 Hi, this is Tracy Takamas-Pinosa, and this is the Week on Memory. Remember, we talked about how memory is one of these huge building blocks for learning? Well, we want to talk about six big ideas within the context of this week's class. The first is that there is no new learning without memory. Remember we talked about the role of attention last week? Well, without attention and without memory, there is no such thing as learning. So that's one big idea we want to emphasize this week. The second is that there are multiple memory systems. It's not just long-term, short-term, but there's such things as sensory pathways, emotional memory pathways, and other things that make memory much more complex than we once thought. Before people used to think, oh, you get a bump in your head, you lose your memory, well, you would lose part of your memory because memories are stored throughout the cortex. So how are memories formed and how are they stored will be another focus of this class. We're also going to talk about this very interesting idea. Most of us really work hard to try not to forget things. Well, we want to challenge that idea in this class and help you understand that forgetting is as important as remembering. People with perfect memories can often suffer in some ways. So we'll talk about the gift of forgetting as well. Fourth point has to do with it. Memory is a very complex process, like everything else we've talked about in the brain. It depends on different chemical processes, electrical processes, distinct neural pathways for different types of memory systems. Physical structures, which serve as hubs of memory. So we want to make sure that you're thinking about this and appreciating the complexity of memory, which is why it's so hard sometimes to learn things that maybe you might not be motivated to learn or that you don't have prior experience with. We'll talk about how memory is enhanced by having previous knowledge of information that's similar to the new target knowledge. And we'll also look at types of things that facilitate or detract from different types of learning moments, related to context and also methodology, the way we teach or learn different information. The fifth point has to do with plasticity dependent memory consolidation. So basically, plasticity is the representation, the physiological representation of all learning. But when we talk about plasticity, what we're really talking about is creating those neural networks that create some kind of a memory for information or newly learned processes in the brain. And the sixth point has to do with, again, thinking about the risk and protective factors in our own lives that prevent new learning of information or enhance the probability that we can learn new information. We'll also take a peek into the aging brain and things that can be done as protective factors to reduce the probability of having problems later on in life with neurodegenerative diseases that do have an impact on memory. So here's this big idea of learning. And at the core of learning is our memory systems and attention systems. Last week, we talked a lot about attention systems. This week, we're going to explore a bit about memory systems, distinct memory systems. And the idea is if we were to combine these two things, would we magically have learning? Well, the key idea here is that we know that when you are missing attention systems or you're missing memory systems, then learning is impaired. So we know that by its absence, you don't have such efficient learning, but we don't necessarily know or can't prove that the just memory plus attention equals learning because it's a lot more complicated than that. But keep in mind that these are two fundamental systems for learning to occur. When we talk about memory, we're talking about multiple systems of memory. It's not just long term versus short term or procedural memory versus declarative memory, which are two types of long term memory, or the collective memory, for example, versus an individual memory. So we're going to explore all of these different types of memory systems, in part to impress upon you the complexity of memory in the brain, but also to appreciate that different types of stimulus will create different types of memory structures. And so we know that for any school learning to occur, for example, things have to get to long term memory. Just having them in short term memory or working memory store does not mean that you learn things. Some people are very good at kind of faking it and having great working memory systems and they look like they know things, but really over the long term, without getting it into long term memory, there is no evidence of real learning. So what are the basic processes of memory? What is our basic understanding of memory? Remember, we spoke about this in the very first class. All new learning occurs through your senses, right? So you have basic environmental stimuli, things that happen to you in the environment. You smell something, see something, touch something. So you have the sensory memory store, which is compared with what you've already experienced before in your life. Remember last week we talked about selective attention. Your brain cannot possibly pay attention to absolutely everything that it experiences in your environment. Your environment is so rich and stimulus that it'd be impossible to pay attention to every smell or sight or thing you could touch in your environment. So you actually have to narrow in and hone in on specific things, which is why selective memory will play a role in choosing what your brain will be paying attention to. Based on what it pays attention to, then it goes into the short term memory store where there's also a time for comparison. And we're looking to see, what do I already know about that information? How similar is it to something I already know? So where is the novelty? Where are the patterns that exist in this new stimulus that's coming into my head? Oftentimes in this stage, the information is not deemed important enough or it's not stimulated enough or rehearsed enough to pass into long term memory storage and it could be lost. If it does get into long term memory store, then there's still this terrible probability that it can be lost if it's not rehearsed. This is why the strengthening of neural pathways is so important to retrieval. If you don't have that development, remember we talked about the Miley and Sheaf when we talked about the basic neurophysiology of the brain. If you don't create those new pathways and then rehearse and strengthen them, and have the stronger Miley and Sheaf, which creates the speed with which you can retrieve information, it will be lost. So there's a lot of places along the way where information can be lost and filtered out and not remembered. So there's basically more ways to forget things or miss things or not learn things at all than there are to actually get them into long term storage and use them as platforms for future learning. So what does this repetition do? Remember we talked about this before, right? You get your sensory information, it's in hold, it can be lost at the stage. If it doesn't get passed on to short term or working memory for review or rehearsal, if it's not rehearsed, it can be lost, right? But if we finally do get into long term storage, this really means a physiological change has taken place. This means that between the different neurons or groups of neurons, you'll have these connections along the axon and the smiling sheath will begin to form based on repetition. So when things are repeated enough and or they have a strong enough emotional stimulus to create a very quick and fast retrieval tie early on, then it's not available for long term retrieval, therefore you didn't really learn it. So memory is really important across all disciplines, obviously, because it is related to learning. But the way it's interpreted is slightly different in different fields. We can go from the biology, psychology, neuroscience fields into social sciences, cultural studies. But it plays different roles and different points. When we talk about neuroscience, we might be talking about how specific groups of neurons are connected together and create neuroplasticity. That's one level of analysis. But then you can also talk about not just individual memory and what that looks like at a very molecular level, either autobiographical memory, semantic memory, these explicit memories that you can have based on school education and or procedural memories, things like learning how to ride a bike, right? But you can also talk about memory when you talk about cultural studies as collective memory. How are things passed on between groups? And we did talk about this a bit when we looked into epigenetic studies and when we mentioned how certain traits, if they are considered or deemed beneficial to the survival of the species, then would be passed on through different kinds of cultural artifacts, but also through genetic potentiation. And so these are things that, when we talk about memory, it's a really broad scope of things. It's going from the individual molecular level to also the influence on culture, as well as the Baldwin effect we mentioned briefly about how traits that are beneficial to the group can be passed on over generations. So if we talk about memory systems, how do we think about memory systems? One of the earlier theories that still is in play today has to do with Sperling, some ideas of sensory memory. Remember, we talked about how all new learning passes through the sensory systems? Well, he put a lot of stock into trying to document and figure out where iconic memory. So when you can remember something, you have a visual recall of something, or echolic memories, things that you can hear and you repeat them and you hear them over and over again, or haptic memory, which has to do with touch memory. So he had a long look at this, tried to see if there were distinct neural pathways or similar neural pathways. It's really interesting. Depends on the sensory processing, but it also depends on where that information is going to end up going within your brain. If it is something that's related to definitions or the name of something, it will go in one pathway. If it has to do with a process or the way that information is used, it will go in another pathway. So these are very interesting early studies that have sort of been born out throughout the decades. A key division here that I'd like to make because I am very partial to this model and you don't have to be, but we used to talk about short-term and working memory as being the same thing. Now we have a big divide, which comes mainly with Badley's work, in which he showed that there is something different about working memory. Short-term memory had to do with plus or minus a certain number of digits, for example, whereas working memory has to do with processes. And in his hypothetical model back in the 70s, which has now really been born out, which is fantastic to see that he had this future site, is that once you have input and you receive information from your senses, he hypothesized back in the 70s, well, what was happening is that you would either log it on to some kind of a visual spatial sketch pad, like a visual image of whatever it is that you learned, or you would rehearse a phonological loop, which had to do with this repetition of something auditorily in your ear. So basically you would be hearing the same thing over and over again, or you might even speak out loud and repeat these things over and over again. The main idea was that there was another way that working memory came into play, which was very different from digit span analysis of short-term memory. So he suggested that these distinct processes, the fact that you were hanging something on a visual sketch pad, or that you were putting something into a phonological loop, was enhancing your ability to use that information for later processes. And then eventually, if it did get to that stage of working memory, then it could move into long-term memory. So these terms, working memory and short-term memory, aren't always distinguished. And even today in the literature, you get many people talking about short-term memory when they were referring to models that were previously called working memory, so phonological loop, visual sketch pad, which were badly's work in the 70s, talking about working memory, not short-term memory, but we have some models today that still call these things working memory, which is why I bring it up, because there is a confusion with the terms. I like the distinction between digits and processes, but you can go ahead and consider the evidence yourself. From the short-term memory, you have this big block of long-term memory, which is divided and has been for decades, without a lot of challenge, into two different types of long-term memory, declarative memory and non-declarative memory, or explicit memory or procedural memory. There's a lot of ways that we categorize these things to mean the same thing, but declarative memory is basically anything you could explain to me, okay? And non-declarative is stuff that would be hard to explain to me, like if I asked you, how do you walk? Okay, that's something you know, you remember how to do it, but it's very hard to make a statement about it. Declarative memory are all the things that you would learn in a school context, so they're contextually associated, they can be episodic memories as well, they really rely highly on recollection for proof that they exist, not demonstration, like in the procedural memories, and they can also be semantic in nature, you know, memorizing definitions of different things, and they're very much based on familiarity, repetition and practice, just being able to retrieve long-term memories in that sense has to do with rehearsal, pure rehearsal. So again, going back to this idea, if we split hairs between short-term and working memory, working memory plays a very, very interesting role in joining these two ideas of attention and memory, which we say are vital for learning. You'll find tons of papers that have come out in about the past eight or nine years who really focused on the key role of enhanced working memory systems in order to learn. When we talk about executive functions a couple weeks ago, we mentioned that working memory was one of three elements, working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, but this idea of working memory is really what bridges these two ideas of attention and memory in the brain. Declarative, as we mentioned before, are things that you learn in school, all the facts, events, dates, things like that, and the hippocampus is a very big hub there, right below the medial temporal lobe. When we talk about non-declarative memory, we're talking about those things that are very hard to explain, so how do you ride a bike? How do you walk? How do you talk? Those things are in a very different kind of a category. They tend to be things that are skills or habituated things. They work based on good priming. They can be related to associative learning, so related to emotional responses or triggered emotional responses that are habituated over time, and also they can be connected to a non-associative learning which have more to do with just reflexes, how you react to different situations based on habituated memory. So in summation, if you don't have short-term, you don't have working, you can't get to long-term, but the key here is you can have short-term and working without getting to long-term, and the key is for learning to get to long-term memory. So long-term memory, if you talk about it, declarative or explicit memory is non-declarative. Those are the two biggies, two big categories, right? And declarative memory can have things like episodic memories, semantic memories, and then you can have non-declarative memories which are related to more procedural habituation or fields or habits. And these are the related hubs for those memory systems in the brain. Obviously, it's not just that medial temporal lobe which is like pretty big anyways, or diencephalon or the basal ganglia or the neuroecortex or the amygdala. There are multiple pathways, but these are key hubs through which those memory systems pass. So now what are we gonna do? We're gonna turn to a couple of videos that have to do with exceptional cases of memory. People who can't learn new things because they can't memorize things and people who can't forget things just to get a sense of the different elements that are involved in forming memories and also in retrieving memories. Clive Waring was playing the piano alone in his room. When his wife came into the room, he immediately leapt up and embraced her with joyful enthusiasm. A minute later, she slipped out to grab a glass of water and when she returned, he gave her that same bright greeting as if she'd been gone for days. And then he did it again and again. Clive was an accomplished London musician until in 1985 at the age of 47, he contracted a rare herpes encephalitis virus that ravaged his central nervous system. Since then, he's been unable to remember almost any of his past or to make new memories. His wife is the only person he recognizes, but he can never recall the last time he saw her. This may be the most profound case of extreme and chronic amnesia ever recorded. Our memory helps make us who we are, whether recognizing loved ones recalling past joys or just remembering how to walk and talk and fry an egg. Memory is the chain that connects our past to our present. If it breaks, we're left untethered, incapable of leaving the present moment and unable to embrace the future. But memory isn't an all or nothing thing, of course. Waring can't remember any details about his personal past, but he still remembers how to speak English and get dressed and play the piano. Some memories you process automatically and they are stored differently than your more personal or factual memories like your first kiss or how to recite pie to 12 places or who won the Peloponnesian War. Speaking of ancient Greeks and to help demonstrate what I'm talking about, I want you to have a look at our Spartan friend here and remember his name because we're gonna be testing your memory in just a minute. Technically, memory is learning that has persisted over time. Information that has been stored and in many cases can be recalled. Except, of course, during the exam, our memories are typically accessed in three different ways through recall, recognition, and relearning. And if you think about all the different kinds of tests you've taken into school, they're all actually designed to size up how you access stored information in these ways. Like recall is how you reach back into your mind and bring up information just as you do in filling the blank tests. So if I say blank is the capital of Greece, your brain hopefully would just recall the answer as Athens. Recognition, meanwhile, is more like multiple choice test. You only need to identify old information when presented with it as in which of the following was not an ancient city in Greece, Athens, Marathon, Pompeii, or Sparta. And relearning is sort of like refreshing or reinforcing old information. So when you study for a final exam, you relearn things you have forgot more easily than you did when you were first learning them, like, say, a basic timeline of the Greek Empire. But how? How does all of that data that we're exposed to all the time every day become memory? Well, in the late 1960s, American psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Schifrin figured out enough about the process of memory formation to break it down into three stages. First, it's encoded into the brain, then stored for future use, and then eventually retrieved. Sounds simple, but by now you've figured out that just because you take a lot of stuff about your mind for granted doesn't mean that it is not complicated. By Atkinson and Schifrin's model, we first record things we want to remember as an immediate but fleeting sensory memory. Think back to the image I showed you a minute ago. You remember his name? If you do, it's because you successfully managed to shuffle it into your short-term memory where you probably encoded it through rehearsal. This is how you briefly remember something like a password or a phone number. Like, hey Tommy, what's Jenny's number? Okay, eight, six, seven, five, three, oh nine. Eight, six, seven, five, three, oh nine. Eight, six, seven, five, three. There's getting it in your head there. Or in this case, I told you to remember that guy's name. Maybe you were thinking Leonidas repeatedly, over and over, even if you didn't think you were doing it. This information really only stays in your short-term memory for under 30 seconds without a lot of rehearsal. So if you weren't repeating Leonidas, you probably have forgotten it already. Because your mind, amazing as it is, can really only hold between four and seven distinct bits of information at a time. At which point, the memory either decays or it gets transferred into long-term memory. Long-term memory is your brain's like durable and ridiculously spacious storage unit holding all of your knowledge, skills, and experiences. Now, since the days of Atkinson and Schifrin, psychologists have recognized that the classical definition of short-term memory didn't really capture all of the processes involved in the transfer of information to your long-term memory. I mean, it's more than being able to just remember some Greek guy's name. So later generations of psychologists revisited the whole idea of short-term memory and updated it to the more comprehensive concept of working memory. Working memory involves all the ways that we take short-term information and stash it in our long-term stores. And increasingly, we think of it as involving both explicit and implicit processes. When we store information consciously and actively, that's an explicit process. We make the most of this aspect of working memory when we study, for instance, so that we can know that Athens is the capital of Greece and that Pompeii was a Roman town and not a Greek one. This is how we capture facts and knowledge that we think we're going to need. Like I told you specifically to remember Leonidas's name, you concentrated on that detail and filed it away, if briefly. But of course we're not conscious of every tiny thing that we take in, yet our working memory often transfers stuff we're not aware of to long-term storage. We call that an implicit process, the kind you don't have to actively concentrate on. A good example might be classically conditioned associations. Like if you get all sweaty and nervous at the dentist because you had a root canal last year. You don't need to pull up that file on the last time you got your face drilled on to think, well, oral surgery, not my favorite. Instead, implicit processes cover all that stuff automatically. This kind of automatic processing is hard to shut off. Unless you've got something unusual going on in your brain you might not have much choice but to learn this way, like how you learned how to not put your hand into a fire. That learning would have happened pretty much automatically as soon as you first yanked your hand away from an open flame. Whether those things are lodged in there explicitly or implicitly or both, there are also different kinds of long-term memory. For instance, procedural memory refers to how we remember to do things like riding a bike or reading. It's effortful to learn at first but eventually you can do it without thinking about it. Long-term memory can also be episodic, tied to specific episodes of your life. Like remember that time that Bernice fell out of her chair in chemistry and everybody started laughing uncontrollably? Man, good times. There are other types of long-term memory too and we're continually learning more about the biology and psychology of the whole complex phenomenon. For instance, while Clive Waring's episodic memories, among others, seem to be deeply affected, his procedural memories for things seem to be in one piece. This has to do with neuroanatomy that we do not have time to explore here and that we don't yet fully understand. Waring and others have a lot to teach us about the different types of long-term memory storage. Now, for healthy memories, there are lots of little tricks you can use to help remember information. Mnemonics, for one, help with memorization and I'm sure you know a few that take the form of acronyms. Roy G. Biv for the colors of the rainbow, for instance. Mnemonics work in part by organizing items into familiar manageable units in a process called chunking. For example, it may be hard to recall a seven-digit number, but it'll be easier to commit to memory in the rhythm of a phone number, 867-5309, or you could just write a song about it. Strategies like mnemonics and chunking can help you with explicit processes but how well you retain your data can depend. Okay, now we're gonna move on to another huge point and this dev tells off of that last, that very first example there in the beginning there where the man just knows he loves and adores his wife, right? That is something that's a strong emotional full. This is very interesting. It's related to this concept of memory enhancement effect which has to do with the idea that the stronger the emotional link, the stronger the long-term memory. So this is one of those things that we don't really leverage enough maybe in school context but getting kids to be highly motivated because they like something, they love the topic, they're deeply interested in the things themselves, they have authentic situations in which they're learning is a huge way to enhance the probability of memory and therefore learning. We don't leverage this nearly enough in schools I think. It's not only due to distinct neural networks but also to chemical changes in the brain related to consolidating those long-term memories in different networks and they would be for a normal semantic learning of information. For example, you learn a foreign language and you're in love with the guy teaching you. You'll have a different kind of link or connection to that memory than you would have just learning through a semantic neural pathway. So one of the best examples of that is probably the live inside video that was shared with you in class related to affective neuroscience. There is the possibility that you can get different types of information into distinct and or overlapping neural pathways in the brain so you can retrieve these memories. For example, if they might be lost in a cognitive sense could you retrieve the memory from an emotional pathway that would be distinct from purely semantic neural pathway, for example? Let's have a look. What do you think of music? My heart belongs to music. I love it. Have you ever had music just hit you in a place that immediately brought you to tears? Music has that power. Music connects people with who they have been, who they are in their lives because what happens when you get old is all the things you're familiar with and your identity are all just being peeled away. Your medicine now, right? A healthcare system imagines the human to be a very complicated machine. We have medicines that can adjust the dials. Blood pressure, oak, turn that down. Blood sugar, oak, turn that down. We haven't done anything to touch the heart and soul of the patient. One resident that barely opened her eyes, she didn't respond. I knew her for two years once we put the iPod on her. She started shaking her feet. She started moving her head. It was amazing. Music has more ability to activate more parts of the brain than any other stimulus. Who am I? Who am I? I'm your daughter. By exciting or awakening those pathways, we have a gateway to stimulate and reach somebody who otherwise is unreachable. Oh! I can't get away from it if I'm in this place. Takes me back to my school days. Oh, God, that's beautiful. Does it make you happy to sing for us? Yeah. I'm crying. Every human being needs stimulation from the outside, from little babies to old people. American culture is wrong. There is actually life beyond adulthood. There's the opportunity to live and grow and become elders. The aging that we experience holds in it very important learnings and lessons. But there is no pill that does that. So there's a tears of joy. I thought you were going to grow wings. I was trying. I hope you get the chance to see the entire video because it's really, really powerful. It really shows you how there are, apparently, distinct neural pathways that lead to emotional memories that can be triggered by things other than just talking to the person. So give us a bit more optimism and kind of hope for aging population. Okay, so long-term emotional memories, as we mentioned before, does travel through pathways that involve as hubs, the amygdala and also hippocampal systems. OECD, Center for Educational Research and Innovation, did a primer on emotions and learning to help educators understand the key role that affect has in cognitive processes. So this is sort of moving out of the shadows and really, really putting stock into this idea that taking care of the emotional and social-emotional environment has a huge impact on the ability of individuals to actually learn. Now for really a great story and probably one of the most cited, most interesting stories that exist out there, the case of H.M., and basically he has been cited in more studies than any other related to memory and understanding how memory works in the brain. It was kind of a mistake, like some very interesting findings in medicine, but I'll let the video explain this. On September 1st, 1953, William Scoville used a hand crank and a cheap drill saw to bore into a young man's skull, cutting away vital pieces of his brain and sucking them out through a metal tube. But this wasn't a scene from a horror film or a gruesome police report. Dr. Scoville was one of the most renowned neurosurgeons of his time, and the young man was Henry Malaeuson, the famous patient known as H.M., whose case provided amazing insights into how our brains work. As a boy, Henry had cracked his skull in an accident and soon began having seizures, blacking out, and losing control of bodily functions. After enduring years of frequent episodes and even dropping out of high school, the desperate young man had turned to Dr. Scoville, a daredevil known for risky surgeries. Partial lobotomies had been used for decades to treat mental patients, based on the notion that mental functions were strictly localized to corresponding brain areas. Having successfully used them to reduce seizures in psychotics, Scoville decided to remove H.M.'s hippocampus, a part of the limbic system that was associated with emotion, but whose function was unknown. At first glance, the operation had succeeded. H.M.'s seizures virtually disappeared with no change in personality and his IQ even improved. But there was one problem. His memory was shot. Besides losing most of his memories from the previous decade, H.M. was unable to form new ones, forgetting what day it was, repeating comments, and even eating multiple meals in a row. When Scoville informed another expert, Wilder Penfield, of the results, he sent a Ph.D. student named Brenda Milner to study H.M. at his parents' home, where he now spent his days doing odd chores and watching classic movies for the first time, over and over. What she discovered through a series of tests and interviews didn't just contribute greatly to the study of memory. It redefined what memory even meant. One of Milner's findings shed light on the obvious fact that although H.M. couldn't form new memories, he still retained information long enough from moment to moment to finish a sentence or find the bathroom. When Milner gave him a random number, he managed to remember it for 15 minutes by repeating it to himself constantly. But only five minutes later, he forgot the test had even taken place. Neuroscientists had thought of memory as monolithic, all of it essentially the same and stored throughout the brain. Milner's results were not only the first clue for the now-familiar distinction between short-term and long-term memory, but showed that each uses different brain regions. We now know that memory formation involves several steps. After immediate sensory data is temporarily transcribed by neurons in the cortex, it travels to the hippocampus, where special proteins work to strengthen the cortical-synaptic connections. If the experience was strong enough, or we recall it periodically in the first few days, the hippocampus then transfers the memory back to the cortex for permanent storage. H.M.'s mind could form the initial impressions, but without a hippocampus to perform this memory consolidation, they eroded, like messages scrawled in sand. But this was not the only memory distinction Milner found. In a now-famous experiment, she asked H.M. to trace a third star in the narrow space between the outlines of two concentric ones, while he could only see his paper and pencil through a mirror. Like anyone else performing such an awkward task for the first time, he did horribly. But surprisingly, he improved over repeated trials, even though he had no memory of previous attempts. His unconscious motor centers remembered what the conscious mind had forgotten. What Milner had discovered was that the declarative memory of names, dates, and facts is different from the procedural memory of riding a bicycle or signing your name. And we now know that procedural memory relies more on the basal ganglia and cerebellum, structures that were intact in H.M.'s brain. This distinction between knowing that and knowing how has underpinned all memory research since. H.M. died at the age of 82 after a mostly peaceful life in a nursing home. Over the years, he had been examined by more than 100 neuroscientists, making his the most studied mind in history. Upon his death, his brain was preserved and scanned before being cut into over 2,000 individual slices and photographed to form a digital map down to the level of individual neurons, all in a live broadcast watched by 400,000 people. Though H.M. spent most of his life forgetting things, he and his contributions to our understanding of memory will be remembered for generations to come. So as you can see, this was one of the very first times we had insight into what would be the complexity of distinct neural pathways in the brain and really the key hubs that influence long-term memories. Hope you get a chance to delve deeper into this if you're interested in memory systems. Okay, so now we turn to what is sleep-dependent memory consolidation, and this is a rather newer article. The original ones back in 2005, 2006 by Robert Stickgold, who worked with Alan J. Hobson in Harvard, discovered this really interesting, fascinating mix, actually. What was going on during dream stages was actually consolidation of memory thanks to a very unique combination of neurotransmitters that only exist during sleep. So this actually permitted long-term memory consolidation of information thanks to this kind of binding that would occur due to the neurotransmitters that were present. This is very interesting to look at when you have students, for example, who might stay up all night and think that they can get less sleep and they'll be just fine, and they pass their test, but they really aren't learning the information because you can ask them the same things a week later and they just won't remember any of it because they didn't sleep on it. So sleep-dependent memory consolidation is a very interesting, new, and growing feel that we're gonna look into next week when we talk about the mind-body connection. So what would happen, and is there such a thing, as a perfect memory? What would you do if you had such a perfect memory? Would this be something beneficial? Most of us tend to think that we don't have a good enough memory and we would wish that we could improve our memory and recall things with greater ease. This is a fairly rare phenomenon to have a perfect memory. Maybe the most famous case is the book by Luria, a wonderful copy you can find in Harvard Square if you're interested in the mind of a nemonist. Basically, how this fellow could not forget anything, but as he aged, this actually became really burdensome because anything, anything he saw or touched or smelled would automatically connect to anything else that he had already saw or smelled or touched and triggering floods of new memories. So every new contact with new stimulus would create what is basically a problem, which is quite interesting. Could this 11-year-old boy hold one of the keys to unlocking the mystery? On first glance, Jake Haussler looks like a normal fifth grader. But as Washington University's Roddy Roddiger is discovering, he seems to be anything but. What happened Friday, October 28th, 2011? World Series Game 7. Cardinals won 6-2. Who are the pitchers for the teams? Chris Carpenter for St. Louis, Matt Harrison for the Rangers. We're just getting to know Jake and just starting to study him. He's obviously a very bright kid with a different kind of very powerful memory. Let's try a different day here. How about May 4th, 2013? That was a Saturday. And I saw Iron Man 3. He appears to have pretty unique abilities. So he can tell you what he did years ago to this date. And that's very, very unusual in and of itself. And to find it in a child is particularly unusual. When was Osama bin Laden killed? May 2nd, 2011, in Pakistan. May 1st, 2011, in USA. I mean, it's amazing. I've never felt like my memory was particularly bad. But compared to Jake's, clearly it is. It's just a mystery as to what's going on here. Jake can remember details from almost every day of his life since age seven. Once he started speaking, really, we noticed he was different. What are the 13 colonies? Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland. Yeah, I remember taking him to the grocery store one time and he knew where all the items were by aisle. It's a little bit like having a computer living with you. We'd all remember getting a pet, but the exact date? What day did I pick up Gracie in Wisconsin? March 31st. Where did I fly into? Minneapolis, St. Paul. What did I eat for dinner the night I was in Wisconsin? Peas currants. That is correct. There's no doubt that there's something different going on there. What's different about Jake is that he has age, Sam. Highly superior autobiographical memory. Highly superior, you can remember days from your life and lots of detail, like what day of the week was it? And you can't forget it. What about 2004? Jim McGaw is a pioneer in the science of memory. He discovered H. Sam 15 years ago. And when did you meet with me? June 28th, 2008. So far, out of the several thousand tested, he's discovered 55 adults who have this amazing ability. A Saturday, a Panera bread in Newport Beach. I can give them any date, say 10 years ago, five years ago, 20 years ago, and so on. Do you know when Elvis Presley died? August 16th, 77. And their performance will be at least 80% correct and maybe 100% correct, depending upon the particular individual. One of the best memories McGaw has ever tested belongs to someone you might recognize, actress Mary Lou Henner from the hit show Taxi. I knew as a very young child that I had a very unusual memory. They called me Miss Memory, Miss Univac, the memory kid, things like that. Name calling aside, they're not geniuses. In fact, on average, they have normal IQs. They are not superior in other forms of learning, like book learning, standard laboratory learning tasks, and so on. I think in misconception, as you probably know, that people have, they think it's some type of autistic savant thing that we're using some type of mathematical calculation like in Rain Man. Yeah, definitely not Rain Man. So what gives them this amazing ability? McGaw has scanned over a dozen H-Sams and found some intriguing hints. For example, an area in the brain associated with memory, the unsnit fasciculus, is more active in H-Sams. There are some differences in the brain. They're statistically significant, but they have not given us a pattern such that we can say this is the neurobiological basis of H-SAM. What is it about their brains that enables this ability? That's the open question. And that's where Jake comes in. He is the youngest person ever discovered with H-SAM. And here at Washington University, scientists are mapping his brain with new imaging technologies. Over the next year, they'll test his memory while doing hundreds of scans. All right, Jake. So what happened on April 8, 2013? I went to the St. Louis Zoo. When they are finished, they will have, perhaps, the most comprehensive picture ever of a child's brain. They were getting loads and loads of data on him, so it's very, very exciting. I mean, if to do this in a normal person in this comprehensive way would be really exciting. And to be able to do it on a child who has particularly unique abilities is extra special. Then they'll compare Jake's scans to other children's to see if they can unlock the secret of what makes his memory so extraordinary. That's a chance of a lifetime. You can't write a grant saying we're going to go look for someone like that. That's the only way to find it, right? The hope is that this little boy's brain can help answer some big questions about how our memory works. Jake clearly is able to extract remarkable amounts of information from his brain, but we don't know if you or I have that information in us, but we just can't remember it or if it just doesn't get encoded into our brain function in the first place. The mystery with Jake and the other H-Sams is, do they actually keep more memories than the rest of us? Or do we all have this wealth of detail buried deep inside our brains? We just can't get at it. If we can understand how he harnesses that to be able to generate that within ourselves could be a very powerful tool. There is potential there that we will learn something truly new and important about the functioning of the most complicated and interesting known structure in the universe, and that's our brain and the most important thing it does is learn and remember. But I'd like to do is to have a quick look at the introduction of this particular video. If you have time, please take a look at the whole thing. But I'd like you to think about this main question that is one of these first questions, which was, what was your first memory and do you know why that was your first memory? Think about this as you watch the beginning of this video. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. Memory. We know it as a record of our lives. How to find our keys or recite facts from school. But stop and think about it. It's so much more from your earliest memory. Falling off of a horse at about five years old. When I walked into kindergarten and I met my best friend. By 1925, we moved to 513 Spring Avenue. You're happiest. When my daughter was born, when she like came out. See a real-life human being breathe the first breath of fresh air. Or saddest. But not the death of my father. We are little but the sum of our memories. It's who we are. That's how we understand ourselves in our lives. Consider for a moment just how vivid a memory can be. The smells, the sounds. I know the shoes, the socks, the pants and the shirt I wore. It was like it happened yesterday. I do have a picture in my head. You can see it. That is a remarkably complex computational process that memory achieved within milliseconds. Incredible, powerful gift. How is this gift possible? How does the world get into our heads and turn into a memory? How does memory actually work? Turns out that's one of the biggest mysteries in science today. If you go and ask most people, they would say they understand memory. But the truth is really rather far from that. We sort of understand the tip of the iceberg. We're just kind of nibbling around the big central mystery of memory. How do I bring back in time now something that happened to me long ago? It's a very difficult problem that we haven't solved. Memory is the biggest mystery. It's as big as the question of what is the universe? Why are we here? Okay, so if we return to this question now, most people will have their first memories sometime between three and a half and four and a half years old. This is pretty much due to the idea that there's the greatest time of head growth is between zero and three. More or less your skull grows pretty quickly between zero and three years old, permitting your brain to sort of unfold. It's this mashed level, but finally it's got a little bit more space. And around three and a half, four years old, the hippocampus really kicks in. And you begin to have the ability to form declarative memories, things that you remember, that you can articulate and say you remember. What's really interesting is the amygdala, another great hub for mainly emotional memories, is actually intact before you're born. So this is really interesting. Sometimes it's a sad case, but you can find kids who maybe were abused in families before they were a year old and they're taken out of that environment and they're put into a really nice home. And it's very interesting that those kids can still have some problems, even though they can't even articulate why, because they don't have an explicit or declarative memory of anything ever bad happening to them, but they could have an emotional memory already set. So this is why if you said that you had a memory that's earlier than more or less around three and a half years old, four years old, the likelihood, the probability is it's actually an emotionally charged memory, like the birth of a younger sibling or a fire in your house or you moved or something like that, that would be more emotionally jarring. Most people will have typical calm memories, but they would probably be stated more or less around four years of age. So now we want to turn to a very interesting, another idea that's kind of counterintuitive, but forgetting is important to memory. Not only in the cases of Luria's patient where it could reach a point of being almost sad that you have a perfect memory, but getting to the point where forgetting things is also sort of like cleaning out the cobwebs kind of a thing and refining neural pathways, believe it or not. So if you've had multiple exposures to information and you're trying very hard to learn something, once you find the right pathway, your brain becomes terribly efficient and uses that single pathway over others. So forgetting information is also helpful in refining memory pathways and leading to more efficient learning processes or retrieval processes. If you're interested in the idea of forgetting, please come to the section this week. We're going to talk about the Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel Satcher, which is just a phenomenal insight into why forgetting is so important. And he talks about sins of omission and sins of commission, things that we leave out and things that we add on to memory as they relate to transience, like over time, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. So do come to the section if you're interested in forgetting. So there is another big surge in information now as technology is getting more and more refined. There is more and more interest in really defining what are these neural pathways? What is the neurophysiology of memory? Not only in identifying key hubs for information, such as the hippocampus and the amygdala, but also understanding the multiple distinct networks that have to be refined for different types of learning. For example, going back to the documentary on Alive Insight, it's so interesting to see that a similar memory can be retrieved through distinct neural pathways. So memories can be reinforced from an emotional perspective or they can be reinforced from a tactical or direct instruction perspective. But wouldn't it be interesting if you could do it both ways so that you would have multiple entry points to that information? So what are some memory disorders that exist? Amnesia, you can have temporary amnesia, which is a long-term amnesia, but this is generally it's damaged to the regions and the medial temporal lobes, sort of right on top of where the hippocampus is. And this causes impediments to retrieval of those memory systems. Then you have the cases we saw before of the hypothermia when you have autobiographical memory that's really enhanced. And you can also have Korsakov syndrome, which has to do with antergrade amnesia or retrograde amnesia, things that you can't remember, new things learned or old things that were learned before. So what are some diseases that we know of in which memory is sacrificed? We know that Alzheimer's disease in general reduces certain connections between neurons, so that means that maybe the cell body exists and still is there, but actually those connections that really made those memories are now gone. This gets to this big question and many, many people who have parents who suffer, who have family members who suffer from Alzheimer's, you know, reflect on this a lot. Are you your memories? If you don't have access to your memories, then are you who you were before? Big questions there, right? In addition to memory loss, there's also spatial disorientation, and oftentimes not just long-term memory loss, but also short-term memory loss. In Parkinson's disease, you also have similar problems, but mainly due to a dopamine reduction, which has to do with the strengthening of those neural pathways to be able to retrieve memories is also gone. In addition, there can be brain cell death as well. And then there's the sort of regular cognitive decline with aging. The older we get, the less active we are mentally in general, which can lead to a strain and getfulness. Does that mean there's actual memory loss? Well, people who rehearse or work hard to retain memory functions, like sitting down and doing surokus or crossword puzzles or learning a foreign language. When they continue to extend and use these connections, they don't decline as fast, so the use it or lose it kind of a concept here, okay? So what would be protective factors to stave off the general cognitive decline or the access to memory systems that we have? Remember when we talked about executive functions? We talked about multiple interventions that could enhance saving off cognitive decline, including things like doing crossword puzzles suroku and also learning foreign languages. We also looked at computer interventions, even just playing new board games, learning new rules of different things can enhance working memory structures, for example, playing concentration with an older relative, can help them sort of rehearse pathways that they already had in existence so that they don't decline. And this is something I really hope you can all, you know, think about. You might not be there yet. You guys are all like spring chickens, young guys, but think about this. This is probably the biggest health threat that is facing all countries around the world, and it's coming up on us really fast. We have worked so hard over the past 50 years to enhance how our body can go into old age, but we have spent very little research in looking into how we can protect the mind from going into cognitive decline. So there is, it's a very interesting initiative. They see that most people in the United States, for example, will retire at age 65, but they won't die until they're 85. So what are you going to do for those 20 good years? There are some very interesting initiatives being done by universities in the States right now to try to call back older students, because they're perfectly ready and focused and can probably have more time for study than maybe younger people could have, and it's a great way to keep them from having cognitive decline in the older years. So here is a very interesting list from the annual of internal medicine in 2010, which was trying to, you know, it began by identifying what are some risk factors that would head you downhill. What would set you up for cognitive decline? And they went from everything from genotype structures to exercise routines, and this is well worth looking at if you're interested in natural cognitive decline. What is it that you can do that would protect you from that mental decline? Some of the things, because it's a very small list, tried to make this slightly bigger with other literature, but you know, if you look at the general risk and protector factors for memory, we know that on a day-to-day basis, it takes its toll into old age. On a day-to-day basis, high stress situations put a toll on memory. If you're highly stressed, it's very hard. You know, just leave me alone. I can't think, I can't think. You can't recall things when you're highly stressed. When you have had little sleep, you do not have access to figuring out which is that pathway I need to find that information in. So lack of sleep is a high risk factor, right? But it can be a protective factor. If you learn how to have better sleep hygiene, it could be a protective factor in serving you for immediate memory needs right now, but also into old age. Repetition. Not having time to go over information enough times can be a risk factor, but knowing how certain amount of repetition, either saying it, visual spatial representation, and working memory, or somehow getting enough repetition so that you can create those connections between those different new points of information in your brain, which enhance memory and recall, which therefore also enhances learning. If you have problems with attention, you can definitely have problems with memory. On the upside, if you have problems with attention, but not with memory, you can use memory to fill in those gaps of attention and vice versa. So knowing yourself, know thyself, big piece of advice there. Know what you are good at and not good at. Do you have a well-working attention system? Do you have well-working memory systems? Know what can be done to enhance each of those systems. Pneumonic rehearsal also helps. Age can be a risk factor. It can be a protective factor as well. Tobacco, we know that other drugs as well can also either enhance or reduce memory systems, diabetes. Other physiological tolls on the body can have an impact on memory. Cognitive training, if you are able to do some of these things, you can enhance, for example, working memory processes. It doesn't help you with long term, but it can help you with working memory. Again, I'll throw in learning a foreign language maybe into your old age. You can also enhance memory processes as well. So what helps or enhances your memory? This is the last part here and I want you to think about the risk and protective factors in your life. There are studies being done. If we just did transcranial stimulation, can we actually stimulate impede memories? Definitely you can. Frequent testing, believe it or not, when we give you the opportunity to take the test or the quiz in our class over and over and over again, believe it or not, that enhances your memory. Because when you take the test the second time and you want to get that perfect score, you have to have recall about what you got right or wrong the first time. So frequent testing actually enhances memory. Getting enough sleep enhances memory. A good diet enhances memory. Positive emotions, you know, not being in a negative state. We know that negative emotions can expel different types of neurotransmitters which would prevent new memory consolidation from occurring. Whereas being in a good mood could actually enhance that. You can do working memory training, either these computer programs that we mentioned or even just playing solitaire can help you. General exercise has been shown to enhance memory in different individuals. Computerized training, cognitive training. There's different things out there. Whatever you do though, I mean double, triple check the sources of information. There's also a lot of junk out there being sold to people because we know that older populations are now getting a little bit desperate about what can I possibly do to protect myself as I get into old age. And so they're selling these retirees a lot of stuff that sometimes doesn't have backing. So be very careful about, you know, read the label. Double check the evidence before you recommend this to your parents or grandparents. What other things that can help protect memory, strong emotional states either super, super hysterical, happy or super, super depressed extremes are never good. Everything in moderation. Remember good old soccer tooth, right? Traumatic brain injury just playing soccer or American football or bunk in your head a couple times or actually being in a car accident can take a toll on memory or this can be in both directions. Remembering things from the past or also being able to form new memories in the future. Lack of sleep as we mentioned before. Lack of attention, lack of motivation. All of these things come up in your daily life. So what I want to ask you to do right now, now that we've looked at this idea of the importance of memory systems for learning we've looked at the different ways that memory systems are structured talked about a bit how forgetting is indeed important in memory processes and learning and understanding that memory is complex and has all these different things surrounding it. Different chemical processes electrical processes, different neural pathways, physical structures and neural hubs and that plasticity is a reflection of actual learning in the brain or the memory consolidation that takes place. The last thing we really want you to do right now is to reflect on the risk and protective factors in your own life. What is it that gets in the way of your being able to memorize and to learn therefore to learn new information and again this might go back even to your very first week of class when we ask you when do you do your best learning it probably has to do with when do you enhance memory or when do you have the best attention. We hope that those things are coming back around to you when you think about that very first week of class when we ask you how do you learn best it probably has to do with structuring environments that are conducive to your own learning based on enhancing memory systems. So do think about that and let us know if you have any questions. Looking forward to seeing you in class next week. Thank you very much. Bye.