A retired Japanese engineer once memorized pi to over 111,000 digits using nothing but storytelling and visualization. He also forgot his wife’s birthday that same year. Neuroscientist Lisa Genova uses this contradiction to dispel a persistent collective fear: that ordinary forgetting is an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s.
About the speaker: Lisa Genova is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Still Alice, Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens, and Every Note Played. Lisa graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. She travels worldwide speaking about the neurological diseases she writes about and her TED talk, “What You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s,” has been viewed more than five million times. The New York Times bestseller Remember is her first work of nonfiction.
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Timestamps
00:00:15 Chapter 1: How your memory works
00:03:15 What memory actually is
00:06:34 The 4 steps of making a memory
00:09:00 Why meaning, emotion, and repetition make memories stick
00:19:48 Chapter 2: 8 techniques to protect your memory
00:24:03 How to actually make memories stick
00:31:06 The imagination trick that beats forgetting
00:35:16 Is technology making your memory worse?
00:39:09 Chapter 3: How to protect your brain from Alzheimer’s
00:44:49 The lifestyle habits that protect your brain
00:51:21 Why chronic stress literally shrinks your memory
00:55:31 How learning new things builds an Alzheimer's-resistant brain
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
My name is Lisa Genova. I am an author and neuroscientist. My book is Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting.
Chapter 1: How Your Memory Works
So, I decided to take a break from my gig as a novelist to write this nonfiction book because I’ve been talking about Alzheimer’s using Still Alice as a vehicle for that conversation for over a decade, trying to help folks understand what it feels like to have Alzheimer’s and to recognize what those symptoms of dementia are. But what I found was over and over is that everybody over the age of 40, certainly over 50, 60, 70, they think that all kinds of forgetting mean they have Alzheimer’s. So these folks would corner me in the ladies’ room or wait to the end of the book signing line and sort of confess to me what’s going on in their lives and looking almost for a diagnosis in this very conversation. So they’d say things to me like, “Well, I’m always forgetting names”. And “if I don’t write down what I have to do later, I won’t remember to do it. And I’m always walking into the kitchen and I don’t know why I’m in there.” And so these people are panicked and afraid and stressed out and really ashamed of these moments of forgetting, which are actually totally normal.
There are so many misconceptions with respect to memory. I think the biggest one in a nutshell has to do with the notion that people think that memory is supposed to be perfect. That our brains are supposed to remember everything that it encounters. And this simply isn’t true. Our brains are not designed to remember people’s names, to do something later, or to catalog everything we encounter. Even people who have phenomenal memories, people who are considered memory champions, will forget the things that human brains forget. So for example, Akira Haraguchi, a retired engineer from Japan, decided that he wanted to memorize pi to as many digits as he could. And he was 69 years old when he decided he wanted to do this. He memorized Pi, a non-repeating, patternless number, to over 111,000 digits because he wanted to. This is amazing. And he’s not a mathematical savant. He’s not a genius, but he has a healthy human brain. And because he knows techniques that pair storytelling and meaning and visualization with all of those numbers, he’s able to do this magical thing. But he also forgot his wife’s birthday one year and he can forget why he’s in his living room.
So we as human beings have to accept a certain amount of forgetting in our lives. So memory is not a war in your brain between remembering the good guy and forgetting the bad guy. I think that a lot of us have that conception of what memory is. Human memory is amazing and it’s fallible.
Neurologically speaking, what even is a memory? So memory is the constellation, the pattern of neural activity that represents the sights, sounds, smells, feelings, information, language that you experienced when you learned something in the first place, reactivated as a neural circuit in your brain. So your memory is not a video camera recording a constant stream of every sight and sound you encounter. There’s no memory bank. I think a lot of people think that memories are stored in a place. And this is actually true for a lot of other things that go on in our brain. There’s a physical location. There’s an address for where we process vision or language or movement. But memory is different. It’s not in a file cabinet. It’s not a DVD menu. Memory is located throughout your brain and all of the disparate places that are involved in what that memory consists of.
So if I’m thinking of the sight and sound of Mickey Mouse, I’ll have neurons in the back of my head. That’s my occipital cortex. My visual cortex will be activated. Those represent what Mickey Mouse looks like. But the sound of Mickey Mouse is located somewhere else. That’s in my auditory cortex. And so the circuit, the memory, will involve the activation of neurons in those very different places. But that’s the memory of what Mickey Mouse looks and sounds like for me.
Your hippocampus is your memory weaver. This is the part of your brain that binds all of those disparate elements of what will become a singular pattern of neural activity, what will become a memory. So it links together the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings, the language, the information so that they become connected into a neural circuit. The hippocampus is a part of your brain that is essential for the formation of any new memories that you will later consciously be able to retrieve. And when you are recalling a memory, when you are recognizing something that you know, your brain is being activated in a similar manner to what it was when you actually experienced the information or learned the information in the first place. So the pattern of neural activity is based on what you paid attention to and learned in the first place. It will be recalled again. It will be reactivated.
So how do we know where memory is in the brain? How do we know that it’s activated really all over your brain?
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