How Your Memory Works -- and Why Forgetting Is Totally OK | Lisa Genova | TED

292,389 views ・ 2021-04-29

TED


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Thinking about the past week,
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did any of you forget where you put your phone?
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Did you have a word stuck on the tip of your tongue,
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you couldn't remember the name of an actor
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or that movie a friend recommended?
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Did you forget to take out the trash
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or move the laundry from the washer to the dryer
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or to pick up something from the grocery store you meant to buy?
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What is going on here, is your memory failing?
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It's not.
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It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
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For all its miraculous,
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necessary and pervasive presence in our lives,
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memory is far from perfect.
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Our brains are not designed to remember people's names,
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to do something later
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or to catalogue everything we encounter.
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These imperfections are simply the factory settings.
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Even in the smartest of heads, memory is fallible.
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A man famous for memorizing over 100,000 digits of pi
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can also forget his wife's birthday
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or why he walked into the living room.
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Most of us will forget the majority of what we experienced today
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by tomorrow.
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Added up, this means we actually don't remember most of our own lives.
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Think about that.
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So what determines what we remember and what we forget?
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Here are two examples of supercommon memory failures
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and why they're totally normal.
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Number one, where did I put my phone,
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my keys, my glasses, my car?
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The first necessary ingredient in creating a memory
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that lasts longer than the present moment
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is attention.
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Your memory is not a video camera
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recording a constant stream of every sight and sound you're exposed to.
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You can only remember what you pay attention to.
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Here's an example that will probably feel familiar.
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I often drive from Boston to Cape Cod.
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About an hour into this trip I cross the Sagamore Bridge,
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a really big, four-lane, cannot-miss-it structure.
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And then about 10 miles and a mere 10 minutes later,
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I'll suddenly wonder, wait,
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did I already go over the bridge?
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I can't recall going over the bridge
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because that memory was never created in the first place.
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It's not enough for my senses to perceive information.
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My brain can't consolidate any sensory information into a lasting memory
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without the neural input of attention.
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So because I've driven over that bridge countless times
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and because I was probably lost in thought or listening to an audio book,
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so my attention pulled elsewhere,
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the experience of driving over it slipped out of my brain within seconds,
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gone without a trace.
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The number one reason for forgetting what someone said,
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the name of a person you just met,
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where you parked your car
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and whether you already drove over a really big bridge
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is lack of attention.
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Number two,
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"Oh, what is his name?"
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One day I couldn't come up with the name
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of the actor who played Tony Soprano in the HBO series "The Sopranos."
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I knew his name was stored somewhere in my brain,
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and I could tell you all kinds of things about him,
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but I could not produce his name.
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I eventually gave up and googled it.
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"Actor who played Tony Soprano."
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James Gandolfini.
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Yes, that's it.
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Blocking on a word, also called tip of the tongue,
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is one of the most common experiences of memory failure.
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You're trying to come up with a word, most often a proper noun,
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but you cannot, for the life of you, retrieve it on demand.
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Why does this happen?
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Blocking on a word can occur when there's only partial
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or weak activation of the neurons
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that connect to the word you're looking for.
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We often come up with a loosely related word instead,
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something similar in sound or meaning.
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These obliquely related words are rather unfortunately called
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the ugly sister of the target.
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And even more unfortunately,
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zeroing in on an ugly sister will only make the situation worse.
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These decoys lead your brain activity down neural pathways that go to them
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and not to the word you're looking for.
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So now when you try to retrieve the word in question,
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all you can come up with is the ugly sister.
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Here's an example.
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I recently asked my boyfriend,
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"What's the name of that famous surfer?
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Lance?
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No, it's not Lance."
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He knew who I was talking about,
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but he couldn't come up with it either.
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We were both stumped.
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And turns out my blurting out the wrong name
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set my boyfriend's brain to Lance Armstrong,
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the ugly sister.
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Now, he was stuck in the wrong neural neighborhood and couldn't get out.
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The ugly sister also explains this phenomenon.
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Much later, once you've stopped trying to find the word,
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it suddenly bubbles to the surface, seemingly out of nowhere.
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Laird Hamilton.
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Yes, that's it.
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Why does that happen?
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By calling off the hunt,
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your brain can stop perseverating on the ugly sister,
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giving the correct set of neurons a chance to be activated.
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Tip of the tongue,
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especially blocking on a person's name, is totally normal.
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Twenty-five-year-olds can experience several tip of the tongues a week,
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but young people don't sweat them, in part because old age,
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memory loss and Alzheimer's are nowhere on their radars.
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And unlike their parents,
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they don't hesitate in outsourcing the job to their smart phones.
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Which brings me to an important point.
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Many of you are worried that if you use Google to look up your blocked words
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then you're cheating and contributing to the problem,
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weakening your memory.
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You're worried that Google is a high-tech crutch
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that's going to give you digital amnesia.
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This belief is misinformed.
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Looking up the name of the actor who played Tony Soprano
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doesn't weaken my memory's ability whatsoever.
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Likewise, suffering through the mental pain
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and insisting on coming up with his name on my own
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doesn't make my memory stronger
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or come with any trophies for doing so.
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You don't have to be a memory martyr.
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Having a word stuck on the tip of your tongue
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is a totally normal glitch in memory retrieval,
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a byproduct of how our brains are organized.
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You wear glasses if your eyes need help seeing,
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you have my permission to use Google
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if a word is stuck on the tip of your tongue.
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Memory is amazing
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and is essential for the functioning of almost everything we do,
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but it will also forget to call your mother,
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where you put those glasses,
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and what you ate for lunch last Tuesday.
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Frustrating, but not a cause for diagnosis, panic or shame.
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Most of what we forget is just a normal part of being human.
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Thank you.
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David Biello: I will stand in for the audience
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to give you my own personal standing ovation.
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I personally feel so much better.
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So thank you for that.
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I think we all get a little concerned about our memories,
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particularly after this pandemic.
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And I see that we already have some questions from the audience.
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But before we get into that, I have to ask one very important personal question,
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which is, should I be worried,
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because every time I get up and go to another room,
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I forget why I've gone there.
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Is that is that troubling?
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Should I be nervous?
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LG: No, you should not be nervous.
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And that's one of the big take-homes of why I wrote the book I just wrote,
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there's so many people, especially over the age of 40,
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who experience normal moments of forgetting
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but now we are keyed into it
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and we think, "Oh, my God, does this mean I'm losing my mind,
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I'm going to get Alzheimer's."
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So here's what happens when you have that --
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so you're in your bedroom and you're getting ready to read a book,
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it's bedtime,
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that's what you do before bed.
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And you realize you've forgotten your glasses.
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And you're like, they're probably in the kitchen.
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So you go walk down to the kitchen
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and you created the memory,
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the intention of what you plan to do later.
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That's called your prospective memory.
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So it's like, I intend -- we do this all the time, right?
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"When I go to the grocery store later, I need to buy milk."
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"I need to remember to call my mother."
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"I need to remember to pick up the dry cleaning," right?
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These things that we plan to do in the future.
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Our brains are terrible at them, like, inherently terrible.
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So people feel like they're cheating if they create to-do lists, checklists,
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put it in their phone.
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No, this is just good practice, right?
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So pilots don't rely on their prospective memories
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to remember to put down the wheels before landing the plane.
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They outsource the job.
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Don't use your brain, use the checklist, right?
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So, like, using a checklist is sound practice.
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So anyway, you made this intention,
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this memory of, like, when I get to the kitchen,
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I'm going to look for glasses.
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You show up in the kitchen, you're like, "I don't know why I'm here."
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Part of the reason is prospective memory sucks.
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But we've only asked it to remember something for 10 seconds.
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It's not like, "Oh, I need to remember to go to my Zoom meeting at four o'clock."
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So what's going on?
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The other key in this situation has to do with context.
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So memory is very much influenced by context.
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The cues, the associations,
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the sensory information, the emotional information, our mood,
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anything that is linked to the thing we're trying to remember.
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So context helps us form a memory
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and context helps us retrieve that memory
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because memory is the connected neural network of associations.
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So in the bedroom, all the cues for what you needed were there, right?
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The bookcase, the book you're reading, the time of day, it's bedtime,
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"Oh, I need glasses."
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You show up in the kitchen and you're like,
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"Am I hungry? Am I thirsty?"
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Because, right, the cues are signaling,
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"Is it a meal? Is it what?"
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And not the glasses that you didn't notice.
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So when you walk into the room and you're like,
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"I don't know why I'm here,"
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you're not going crazy, you're not getting Alzheimer's,
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your memory isn't terrible.
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It's, go back to the room you were in before you landed in this one,
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either in your mind's eye or physically do it
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and imagine the cues that were there and it will instantly deliver
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what you were completely befuddled by a moment ago.
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DB: So a question that's come in from a number of our audience members,
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including Mel and Lorraine, is the flip side of this.
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So when would you consider,
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or what kinds of memory cues would be signs of abnormality
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or you should get further testing and checking?
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LG: Oh, I love this question, too,
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because I think that for too long there's been this disconnect with,
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you know, people are comfortable thinking
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about having an influence over their health
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from the neck down, right?
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So especially with heart health,
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a lot of us count our number of steps
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or we'll go to the doctor and get blood pressure taken.
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And do we have high cholesterol?
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How can I influence these factors, right?
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How can I influence the likelihood that I'll get a heart attack later?
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But most people don't think they have any influence over their brain health.
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And so this question is great because it's like,
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well, what can I notice?
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And then what do I do with that information, right?
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So, like, don't just panic and don't tell anyone.
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There's so much shame and stigma attached to anything going on with the brain
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and particularly memory.
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But this becomes information
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that you can be in conversation with your doctor about.
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So what is your cognition?
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What is your memory today
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and what does it look like a year from now?
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Is it changing?
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And so what are the differences?
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So forgetting people's names,
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totally normal.
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Names sort of, live in, like, little neurological cul de sacs
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like, ultimately lots of things connected to them,
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but really hard in the end to just produce the words,
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you've got to get to that house at the end of that street,
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there's only one way in.
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Whereas common names, common nouns are like,
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in the intersections on Main Street, USA,
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like, you can get, there are a number of different ways,
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and it's super easy to get in and out.
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If you start forgetting common words frequently --
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so if I'm like, "Oh, what's the name of the thing you write with?
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The thing you write with. What's that"
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"Pen?" "Yeah" --
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if that starts happening, that could be something.
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Doesn't have to be Alzheimer's.
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There are lots of reasons for having issues with retrieving memories
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making new memories.
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It can be sleep deprivation,
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it could be B12, it can be lots of things.
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So you don't have to just jump to Alzheimer's.
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But it is something that you can hopefully address.
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Again, be involved in your brain health.
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The other has to do with understanding how things work,
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what things are for.
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So, like, my friend Greg O'Brien has Alzheimer's
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and he uses the example which I love and I used in my book is,
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a lot of people say I can't remember where I parked my car.
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That happened to me the other day.
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I was in the mall, I got out,
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I couldn't remember where in the garage I parked the car.
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I've certainly done this.
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For Greg, who has Alzheimer's, it's he drives somewhere,
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back when he used to drive,
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parks his car, gets out, like, does something for a minute.
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So his example's the dump.
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"I went to the dump, threw the trash out,
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turned around standing in front of my car.
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Don't recognize it as mine."
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So that's a semantic memory.
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That car is my yellow jeep and I don't recognize it.
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And then B, forgets that he drove there.
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So that's an episodic memory, a memory for what happened.
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So just a few minutes ago,
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I drove to the dump and now I don't remember that I did that.
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And so that's not the same as, like, "Did I park on level four or five?"
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DB: Yeah.
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So George Weiss,
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in the helping-us-remember-better vein,
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wants to know can diet help us to avoid memory loss
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and can you, kind of, exercise your neurons into better memory
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through crossword puzzles or deeper relationships
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or anything like that?
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You're shaking your head no, so that's the short answer.
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LG: Yes and no. Again, I love this question, so thank you.
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Yeah, so I tell folks, like, there's no real gimmick to this,
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like there's no supplement I can give you
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that's going to keep you from experiencing a tip of the tongue
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or help you memorize your next TED Talk.
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Like, there's no supplement,
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the crossword puzzles are not the thing,
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I don't know who started that one.
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So crossword puzzles are going to --
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think about what you’re doing --
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you're retrieving words you already know.
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So you're going to get better at remembering those words.
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But it's not cross-training.
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It doesn't then help you in your day-to-day life
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remember what happened that day
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or again, if you have a presentation, what you have to say.
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It doesn't work that way.
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It's also not building new neural roads.
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So retrieving information you already know
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doesn't lend itself toward neuroplasticity,
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which is in building something called a cognitive reserve.
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So every time we learn something new,
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we're actually building new neuroanatomical
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and neurochemical connections.
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And so if you imagine --
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your brain isn't just this pink blob in your skull,
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in this little black box in your head,
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it's a very dynamic organ and it's changing constantly.
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And your genes are interacting with what happens.
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It's interacting with what you do and experience and feel,
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and it changes.
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And the more we learn, the more connections we build.
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And this is important
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because if you do start to experience some pathology,
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that is sort of, pre-Alzheimer's,
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or if you start to get Alzheimer's,
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you actually have a lot of reserve.
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You have back-up connections
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that can dance around any problems or detours.
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So learning new things is one way.
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Exercise has been shown to decrease your risk of dementia
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by up to a half.
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Just day-to-day,
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we know that sleep is massively important,
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both for preventing Alzheimer's and for your memory today.
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So the memories that I make today
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become long-term, stable memories,
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become long-term, stable alterations and neural connections while I sleep.
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And it's during certain phases of sleep that this process happens.
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So sleep is not this passive state of doing nothing.
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It's a very busy biological state.
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And so it's locking in the information and experiences you learn today.
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And so that's superimportant.
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Then tomorrow, if I didn't get enough sleep tonight,
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I'm going to --
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my frontal lobe's not going to want to drag itself into its day job
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and do the work of paying attention today, right?
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You feel sluggish, like, "Ah, I can't pay attention. What?"
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If I can't pay attention, what's not going to happen today?
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Making new memories.
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So I'm not going to remember yesterday,
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I'm not going be able to make new memories today,
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I have a form of amnesia just from not getting enough sleep.
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DB: Right.
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LG: So seven to nine hours a night has been shown --
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the science is superclear
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that this is what we need minimally as a human species.
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And then in terms of what you eat, again, there's no perfect study,
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and there's no rabbit-out-of-a-hat I can pull for you,
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or of, like, if you eat this
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or this nutrient, this antioxidant, this recipe,
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it's going to save your memory.
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It's like, no, but we know there's been enough to show us
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that being on a Mediterranean diet, a mind diet
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so these leafy vegetables, the brightly-colored foods,
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18:08
the whole foods,
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fatty fishes, olive oil, nuts, beans,
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these are the kinds of foods that really fuel and support heart health,
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brain health and memory.
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And it doesn’t have to be 100 percent, folks, right?
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You're not going to be perfect at this,
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and that's OK.
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Try to do it overall, right?
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Today, what did I eat overall?
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This week, how did I do overall?
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Because I think we need to have realistic expectations.
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So exercise,
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the diet, sleep and stress and learning new things.
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And learning new things is also -- it's this, it's being around people.
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If you're in conversation,
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that conversation's never happened before.
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So if you're present and paying attention,
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your brain is getting a lot of stimulation that's superhelpful.
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DB: So Bob wants to know about our capacity, our brain capacity.
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Do we have like a lifetime capacity
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and we hit it and then that's kind of it,
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19:06
or is that why children seem to remember things better
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19:09
than maybe folks of my age?
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Or is that just, I don't know, an urban myth?
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LG: Yeah, it's myth.
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This idea that like, oh, you only use 10 percent of your brain
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19:21
or you only use five percent of your brain,
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19:23
someone's making it smaller.
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I don't know who started that one, either.
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That's not true.
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So, you know, at any given moment,
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I'm using certain parts of my brain, right?
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So I'm not in a rage right now,
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so my amygdala is kind of chilling.
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Like, I'm not grief-stricken,
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so my amygdala is kind of relaxed,
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19:42
and I have my eyes open,
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so my visual cortex is lit up,
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and neurons there are firing.
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And if I were to close my eyes, that part of my brain goes quiet.
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But all of my brain is being used at some point throughout the day, probably,
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or certainly capable of accessing it.
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There aren't parts of my brain that I just can't seem to use
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and I'm only squirreled away into certain domains.
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That is a fallacy.
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And no, you don't run out of room.
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So, you know, there's a man, I use his example in the book,
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20:16
Akira Haraguchi,
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20:18
a retired engineer from Japan who at the age of 69,
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20:22
he's the guy who memorized over 100,000 digits of pi, right?
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So at an age where we associate,
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20:29
like, you know, senior discounts and retirements,
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20:32
like, he's doing something that is kind of completely mind-blowing.
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And we can all do this if we wanted to.
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So no, at any age, you’re capable --
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So as you grow older,
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you don't lose the information of stuff you've learned.
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20:49
So the stuff, your semantic memory.
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20:51
So this is why you've accumulated a body of knowledge
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20:54
and you've got wisdom now, right?
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Because now you know how it all fits
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and you can use that wisdom you've collected.
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You've got that.
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It's not that that starts to go away.
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You accumulate that.
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21:07
And you might think like,
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21:08
"Oh, I don't remember much from childhood.
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21:11
I can't really think about,"
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21:12
like, "I can't tell you what happened when I was 10."
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21:15
This has more to do with context.
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It's still in there.
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So if, you know, if you live in New York and you’re, you know,
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21:22
you're surrounded by skyscrapers and city life
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21:25
and you grew up in rural Vermont,
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21:27
"And I can't remember what happened when I was 10."
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21:30
Go back to your neighborhood and drive around and,
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21:32
there's the willow tree, and there's Ms. Richards house,
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21:35
and there’s Ms. Molansen,
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oh, that's where, like, Joey broke his leg,
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21:39
and like, it all will come back,
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because, again, it's like going from your kitchen to your living room,
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21:44
your bedroom to your kitchen to look for the glasses.
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It's like, all that context will reveal memory that you have in your head.
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you didn't realize you have.
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21:53
You've got trillions of possible connections.
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And no, you will not run out.
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You can learn to juggle when you're 80.
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You can learn to play piano.
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You can learn a new language.
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You can listen to a new TED Talk
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and learn and remember something to share with someone else.
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Like, it's unlimited.
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There's no reason to think there's a limit to it.
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[Get access to thought-provoking events you won't want to miss.]
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[Become a TED Member at ted.com/membership]
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About this website

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