- [Chang] What is memory?

The answer to this question might surprise you.

- [Genova] It's not a video camera recording a constant stream of every sight and sound you experience.

Memory is the constellation of neural connections that were the sights, sounds, feelings, knowledge that you experienced in the first place reactivated through a linked circuit.

- [Suzuki] It defines our own personal histories.

What we remember becomes part of who we are.

- [O'Shanick] It's the ability to create a story of our world, and to gain knowledge that we can then apply in other situations.

- [Chang] It really shapes our world, but what we know about memory is often dwarfed by what we don't know, yet the latest research shows us that there are tangible steps we can take to improve and protect memory throughout our lives.

- [Merzenich] You have to improve the machinery of the brain that's representing information at speed and in detail.

- [Chang] With simple and straightforward strategies, Memory Boosters, anyone can maximize their memory and improve their life.

- [Suzuki] You can have conscious control.

You are creating and not only bringing up the memory, but you're bringing up all of those joyful feelings.

You are calming your stress using the principles of how memory works.

- [Chang] Follow the advice from leading memory researchers and you, too, will be able to Build A Better Memory Through Science!

Hi, I'm JuJu Chang.

Can you remember what you had for breakfast?

Okay, but do you remember what had for breakfast last week?

Or last year?

That's maybe not that easy, is it?

Memory can seem pretty elusive and maybe even unpredictable, but the latest research in neuroscience shows us there are paths toward protecting and preserving this treasured, personal resource.

It turns out that, as we learned from researchers we spoke with, you actually have far more control than you realize over your own memory journey.

And concrete tips they shared allow anyone the opportunity to grab that steering wheel with both hands.

You can make a difference in building a better memory through science.

So, let's get back to the first question I asked.

Do you remember what it was?

That's right.

What is memory?

The answer to that simple question is far more complex than it seems.

- [Fenton] Everyone has an intuition and thinks they know what memory is, but when you actually study memory, it becomes a very difficult thing to identify.

The basic idea of memory is that it's an idea.

- [Chang] Memory has a journey, which actually starts out here in the real world, and the interaction between us and our environment shapes how memory works.

- [Fenton] My senses, my hearing, my vision, my sense of taste, touch, these are ways of collecting energies from the external world.

Once that transduction happens, there's just this neural activity, the experience from what had happened in the external world.

- [Chang] Once all that experience gets into your brain, there's still work to do before we get to a memory.

- [Genova] It's not enough to just notice and perceive things through our senses.

We actually have to pay attention to it.

- [O'Shanick] Attention is the first step of memory, and if we don't lock on to what it is we're experiencing, we have no capacity for remembering it.

We need to make sure that our general health is intact.

If we have a vision problem, if we have a hearing problem, we're gonna miss out.

- [Chang] Paying attention is the very first Memory Booster.

It's the foundation for building a better memory through science.

Attention works in concert with suppression of distraction, things like alerts on your phone, checking in on social media, the TV in the background, which sounds like a typical day in my family.

This dance between attention and distraction unfolds between neurons, or brain cells.

- [Fenton] A neuron is sitting there in a network of neurons, like an individual who has lots of friends.

The neuron has 10,000 friends, that's a lot of friends, and all of them are chattering.

Attention occurs when the neuron is able to respond selectively to some of that chatter and not to the rest of the chatter.

- [Cai] As we get older, our ability to attend or to pay attention decreases, and so you have to work harder and practice more to attend so that that information can go into your memory.

If you really want to be able to encode that memory, you have to make sure to pay attention to that one thing without the interference of all these other things that are distracting you from attending to them.

- [Chang] If we pay attention to something, researchers say that the memory is encoded.

The encoding of experiential memories takes place in a part of the brain called the hippocampus.

Neuroscientists believe that this is where the brain starts to make lasting memories.

- [Frackowiak] The hippocampus seems to be very central to memories in general, and the reason for that is that its connections with the whole of the cortex.

It's very deep in the brain.

It has connections through the cortex, right from the frontal through the parietal down temporal regions, occipital region.

So it's got a lot of inputs.

- [Genova] The hippocampus is what binds and links and knits together all the information so that all of these previously unrelated aspects of the world that we experienced or learned become related and associated, so that I can later retrieve them.

- [Chang] The hippocampus is important for these memories for a certain amount of time as they're being strengthened.

This is called consolidation by neuroscientists.

- [Genova] Say I saw something, I heard something, and I felt something.

I see the tree and there's a beautiful robin sitting on the branch and it's the first robin I've seen of this year, and so I feel hopeful.

So now I feel hopeful, I see a robin, and maybe I hear it tweet.

The tweet, the robin, and the hopefulness don't have anything to do with each other at first, right?

So I see in the back of my brain, that's your occipital cortex.

I hear, right near my ears actually in your temporal cortex, your auditory cortex.

And then I feel in my amygdala, in my limbic system.

Those are very different neighborhoods in your brain.

They become connected through the hippocampus.

The hippocampus reactivates those parts of the brain, that pattern of activity, over and over again, until they become self-sustaining, until they become an associated connected pattern of activity, a neural circuit such that when I think back to that robin, I can also remember the tweeting, what it looked like, and what I felt.

- [Chang] So what can you do to control memory?

Where does that control come from?

One of the most incredible discoveries about the brain is that it can change, no matter your age, which is great news for us.

It changes based on how we use it.

You can create brain change.

And the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain, after all, is no exception.

It changes based on our experiences and even because of our memories.

This brain change is called neuroplasticity and it plays a pivotal role in the journey of memory.

- [Merzenich] One of the wonderful things about brain plasticity is that it's good for life.

Turns out that the brain is continuously plastic.

Of course, it's the brain's big trick.

It's the most important thing that it's doing.

You have this capacity to acquire new ability or improve at any ability at any point in life.

Your brain has an inherent power to get better as a function of how you engage it, if you engage in the appropriate way.

- [Chang] Researchers seeking to better understand brain change devised an experiment involving taxicab drivers in London to help prove that even the hippocampus can change its structure and its function.

And to become a licensed taxicab driver in London requires intensive multi-year study.

- [Frackowiak] We were talking about memory and down the road were coming these little scooters with plexiglas fronts with a map, and these are guys who are training to get their taxicab license.

In fact, they're learning the whole geography of London.

These guys are zooming past and then suddenly, click, my god, visual-spatial memory.

These guys have to remember things in space, relations in space.

They have to remember routes in the city.

- [Suzuki] Could new learning change the brain as an example of brain plasticity?

What if you follow London taxicab drivers from apprentice drivers who can eventually pass the test and became a London cab driver?

Can we see changes happening?

They showed that London taxicab drivers who succeeded in the task had a larger front part, or anterior part, of the hippocampus.

That is a beautiful real-life example of brain plasticity.

In other words, brain changing in response to your environment to learning something very difficult, in this case, the map of London inside and out.

- [Genova] So your brain is amazing.

It is not this static blob that stays the same inside your skull your whole life.

It is involved in everything you experience and changes with your experience.

It changes with your opinion, your mood, what happened today.

Your senses change what happens in your brain.

- [Chang] What you do makes a difference to your brain.

You can be in control of your brain health by taking advantage of your own neuroplasticity.

This brain change occurs on the cellular level, in the connection between neurons.

The connection is called a synapse, and synapses form the basis of the network of communication throughout the brain.

- [Suzuki] The birth of new synapses is called synaptogenesis, and that is what happens when you are learning something new.

New motor pathways happen when you are learning a new kind of exercise.

New synapses are forming as you are learning something new about music or dance or books or whatever you're doing.

- [Chang] Synaptogenesis, it's what connects the sometimes random events and varied sensory information we perceive into our memories.

- [Genova] For example, if I went to the beach, and it's the first day of summer, and I remember Lady Gaga playing on the radio, and the kids are playing soccer, and it's a gorgeous sunset, and I'm drinking white wine with my girlfriends, and we've got oysters and s'mores for the kids, and one of the kids gets stung by a jellyfish.

So this is my memory of the first day of summer.

Prior to this, Lady Gaga has nothing to do with a jellyfish, which has nothing to do with s'mores, but because it's now a memory in my brain, these disparate unrelated things become related.

Well, how did that happen?

That happens through synaptogenesis.

New neural connections are made connecting Lady Gaga to the jellyfish, to the glass of wine, to the s'mores, to the soccer, to the sunset.

Synaptogenesis allows us to remember what happened, what we learned, what we know.

- [Fenton] It's really valuable to think about memory as a process, and it's a process that's really intimately connected with experience.

The experience itself can change the communication between the neurons.

- [Chang] A neuron is connected to thousands of other neurons in the brain, but during the formation of a memory, only a small number of its thousands of contacts change.

- [Fenton] And that's the crazy thing about thinking about brain information processing and memory.

It's distributed.

We're not used to that.

The internet has given us an intuitive, if you will, model for that.

Where is the internet?

The internet is made up of computers communicating.

How does the internet grow and transform?

It grows and transform in a use dependent way.

So that analogy really applies to this distributed network of neurons that we have, and the ways to think about memories.

They transform.

They don't necessarily have to sit in the same place.

They don't necessarily have to involve the same neurons every time.

- [Chang] This new way of imagining the networks of memory opens us to understanding the real power of synapses.

And while our neurons are orchestrating a constantly shifting symphony of memories, synaptogenesis isn't the only brain change taking place.

Neurons can actually be born in the brain in a process called neurogenesis.

This process was thought to end after a period in childhood, but researchers discovered that older adults can also experience neurogenesis.

- [Begley] An experiment done in the late '90s, which was very clever, took cancer patients who were terminal and who had of course given their consent to the experiment, and they labeled their brain neurons with a particular dye that was incorporated only in dividing cells, in other words, only in cells that were making more of themselves.

And this is something that, of course, cancer cells do all the time.

After the patients passed away, their brains were examined, and it turns out that a number of neurons in the brain had taken up this dye, and that was prima facie evidence that, in fact, new neurons were being born in the brain.

And just to underline, these were elderly people, they were in their 50s and 60s and 70s, so even once you are well past the age of Medicare, your brain is still forming new neurons, particularly in a region that controls memory.

- [Chang] Which is incredible news for all of us.

That region that controls the memory, that's the hippocampus, and it can still grow new neurons and replace brain cells as we age.

- [Genova] So this is pretty cool.

So what can we do to enhance neurogenesis in our hippocampus?

The strongest, best way we've found to enhance neurogenesis in your hippocampus is through exercise.

- [Suzuki] If you do it regularly, what happens is you start to change the brain's anatomy, physiology, and function, and that's where those new brain cells in the hippocampus comes in.

Do you realize that with more regular physical activity, you could actually grow new hippocampal brain cells?

To tell you the truth, that is my motivation every morning when I do my workout.

- [Chang] And you don't even have to do a workout or be a triathlete to spur on neurogenesis.

Regular movement, a daily walk, some stretching, can all have a beneficial impact, and that's what makes movement Memory Booster number 2.

- [Suzuki] The most transformative thing that you can do for your brain and specifically for your memory is move your body.

Every single time you move your body more, you are releasing a whole set of neurotransmitters, including dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, endorphins.

As you might imagine, they make you feel good.

The other thing that is released with exercise is a growth factor called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, and that is so helpful for helping the hippocampus grow new brain cells, which is critical, and to make more synapses.

What you get is better focus, better reaction time, you get better mood every single time you work out.

- [Genova] We're too sedentary as a culture, so get up and move.

It can be little micro bits of movement in your day, right?

So we can be moving around while we wait for the microwave.

I dance while I do the laundry.

You can invite little moments of movement in your day.

Even more, exercise is gonna decrease your risk of Alzheimer's in the future.

It's gonna increase neurogenesis in your hippocampus today.

It's going to really empower your memory today and protect it from memory loss in the future.

- [Chang] And when we come back, we're gonna learn so much more about how memory works and how to improve it.

We'll also hear about additional Memory Boosters that will help us all Build A Better Memory Through Science.

So stay with us.

- [Chang] We're back with Build a Better Memory Through Science.

I'm Juju Chang.

So far, we've seen the remarkable power of brain change that allows us to form new and expanding networks of memories.

We've also seen how the power of attention and movement can boost our memory, and with each boost, maybe you're starting to see, as am I, just how much control we have.

With the power of brain change, you, too, can take steps today that will have a huge impact on tomorrow.

It all starts with a better understanding of how memory works, so let's take a little closer look at some of the different forms of memory.

- [Cai] We have short-term memory and long-term memory.

And so there are at least two types of short-term memory.

So there's a really, really, short term memory.

You say, "My name is Denise," and I think, "Denise," and then I might lose it.

But one way to practice holding the short-term memory... Back in my day, we had things called phone books, and when I wanted to call the pizza place to get a delivery, I would have to look up the phone book, and while I was walking from the phone book to the phone, I would chunk the numbers so that I can hold it in my short-term memory, or we call this working memory 'cause you're actively working to hold these numbers, to hold it till you get to the phone.

- [Suzuki] Working memory is that scratchpad memory, and that form of memory is not dependent on the hippocampus, it's dependent on the part of the brain right behind your forehead, the prefrontal cortex.

And I love to give the example, if you saw that great series called "The Queen's Gambit", many really amazing chess players can keep all the chess pieces in mind.

She could remember the location and the moves for an entire game.

Now that is high-level working memory, but that is working memory.

And how do you get your working memory better?

You practice.

- [Genova] Anything that makes it past working memory, captures our attention, and gets consolidated by the hippocampus, can become a long-term memory, but there are different kinds of long-term memory.

We have memory for the stuff that happened, that's your episodic memory, this is the story of what happened in your life.

There is semantic memory.

This is like the Wikipedia of your brain, all the facts, and knowledge, and information that you know.

There is also muscle memory, and that term is a bit of a misnomer.

So the memory for how to do things doesn't live in the muscles of your body, it's actually a memory that resides in your brain.

It's the choreography, the procedure, that is riding a bike, playing piano, typing, playing tennis, playing golf, driving your car, brushing your teeth, all of the coordinated movements that become automatic.

There is also prospective memory.

That is your memory for what you intend to do later.

Prospective memory is your memory for, "Oh, I need to remember to call my mother before I go to bed tonight."

Unless we write these things down, we tend to forget them.

And that's not cheating.

You should write them down.

Your brain is not designed to remember to do something later.

- [Chang] Knowing these different forms of memory and their strengths and weaknesses lets us focus on where we can really make a difference.

One place that researchers pointed us to specifically was that journey from a short-term memory to a long-term memory.

This process starts with the hippocampus, but it really can be enhanced by memory booster number three.

It's like the secret sauce toward building a better memory.

It's something we all do, maybe not as well or as much as we'd like.

memory booster number three is sleep, and most importantly, getting sufficient and good quality sleep.

- [Cai] There are all of these little machineries in each cell in your brain, that encodes the memory, that gets working and starts stabilizing the memory in those cells.

One of the ways that really supports this process is through sleep.

My work, along with many others in the field, has shown that after you learn, your brain wants a quiet place to kind of lay down those memories without new information coming in competing for space in those cells, and so after learning, when we go to sleep, not only is our brain resting, actually our brain is working quite hard to strengthen those memories and lay down those memories in those cells.

In addition, the hippocampus is teaching other parts of the brain about this memory, such that, after a couple years, it's distributed across lots of different areas in the cortex.

This does two things.

One, it frees up the hippocampus to form new memories.

Two, by transferring the memory from the hippocampus to the cortex, it makes this memory very redundant and resilient.

- [O'Shanick] Probably the biggest problem for most of us in the United States is we're horrible at getting adequate sleep.

There was a situation several years back where an individual was looking as if they were developing Alzheimer's dementia.

This individual had worked in the chemical industry, and they had developed significant nasal polyps.

They had developed, in essence, a form of obstructive sleep apnea.

When those were corrected, immediately, all of their cognitive symptoms abated.

So many times, it's an issue of assessing how sleep is or isn't working for someone that can make a pivotal change for these individuals.

- [Chang] In fact, good quality sleep does have an impressive list of health benefits, and most importantly, benefits your memory.

But the job of sleep that might be most critical for memory is when it allows the brain to clean up its own messes.

Bet you didn't know that your brain had a janitor.

- [Genova] So while you're asleep, the metabolic debris that accumulated in your brain, in your synopses, while you were in the business of being awake, is cleared away by your glial system.

This is sort of like the sewage and sanitation department of your brain, so it cleans up your brain while you're asleep, and one of the things it clears away is a protein called amyloid beta.

If amyloid beta has a chance to pile up, it'll stick to itself and form plaques, and if it forms enough amyloid plaques, that's the beginning of Alzheimer's in your brain.

- [Chang] Sleep really is a superpower for building a better memory.

- [Cai] What sleep does is it boosts your immune system.

It clears away and helps you forget things you don't need to remember, and it helps you stabilize memories that are important to you.

It decreases stress so that you can better form memories the next day, and it's a way to rest both your brain and your body.

- [Genova] If you can get more sleep, seven to nine hours a night really has been shown scientifically to help you strengthen your memory today, and reduce your risk of Alzheimer's tomorrow.

- [Chang] Which is something that I think we can all get behind.

The loss that occurs with Alzheimer's is devastating, and it's the kind of memory loss that we are all most concerned with when we are trying to preserve and protect our memory.

These types of memories are called episodic memories.

These are the most personal memories, the honeymoon, the wedding scene, that you might conjure up in your mind's eye.

They are the most precious moments that we hold dear.

These memories stitch together and form a quilted autobiography of our lives.

When we worry about memory loss, we're talking about the loss of episodic memory.

- [Genova] The more we repeat, reminisce, go over the stuff that happened, the more likely it is to sort of deviate and travel away from the original memory, and this is because, for episodic memories, when I retell it, when I revisit it, I then store the new version of what I remembered, and it overwrites the original.

- [Chang] Even shared public memories, what are called flashbulb memories, are susceptible to revision.

- [Genova] We have these shared memories of public events that were shocking and very emotional, and yet, because this is a memory for something that happened, it changes over time.

- [Chang] A study at Emory University investigated just how fragile episodic memory is.

They conducted an experiment shortly after a flashbulb memory, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

- [Genova] 19-year-olds were interviewed 24 hours after the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up.

Who were you with?

What were you doing?

What were you feeling?

Then they were interviewed again, same questions, two and a half years later.

Something like 75% of them didn't even remember filling out the questionnaire at all, and none of them, 0%, got all of the answers accurate.

Our memories change over time for the stuff that happened.

- [Cai] Memories are actually quite fluid, and they're very dynamic, and they're constantly changing, as every time we recall the memory, we're reconstructing, adding layer to that memory and it gets laid down.

- [Chang] Every time you access a memory, you can change the encoding in a process called reconsolidation.

As memories are accessed and reaccessed, the synaptic connections can change all in the service of memory retrieval.

We can and do change our memories by how we remember them, and there is another powerful force impacting our memories, our emotions.

- [Cai] Emotional memories are particularly important, and I think we've evolved to pay special attention to memories that are very aversive or that are very positive.

If you touch a hot stove, that next time you see that stove, you might have this negative reaction, and you know you don't wanna touch it because that's really important so that you know not to get burned again.

And so emotional memories are the ones that are most important to help us make decisions in the future that will either benefit us or keep us away from harm.

- [Suzuki] But also, positive emotions can be processed by the amygdala, which literally sits right next to the hippocampus that we've been talking a lot about.

The amygdala is there to help supercharge those memories that are just super joyful, or sad, and stick with you for the rest of your lives.

There is a bias to remember those fearful, threatening memories more strongly.

Why?

Because it's evolutionarily practical.

- [Chang] Our predisposition to remember the more threatening memories is called negativity bias.

Fortunately for all of us, there's something we can do to take control of our memories by using our emotions to counteract that negativity.

It's called joy conditioning, which is memory booster number four.

- [Suzuki] We all have experienced what's called fear conditioning.

Something bad happens, and there is a part of the city associated with that bad thing, and so every time you go near that part of the city, you have this bad, fear conditioning memory.

However, joy conditioning is kind of the antidote for that, and that is honing all of the most joyful, most luscious, most juicy memories you have in your life.

The happiest memories are also remembered very, very strongly.

It might need a little boost by explicitly bringing back those happy memories.

- [Fenton] Hope, and love, and joy promote longevity, they promote bonding, they promote things that are to be built, and your body physically is actually doing that in its metabolism.

It's repairing DNA when these positive emotions are being experienced.

We have a quite powerful resource, called our attention and our emotion, and how we use our emotions whether, again, for threat avoidance or promoting long-term good, that is up to us.

- [Chang] This is at the heart of building a better memory through science.

You can take control of what you remember.

The world around you has impact on your memory, too, and you can also build a better environment for memory through science.

It's true, scientists have been studying the impacts of what they call enriched environments, on the brain, and what they've found is encouraging for all of us.

- [Genova] We know through animal studies, rats that are in cages that are enriched in some way so they've got a cool walking wheel, and they've got toys, and they've got things to look at that are interesting to rats, their hippocampus is enlarged due to enhanced neurogenesis, whereas the rats who live alone in a cage with nothing interesting in there, they have a smaller hippocampus.

How does that translate to us?

If your home doesn't have a lot of interesting things going on, make it look new in some way.

Your environment will feel enriched in ways that your brain likes, and that will enhance, potentially, the neurogenesis going on in your hippocampus.

- [Chang] And the enriched environment isn't the only way to benefit your memory.

Fostering a richer mental life can yield positive results too.

You can take advantage of the brain's lifelong neuroplasticity and create stronger connections for your memories.

- [Fenton] In fact there's a very nice study that was conducted on a group of nuns.

What's interesting about them being nuns is that you can find them across many decades in the same place, so it's easy to return to the same person and evaluate the same group of individuals.

- [Chang] This experiment, called the Religious Orders Study, is being conducted by Rush University Medical Center in Chicago in collaboration with several other medical centers.

It began in 1993.

- [Bennett] We've enrolled more than 1,400 older nuns, priests, and brothers, from across the United States, and they all agreed to annual clinical evaluation, detailed cognitive testing, and a condition of entry is that they all had to agree to be a brain donor.

- [Fenton] And what has been recognized is that, not surprisingly, some people in this population develop dementia, and some people do not.

Many of these disorders have a genetic component, that's true, but they have an experiential component.

- [Chang] The nuns in the study had a variety of life experiences with regard to their education, and upon autopsy, the researchers discovered something remarkable.

The plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's were found in many participants, but the researchers discovered plaques and tangles in participants that had never shown any outward signs of dementia.

- [Genova] So how could this be?

We think that the nuns who showed signs of Alzheimer's in their brain tissue but no signs of Alzheimer's in their life while they were alive had a significant level of cognitive reserve, which means they had an abundance and a redundancy in neural connections.

- [Aggarwal] So cognitive reserve, in the simplest form, is really trying to keep you in tip-top shape for your brain, and paying attention to that.

The reason why it becomes important is is that when things may start to change, whether it be a health condition or a risk, et cetera, it knocks down part of the reserve, and the question is, how much greater reserve can you have?

- [Genova] These nuns had a higher degree of education, they read a lot, they stayed cognitively really busy throughout life.

Because they had more neural connections, they were able to dance around all of that damage and still be able to remember what they needed to know and do.

- [Bennett] We've come to the conclusion that at least to some extent, certainly for Alzheimer's disease, how you live your life and what kind of person you are can have a big influence on whether or not the pathology actually expresses itself as memory loss.

- [Chang] The results of the Religious Orders Study provide insights into cognitive reserve, which has implications for our memory as we age.

- [Genova] When you're learning new things, when you're having new experiences, that information, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, the information, it interacts with your neurons, your gene expression, and it changes your brain, and in doing so, you're creating more neural connections, and so now you have what's called more cognitive reserve.

- [Merzenich] Now, it turns out that this is a plastic commodity.

You can take anybody in the universe, you can engage them, and you can accelerate their operations and increase their accuracy.

And when I look in a brain that's been trained in this way, all of these things that relate to the health of the brain have changed.

- [Chang] When you take advantage of these boosters, you can help increase your cognitive reserve, and you can ultimately build a better memory through science.

When we come back, we'll learn more about what we can do to help keep our memory in shape and powerful as we age, and we'll hear from some amazing people called Super Agers.

Stay with us.

- [Chang] Welcome back to Build a Better Memory Through Science.

I'm Juju Chang.

So far, we've seen how paying attention, incorporating movement, getting good quality sleep, and using a technique called joy conditioning can all help build a better memory through science.

It's never too late to start improving and protecting your memory.

It's also never too soon, but usually, we don't even start considering our memories until we get a little older and little moments start happening, like when you can't remember that name of that one actor who was in that show and about that thing, what was his name again?

If this starts happening to you like it does to me, you might start wondering what is wrong with my memory.

Is this normal?

- [Suzuki] Everybody's worried about, "Is my memory bad?

"Is my memory normal?

"Am I starting to get dementia?"

Here is the number one memory myth that I hear all the time, that our memories are supposed to be perfect, that I should be remembering everybody's name and every association that I ever, ever met.

And the truth is our memories are imperfect.

Even the best of us forget things all the time and memory loss is a normal part of just how normal memories work.

- [Chang] Whew, what a relief.

It's good to know that you don't need to get stressed out about some of these moments of forgetting.

Still, memory loss is a real concern, but it's not destined to happen.

In fact, a lot of the news about aging and memory that the researchers shared with us is quite positive and encouraging.

How do you like that?

A little good news for once.

- [Fenton] With age, cells get old, they get tired, they get less effective.

What's fantastic, however, with age comes wisdom.

And wisdom can be thought about as having, in some sense, the best stories or the best predictions.

Through experience, you've seen so many things play out in so many different ways, but if you were able to couple that wisdom with being able to really focus on what is important to your story or to your current circumstances allows you to form, not surprisingly, cleaner, less distractable memories.

- [Chang] Aging is inevitable, but cognitive decline doesn't have to be.

In fact, a group of researchers at Northwestern University have been investigating this concept with a population of older adults that they call super-agers.

- [Rogalski] What we've learned is that Alzheimer's is much more complex than we ever, probably ever imagined.

And maybe we can look at the opposite end of the spectrum.

What if we find these people who are doing exceptionally well and say, how did they get here?

- [Chang] A super-ager is someone their eighties or older who exhibits cognitive function that's comparable to that of an average middle-aged person.

Additionally, this group has been shown to exhibit less brain volume loss.

- [Mesulam] The question that we had in the beginning was are there some individuals who are unusually resistant to age-related changes?

Here you have an enriched group of individuals who potentially are resilient.

- [Chang] The researchers discovered some amazing differences in the brains of super-agers, even when comparing them to much younger people.

- [Rogalski] The super-ager brains actually looked better than the 50-year-old brains in one particular region.

That region's called the anterior cingulate.

The anterior cingulate we know is really important for attention and attention is important for memory.

- [Chang] And the super-agers they've studied are truly remarkable.

Edith Smith is 107 years old and consistently astounds the researchers with her memory performance.

- [Rogalski] Super-agers' memory performance is supposed to be as good as individuals 20 or 30 years their junior, but in Edith's case, she's over age 100, so now her memory performance is as good as individuals who are half her age.

- [Smith] I didn't know why I was a super-ager, but I thought I had more sense than some of the people I knew who are much younger.

And so I said, well, maybe that's why I'm super-ager.

- [Chang] It might not surprise you to learn that Edith Smith is being a little modest about her journey to becoming a super-ager.

In 1937, she was the first African American woman to graduate from Grinnell College, majoring in psychology.

Edith shows us all firsthand that an enriched environment and an active mind can have an impact on your memory as you age.

And in 2019, she received an honorary degree from her alma mater.

(crowd claps and cheers) So where do we sign up?

How do we get to be one of these super-agers?

- [Rogalski] We can certainly glean lots of information from previous research.

There seems to be benefit in keeping a healthy diet, staying active, and keeping your social network strong.

Super-agers, they tend to be pretty active, so there are some super-agers who are still employed.

They are volunteering.

Another thing about the super-agers is they encounter stressors, but the way in which they commonly respond to those is they seem to learn from it and embrace it.

- [Chang] Super-agers may be uniquely suited to building a better memory through science, but they show us that there are many things we can do to maximize our memory.

One of the roadblocks to a better memory, as Dr. Rogalski mentioned, is how we manage stress.

It's a delicate balance, though, because some stress is necessary.

- [Genova] We need stress to sort of awaken and arouse the neurons in our brain to remember anything.

But that is meant to be quick.

It's meant to turn on and turn off.

- [Cai] However, a lot of stress can really impair memory performance, and that is because your brain goes from a memory encoding machine to a, how the heck do we get out of this situation machine, right?

Under chronic stress, if your brain is constantly in that fight or flight mode, it becomes very hard to expend resources for your brain to then encode memory, consolidate that memory, because your brain thinks there's some kind of danger that is more important to prioritize.

- [Chang] Being in a chronic stress situation has actually been shown to shrink the volume of your hippocampus, that central hub of memory in your brain.

This is why managing stress is so critical.

But never fear, there are things we can do for chronic stress.

- [Genova] The good news is this is reversible and preventable through things like yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and exercise.

All of those have been shown to prevent the shrinking of your hippocampus that can happen in the face of chronic stress.

- [Chang] One of the most widely studied ways of reducing stress is meditation.

What's perhaps most fascinating about meditation is that it isn't just a stress-relieving tool.

It has many more benefits when it comes to memory, from increasing the ability to pay attention to improved cardiovascular health, both of which are vital for building your best memory.

And it's still being studied, so researchers are learning new things about meditation every day.

And that's why it's memory booster number five.

- [Suzuki] So many people complain about they can't remember anything, too much stuff coming in.

Maybe their brain feels full.

And that is a concept that in neuroscience we call interference.

How do you change that?

One of the recommendations that I love to give is the practice of meditation.

So what is meditation?

It is a practice of learning how to focus on one thing.

- [O'Shanick] You don't have to be sitting in an awkward position.

You don't have to be burning incense around you.

You merely have to pause.

Take the time to just focus your attention, focus on your breathing, focus on your heartbeat, focus on your grandchildren's hair, focus on your significant other's face, things that are meaningful, things that allow you to reflect, things that allow you to have gratitude.

- [Chang] While we often think of meditation as an ancient practice, it shares some traits with a more modern intervention in neuroscience, called cognitive training, or brain training.

- [Fenton] Cognitive training and knowledge training is one of the things that we know to do.

Why is that?

Well, because it engages the brain, Which is the activity stuff that promote the kinds of neuron-to-neuron communication engagements that we recognize are the substrate of memory, and in fact, the substrate of neuroplasticity and brain health.

- [Chang] The latest research in brain training is really quite astounding and incredibly hopeful for all of us.

In fact, researchers at the University of South Florida are investigating a form of brain training that has shown promise in reducing the risk of dementia.

- [Edwards] We've been investigating a certain kind of cognitive training and how it helps older adults age well.

And recently we found from a large multi-site clinical trial that this particular intervention reduced the risk of dementia up to 33% across 10 years.

- [Chang] The cognitive training that Dr. Edwards studies is called useful field of view.

- [Edwards] So the useful field of view is a measure of visual attention and speed of processing, in particular.

And one of the primary things that happens to us with age is that we slow down.

One of the things that we study in gerontology are what we call instrumental activities of daily living.

And we found early on that the training improves older adults' abilities to do these tasks.

They can do them more quickly and they can do them more accurately after receiving the attention and speed of processing training.

- [Chang] All of the participants improved on the training related tasks, but after a year, the researchers started to see some differences.

- [Edwards] The older adults who didn't receive any kind of training were declining and declining more rapidly.

And that allowed us to see then that the training was actually helping the older adults maintain their abilities longer.

This training is the only intervention to date, pharmacological or non-pharmacological, so medicine, non medicine, that has been shown in a clinical trial to reduce the risk of dementia.

- [Merzenich] What this illustrates is the incredible, almost unbelievable power of changing the speed and accuracy of operations to the brain.

There's so much distress that could be prevented by applying this science, and this is a beautiful illustration of that potential.

- [Edwards] I think I just wanna make it clear that we need to do brain training before we think we need to.

That it is preventative and that it is designed to help you keep what you have.

But if we wait too long until we've experienced cognitive decline, it isn't going to be effective.

So a lot of times, people come to me and say, can you please help my mother, can you please help my father, they have dementia, and my answer is very commonly you need to start doing brain training now.

- [Chang] And the scientific community has taken notice of the astonishing impact of Dr. Edwards' research.

The National Institutes of Health recently awarded her team an additional grant of over $40 million to continue studying the potential of their cognitive training program.

While we wait for the results of Dr. Edwards' study, there is something we can do right now to improve our brains and build a better memory through science.

It's memory booster number six, engaging in life-long learning.

- [Genova] We know that learning new things involves neuroplasticity, which creates more neural connections in our brain, which is one of the ways that we can protect ourselves from being diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

- [Suzuki] You are growing at least new synaptic connections with every new learning experience, and that is why studies showing that people that stay learning over their lifetimes, learning higher level things, like a new language, learning how to play an instrument, learning how to play strategic games, like bridge or chess, that has been shown to help counteract cognitive decline.

- [Chang] There are tangible steps that anyone can take to improve and protect our memories, even as we age.

Let's go over those valuable memory boosters again.

I don't want us to forget those.

Memory booster number one, pay attention.

- [Fenton] If you're worried about your memory, learn to pay attention.

Pay attention to the things that matter to you.

- [Chang] Memory booster number two, movement.

Exercise is good for your heart, your brain, and your memory, and it doesn't even take a long time to get those benefits.

- [Suzuki] A review of studies showed that as little as 10 minutes can work to improve your mood levels and possibly your focus and attention levels.

So as little as 10 minutes can work, anybody can do that.

Can you go out to walk for 10 minutes?

- [Chang] Memory booster number three, sleep.

It's not just getting good quality sleep that can help with memory maintenance.

You can actually use sleep to supercharge your memory.

- [Genova] If we had a medicine today that I told you could decrease your risk of Alzheimer's by 50%, you'd take it, I'd take it.

We already have it in some ways, right?

It's called sleep and it's free.

- [Cai] Before going to sleep at night, right, thinking about the things that you want to remember, thinking about the people, the experiences that you had that day, priming the brain such that when you go to sleep, you're able to consolidate those memories that are important to you.

If there are important people in your life, thinking about those memories, having those pictures around your bedroom that you look at before you go to bed, allowing those memories to be reconsolidated or consolidated or strengthened while you're sleeping.

- [Chang] Memory booster number four, joy conditioning.

Use your memories to improve your life.

- [Suzuki] Go to your photo album.

I love going to my photo albums so far back that you say, "Oh my god, I don't remember that.

"But yes, I remember that amazing experience," from that trip, from that vacation, from that moment, whether it be a graduation or the trip to Hawaii.

But those are great memories.

Also, the dish that you cooked and how that smells just like your mom used to make or your grandmother used to make.

All of those are great triggers for joy conditioning.

- [Chang] Memory booster number five, meditation.

It's a real brain workout, but it's simple to start and can be done anywhere, anytime.

- [Genova] Maybe you're thinking well, that needs to happen at a Buddhist monastery or that I need some sort of training or I don't have a half an hour or I'll probably do it wrong.

There are all of these, you know, excuses and fears around meditating, but it really can be this simple.

Close your eyes and just take a deep breath in, hold it for a second and take a deep exhale out.

- [Chang] And memory booster number six, engaging in a strategy of life-long cognitive training, better known as life-long learning.

- [Fenton] So at the end of the day, everybody wants to know how to have a powerful mind, how to have a strong memory, how to stave off dementia, for example.

The best news that I have and the best knowledge that I have comes from, for example, what you can observe, right?

People who exercise their brains, people who use their minds throughout their lives tend to have, not surprisingly, strong and active, useful minds later and later and later in life.

In fact, this kind of activity is like working out your muscles, it's working out your brain.

That kind of activity is connected to long-term wellbeing and a reduction in the likelihood of dementia and a reduction in the likelihood of some of these neurodegenerative diseases.

That's not magical.

- [O'Shanick] There's been a lot of misinformation about memory and we are finding that as the population ages, many of those misconceptions, many of those concerns that there's nothing one can do to improve one's memory have left a lot of people just despairing that, well, this is as good as it gets.

It is important for people to understand that it's not as good as it gets.

It's important for people to understand how memory works and through knowledge is power.

We don't have to be at the mercy of events around us.

We can control our destiny.

And if we control our destiny, then we have a more fulfilled life.

- [Chang] We can have that more fulfilled life when we take advantage of the research and use the memory boosters.

The scientists we talked with are all incredibly hopeful about the future of research to help improve and protect our memories.

They are working on ways to harness what we already know and pave new roads forward with breakthroughs in memory.

I'm Juju Chang, thanks for joining us.

And don't forget to build a better memory through science.

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