Essentials: Tools to Boost Attention & Memory | Dr. Wendy Suzuki

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Wendy Suzuki. Wendy, great to see you again and to have you here. It's been a little while.

It's been a while. So great to be here, Andrew. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, delighted. I'd like to start off by talking about memory generally, and then I'd love to chat about your incredible work discovering how exercise and memory interface, and what people can do to-

Yeah

... improve their memory and brain function generally.

Yes.

Maybe you could just step us through the basic elements of memory.

Well, I like to say there are four things that make things memorable. Number one is novelty. If it's something new, the very first thing, uh, the very first time we've seen something or experienced something, our brains are drawn to that. Our attentional systems draw us to that, and when you are paying attention to something, that's, that's part of what makes things memorable. Second is repetition. Third is association. So if you meet somebody new that knows lots of people that you know, so you and I share many, many, many, many people that we both know-

Mm-hmm

... it's easy to remem- it's easier to remember you, especially if you were somebody new that I hadn't met before. We have met before. Uh, so association, um, and then the fourth one is emotional resonance. So we remember the happiest and the saddest moments of our lives, and that also includes, you know, funny, surprising things. Uh, that is the interaction between two key brain structures, uh, the amygdala, which is important for processing, uh, lots of emotional, particularly threatening kinds of situations. But, uh, those threatening, surprising kinds of situations, the amygdala takes that information and makes another key structure, called the hippocampus, work better to put new long-term memories in your brain. So that, in fact, is the key structure for long-term memory, this structure called the hippocampus.

Now, step us through kind of what this structure is, what it looks like.

Yeah. The word hippocampus means seahorse. It is visually, anatomically beautiful, with these kind of intertwining subregions within it. So that's anatomically. Functionally, what does it do? Well, it's easiest to understand what it does when you, uh, look at what happens when you don't have a hippocampus anymore. We know this from the most famous neurological pati- patient of all time. Uh, his, uh, initials were H.M., so all psychology and neuroscientists, neuroscience students know him. Uh, he was operated in 1954, and, uh, the paper was published in 1957. Um, they removed both his hippocampi because he had very terrible epilepsy, and, um, they knew that the hippocampus was the genesis of, of epilepsy, and this was experimental. His epilepsy was so bad that they decided not just to remove one hippocampus, but both. And what happened was immediate, um, immediate loss of all ability to form new memories for facts and events. So this hippocampus does something with all of these perceptions that are coming at us every single day, every minute of the day, and not for all of them, but for some of them that have these features that we just talked about. Maybe they're novel, maybe they have associations, maybe they're, they're emotionally relevant, maybe, uh, uh, maybe they've re- been repeated. Some of those things, uh, in the realm of facts or events get, uh, uh, encoded in our long-term memory. The hippocampus and what it does really defines our own personal histories. It means it defines who we are, because if we can't remember what we've done, the information we've learned, and, and the events of our lives, it, it changes us. That, that's what really defines us. But what people have started to realize that it's not just memory, it's not just putting together associations for what, where, and when of, of events that happened in our past, but it's putting together information that is in our long-term memory banks in interesting new ways. I'm talking about imagination. So without the hippocampus, yes, you can't remember things, but actually you're not able to imagine, uh, events or situations that you've never experienced before. So what that says is, the hippocampus i- i- is important for memory, is a too simple a way to think about it. What the hippocampus is important for is what we've already talked about, associating things together writ large. Anytime you need to associate something together, either for your past, your present, or your future, you are using your hippocampus, and it takes on this much more important role in our cognitive lives when we think about it like that. That is kind of the new, the new hippocampus that, that neuroscientists are studying these days.