Something You Should Know - What Is Good Mental Health? & The Weird Thing About Memory

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, just how efficiently laid out is your kitchen? Let's find out. Then, the fascinating world of mental health and how it relates to your physical health. So people with chronic pain have worse mental health. But it relates to your physical health. So people with chronic pain have worse mental health, but I couldn't tell you anything more obvious than that. It sucks to be in pain. But the opposite is true as well. People with

Starting point is 00:00:54 depression today have a higher likelihood of developing chronic pain in the future. Also, what having a big, bold signature says about your personality. And how your memory works, and why memories can become so inaccurate. A lot of memory researchers have argued that we don't really replay the past, but we imagine how the past could have been. And we do that by getting these bits and pieces and then using it like a detective to kind of come up with a story of how things unfolded. All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures

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Starting point is 00:02:16 Welcome. Here's something that I came across, and I actually came across this a long time ago and always remembered it. It's a little test to see how efficient your kitchen is. So try this. Make yourself a cup of coffee. And if your kitchen is well organized, your feet shouldn't have to move very much. But if you have to go to one side of the kitchen for a cup, the other side for the coffee pot, somewhere else for a spoon, you might want to reconsider how you've laid things out. Often we place kitchen items in really in random places, or we move them without considering the effect it will have. Think about putting things in logical places. For example, potholders next

Starting point is 00:02:57 to the oven, silverware and dishes in a cupboard between the dishwasher and the table. That kind of thing. That way you'll save steps, which will save time, which over the course of living in your home can save you hours and hours. And that is something you should know. When you hear people talking about mental health, it tends to be in a negative vein. You know, somebody has mental health problems or mental health issues. What is good mental health?

Starting point is 00:03:30 What does it mean to be mentally healthy? Must you be happy to be mentally healthy? Must you be mentally healthy to be happy? Well, to bring this all into focus and explain what our mental health is, is Camilla Nord. She leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, and she's author of a book called The Balanced Brain, The Science of Mental Health. Hi, Camilla. Welcome. Glad to have you on Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me. So we throw around the term mental health, but how do you define it? What is mental health? continuous state of happiness and pleasure that's totally impossible and probably unhealthy. But I really think of mental health as a drive that our brain has, every single brain,

Starting point is 00:04:32 towards a kind of homeostasis, a kind of balance, an accurate prediction of what will happen based on what was, what has already happened to us. Well, there is a sense, I think, there is a sense that good mental health equals a happy person. Not that they're happy every second of the day, but that good mental health equals happiness. I think that's a very pervasive belief. Is it true?

Starting point is 00:05:00 I like happiness as much as the next person, but my feeling is that happiness is only one constituent of mental health. And that's really what the science shows us as well, that a brain with a mental health disorder, it isn't just less happy, for example. It has a kind of a whole range of things that we might need to examine and actually those very things that might protect someone else and preserve their mental health. If you go to the doctor for a physical, let's say, it's not uncommon for the doctor to say, you're fine, you're in excellent physical health. When it comes to mental health, I don't think anybody is told, you know what, you're in excellent mental health.

Starting point is 00:05:44 You have excellent mental health. You have excellent mental health. There's nothing wrong with you. Yeah, that's true. And that's probably because it's not a kind of binary state in the way that I guess a doctor's appointment and assessment for some kind of disorder, disability in the physical sense is binary. It's visible or it's not. Mental health, it's a subjective state. And so whilst I think I know there are objective factors, biological factors, that doesn't mean that the best assessment is biological. I think the best assessment will always be subjective and the best assessment will also be relative. Maybe you feel objectively okay, but worse than you ever have. So actually, that subjective sense is really crucial.

Starting point is 00:06:31 So is there any connection between, well, I already know what you're going to say, but is there any connection between your physical health and your mental health? Your mental health profoundly affects your physical health. Mental health conditions have a much higher mortality rate. In fact, you die much sooner with many severe mental health conditions. And that's usually because of physical health problems, cardiovascular problems, metabolic problems that come along with those mental health conditions. And the same is true in the other direction. Many physical health problems come hand in hand with mental health conditions. So I think we really do have to see the two as intertwined. And I even suggest something a little bit more

Starting point is 00:07:16 radical, which is that in some cases, certain physical health problems might actually be best treated by what we think of as psychological mental health interventions and vice versa. For some people, their mental health problems might be best treated by a physical intervention, like for example, an anti-inflammatory drug affecting our immune system. Well, I thought it was interesting to learn that you talk about, the connection between mental health and chronic physical pain. I'm interested in that in both directions. So people with chronic pain have worse mental health, but I couldn't tell you anything more obvious than that. It sucks to be in pain. But the opposite is true as well. People with depression today have a higher likelihood of

Starting point is 00:08:04 developing chronic pain in the future, particularly after an injury or something. So that means there's this kind of bidirectional causality where a disorder like chronic pain can engender mental health problems, but maybe more surprisingly, mental health problems can predispose you to chronic pain. And I think perhaps one of the most remarkable facts I can tell you about that is that the networks in our brain that maintain chronic pain have, in fact, much more common, much more overlap with the networks that maintain depression, as opposed to they have a lot less in common with sort of acute pain, what we call nociception. You know, you stub your toe,

Starting point is 00:08:50 you accidentally slip and hit yourself on something. That has very little in common with chronic pain. So I want to really drill in on something that you said, because I don't get it. When you say that physical problems and mental problems go hand in hand, that depression can lead to whatever, I don't remember what you said, metabolic problems or vice versa, what's the mechanism? How do they go hand in hand? Because they don't seem like they would. If you have a stomach ache, how is that a mental problem? What's the magic that makes them go hand in hand? So I would say that there are multiple mechanisms, some of which we know more about than others.

Starting point is 00:09:42 So if you have a stomach ache, I mean, you've just given me an example of a type of pain that is itself distressing. And actually many people with stomach ache or long-term stomach aches end up also having particularly anxiety disorders, but some other mental health conditions as well. And why that is, I mean, really fascinating. It's not just the direction from pain to mental health. Actually, it's also that regions in our brain that process the sense of our body are also involved in processing the sense of our emotional self. So places like the insula, it's a convergent region taking in signals from our body, but also from our emotions and computing how we feel. And people are differentially sensitive to these internal feelings. So some people can genuinely detect changes in their stomach better than others,

Starting point is 00:10:32 but it's not just better or worse. Some people then interpret those signals as being more significant, more worrisome than others. And you can already see how that overlaps phenomenologically with anxiety quite a lot. And that's why stomach aches are quite a common symptom of anxiety disorders. I want to go back to what we were talking about before, comparing physical health with mental health. Because I can go to the doctor and he will say, one hopes, you're in good physical health. And he would say that because he's checked my blood pressure, checked my blood sugar, checked my weight, goes through this checklist, and can then come to the conclusion that I'm in good physical health.

Starting point is 00:11:18 But what is good mental health? What's the checklist? Who's to say? Because it seems so subjective. I think this is one of the most difficult questions. And the answer you'll get depends on why you need to know the answer to that question. I think medically, from a doctor's perspective, the only answer that matters is functioning. So you can have all kinds of interesting symptoms, interesting experiences. And in my view, you are mentally healthy if your functioning is good,

Starting point is 00:11:54 if you can maintain relationships, if you can work, if you need to work, and so on. So I have a very simple vision of what it means to be mentally healthy, which means you can exist in your environment without tremendous strain. And then I think that if you want to know whether someone's mentally healthy for other reasons, then you have to dive into what the context of those reasons are. For example, someone might be able to function, but really struggling with a particular facet of that. And then that is what would need to be kind of explored and treated and discovered for what the mechanism of that particular problem was. What is it that you think is important that people understand about mental health that perhaps they don't, that you hear from people in your conversations with people that something they don't quite get or

Starting point is 00:12:46 misunderstand? I think one message that I would really like to get across to people is the role of expectations in mental health. So if I said to you, you know, would you rather have $1 or $5? Surely 100% of people would say $5. And so if I said, well, which one do you think would make you happier? Then you would also think the answer is $5. But actually, that's not the answer. In a series of really, really robust, huge experiments, we know the answer is it depends what you think you're about to get. So when I asked that question point blank, you were expecting me to give you $0. But in the context of an experiment where we can actually tweak that ourselves, change that as a parameter, you can show that if someone is expecting $7 but

Starting point is 00:13:39 gets $5, that $5 feels a lot worse than if they were expecting zero and get one. And this is actually something you can put into an equation and predict how happy people feel moment to moment, an equation for happiness. This work was done by a great scientist called Rob Rutledge at Yale. So that work, I think, has inspired many, many other studies, but it's very exciting because it shows that these little shifts in our mood and our well-being are actually underpinned by really quite simple phenomena, like whether what has just happened is a little bit better or a little bit worse than what we were expecting. I'm speaking with Camilla Nord. She leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge,

Starting point is 00:14:29 and she is author of the book The Balanced Brain, The Science of Mental Health. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking, Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow melissa and doug the play is pretend the skills are real look for melissa and doug wherever you shop for toys from the kitchen to the laundry room your home deserves the best give it the upgrade it deserves at bestliance event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now in-store or online at bestbuy.ca.

Starting point is 00:15:10 Exclusions apply. So, Camilla, there's this theory you hear floating around from people, and it often comes up like when you're talking about kids, that your mental state your mental health your mental whatever that is is set at a very young age and if kids have a lot of mental trauma early in life and and you don't intervene early then then it's too late that that that stuff is set right at the beginning what do you think maybeurprisingly, I'm not a fan of that account. There are obviously enormous impacts of early life trauma, but these can be treated both in

Starting point is 00:15:57 early life via therapeutic interventions, you know, childhood PTSD interventions are remarkably successful. But also later in life, the amazing, the incredible thing about the brain is that it isn't just done when you're in your early 20s, when your official adolescence is finished. It keeps going. It keeps changing throughout your life. And I think for a long time, scientists and the general public were sort of like, you're fixed, your personality is fixed by that age. Development is very important, but that's absolutely not true. Change is possible at the biological level, change is possible. Now, your roots to get there might involve more work if you're doing it a little bit later than things in childhood, but we have roots to get there both in more work if you're doing it a little bit later than things in

Starting point is 00:16:45 childhood. But we have routes to get there, both in terms of things like psychological therapy, but also in terms of a range of medications, more of which are in development and other kinds of, maybe more radical treatments that are coming out of neuroscience. So what is the goal for people? If life is going okay, should you be trying to improve yourself, improve your mood, or should you just let life do what it does? knowing what you know for the average person who doesn't have a whole lot of problems, but has the ups and downs of life just let the ups and downs of life happen or what? Yeah, I'm sympathetic to the idea that you kind of should, sometimes you just have to let things happen because you don't know necessarily when something, when you're feeling a bit crap, is it going to go away shortly? Or is it something that's going to kind of precede a much worse period in your life? No

Starting point is 00:17:52 one knows that. So I don't think that at every time, at every point in our life, we need to somehow be optimizing our mental health in every possible way, hacking our mental health. I kind of think that's a bit futile. But I do think that when we feel those dips, whether or not we think it will precede a worse dip, we could be doing things in those dips to try to maintain our positive health. And those are things that may be quite personal for you. There is no silver bullet for mental health. And even if you that may be quite personal for you. There is no silver bullet for mental health. And even if you read about one tomorrow in the New York Times, I'm telling you, there is no guarantee that will work for you. Because the nature of mental health is that two people, even with the same disorder like depression, might have entirely different symptoms. So likewise, a treatment

Starting point is 00:18:46 that is a miracle for one person might well not work or even have side effects in another. So mental health is personalized and the way we treat it needs to also be personalized. There's a general belief, I think, that if people are having mental problems or difficult times in their life, that talk therapy can help. And my experience is that it can help maybe some people, but there are some people that just don't seem cut out for that and that it does seem that you can wallow in your misery and talk it to death and nothing ever happens. And there's been a bit of a backlash against therapy.

Starting point is 00:19:27 There are people who believe it's baloney, that there's no way to measure if it works. There's no way to really tell unless the person... So help reconcile that. Well, I think the data agrees with you that it's certainly not right for everyone. But the data really disagrees with people who think it's baloney. If you look across many, many studies, there is a reasonable effect of therapy on about maybe 50 to 60% of people when you're looking at perhaps the most effective types of therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy for depression. But therapy is really not one thing.

Starting point is 00:20:05 So I think the way in which the baloney people are right is that there is baloney in some therapy. And often as an individual, you don't necessarily know what technique is my therapist going to use on me? Is this a technique that's been well supported by evidence or not? So there's a degree of uncertainty that I really appreciate from the perspective of someone going to see a therapist. I also think that therapy, whilst it can be very effective, it might not be marrying itself well enough with what we know about the biological basis of therapy. So we know that therapy can change the brain. If you scan someone before and after they do a course of therapy, mindfulness, CBT, et cetera, you see changes in the brain. This shouldn't be a surprise really, because it's an effect of learning to do something new

Starting point is 00:20:57 with your brain, perhaps having a remediation of some symptoms, but it does happen. It happens in overlapping and distinct ways if you take a course of antidepressants. It happens in overlapping and distinct ways to if you take a course of antidepressants, some changes in your brain happen in a similar network, but a different area. So I personally think that one of the ways we could be using therapy better is by not thinking of it as a kind of distinct, entirely distinct modality, but thinking of it as a modality that can be used in conjunction, perhaps with a short-term course of a medication that would help someone engage better in therapy, perhaps as something that you would do, I don't know, after a workout, which changes particular biological circuits and then which could be more or less compatible with therapy.

Starting point is 00:21:41 So that's my view for kind of, I don't know, 10, 20 years down the line. What I would like to see from therapy sessions is that they have a much keener understanding of how to exploit the biological changes and really make them work for more people. There is a general belief, I think, and therapy plays a part in this belief, that if you have some sort of psychological problem, mental problem, big trauma, that you really need to talk it out. You need to tell somebody. You need to get it all out. What's the science say? Because I know plenty of people who would really rather have a root canal than do that. My colleague, Tim Dalgleish,

Starting point is 00:22:27 once said to me, denial is a really effective clinical strategy until it isn't. So I would answer that in saying that I don't think everybody always needs to talk out everything. In fact, for some people, it can be unhelpful. But what therapy like cognitive behavioral therapy really does is it teaches you strategies of dealing with things like intrusive thoughts, behaviors that you find unhelpful. So if you are living with trauma without those things, without things that are intruding on your life, making your life functionally worse than it would otherwise be, I say go for it. But if you are, then there may well be roots, and that doesn't have to be therapy, to get out of it. And I agree with you

Starting point is 00:23:10 that sometimes talking it out is actually not the right process even within therapy. So there are kind of subsets of people who do much better with therapy, like mindfulness practices, where your terrible thoughts and experiences exist, but you just kind of let them go. It doesn't matter. You learn to distance yourself from them. And I think that there's a kind of real role for those sorts of practices in therapy as well. Well, the idea that mental and physical health are connected, I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that they are connected because, I mean, I've had pain where I've been in pain for a while, an injury or something. And I remember I injured my leg and I was in pain for a while and it took a toll on me mentally.

Starting point is 00:23:55 I was grumpy. I was no fun to be around. I felt sad. I mean, it was it was it took it. So it's no secret that these two things affect each other. Yeah, I've had, I've had the same experience and, you know, it goes in both directions. So this is really the same phenomenon as the placebo effect. The fact that kind of expectations, things going on in the brain are affecting sort of your physical sense of what's going on in your body. But you can also show that in the other direction. For example, if you're expecting a side effect, you then see instances of that side effect. That's called the nocebo effect. And that's really the same process by which certain

Starting point is 00:24:39 symptoms can be enhanced by the brain is this kind of cognitive process, maybe involving attention, maybe kind of attaching greater importance to it, significance. So these are kind of, you know, little computations that your brain is doing that is bringing your physical signals to the fore, whilst other people, lucky people's brains might be dampening them out. This is one of those conversations that I guess I'm surprised I haven't had before. I don't really, we've talked a lot about mental health and brains and things like that on this podcast, but not quite this way. And I like this way. I've been speaking with Camilla Nord. She leads the mental health neuroscience lab at the University of Cambridge.

Starting point is 00:25:23 And the name of her book is The Balanced Brain, The Science of Mental Health. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for being here, Camilla. I really enjoyed your questions. Metrolinks 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.

Starting point is 00:25:49 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 better help. 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.

Starting point is 00:26:16 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. Your memory is an interesting thing. It serves you in so many ways. It would be hard to function if you didn't retain much of what you experienced in your memory. And yet you've no doubt noticed that your memory can sometimes let you down.

Starting point is 00:26:51 You can't recall some things. You remember things differently or you forget part of the memory. Who was there? When did it happen? So what is your memory and how can we use it better? Let's talk about that with Charan Ranganath. He is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. And he's author of a book called Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters. Hi, Charan. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you. So when I think of my memory, I think of it sort of like a filing cabinet almost, and in there I store the things from my past. Events, information, people, places. I know it's not that, so what is it?

Starting point is 00:27:42 What you said is how a lot of people think of memory is this kind of passive repository of the past, right? Like a little library in your head. And that's not really what memory is for. It's really much more about the present and the future than it is about the past. And that's why I believe we don't remember everything. You can study anyone you want. No one's been found to remember everything. You can study anyone you want. No one's been found to remember

Starting point is 00:28:05 everything. People forget quite a bit, and most people will forget most of what they experience, at least the majority of what they experience in a given day. So you can ask yourself, okay, well, if memory is supposed to be this library of the past, why can't I remember everything? But the reason is that you want to pack some things that you've had in the past, why can't I remember everything? But the reason is, is that you want to pack some things that you've had in the past and take them with you in the future. Just like you don't want to pack everything in your entire house if you were to go on vacation, right? The analogy is essentially that you want to have just the memories that you need without all this clutter of other stuff. But explain what you mean that memory is about the present and the future,

Starting point is 00:28:45 because my sense is memory is all about the past. When I say memories about the present, and when I say memories about the future, what I mean is that you're using episodic memory right now just to keep up with what I'm saying. And you're using episodic memory right now to predict where I'm going to go in this conversation. How so? Well, because essentially, if you didn't really call back to previous things that I talked about, you would have trouble understanding that I had mentioned that memories about the present and about the future, you might be hearing my sentences, but you're still trying to figure out, wait, wait, what's he talking about? What's the point here? And then later, but part of your being able to figure out what my point is, is to kind of have some kind of an internal sense of my goal in the first place. Where am I going with this? And I think this is what we do often

Starting point is 00:29:45 when we're communicating with people is we try to predict where they're going to go. I'm sure you've had many guests where you could probably predict the next four sentences they're going to say, just starting with the first sentence. And this is something I think many of us just do without even thinking, but that's memory at work. A question I have that I've always wondered about is what determines what you remember. And here's my example. So I interview a lot of people, a couple hundred people a year for this podcast. And a lot of it, I don't remember, but some of it I do. I remember some things, some facts, some something that someone said. And what I wonder is, why do I remember some things and not others?

Starting point is 00:30:31 This is the question, and I've spent a good time, a proportion of my career studying it. The answer is there's not one thing that will determine whether a particular memory will stick around. And that's why it's very hard to say, why did this one stick around and not that one? But let's go back to that point about memory being what you want to carry with you from the past, right? Well, your brain is not, you know, evolution did a great job with our brains, but we don't know always what's going to be useful later on. And so if you look at some of the chemicals in the brain that promote plasticity to be kind of lasting, so you have things like

Starting point is 00:31:11 you've probably heard about dopamine or noradrenaline, serotonin, these chemicals, when we experience something, there's changes in the connections between the neurons in our brain. But those connections will often revert, those changes will reverse themselves in many cases. But if there's one of these chemicals, which we call neuromodulators, if they're released, what happens is it stabilizes that plasticity and allows those memories to stick around. So what are the things that cause those neuromodulators to be released? Surprises one. Desire would to be released? Surprise is one. Desire would be one.

Starting point is 00:31:47 Fear would be one. These are situations where your brain is doing something out of the ordinary. There's something that's important. You're in a brand new place. You'll have more release of dopamine in the brain because of that. But on the other hand, like you said, if you're doing the same thing every day over and over, to some extent, and I don't want to anthropomorphize the brain too much, but basically your brain is saying, I've done this. I already have the memory for this.

Starting point is 00:32:16 I don't need to build a new episodic memory here. But if somebody says something that surprises you, it speaks to you in some way, it brings out some curiosity in you. We've done work on curiosity and that enhances memory. And so those are the kinds of conversations that will be more likely to stick around. I know I've heard a couple of times from people that events that are emotional that there's a lot of emotion wrapped around an event like your wedding or your baby is born that that makes those memories stick yes that's right so emotional events tend to be events that elicit these neuromodulators so for instance it's like if you're being chased by somebody with a gun,

Starting point is 00:33:05 you're going to have a massive explosion of noradrenaline in your brain, and that will stabilize those memories that are formed during that time. And what's a really interesting thing is that some of these chemicals, like for instance, you see this with stress hormones like cortisol, that they not only stabilize the memory for what happened at the moment it's released, but they can even stabilize the memories that happened right before that neuromodulator release. And that's really important because what that tells you is that you don't want to just remember the thing that was the most emotionally arousing, but you want to be able to remember what led you into that situation in the first place, right? So you're a

Starting point is 00:33:45 cave person and you're being, you know, you walk into a particular cave and you get bitten by a snake. You want to know not only that you got bitten by a snake, but you want to know where was the place where you got bitten by the snake and how do you get there? How can you avoid that place of the future, right? So that is a big part of why we have such a great memory for things that arouse our emotions, because our emotions are linked to these survival systems that we have that are much more, you could argue, more primitive in some ways, but very, very important, right? And it's like, we want to eat, you want to reproduce, you want to avoid predators. And these are the kinds of things that really drive the chemical changes in our brain that really stabilize memories.

Starting point is 00:34:32 When we remember something and are able to check, it often seems that memories, particularly from long ago, turn out to be not so accurate or turn out to be not the same memory that somebody else who was there had or you know the the room was over on the left instead of on the right we get our memories blurred and mixed up and if a memory is a memory why isn't it more like a photograph that just sticks that's exactly right it's not like photograph. I think it's much more like a painting. So if you're trying to be, let's say if you're like a painter at the beach or something like that, and you're painting landscape, you're going to have some facets of your painting that are reflecting what's in landscape. You're going to have some facets of the painting that are distorted and incorrect. And you're going to have some facets of the painting that are reflecting what's in the landscape. You're going to have some facets of the painting that are distorted and incorrect.

Starting point is 00:35:26 And you're going to have some facets of the painting that are neither correct nor incorrect, but they reflect your perspective and your interpretation. And that's really how we remember, right? So even if you look at just when you see the world, we have this illusion that we see everything. But in fact, we're not. We're putting together this little mental model of what's happening by moving our eyes around every, say, 200 milliseconds. So five times a second, we're moving our eyes around and building this picture of what's in front of us. And you mentioned if the memory is old, why does this happen more? Well, part of the problem is,

Starting point is 00:35:59 is that as memories get older, we're farther away from that place in time where they happened. And so it's harder to fully immerse yourself back in that place in time because it's so different. And not only that, but if it's a memory that you've come back to over and over and over again, what happens is every time you recall that memory, it gets changed, it gets modified. And those modifications make it a little bit less specific to that past place in time. So you probably have had the experience not only of having a memory that you call back many, many times and becomes kind of blurry and distorted, but you also have memories where you're just in some place and a smell or a song brings you back

Starting point is 00:36:42 in time and it's extraordinarily vivid and you can pull up a lot of details from that right and so that would be a case where it's a memory that you haven't pulled up many many times and so you're not really as haven't had as many times to in some ways reshape that memory as you would have for something that you've called back over and over every once in a while i'll have a memory of something or someone that I haven't thought about for so long. And I wonder, well, why have I not forgotten that? Because it does seem that a lot of the things I forget are things that I don't remember regularly, that I don't need in my life.

Starting point is 00:37:24 So they kind of fade away because they're not necessary. But once in a while, one of those unnecessary ones pops up. I would say for particular memories, for particular experiences, I would say that the more you pull them up, the stronger they will be, the easier it will be able to pull them up in the future. But the things that you don't pull up, now what happens is you have a whole ecosystem of memories that are all kind of interacting with each other. And so the memories that you pull up now start to compete with and edge out the memories that you haven't been pulling up. And so you can see this

Starting point is 00:38:03 really in computational simulations of how the brain works is that these memories are kind of fighting with each other. And the ones that you repeatedly retrieve can kind of squash the ones that are related, but you haven't retrieved. When you know all this, is there anything you can do with it other than observe it and say, isn't that interesting? But given what you know about memory, is there a way to then do something with it? Yes. So one of the things I will say is just the most important thing to remember is that memory is selective. You're not going to get away from that, right? So the question is, what are the factors that determine whether a memory is going to stick around?

Starting point is 00:38:46 And we know, for instance, that as I said, these memories are competing with each other. So what you can do is for things that are important, you can create a memory that's more distinctive. It sticks out. So imagine just as an example, and I'm not this isn't a perfect analogy, but imagine you're in front of a clutter desk, and it's easy for me to imagine because I am, but now imagine this clutter desk is full of these dull yellow post-it notes where you've made notes yourself, right? And you're looking for the specific note where you wrote something, where you wrote down a temporary password, and you need it to log into the system. Well, good luck finding it, right? But now imagine you've got all these yellow Post-it notes and you wrote one note that's in hot pink. Well, that's going to stand out. It's going to be different. And so it's easy to find as a result, right?

Starting point is 00:39:36 So the question is, how do you form hot pink memories? So part of what you need to do is literally attend in the moment to what's unique about this particular moment that's different from other times that you've done similar things, right? So you can ask yourself, what's unique about my voice that's different from other interviews you've done? Ask yourself, what's unique about some of the topics that we're talking about that's unique? And all those factors will create a more distinctive memory that's likely to stick around. Now, that's just one of many, many things you could do. And I'm happy to tell you all sorts of things that you could do, especially to improve your memory as you get older. Yeah, sure. Please continue. Okay, great. So one of the things that a lot of people

Starting point is 00:40:21 ask is, as I get older, my memory is getting worse. What can I do? And one of the things that a lot of people ask is, as I get older, my memory is getting worse. What can I do? And one of the things that I say is that, you know, as a memory researcher, in some ways, this is not the most exciting thing to tell people, but it is the most accurate thing, which is your brain is a body part. And so things that affect your physical health on average will affect your memory. Things that affect your mental health will affect your memory. So if you look at these studies that have found effects on keeping your memory, preserving those functions as you get older, what you see is that there are things like exercise, sleep, social stimulation, reducing the effects of chronic stress through various behavioral means. Even things like gum infections, dental health are starting to be linked to cognition. And then there's things that you can do, things like

Starting point is 00:41:09 using hearing aids, which we don't even know why, but that seems to be something if you have hearing loss, just having things that plug you more into what's going on around you seem to improve cognition and memory as you get older. So one of the things that happens is as people get older, they seem to notice lapses in memory. They forget things and they joke about it. Oh, must be Alzheimer's, dementia. But I think people worry like, A, is it normal as you age for your memory to decline in a healthy person? And B, where's the line between normal and non-normal? Great question. And first of all, I'll just say that we're still figuring out that line if you think about Alzheimer's and when the disease starts,

Starting point is 00:42:03 because one of the fascinating things is that now people are starting to see the pathology in the brain for Alzheimer's disease before people actually get to the doctor. They call it preclinical. And this is one of the things we're actively researching is how to, you know, how to identify those people. But if we get to the more, you know, the heart of your question, when is it really something to be seriously concerned about? I think, first of all, yes, we can start off by saying forgetting as you get older, totally normal. And there's different kinds of forgetting, right? There's saying for myself, you know, what's the name of that guy who was in that thing? He was in that movie.

Starting point is 00:42:44 He's got short hair. He's from Boston. Oh, yeah, it's Matt Damon. Or maybe I can't remember it. And then later on, a day later, it pops into my head and say, oh, God, I must be losing it. I can't remember these things. But you can remember it. You just couldn't find it. So that is a kind of memory. That's a kind of a problem I'd say, don't even worry about that. If you can't remember the specific directions to a place that you've gone to for the first time, fairly normal. But if you can't remember that you went there, that's something to worry about. If you're asking yourself, if you catch yourself with a memory problem, often that's a sign that you're thinking about it and you're with it enough to catch these things. But if other people are telling you that, that's, I think, typically a

Starting point is 00:43:29 sign that, in fact, you have more of a problem. Well, I would imagine, too, that part of the quality of your memories depends on when you're doing the recalling. You know, if you're really tired, if you've had a few cocktails, and also why are you trying to remember this, and who are you remembering this for, that there's so many things that seem to play on this. And here's the really fascinating thing about memory, one point that I love to talk about, is that when we remember, we often pull up just little fragments of bits and pieces of things that we thought about, things that we felt, things that we saw. But then once you pull up these little fragments, you get to work on elaborating on that and making a narrative or a story out of what happened.

Starting point is 00:44:19 And so, in fact, a lot of memory researchers have argued going back to the 1930s when Frederick Bartlett said this, that we don't really replay the past, but we imagine how the past could have been. And we do that by getting these bits and pieces and then using it like a detective to kind of come up with a story of how things unfolded. That's why people have trouble differentiating between things that happened and they have a memory of versus things that they just thought about, but didn't actually do. That also sounds like it's part of the explanation as to why you remember your past in a much happier way than what was really your past. Yes. Most people on average tend to have a very optimistic bias in their past, meaning that they tend to remember more positive experiences, but they also tend to view themselves more positively too. And part of that is that we're using our beliefs to construct the story and see if you have a healthy self-esteem,

Starting point is 00:45:23 you're going to make yourself look good in this story because that's what you believe right and so one of the fascinating things about memory though is you can change your perspective and so for instance not all people look back on their past positively so for instance people with depression have a negative bias and they tend to view themselves in a more negative light than might be appropriate. And so one of the coolest things about therapy when I was working in the clinic was collaborating with them on telling these stories'm giving my version from my perspective. And now that memory is no longer theirs. It's ours. We are collaborating on a different version of that story. And a good therapist won't just shove it down someone's throat. It's really just saying, hey, what if you looked at it from this perspective? And when you do that, you change your perspective. Sometimes you can pull up things that you didn't even know you had before. You could pull up parts of the memory that were dormant because you weren't looking for it.

Starting point is 00:46:28 Well, it's clear from listening to you that memory is not what it often appears to be, this repository of all the things that have happened to you. It's so much more complicated than that and so much more vague than that. I've been speaking with Charan Ranganath. He is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. And he is author of a book called Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters.

Starting point is 00:47:01 And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Charan. Thanks, Mike. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Charan. Thanks, Mike. It's truly been a pleasure. Do you work for a boss who has a big, bold, loud signature with lots of little flourishes in it? If so, you may be working for an egomaniac. A study from the University of North Carolina analyzed the signatures of 605 big bosses, and the study determined that those with the biggest signatures received the highest pay

Starting point is 00:47:38 and were more likely to succeed big or fail big. The study also suggested that the bigger the signature, the more likely the boss is a narcissist. Big signature bosses also tend to be not such great decision makers, but what they have going for them is the confidence and the charisma to convince directors and shareholders that they're actually quite competent. Some of the biggest signatures on the list were Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Richard Branson. And that is Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know episodes are put together by, well, by me and Jeffrey

Starting point is 00:48:19 Havison and Jennifer Brennan, and the executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

Starting point is 00:48:46 She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth.

Starting point is 00:49:12 Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine. To be continued... is not a loving God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.

Something You Should Know - What Is Good Mental Health? & The Weird Thing About Memory

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