. I can do that. I have to go support that effort somehow. But no one tells me what to study. No one tells me what science to do. I get to decide that, and I do it communally with my lab because we're all collectively, and so we get to decide on the science that we want to do. We get to write the grants and papers together. So that's liberating. And I don't know of any other job out there where you can decide what you want to do at any given day and just go do it. Yeah, right. That's incredibly empowering. You can continue to do what you want to do and continue to be in love with it for as long as you want to.
- [61:42]
Summer
This has been such a journey into my own brain and anyone listening. So thank you for just inspiring us also to treat our brains a little bit better.
- [61:52]
Dr. Michael Yassa
You're very welcome. This was so much fun.
- [61:54]
Summer
Thank you so much. This is great.
- [61:58]
Alie Ward
So once again ask neuroscientists neurotic questions if you are me. And thank you to Dr. Michael Yassa and everyone down in Irvine for helping arrange this. There's more links to their lab and his work. They're in the show notes and up on our website@alieward.com mnemonology and we're at Ologies on Instagram and now Blue sky where everyone seems to be heading. See you over there. We also have smallogies, which are shorter kid friendly episodes that you can find anywhere you get podcasts. We put them in a new feed so it's easier for parents and teachers or anyone who's looking for shorter, clean language versions of Ologies to find them. You can look for the new green artwork and the Smalogies logo. Thank you also to Erin Talbert for admining the Ologies podcast. Facebook group Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our birthday girl this past week and she's our wonderful scheduling producer. Susan Hale managing directs at all, Jake Chaffee edits and lead editor. And another great brain is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio with some assists the last couple weeks from Jarrett Sleeper of mindjam Media When I'm late on things, Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. If you stick around until the end, I tell you a secret. And this week it's that I have a theory that if you have a good friend who has a party like they're close buds, you should either be the first one there to help set up and just kind of like set the mood so they're not worried about when people are going to start showing up. Or you should be the last one standing to help tidy up and say, hey man, great party. Relatedly, I love ice. I love having any cold beverage with an absolutely egregious amount of ice. So much so that our freezer could not keep up with my ice consumption. Our ice maker was like, I don't know what to tell you now. During early quarantine there were a lot of cafes that were closing and Jared surprised me when I was out of town. I was helping my dad and he bought an ice machine from a closing cafe. We have it in our garage and I use it every single day, even in winter. Now, what does this have to do with parties? So we have become the friends who show up first with a giant bucket of ice. And it feels heroic. So if you are someone who goes to bed early, be the first to show up at a party, pick up some bags of ice on the way, everyone will love you forever. You get to bed early. Okay? Just in general. Be safe out there. Okay, Bye.
- [64:14]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Bye.
- [64:14]
Summer
Pachydermatology, Homeyology, Cryptozoology, Litology, Nanotechnology, Meteorology, Olfactology, Nephology, Serology, Selenology.
- [64:34]
Dr. Michael Yassa
Let's make some memories, huh?