Memory: How to Boost It

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus.

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All right, let's get into it.

This is the show that pits facts against

duh.

Facts.

Facts against memory.

That's right.

Today we are pitting facts against memory.

Because a lot of us think that our memory has gone down the toilet.

Senior producer Meryl Horne got to chatting with some of our colleagues at Spotify about this.

Do you worry about your memory?

Oh, yes.

I certainly do.

Yeah.

I definitely would give it a D.

Yes, I worry about my memory, and I have for a very long time.

It's like kind of like a blurry fog, like a gauze over everything.

And people were really noticing this in their day-to-day at home.

I certainly lose things around that house a lot more often.

Like what?

Just like keys, phone, glasses.

And sometimes it's in the matter of like five, like five minutes.

Like I put it down five minutes earlier and I'm like, where is that?

I often

forget if I've closed the garage door and I have to go back and I have forgotten forgotten once and someone else has texted me and so now I'm very conscious about that.

I mean, it's definitely frustrating.

It's a little embarrassing.

It's a little scary because I'm like, the catastrophizing part of me is like, oh, it's all downhill from here.

And it is so scary, this idea of losing our memory.

Some of our colleagues had seen it happen to people they love, like their grandparents, and it was really hard to watch.

Another person we talked to, Connor, he's the guy that keeps losing his keys.

He was worried that he wouldn't be able to hold on to important memories in his life.

It causes me concern about

how that will affect the rest of my life, especially like when Luke and I, Luke, my husband, and I decide to start a family.

I want to be able to, you know, like my brain to be able to capture those moments more,

just

better, be able to do it better.

And so with the stakes being so high here it's not surprising that online you'll hear people claiming to have the solution telling you that you've got to train your brain with puzzles or giving you some secret pill or hack to save your memory struggling to remember things here's a brain hack that could boost your memory by 80

morning ritual to improve your focus and memory if you do daily crossword puzzles you could have a sharper brain later in life there's certain nootropics and you can take those and they can enhance memory.

It's not horseshit or snake oil or placebos.

It's real.

And the folks that we were talking to just wanted to know: is this stuff for real or not?

I mean, bottom line, they had one big question for us.

Can you tell me what I should do to have a better memory?

So, today on the show, what actually works, if anything, to improve your memory, is there anything you can do to keep it sharp as we all get older?

Because when it comes to our keys or wallets, a lot of us have been wondering, where

is that?

Then there's science.

Science versus memory will be back just after the break.

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Welcome back.

Today we're looking at memory and with me is senior producer Beryl Horn.

Hey Beryl.

Hey Wendy.

Do you worry about your memory?

How is it?

Mine's really bad, I think.

Oh.

I was thinking about this a lot for this episode and I remembered this time when I was in college that I just like forgot my PIN number for like several days to this debit card.

That was like my main debit card that I used for years.

Oh, yeah.

And it was just like gone one day.

And then eventually it just came back to me randomly when I was like in an elevator.

But like, what was that?

Like, that feels worse than normal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that stuff has definitely happened to me as well.

I'll go to do something and go, oh, oh.

So how worried should we be about our memories, Beryl?

I called up Charin Ronganoff, professor at the University of California, Davis, to talk about this.

When I ask people about their memory, 90% of them say that they're terrible at memory or they have memory problems.

What would you say to that 90%?

Well, what I would say is this.

First of all, forgetting is the default.

Our brain wants to forget most stuff.

That's actually by design.

What I mean by that is you experience all this stuff.

At this moment, you're getting a barrage of information.

A massive amount of that information is lost within just an hour of learning.

That sounds, yes.

That's right.

That sounds about right.

Yeah.

So I got the end of my sentence just there.

That's normal.

He's saying.

Yeah, but that's normal.

Like, okay, so like the point of memory isn't to log everything that's happening to us, that barrage.

Like right now, there are probably things happening to you that aren't even kind of making it to your conscious awareness, right?

Like the feeling of the chair on your butt.

Probably weren't even thinking about that, right?

And then there's the stuff that like makes it over that first hurdle.

So you're aware of it, but the brain decides, like, eh, it's not really important to store that.

And so memory, if you want to, you want to take a cheesy analogy, memory is basically packing for the journey of life.

Huh.

The brain is saying, okay, I got to pack some stuff.

What am I going to pack with me based on what I think I'll need in the future, right?

A lot of the things I feel like I tend to forget are just really boring or like meaningless to me.

Like, what was the name of the person I just met?

Did I water my plants?

Like, kind of makes sense that I'd be forgetting to do these things that I don't really give a crap about.

Exactly.

Like, imagine if you remembered every temporary password you had, right?

Like, if your brain was just hoarding memories nonstop.

And the reason the brain isn't hoarding memories non-stop is because it doesn't have infinite resources to store everything.

Yeah.

Fun facts, Charon told me that the power our brain operates on is roughly the same as a light bulb.

Oh.

But then issues pop up when our brain economizes so much that we forget stuff that we actually want to remember.

Yeah.

And Charin says that he forgets stuff all the time too, just like the rest of us.

Where I put my keys, where I put my phone.

I lose track of conversations.

You know, I actually got contact lenses because I kept misplacing my glasses.

And he's not worried about any of that.

I mean, in the moment, he'll still get frustrated, but then he'll tell himself, oh, no, wait, this is normal.

And he actually has scientific explanations for why we tend to forget a lot of stuff like this.

So, like, let's start with that key thing.

There's a scientific explanation as to why we keep losing our keys.

There is, yes.

It's called interference.

Basically, like putting our keys down, it's something we do like thousands of times, countless times.

Yes.

And so we have a ton of memories for putting down our keys.

Yeah.

That kind of get in the way when we're trying to remember that specific place.

We just put them last.

That's right.

That's right.

You put them on the table, you put them on the bench, you put them in your coat pocket, winter coat pocket, jeans pocket.

Yes.

And then when you've got to go through that, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, your memory is just like throwing out all of these

ideas.

Yeah, it's like a needle in a haystack.

Yes, got it.

Uh-huh.

And Tarin says that, like, rather than trying to do that at all,

maybe just like buy a hook for your keys.

Putting your keys in the same place for one thing all the time makes it a lot easier.

So building that habit in.

Everyone should have a case bot.

Come on, come on.

We don't need a PhD for this one.

The bigger point is, like, yeah, don't worry if you keep losing your keys.

But he also talked about like this other thing that happens all the time.

Uh-huh.

So imagine you're in your bedroom and you realize, oh, I need to get my glasses, which are in the kitchen.

But then when you get to the kitchen, your mind goes blank.

So this happens to Charon all the time.

I'm thinking to myself, why am I in this kitchen?

Yeah.

And so I'll see some chocolate.

I'll eat it.

You know, I might

grab a bag of chips or something like that.

And then I come back to the room and boom, it comes back to me, right?

Now, the fact that it comes back to me says that I did have that memory i didn't lose it but i couldn't find it in the moment right this is so i love this it's so relatable particularly the chocolate

that's exactly right so this is also normal yeah it is and the reason that it happens is super interesting and it's all about how our memories are tied to the specific place where they're being created.

So like right now we're talking.

You're in your office, looks like.

Yes, yes.

So, like, right, you know, there's all this stuff happening.

We're having this conversation.

Maybe there's like birds chirping outside or, you know, emails dinging and your, your brain is kind of processing all this stuff that's happening.

And then at some point, you'll leave your office.

And at that moment, your brain will be like, and seen.

There's like a little reset that happens.

And when you go into the next room, a new scene begins.

And so

in between each of the rooms is this boundary, right?

We call it an event boundary because there's like a boundary between two different events.

And scientists think there is a flurry of activity in the brain at these transitions, at these event boundaries.

When you leave a room or leave your house, or when you leave a scene, you can almost see the camera in your mind.

clicking to take a photo to to create a memory.

Yeah.

And so to tie this back

into why

when you leave one room and go into the kitchen, you totally forget what you were doing.

That's because you like a memory ended and now you're in the middle of a new memory and it's hard to get back.

Yeah.

Here's how Charon described it.

I have to mentally time travel back and I have to leap across these different rooms basically in my mind to get back to this moment in time time and remember what happened.

And I, then I realized, oh, actually, event boundaries, this can explain a lot of my day-to-day forgetting.

So this is why every time I go into my bathroom, I'm like, oh, I really need to order more lotion.

Like this bottle has been empty for like weeks.

I'd leave the bathroom and forget about it immediately.

And then the next time I'm in the bathroom, I'm like, all right, the lotion.

I should probably just order the lotion in the bathroom is what I'm learning by saying this out loud.

Yes, exactly.

Isn't that great?

You've already learned something today.

You need to get lotion.

So, yeah, that's, and this is one of the hardest things that the brain has to do is remembering to do something in the future.

Because once the future comes, that context is different.

And so, how do you remember it later on?

It's a miracle that we ever do this properly, right?

And knowing what he knows now about memory, Charin gave me some advice.

He was like, try doing a little prep work before you leave the room to set your brain up for success.

So if I want to remember what I need to do in the kitchen, what I really should do is imagine myself in the kitchen.

While you're still in your office.

While I'm still in my office, imagine myself in the kitchen and imagine myself basically finding my glasses and being happy that I found my glasses, right?

Yeah.

So what's really fascinating about that is I've planted a memory.

I've sort of done an inception thing where I've I've sort of implanted a memory in myself so that later on, when I walk into the kitchen, that memory just pops up again.

Right.

And that's basically the smart way of doing it, which I never do.

Because you forget to do that.

Exactly.

I have actually remembered to try this and it worked.

What did you do?

I just was in the kitchen and was thinking I need to send an email when I get back to my office.

And so I just imagined sending the email.

And then I remembered to send the email when I got back to my office.

Whoa.

And there are other tips too

for trying to remember things that are science-backed.

So actually, Wendy, I'm curious, like, do you have specific things that you're trying to get better at remembering?

I guess something that really annoys me about my memory is that I can't learn Spanish faster.

And words that I knew in Spanish then are lost to me.

And I wish I could hold on to them.

Yeah, I relate to that.

Okay, so I have a trick for you.

Okay.

What's a word that you want to learn in Spanish?

99.9%

of the Spanish language.

What about a phrase?

A phrase I would like.

Yeah, that's good.

Okay, what about

that's so funny?

Okay, okay, so

what's your guess for how to say that?

Este

muy um

dipertido or something.

Oh, sorry to anyone who speaks any language.

What is it?

Okay, so the answer is,

and this is, I need to check this because it's just Google.

Do you want me to call my mom?

Sure, yeah, yeah.

Let's get the real answer.

I don't know your mom spoke Spanish.

Oh, yeah, she's Peruvian.

And you still don't.

I know.

Can talk to my mom about it.

Hey, hey, Wowie.

Hi.

We're recording a science versus episode.

How do you say that's so funny in Spanish?

Esto.

Esto?

Es.

Es.

Muy.

Muy.

Chistoso.

Esto es muy chistoso.

Okay.

All right.

Love you.

Love you.

Gracias.

All right.

Okay.

Esto es muy chisoso.

Esto es muy chistoso.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

So what we just did will make for a stronger memory than if I had just told you, oh, it's esto es muy chistoso.

Like, without making you guess first.

Okay, just making me guess it.

Okay, okay.

So remember what you tried to guess, like

that.

Yes, yes.

That was wrong.

Right.

But it doesn't really matter that it was wrong.

It's like just the fact that you made a guess at all before finding out the right answer really helps make a better memory for you.

Interesting.

Why is that?

Well, one scientist I talked to said that he thinks it's like upping the stakes emotionally.

Because like, if I had just told you, here's the answer, you'd be like, oh, okay.

But if I ask you first and then you kind of struggle with it and then I'm like, you're wrong.

It's this instead.

Then you like give more of a crap about what the real answer is.

So your brain is more likely to log that memory as importance because, you know, generally, we're more likely to remember stuff that's happened if it's made like an emotional impact on us.

Esto es muy interve sante.

Yeah, see.

And it also helps if you want.

You could write it down after you learn it.

Like handwriting is actually, we think, better than typing.

Right, okay.

And by the way, I asked Charon about those people who seem to have like amazing memories, who are like winning memory competitions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how do they do it?

Are their brains just magical?

No, most of the research suggests that their brains aren't magical, but a big part of it is really learning skills.

So like one skill they'll often learn is how to put information they need to memorize into a memory palace, which is kind of like imagining a place that you're really familiar with and then like putting different information into like different rooms.

And this kind of thing works.

It's sort of helping your brain create a story around information to make it more meaningful.

Right.

Yes.

Cause we know from many years at Science Versus is people don't remember random information as well as they remember anecdotes and stories.

Yeah.

You're just harnessing this fact.

Yeah.

And the other hack you might have heard of is turning something into a song.

That's been used for centuries.

And there is research that says, yeah, this works.

That's great.

Okay, well, this has been a very optimistic first half.

I do feel better about my memory.

I guess it would still be great to just have a better memory in general.

So, are there bigger things we can be doing here?

Yeah, like, is there anything that can boost our memory in general for everything rather than having to use all these like piecemeal hacks?

Yes.

I did actually find something that can do that,

Which I'll tell you about after the break.

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Welcome back today on the show, how we can boost our memory.

Meryl, where do we go next?

Well, I mean, there's tons of things that people say can boost our memories.

Let's start with supplements, because there's this like parade of supplements going around the podcast circuit.

And, you know, there's big influencers who are into them, sometimes selling them.

Yes.

And so I wanted to look at the science.

And I actually found this really big review that came out recently that's sort of perfect for answering this.

Okay.

So what they did is they looked at a ton of different supplements that are supposedly good for memory, over a hundred of them.

And then they looked at the most common ingredients, like the stuff that just popped up again and again and again

to find out whether anything really works.

And there were some things that had a little bit of evidence behind them.

So, there's this chemical called curcumin.

It's the thing that's in turmeric.

Yes.

And that's actually been found to help a little bit with something called working memory,

which is kind of your ability to like keep things in your head at the moment, like remembering what I just said a few seconds ago.

But it doesn't seem like it really helped for other types of memory.

Uh-huh.

Interesting that it works at all because turmeric has been on the superfood list for years now, and I have always wondered if it was all garbage, but there is a little bit of evidence behind it.

Yeah, I was surprised too.

I was like, maybe there's something there.

Uh-huh.

And then I wanted to mention one other one called phosphatidyl

serine.

Try to mention this other one.

Phosphatidylserine.

Phosphatidyl serine.

Phosphatidylserine.

Uh-huh.

You'll find it in some of these supplements also.

And there are a couple of trials suggesting that it can help with memory, like for some people.

What does it do?

What is it doing?

It's actually

part of the membrane that's in our neurons.

So like the the outer envelope of our neurons have phosphatidylserine in it.

So, it kind of makes sense that, like, maybe it could work.

Uh-huh.

So, like, those two were like the cream of the crop that this review found.

Okay.

For a lot of the other stuff in this pills, there's either like mixed evidence for it or, you know, nothing at all, or like really tiny, crappy studies.

Okay, so, you know, you want to put a little turmeric

on your dinner, go for it.

But

what else do we have here?

Does stuff like crossword puzzles work?

I mean, a lot of people think crosswords help with memory, right?

Yes, I feel like we all hear this.

So I looked into that.

And there are actually a couple of studies on this.

Yes.

So they'll typically gather a bunch of people in their 70s and 80s and ask them, okay.

who does crossword puzzles?

Right.

And then they'll track them for

years and see who gets dementia.

And

they find that actually, like, there might be a benefit here.

The people who say that they do crosswords are less likely to get dementia, or maybe they'll get it a few years later than the people who weren't doing the crossword puzzles.

Like, they'll have more years of good memory.

Okay.

Okay.

But there are a couple of big caveats here.

One is that these studies also find a benefit for other stuff too.

It's not just crossword puzzles, like reading the newspaper, knitting, cooking, like a bunch of stuff that sort of just uses the brain has also been linked to a lower chance for dementia.

And then the other caveat is that it could just be that the people who have a better memory in the first place are doing more crosswords.

Their memory was already better and so they kept doing it versus someone like me who I get very frustrated because I'm terrible at crossword puzzles.

And so I don't do them.

My memory already kind of sucks.

Yeah.

We don't know if

the crossword was causing the improvement or just exactly.

Or if it was just the people who already had a better memory were doing crossword puzzles.

Like there are some clinical trials on crosswords and brain training games in general, but those are all kind of a mess.

Like it's hard to tell from those if there is a real benefit to this kind of puzzle.

So bottom line, Merily, you're going to be doing more crossword puzzles?

No, I'm also terrible at them.

Okay.

So, but let's talk about something that's maybe not as sexy as a crossword puzzle.

Sleep.

Oh, no.

It's even less sexy than a crossword puzzle.

Sleep is cool, I guess.

Sleep.

We're talking about sleep.

I just couldn't imagine anything less sexy than a crossword puzzle.

And then you're like, let's talk about something a little less sexy than crossword puzzles.

I was like, what?

A long division?

Like, I want to be.

Is sleep sexier than a crossword puzzle?

Am I wrong about this?

I think sleep is sexier than a crossword puzzle.

Oh, great.

Then let's go to something much sexier than a crossword puzzle.

Sleep!

So sleep.

The hack.

Okay.

The hack for our memories.

Yeah.

So there are tons of studies on sleep and memory.

I wanted to tell you about this particular one that I found just because it was so weird.

It was done by Jan Born at the University of Tübingham in Germany.

So here's what they did.

Okay.

They got around 30 people into a lab at night and had them read something.

Kind of a bedtime story.

Stories, short texts.

Kind of describing, for example, a murder of a child.

Yeah, they would do it.

Very cruel.

Oh, Jesus.

It sounds like it would be pretty intense.

Yes, it is intense.

Definitely.

And, you know, part of the reason they chose this was because they wanted people to really be paying attention to the thing they were reading.

And they figured, like, well, this should do that.

Okay.

But so then they moved on to the sleep part of the study.

So after reading this

story, they either had people sleep for a few hours or they had them stay awake.

Okay.

And then they tested them to see how good their memories were for the thing that they just read.

And the sleep made a difference.

And you find an immediate enhancing effect of sleep on the memory for these stories.

But what really caught my eye about this study was what happened next.

So the researchers then waited four years

and then called up some of the same people to ask them what they could remember.

And you just called them up out of the blue?

They were out of the blue.

Yes.

Yes.

They were not prepared.

Yeah, what did they find?

Did the people who had slept remember more four years later yeah the the people who had like read that type of story still remembered it better than the people who didn't sleep during that original study four years ago oh that is crazy and since then we've had other studies finding that like yes sleep does enhance all different types of memory not just reading this like kind of emotionally traumatic stuff but it can even help with like motor memories so like learning how to do a new skill with your body And it's not a small effect either.

Like, you'd probably notice it.

Roughly, how many studies have now found that if you sleep right after learning something, your memory for it is better?

Are there like a dozen, more than a dozen?

Oh, no, thousands of studies.

Whoa.

It's incredible.

The amount of research

provides you with a safe feeling.

Yeah, this is true.

Sleep consolidates memory.

Yeah.

We really know this by now.

Yes, I think this is for sure.

Yeah.

And on the flip side, we do think that getting crappy sleep is a risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

And do we know why sleep is so important for memory?

Well, one reason has to do with like how our brains make memories in the first place.

Uh-huh.

So, like, let me just like nerd out to you a little bit about that for a second.

It's really cool.

So, after we have an experience, we think that our brains will like replay little bits of it after it happens.

I talked about this with Professor Lauren Frank.

He studies memory at the University of California, San Francisco.

So like after we have this conversation, we'll both have little

like sections of it kind of flying through our brains unconsciously for the rest of the day?

We think so, yes.

Right.

And then some of those might become conscious.

Many of them are probably unconscious.

But if the conversation makes a big impact on you, yes, it comes back.

That's cool.

That is so cool.

Right?

Like we can see these things happening in the brain.

And we think these events, these replay events, are important for like consolidating memories into kind of long-term memories.

But to take this all back to that sexy place we started, sleep, this really matters because we know a lot of these replay events are happening then during sleep.

Like we can actually see these replay events happening in rat brains while they're sleeping.

We can see in the rats the doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo, doo doo doo.

So yeah, all this started kind of getting to me because I actually have not been sleeping great.

So I talked to Lauren about that.

As I've been learning about this, it just makes me feel kind of crappy because I have a two-year-old who just like wakes up multiple times a night still.

And yes, that's

kind of feel like, oh, it's that just me and my memory is completely screwed.

Like, how about that?

No, I mean, we're, that's it.

We're amazingly flexible beasts, right?

So that we can adapt.

You are clearly a highly functional individual, despite the fact that you have a two-year-old who wakes you up all the time, but you will probably be a more functional individual in a couple of years.

Something to look forward to.

Yeah, I can't wait.

So, okay, so before the break, you promised us a thing to boost all of our memories, and that is sleep.

We have to sleep.

We know that really helps, yes, for sure.

But that's not the only thing because it is annoying when you get that advice and you can't actually control your sleep, right?

So I asked Lauren, like, what else we got?

And he said that actually, there is other stuff we can do because sleep isn't the only time we see those replay events.

Like we also think that our brains can strengthen memories when we're just kind of like hanging out, not doing much.

You could just take a walk.

Anything that's kind of less of this constant stimulation that you're trying to pay attention to, less of, you know, people talk about the constant dopamine hits of, oh, look, here's something new, exciting on the phone, right?

So something where you can just be for a little while and let your brain process.

We know that if you try to learn something new and then you just relax for a bit, it can also help cement your memory.

So a big review of these studies found that wakeful rest after learning something new can improve memory.

And so like, no, it's kind of making me change the way I think about just like, oh, if I'm taking a little walk, maybe my brain is kind of working working behind the scenes to do all this stuff that's helping my memory get better.

And so I'm kind of trying to let that happen more rather than constantly be like shoving my phone in my face.

Yeah, and shoving more things in your brain, but actually letting it have that downtime.

Yeah.

And another thing that you hear a lot is about the power of exercise, that that can really help your memory too.

The truth is, exercise is definitely good for the brain, but rather than it being like a silver bullet for memory specifically, it's more like if you generally want to feel like mentally sharper, you should definitely exercise.

Like doing exercise in your 40s and 50s can kind of create a like buffer against cognitive decline when we age.

Also, exercise helps you sleep.

So it all comes back around.

Right.

Okay, so here is what I have learned.

If I can remember it.

A bunch of the things that we do day to day and maybe think it's a sign that we're losing our mind and our memories are actually totally normal.

Things like leaving a room, walking into another one and forgetting why you were there, forgetting where you put your keys.

This is just part of how memory works.

Yeah.

But if you are still worried about your memory and you'd like to improve it, one of the best things you could do is to get more more sleep.

Yeah.

And barring that, give your brain a bit of downtime.

Yes.

And one more final piece of advice from Charin that I really loved, which is basically that, like, if you want to make your brain think something is important enough to remember, then you got to like pay attention to it in the first place.

Here's what I asked him.

I just had this really nice picnic last weekend with my family and I was thinking it would be like really nice to be able to like hold on to that memory in as much detail for the rest of my life, ideally.

Is there a way I could use one of these hacks to like cement this memory into my brain?

What you really need to do in that moment is pay attention to the details.

Really immerse yourself as almost as a mindful observer into the sights and the sounds and the feelings of what's happening in that moment.

Like while I'm living it, that's the first thing.

While you're living it, while you're living it and lock on to anything that makes this moment unique.

Well, that's just lovely advice in general, right?

When you're having a beautiful moment, just focus on it.

Live it.

So thanks, Meryl.

Thanks, Wendy.

So how many citations are in this week's episode?

We have 45 citations.

Excellent.

And if people want to find them and read more about memory, sides of memory, wish they go.

They can go to our transcripts.

You can find links for it in the show notes.

And then also definitely check out Charon's book, Why We Remember, is really, really good.

Highly recommend that.

Great.

And if people want to let us know what they thought of the episode, you can find us on science underscore VS.

I am on TikTok at WendyZook.

See you, Meryl.

This episode was produced by me, Meryl Horn, with help from Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimmler, Michelle Dang, and Aketti Foster Keys.

We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Mix and sound design by Boomi Hidaka.

Fact-checking by Sam Lemonik.

Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Bobby Lorde, and Emma Munger.

Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Bruce Miller, Dr.

Christopher Madden, Professor Joel Kramer, Professor Mark Roy, Professor Sarah Raskin, and Professor Stephen Dukosky.

Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original.

Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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