Something You Should Know - Spite: For Good and Evil & Why Memory Often Fails Us

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

I’m sure you’ve gotten a song stuck in your head. It happens to all of us. And once it gets in your head, it is hard to get rid of. It turns out there are some ways that have researched that do seem to work to get that song out of your head the next time it seeps in and just won't leave. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/03/21/heres-how-get-song-out-your-head/99264896/ You have probably done something to someone out of spite. Most people have. Interestingly, humans are just about the only creature on earth that acts out of spite. According to psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones. Simon says spite comes from a feeling of being wronged – of not being treated fairly. Often people will go to great lengths to get revenge. That’s spite. Still, spite may not be all bad. It can actually be useful. Listen as Simon reveals why we do things out of spite and why spite may be an important tool we use to keep each other honest. Simon is author of the book Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side (https://amzn.to/2OO8FJu)  Human memory is full of flaws. For example, most things we simply don’t remember at all. Other things we don’t remember very well and a lot of what we do remember gets distorted over time. So how do we make sense of our memory? Here to help explain it is Lisa Genova. She is a neuroscientist, writer and speaker who has appeared on The Today Show and PBS NewsHour, and she is author of the book Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting (https://amzn.to/3ccv2B7). Ever have a bad day? Sure, you have. And it seems that the worse the day gets – the worse it gets. Well, you can actually turn that spiral off. Listen as I reveal this simple technique that will stop you from focusing on the bad things happening so your day can get back on track. Source: Dr. Judith Orloff author of Positive Energy (https://amzn.to/3dZ323w). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, how to get that song that's stuck in your head out of your head. Then, acting out of spite. It can be a bad thing. But not always. Spite can make us potentially more creative. So spiteful people tend to score higher on the personality trait of disagreeableness. And disagreeable people tend to be more creative when doing things such as maths, engineering, physics.

So spite can potentially aid creativity. Also, how to stop a bad day from getting any worse. And memory. It's good for some things, but sometimes human memory really sucks. You know, knowing what I now know about memory and what I hope to share with you all is that, you know, when you're so sure of a memory for what happened and you're arguing with your spouse because he thinks something else happened, you're probably both wrong. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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I'll just take the car. Don't wait up, okay? Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time, don't they? At Intact Insurance, we insure your car so you can enjoy the ride. Visit Intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi. Ever get a song stuck in your head? Ever get that song stuck in your head? I've actually had that song get stuck in my head, that little musical intro there. Those things are called earworms, and it seems that the more you try to get it out of your head, the more it keeps playing over and over again. Well, here is some well-researched advice for getting rid of those songs that keep playing over and over and over. This is from a study from 2016. The first piece of advice is to chew gum. Gum chewing reduces the number of involuntary musical thoughts and affects the music hearing experience,

and it interferes with a person's ability to recall words from their short-term memory, so it made it more difficult for that song to stick. Listen to the actual song. See, I would think that would make it worse, but it turns out it actually helps it go away. Listen to a different song, or go talk to someone. Often, I guess, these earworms get stuck in your head when you're alone, but if you engage with others or go pay attention to another song, it fades away.

Do a puzzle. I guess that's just distraction, but it seems to help. Or just let it go. Don't try to get rid of it. Don't try to get it out of your head. Just move on, and eventually it goes away. The study found that classic rock songs were the most common earworm-inducing songs, and at the top of the list were songs by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Queen, Kylie Minogue, and Journey. And that is something

you should know. Something strange that we humans sometimes do is we act out of spite. Often, we later regret acting out of spite, but when we get angry at someone, spite can be a really powerful force that makes us do things we would otherwise not do and makes us do things that may eventually cost us something. So why do we act out of spite? And can we turn that force into something more positive? Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones has taken a journey into the world of spite and vengeance.

He's written a book about it called Spite, The Upside of Your Dark Side. Hi Simon, welcome. Thanks Mike. So what is spite exactly? Spite is when you're taking your time at the checkout just to make that next person wait. It's when you put gnomes in your garden just to irritate your neighbor. It's when you invest in a company or even buy it, as happened in one case, so you can fire the management. Broadly speaking, it is a behavior in which we pay a personal cost or price in order to hurt or inflict a cost on somebody else.

Is it an emotion? Emotions drive it. So I'm focused on it as a behavior. Obviously, there are certain emotions that drive spite, primarily anger, feelings of injustice. And so it is what it is. Why are we talking about it? Why is this important? I kind of go back to Star Wars when Darth Vader says to Luke that you don't know the power

of the dark side. Doing the research for this book, which I wrote, it made me appreciate that we don't appreciate the power of our spiteful side. So if you look at, say, our cousins, the chimps and the bonobos, if were to um offer them uh if you were to give one chimp ten dollars and you asked that chimp to give some of that money to another chimp and it only offered the other chimp maybe one or two dollars the chimp would take the money or the or the bananas or whatever it would be that you give a chimp and they'd be happy enough with that if you deal with people then if we're offered an unfair split of money then we react very differently we will literally almost toss the money back at the other person. We'll give up

free money if we don't feel we're being dealt with fairly. Now, that kind of makes sense. If we've been treated unfairly, it makes sense that we might give up some money or pay to punish the other person. And that kind of makes sense. What happens then if somebody else has maybe gotten ahead of us fairly? They've worked fairly. They've earned more than us. And would we, in that situation, give up our own money to punish that person for getting ahead of us, even though it was completely fair how they got ahead? And again, you find in these economic games, one being the Joy of Destruction game, that around 40% of people, if they're anonymous, will pay to inflict a cost on somebody else who has gotten ahead of them due to their own uh hard work which is which is pretty nasty and it it gets perhaps even stranger

in the sense that you wouldn't think that if somebody has helped you that you would you would in any way be spiteful towards them you think you know if someone's been unfair then that's going to be the trigger what you find is that even if somebody has helped you and been really generous, people will still in some cases, spite them. This is called do-gooder derogation. And the idea here is that if somebody has been very generous, then that kind of gives them more social points than you. Other people are going to maybe like them more, are going to want to cooperate with them. And so therefore their generosity is a threat to you. And therefore you are potentially open to spiting them which is obviously not a good thing for society yeah well you know i can imagine like say say somebody gives

you a job and that but that somebody who gave you the job owns the company and is a multi-millionaire and you're making you know 15 an hour you might feel spiteful towards that person and yet they gave you a job we're a paradoxical creature. But I guess it all comes back down to this spite seems to be wrapped up in our desire, really, for dominance, to raise ourselves up and to pull other people down. Because again, we're an inherently social creature. So dominance is a really important thing to us. And yet, I bet if you ask people why they do things like this, it isn't that they're trying to be dominant so much as it's about the fairness

and the justice part of it. Yes? Yes. Again, there's a split between why we think we do things and why we might actually do things. So again, if you ask somebody generally why they're punishing somebody, they'll say that it's to make the other person act better in the future, that they're trying to maybe deter the other person. But if you look at the experimental games that have been done, it really comes through quite strongly that people are really punishing people in order to harm them rather than just simply make them act better. And that punishment is quite often an act of domination, which is hidden below a mask of fairness. And when people do these things to spite other people, is the satisfaction everything they'd hoped in general? Or does it usually turn out to be, well, what did I do that for? That was really stupid. Well, these things are often driven by anger. And again, if in the experience you have a pause between somebody being treated unfairly

and then deciding how to respond, then you'll find they're much less likely to be spiteful. So once they can control that emotion, then they can deal with it better. But again, in the heat of the moment, they might act in ways that they're going to later regret. But yeah, but do they typically later regret? Is spite usually regretted later? Or are there examples of people who brag about it, who were very spiteful, very vengeful, got the other guy and, you know,

were real happy they did it? Well, I guess, I mean, if you take an extreme example from literature, you have Captain Ahab, whose desire was to destroy the White Whale at all costs. You can see that as being a really spiteful act. And clearly, the guy, even though his life was being destroyed, got some satisfaction from doing that. And again, you can see when people are maybe trying to make spiteful bids on eBay, just make the other person pay more. You can see that people are feeling quite good in the afterglow of that. Again, on pond reflection, people might come to regret it,

but others not. I mean, it's particularly an issue when matters of justice are involved. So our brain responds really powerfully to justice. So if you've been maltreated, then a spiteful response is going to potentially feel really good for you, both in the short term and in the long term. So studies have been done in the MRI scanner where somebody was treated unfairly, and then they got the chance to punish the other person. And the brain activity really strongly overlaps with what you see when a drug user is about to take a drug. So in many senses, justice is like a drug to us. I mean, we crave crave it and we get really powerful rewards from administrating it potentially through spite. Are there people who never have this reaction?

Depends on how you measure it. So if you do questionnaires in the population, you'll find maybe five to 10% of people say that they act spitefully. If you do experimental games, the numbers become a bit higher. So some auction bidding games have found that a third of people behaved not at all spitefully, a third behaved really spitefully, and the other third were in the middle. But I think if you look at how people behave, if you put the right person in the right situation, or maybe the wrong situation, that almost everybody will potentially behave spitefully at some point if pushed. Has anybody done a survey and asked and gotten a sense of, has everybody pretty much done something out of spite?

No, the questionnaire data was only being looked at in the past decade or so. So we still don't know too much about spite, which is quite strange. Most of it comes from the profession of economics. So we don't really know quite how spitefully people will act when they answer these questions. What's your sense? Is it a pretty universal response to life? You tend to find it. So the games that economists have developed to measure spite, they've played these all over the world, in America, in the jungles of Borneo. And levels of spite vary, and it seems to be quite strongly influenced by the role of your culture in setting norms of fairness and how

people are expected to behave. So culture plays quite a strong role in how likely people are to be spiteful. Are people more or less likely to be spiteful depending on their status, where they sit on the social ladder? People who pretty much have everything would, I would think, maybe be less spiteful, perhaps? I don't know. Is there any connection there? it's hard to say what the research does point towards is that as your environment becomes more competitive that you're likely to become more spiteful as potentially an adaptive response to that and there's been some really nice work done in the states about how the brain enables spite so to sum that up briefly so basically if the world becomes more competitive in in the olden days the much older days when we were evolving, then certain types of food will become more scarce and harder to get. And the neurotransmitter in our brain, one of the big ones is serotonin.

And we need to get tryptophan, which is an essential amino acid. We need to get from the food in our diet in order to make serotonin in the brain. Now, if the world becomes more competitive, we've got less access to foods with tryptophan in. It turns out that once your serotonin levels drop, that makes you behave more spitefully. So therefore, you have a mechanism through the world becomes more competitive, and there's a knock-on effect into your brain, which makes you act more spitefully. And the way it does that is it makes you basically get more joy from punishing other people from transgressions. We're talking about spite and how it can be a force for good or a force for evil. My guest is psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones.

He's author of a book called Spite, The Upside of Your Dark Side. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at BestBuy.ca. Exclusions apply.

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What are spite games and how do they work? So the classic game is called the ultimating game. This came out of Germany in the late 1970s. So in this, you go into a room and you're told somebody else is in the next room and they've been given a sum of money, say $10, and they've been asked to sum of money say ten dollars and they've been asked to split that money with you and you can either accept what they give you in which case you keep your bit of money and the other person keeps the remainder or you can reject

the offer and in that case neither of you get anything so the rejection is a spiteful response because you both lose and those studies found that basically around half of people, if offered just $2 out of the $10 pot, would spitefully reject it and say, no, I'd rather we both went home with nothing than you went home with the $8 and I was left with the $2. And you might say, well, that's $10. That's fairly small fry. Does it really make any difference to anyone's life um when the money's when the study's being done with much much more money on the table um you still find this same pattern of results so it's not simply because it's a small amount of money even when relatively large amounts of money are involved people will still act spitefully towards unfairness you started by talking about like you know if you gave if a chimpanzee gives another chimpanzee two of his ten dollars he'd probably take it and he'd be fine. But what about other animals? Do other animals act spitefully or not? When you see spite in nature, it tends to evolve because certain conditions have been met. So basically, if you're an animal, let's say that

you're an ant, if you have a behavior in which you can harm creatures who are quite genetically unrelated to you, and that you can tell who those creatures are and there's a fairly low personal cost to you those creatures will act spitefully so you can see in nature um best example would be the the red fire ant so this ant has a variation in one of the genes gp9 and basically if you're a sterile work ant so you have kind of no fitness evolutionary evolutionarily to damage because you can't reproduce therefore you can't kind of suffer a fitness loss if you're one of these sterile work ants then you can smell if another queen doesn't have the same version of the gene

as you do and if she doesn't then they attack and kill it so you can see spite evolving in in nature because basically you have copies of your genes in your close relatives. And if you can do something that harms you and harms somebody else, but benefits those relatives, then that can still evolve. And so what do we do with this now that we know more about spite? So what? I think it's about seeing the downsides, but also seeing the potential upsides of spite, which don't get talked about that much. And then using our understanding of spite to control how we use spite. So in terms of the upsides of spite, so you find that spite can lead to you having kind of

reputational gains. So if someone punishes you and you retaliate, other people watching tend not to think too much of you because of that. But if you watch somebody else hurt somebody else and then you punish the aggressor in that situation so you haven't got a dog in the fight you see somebody harm somebody else but you punish the aggressor then other people think that's a pretty cool thing for you to do they'll cooperate with you they'll give you social brownie points um which explains frankly quite a lot of what we see on social media so spite has reputational gains spite also seems to help us be better at competing so in one study people were asked to do some maths puzzles and people did them then they were asked to do them again but they were told there was a prize on offer this time and what you found was

that the non-spiteful people got a bit better at solving the math problems but the spiteful people got a lot better so being spiteful seems to help you be more competitive and that seems to be because spiteful people have a focus on getting ahead and are quite okay by being ahead of other people so that desire to get ahead can have benefits spite can make us potentially more creative So spiteful people tend to score higher on the personality trait of disagreeableness. And disagreeable people tend, there's some evidence, tend to be more creative when doing things such as maths, engineering, physics. So spite can potentially aid creativity. And the final thing, which again, doesn't seem intuitive, spite would seem to help us fight tyranny or fight the unfightable. So if you were trying to take on, say, a tyrannical

government or a tyrannical company, then you quite like to lose in that situation. So you need something in you that can help you fight adversity when you know quite likely that you're going to lose and our spiteful side seems to be useful for that so there's a nice quote from a theologian called reinhold niebuhr where he says that only a sublime madness would lead someone to fight uh malignant powers in high places and so maybe spite can be that sublime madness can allow us to fight for what is right even when we know it's a lost battle. So it's all about managing spite, I think, rather than just playing it completely down. By your definition, spite is an action. In other words, you know how people will

ruminate and think about and, you know, write an email that they never send or they think that of things they would do to get back at somebody, but they never do them. So that's not really spite, or is it? You could see it as being a spiteful intention, and then the person has been able to manage maybe the anger that's driving that intention. So I'd see that there could be a form of spiteful intentions, which either through mindfulness, taking a time out,

reappraising what you think the other person is really trying to do, that you can manage that anger and then stop yourself from acting spitefully. So I understand how acting in a spiteful way has its rewards. It can feel really good to get back at somebody who wronged you. But it also seems like in many cases anyway, it's a lot of work. It's an awful lot of work. You're giving up something of yourself. And what if you just talk to the person? What if you just communicate with someone and try to work out your differences instead of, you know, planning this big scheme to get back at them? I think you're right about the communication issue. So again, on one of those experimental games I was talking about, ultimatum game if the person who felt they'd

been wronged could pass a note to the other person or the other person could pass a note to them explaining their behavior you find that spike goes right down so maybe then at the end of the day we just need to kind of better understand why each of us is doing why is what we're doing which is generally quite often for good reasons. And if we can understand where the other person is coming from, we might be able to evade destructive, spiteful acts. Yeah, well, you know, road rage is a really good example of that. Because, you know, when people cut you off or do something that perhaps puts you at risk, there's a tendency for a lot of people to do, to get back at them and do something equally

as, as equally as, as stupid because we judge people by their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions. But if the guy that cuts you off turns out to be your best friend, all of a sudden there's a lot of forgiveness going on and there's less spiteful revenge because you know this person yeah absolutely yeah so people once we know the person again it humanizes them so although that said so there's some really interesting work again from the states about what happens when we see people acting in a way which we wouldn't approve of so let's say somebody breaks like a social norm of behavior there's evidence showing that when we look at that person's face, we now see it as less face-like. So the brain processes that other person's face,

who's just violated a social norm, more like an object and less like a face. And obviously, if their face is less face-like, they're more like an object to us. And that makes it easier for us to punish them. This is this mechanism called perceptual dehumanization. Wow. Isn't that interesting? And I wonder, does that also apply if you know the person? I don't know if I looked at that, but I mean, I guess the positive message there is that we have empathy. We can feel others' pains and it's a really strong mechanism for preventing us from hurting other people. But obviously, in our evolutionary history, there were times when we needed to hurt other people, so we needed mechanisms to turn empathy off. And this seems to be one of those mechanisms.

What's interesting is what you said, that there isn't a whole lot of data about spite, and that most of it has come from the last decade or so, and most of that has come from the world of economics. And yet spite is such a powerful force in almost everybody, whether people act on it or not. And I suspect most people probably have. Just the intention of being spiteful, it seems like a very powerful force that is well worth understanding. Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones has been my guest, and the name of his book is Spite, The Upside of Your Dark Side. And there's a link in the show notes to that book at Amazon. Thank you, Simon. Thanks

for being on the show. Absolute pleasure. Thanks. Metrolinx and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings

and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. Why do you remember some things forever and other things you quickly forget? Why do you sometimes recall events differently than someone else who was right there at the same time? Why do you remember odd little things from years ago but can't remember where you put your keys ten minutes ago?

And is your memory finite? Can it only hold so many memories? These are all some pretty good questions that are about to be tackled by Lisa Genova. Lisa is a neuroscientist, writer, and speaker who has appeared on the Today Show, PBS NewsHour, and she's author of a book called Remember, the Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. Hey, Lisa. Hi, Michael. Thank you for having me. So what is your memory? It's not like you can look at a brain and say, oh, there's the memory part of the brain. So what is the memory?

There is no memory bank. Memory isn't stored in a place. It's not like files in a file cabinet. So if you think about something you remember, the first day on the beach with your friends and family and your kids are playing soccer, the sunset is beautiful. Lady Gaga is playing on the portable radio. You've got oysters and s'mores and wine and beer. So Lady Gaga has nothing to do with oysters and wine and a sunset, but because I experienced all those things and paid attention to them, those different neurons, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, all of those are located in very different areas of my brain.

All of those things become connected and then activation of any one aspect can trigger the full expression of all of the other connected parts. That's a memory. And when I remember, what is it I'm remembering? Am I remembering my memory or am I really remembering the event? In other words, is my stored memory not necessarily reality? And doesn't it change over time? And that's what I keep remembering. And that's why, like when I go back to the house I grew up in, it doesn't look anything like I remember it, even though I think I remember it. So there's different kinds of memory, and some of them are more accurate and reliable than others. So you're talking about, so there's memory for stuff and

information, sort of the Wikipedia of your brain. And that really is pretty faithful over time. So, you know, if I memorized six times six in the third grade, like I'm not going to remember it as being 47 today. I'm going to always remember that that's 36. That's not going to change. But my memory for stuff that happened, that is highly likely to change over time. And it begins with a distortion because our brains are not video cameras recording a constant stream of every sight and sound we're exposed to. We can only capture to begin with what we pay attention to, right? So if you think about, you know, your childhood, so say Christmas morning, you are going to remember something different than your little brother and something even

different from what the parents notice. So what your memory of what happened isn't sort of, you know, the universal truth. It's just the slice of reality that captured your interest to begin with. Then over time, it can change because every time you reminisce, think about, write down, talk about a memory for something that happened, you have an opportunity to edit it and you will store the edited version over and you'll rewrite over to edit it. And you will store the edited version over. You'll rewrite over the original version. So if I talk about that Christmas morning and my brother adds a piece of information,

oh, you remember Aunt Susie and Uncle Bill came over. You had forgotten about that and didn't include it in your original memory. But now you do remember that they came. And so you add that to your memory. If it's for something like September 11th, 2001, your memory can get distorted because you've watched the news. You've listened to so many reports and read so many reports about it. You've listened to other people talk about it. You can incorporate that information into your memory and that gets stored over the original. So our memories for what happened are very fanciful and not accurate.

Well, I think everybody, I know I've had memories. I have memories of things that have happened, but I know that my memory has changed over time. And yet, even though the memory is probably a little different than I remembered it five years ago, I don't think of it as any less accurate. I think my memory today is just as accurate as it was before, and yet it's different. This has happened many times. There are folks who answered a questionnaire right after the space shuttle Challenger exploded about where they were, who they were with,

how they heard about the news, how they felt about it. And then were re-interviewed two and a half years later and gave very different answers from what they gave immediately after the explosion. And then when they were shown their own handwriting that took place two and a half years ago, describing who they were with and what they were doing, they were dumbstruck and couldn't explain it

and stuck to their memory today versus their own handwriting two years ago. So memory for what happened is a funny thing. It does seem sometimes that memories disappear, that they're gone forever. And yet there are those memories that might seem like they're gone forever, but then some trigger will bring them back. Like they're in there. It just needs something to pull them out. And this gets back to what you said about visiting a childhood home, right? So if I live in New York City and I'm in Manhattan and I say I grew up in rural Vermont and you asked me to describe my childhood neighborhood or something about my childhood home, I might not come up with much sitting amidst all the skyscrapers in the busy city. But if you take me in the car and drive me to that neighborhood in Vermont, and all of

a sudden I'm surrounded by the context and the cues that are associated with those memories, those become triggers that once activated can then trigger the activation of all of the other neurons connected to it. So, oh, there's the weeping willow and there's Mrs. Daly's house and, you know, Mikey and Joey lived right next door. And so the memories come flooding back when you're in the context of memories that were seemingly long forgotten or not accessible. Yeah, that happened to me. I walked in after several years of having not been in my high school. I walked into my high school and it was like I had never left. And all these memories of people and places and events and things that I haven't thought of forever came flooding back. And it's as if it had just happened

and it was the strangest thing. And that's happened a couple of times to me. Yeah, because a memory consists of all of the sensory and emotional elements, right? So when you're not in the presence of those cues, your brain isn't being activated specifically. If you go back to high school, there are the lockers, the color of the lockers, the smell of the hallway, the stairwell, all of those visual, the olfactory, the touch, all of it can start to stimulate your brain. And then it's not just the sights and sounds and smells. It then activates all the things that are connected to it. So there's, oh, there's the memory of the girlfriend from senior year whose locker was two lockers down from yours. And you never even would have thought of that had you not been physically in that space. So is the brain when it forgets all

these things and then, but they're still there because they can come flooding back with the right triggers. Is that some kind of evolutionary efficiency that the brain is doing to make room for other things? And if we need those, we can pull them up. But the brain is working in some sort of efficient fashion so that new things can come in. Yeah, this is a little bit of a misconception, too. So there's, you know, people will say, oh, you're only using 10% of your brain. And, oh, I need to forget things so I can make room for others. No, I mean, we have over 100 trillion connections available to us in our brain. And so there's not a limit capacity. So, I mean, there's a Japanese engineer who at the age of 69 memorized over 100,000 digits of pi. And so here we have

someone who's at an age that we would associate with being elderly and having maybe a diminished memory and sort of a long-lived life that's fairly full of stuff in the brain, and yet he has room for 100,000 digits of pi. We always have room to remember more. So it's not that we need to be efficient and sort of tuck some things away or not, or get rid of a certain number of memories so we can create new ones. Memories don't feel available to us if we're not using them or searching for them. They're memories for how to do things. Culture calls it muscle memory. It's also called implicit memory. But so the memories for how to do things, right? So how to brush your teeth, how to ride a bike, how to type on your computer. These become sort of unconscious automatic pilot,

we know how to do them things. And we can not do them for years. So for example, I was a skier when I was younger, and then I didn't ski for over 10 years. I was busy having kids and moved far away from mountains. And then when I got back up on skis, I had a moment where I thought, do I remember how to do this? And so my brain hadn't used remember how to ski in over a decade. But as soon as I got on those skis, my brain knew exactly what to do. So muscle memory has integrity over time. It doesn't matter how many years you go. That's where the saying, it's just like riding a bike. It's in there. You don't have to get rid of it to make room for other memories. Yeah. But that's a misnomer, right? I mean, the memory is in your brain. It's not in your muscle. Thank you. Yes, that is a misnomer, right? I mean, the memory is in your brain. It's not in your muscle. Thank you. Yes, that is a misnomer. Right. So the choreography to the chicken dance, you know, it seems like your muscles know what to do, but they only know what to do because your

brain is sending neurons to motor neurons to your muscles, telling them what to do. So yes, this is why it's called a muscle memory, but it's a memory that lives in your brain for sure. So Lisa, you mentioned things like 9-11 and when the Challenger exploded. And those are those kind of memories where everybody remembers where they were when those big traumatic events happened. Those seem like they're very special, very unique kind of memories. This is true. And they feel vividly remembered and richly detailed. And we feel confident in the accuracy of them even years later. And while you will remember all of these things, like I remember where I was when I heard that Princess Diana died, you know, 9-11 for sure. The details

around it, even though they're confidently held, are very often not accurate. And, you know, this is okay for the most part. It gets interesting when we think about eyewitness testimony, which relies on the memory for what happened. But all of these, they're called flashbulb memories, which is a little bit of a misnomer because it's not a photograph of what happened. But again, folks who are interviewed after all of these, so flashbulb memories are for highly emotional, shocking events that do feel personal to you. So like I have a flashbulb memory of where I was and what was going on after the Boston Marathon bombing. But maybe if you're from, you know, if you're from Paris, France, you might have heard about the Boston Marathon bombing. And it's certainly shocking, but you might not have a flashbulb memory of it because Boston might not be personal for you.

And I'm from Boston. So while you will remember these events always, the details of actually what happened morph over time. And we've seen this over and over again in all the studies that interview folks immediately after the event and then interview them again a year or two years later. And most of the details are off. People don't remember it accurately. Knowing what I now know about memory and what I hope to share with you all is that when you're so sure of a memory for what happened and you're arguing with your spouse because he thinks something else happened, you're probably both wrong. Well, that doesn't say much for eyewitness testimony, does it? No, it doesn't. And, you know, there are many psychologists out there who've written a lot about this, one in particular named Elizabeth Loftus, who is really

trying to educate the court system, the judicial system, that there are a lot of life sentences and death sentences that have relied exclusively on eyewitness testimony. And since then, DNA evidence has shown that these folks are innocent. So it's really, it's very scary to rely on it. Our memories for what happened are very vulnerable to suggestion. So for example, if I were to show you a video of a car crash, and then after the video I ask you, how fast were the cars going when they collided? Say you say 30 miles an hour.

If I had instead asked you, how fast were the cars going when they smashed? You'd say something faster. You'd say they were going 40 miles an hour. So just the substitution of a single verb can change your memory for what you believe you saw happened. Is there any way to prevent that?

In other words, knowing what you know, are there ways to cement memories and keep them real? Or this is just how the human brain works? Yeah, unfortunately, this is how our human brains work. Like, even when we write something down, we narrow the experience of what we, the memory of what we actually experienced, right? Because we can only, we only capture so much. Like, if I, you know, in this conversation with you right now, if I were to then write, you know, Dear Diary today, I had a conversation with Michael Carruthers and I talked about what we talked about. I wrote if I wrote down what we talked about, I certainly

wouldn't include all of it. And so when I go to revisit my diary and read what what we talked about, I'm really going to reinforce and therefore only remember what I've written down. And so when I go to revisit my diary and read what we talked about, I'm really going to reinforce and therefore only remember what I've written down. And I will forget any elements that I forgot to write down. So yeah, our memories for what happened are not accurate or reliable. They're quite fickle. Our memories for the stuff we learn are way more stable and reliable. The memories for how to do things are really reliable. Our memories for what we want to do later, which is called your perspective memory, is probably the worst of them all. And again, this is part of the price of playing poker here for being human.

Our memories for what we want to do later. This is like your brain's to do list. It's awful. We weren't designed to do later. This is like your brain's to do list. Oh, it's awful. We weren't designed to do this. So like planning to like, oh, I need to remember to call my mom or take out the trash or I need to remember to, you know, take my heart medication. If you don't have a cue that triggers that recall when you're supposed to remember it, or if you haven't written it down and have some sort of text alert on your phone, or you're not in remember it, or if you haven't written it down and have some sort of text alert on your phone, or you're not in the routine of looking at your calendar, you are very likely to forget what you plan to do later. What about those people who can never remember

where they put their keys or where they put their glasses and their phones? They're always using the find your phone thing because they can't remember where they left their phone. And people worry that, you know, that's a memory problem. Most of what we can't find. So there's the, oh, I can't remember where I put my phone. I can't find my glasses. Where did I park my car? 99% of the time, this is not a memory problem.

This is a symptom of distraction. You haven't paid attention to where you put those things in the first place. And the very first necessary step in creating any memory is attention. There is a perception though, and the experience that many people report, that as you get older, your memory isn't as sharp as it used to be. Yes? Yeah. So processing speeds do slow down. You know, 25-year-olds experience several tip of the tongues a week, that experience where you're like, oh, what's the name of that actor? Oh my God, I know, I know it. I can't get it. That will increase as you age because the processing speeds of your neurons slows down. So they're chugging a

little slower to get to where they're trying to go. But it's the same phenomenon. You're not, you know, your brain isn't decaying. You're not experiencing dementia or a disease. This is not a reason for diagnosis. So it's frustrating, but it's not a cause for panic or shame or diagnosis. It's, you know, again, this is the price of playing poker. Stress can make us fuzzy too. Chronic stress is really bad for our memory. And I think that, you know, in the last year in particular, a lot of folks have been, you know, sort of drowning in chronic stress. So chronic stress is really bad for being able to form memories of new things, retrieving memories of stuff you already know, and will increase your risk of Alzheimer's in the future. And I think older folks notice it more.

So if you're 25 and you can't remember the name of the movie that your friend recommended, you don't immediately then jump to, oh my God, I'm losing my memory. I'm going to get Alzheimer's. And you're 25, you're immortal. You just, And you don't hesitate to look it up on your phone because you've been tethered to a device practically since birth. But if you're 55 and you can't remember the name of the movie, a lot of us start to panic and immediately jump to, oh my God, I'm losing my mind. So some of it's just that psychological leap. But there are times when people report, especially older people, things like they left the oven on or they can't remember how to spell a very common word. And it's not that they can't do it. It's not that a speed problem, a processing problem.

They just don't remember. Right. So that can be a cause for concern. But again, before people panic, understanding how memory works and how it is supported and facilitated, and that if those things aren't present, maybe that's the reason you're foggy today. So we require seven to nine hours of sleep a night for your brain to clear away metabolic debris that accumulated during the business of being awake the day before. And it consolidates the memories, the stuff that you learned that day before and the stuff that you experienced gets laid down and locked into a lasting memory while you sleep. And so if you're sleep deprived, you will essentially wake up the next day with a little bit of amnesia and an inability to learn new things and remember new things that day. So you'll be compromised the next day if you're not getting enough sleep.

So you can check in with yourself. Is that going on? Am I overly stressed? You know, have I been sedentary for too long? If you don't, exercising is probably the best thing you can do for your memory. You know, people are looking for the pill, the supplement, the magic bullet. It's exercise is really the best thing we know of. So, you know, are you distracted? Again, you can't remember what you don't pay attention to. So if you're cooking on the stove and you've got, you know, young kids running

around and there's some crisis and they're crying and they're screaming and they're fighting or the phone rings, or if you're distracted, maybe that's why you left the oven on. Um, if none of those things are happening and you're, and you're worried, I definitely recommend a conversation with your doctor. I mean, I think people are so afraid of anything that's going on from the neck up. And they they keep quiet about it. And they don't talk to the doctors about what's going on. And and I'd like to see that change. You know, we're not afraid of talking about our heart health, right. So we'll get our blood pressure taken check for cholesterol and we'll count the number of steps and we're all you know sort of in on having an influence over our heart health um i'd love to

see folks be unafraid of having a conversation with their doctor about their their brain health and cognitive health well it's interesting to listen to you because as amazing as the human memory is and the things it can do, it sure has a lot of deficiencies. Memory is a bit of a dunce. It's going to forget to call your mother. It's going to forget most of your life because most of our life is actually spent doing routine stuff and we don't remember routine stuff. But that's okay. It doesn't matter that I don't remember the details of every morning shower or what I ate for breakfast three weeks ago. I think our brains are really good at remembering what's meaningful and what matters. And I think

understanding how memory works and why it forgets can relieve us of some of the unnecessary stress that we're putting on ourselves when we forget stuff that's normal for our human brains to forget. You know, it's kind of sad, really. I always like to think that my memory's pretty sharp. I think most people like to think their memory's pretty good, but after listening to you, it's pretty clear our memories suck, but I guess all of our memories suck, so at least the playing field's pretty level. Lisa Genova has been my guest. She's a neuroscientist, a speaker, and writer, and the name of her book is Remember, the Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. And there's a link to that book in the show notes.

Thanks, Lisa. Awesome. Thank you so much. Stay safe. Be well. You know when you're having one of those days where everything seems to be going wrong and you see everything through like a negative lens and the more you think about things, the worse they look?

Well, it's possible to stop that downward mental spiral and turn things around. It's so simple, but amazingly effective. Here's what you do. Stop the negative thoughts by focusing on one positive or beautiful thing in your life. Then another. And while you're doing that, you breathe deeply. If you do it for a few minutes, that's it. That's it. This technique

was developed by Judith Orloff, MD, who says that forcing yourself to shift from negative to positive thinking is incredibly powerful. This technique takes advantage of the fact that your mind can only focus on one thing at a time. So if you just focus on something positive, you can't think about something negative. The downward spiral then stops, you become more objective about everything, and life seems more manageable. And that is Something You Should Know.

Something You Should Know is the name of this podcast. We work very hard to bring you a great sounding podcast three times a week, and I hope you'll share it with someone you know, so they too will become a fan. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm megan the magical millennial and i'm the dapper danielle on every episode of our fun and family-friendly show we count down our top 10 list of all things disney the parks the movies the music the food the lore

there is nothing we don't cover on our show we are famous for rabbit holes disney themed games and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher-pitched in hotter temperatures and lower-pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true?

Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts.

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a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.