Jono, Ben & Megan - The Podcast - Can you improve your memory? We chat with a neurologist.

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

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The Hits, with the Jono and Ben podcast. Thanks to Challenge, putting the service back into service stations. I was a little upset they paid for a Disney cruise when the kids were younger and they don't remember it. We're going to get to the bottom of it, my friend Ben Boyce, because we have neurologist Dr. Aaliyah Devitt on the phone. Good morning. Hi. Great to have you on. Cognitive psychology. You're the senior lecturer at Waikato University, the University of Waikato. And I just wanted to say that so it made the show seem a lot more intellectual than it is. Yeah, now you deal with memory. Will you forget this interview afterwards or it depends how it goes? It depends how it goes. If it goes badly, I might be motivated to forget it.

Yeah, okay. Okay, good. Now we'll be talking about things that you remember, your earliest childhood memory. At what age generally do people recall events from their childhood? Usually it's around three years old. There's quite a bit of variability though, so it can be anywhere from, you know, two to four years old is fairly normal to remember something. So why can't we remember some things? You know, like there are some things that people will talk about and you're like, I have no recollection of that. Why is that? Well, it's because it's quite efficient for us to forget things. So we kind of think of forgetting as a bad thing, but we don't actually want to remember everything from our lives because that would make our minds really cluttered. Actually quite efficient for us to forget stuff that maybe

isn't quite important. So if we've forgotten something, maybe it wasn't really important or really stood out to us enough to stick around in our memory. So when Ben's daughters forget a trip he took them on, it means it wasn't that great. Yeah, great time. It wasn't exciting enough, maybe. It was a time of our lives. No more stimulation of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on a cruise liner.

Yeah. Like, ah, nah. Dr. Leah Devitt, can you tell me why, you know, for example, when Ben tells me, don't forget to bring my suit shoes into work, I forget, but I know every single word to the Tux dog food commercial song. I would say that's probably a case of rehearsal. So you might have heard the song quite a few times, and so you're rehearsing it, and that helps the information stick in your mind,

whereas if someone tells you to do something, you might not be paying as much attention to that as you should, and you don't think about it again, so it kind of just slips into your memory and then slips out again without any sort of sticking power there. Tux keeps him full of life, fit as a fiddle, sharp as a knife. From Kate Reangan to The Bluff,

there's only one feed that's good enough. He knows it all. I got lost in a hole on a memory last night, and it was saying that babies as young as six months can form short-term memories that last for minutes. Yes, they can, yes. But the mystery is a little bit around why those memories don't stick with us for our lifetime. So going back to we can only remember things around three years old,

it's still a bit of a mystery for us why we don't remember things earlier than that. Psychologists don't actually know the answer to that. That's really, really interesting. I also read that as we age, we become increasingly susceptible to memory distortions, inaccuracies. That's probably why everyone's parents always go, no, this happened, no, no, this happened. You're telling it wrong, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. So it's kind of everyone's parents always go, no, this happened. No, no, this happened. You're telling it wrong, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's kind of a double whammy as we get older because we

start forgetting more stuff. But then the stuff that we do remember tends to be less accurate and this might have some errors and distortions in there. And it's just sort of a natural effect of aging. And they forget they've told you the same story over and over again. Again and again. Nothing quite like the joy of a couple of bickering boomers arguing over where they aging. And they forget they've told you the same story over and over again. Again and again. I think quite like the joy of a couple of bickering boomers arguing over where they went to dinner and what was said. Can you make yourself have a

better memory? Can you train yourself to have a better memory? Or are you genetically predisposed? You know the word. Almost sounded smart. You're a scientist. Yeah, you can totally train yourself to have a better memory. If you've ever seen memory experts or people who can remember like whole decks of cards and whole lists of words and that sort of thing,

these are people who just have normal memories. They've just kind of taught themselves all the tips and tricks to improving their memory. So one hack to improving your memory if you're trying to remember something is actually to test yourself on it so this is called the testing effect where the sort of effort that you have to go through to remember something helps that memory stick around a lot better so if say you're studying it's much better to test yourself on what you need to remember rather than just you know read your notes and try to refresh it that way someone told me uh that, you know, when you first meet someone and a lot of the times you completely forget a person's name,

is if you say or sort of insert their name into natural conversation after you first meet them. So, hi, Megan, lovely to meet you. What do you do for a job, Megan? Oh, who are you married to, Megan? And if you say it like six or seven times, then you'll never forget their name. No, that's actual fact. That's a really good way to remember people's names so usually when we forget people's names it's because again we're not paying enough attention we're not rehearsing

that information and it doesn't really have meaning for us so if you're repeating someone's name and you're kind of tagging it to other information about them you're adding meaning to it you're rehearsing it for yourself, and so it will stick around longer. So we don't have to end up calling everyone mate. This has been really fascinating. Thanks so much for that interview. Thanks, mate. No, it's been awesome to chat to you.

Really, really interesting stuff. I really appreciate it. Well, thanks for having me.