Speaking of Psychology - The seven sins of memory, with Daniel Schacter, PhD

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Human memory is imperfect – we all misplace our keys, forget acquaintances’ names and misremember the details of our own past. Daniel Schacter, PhD, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, discusses why memory is so fallible, the causes and consequences of the most common memory errors, how memory changes as we age, and how memory is tied to our ability to plan for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When was the last time you misplaced your keys, glasses, or cell phone? Or ran into an acquaintance and couldn't come up with their name no matter how hard you racked your brain? Have you ever gotten into an argument with a sibling over whether a childhood memory really happened the way you thought it did? Both of you sure that your memory was correct? Human memory is imperfect. For most people, it's easy to think of examples of these common but frustrating situations.

For the past several decades, psychologists have begun to gain a better understanding of how our brains remember, misremember, and forget. So why is our memory so fallible? What are the most common memory errors and what are their consequences? How does memory change as we age? Is there anything we can do to improve our memory or keep it sharp? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Daniel Schachter, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. His research uses the tools of psychology and neuroscience to study how memory works and why it is so often prone to error and distortion.

His 2001 book, The Seven Sins of Memory, categorized and explained the most common memory failures. A 20th anniversary edition of the book is due out in September, and it includes updates on how our understanding of memory has advanced over the past two decades. It also explores new topics, including how technology may be affecting our memory and how memory is intertwined with our ability to plan for the future. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Shachter. Nice to be here. So, as I said, your book is called The Seven Sins of Memory. Can you, first of all, talk about those sins are why you call them sins, and some of them are, as you say, sins of omission and sins of commission. What are the differences?

Back around 2000, 1999, as I was kind of surveying the literary. on memory errors, it struck me that while psychologists had known for decades, that memory is prone to error, nobody had really tried to organize our knowledge and try to suggest the way of classifying these errors. And my best take on the literature was that there are these seven basic categories of memory errors. And so by analogy with the well-known seven ancient deadly sins, I couldn't resist calling them the seven sins of memory. So there are three sins of omission, different kinds of forgetting, four sins of commission when memory is present, but either wrong or intrusive. So the three sins of omission I call transients. That's forgetting

over time. We all know from our everyday experience that all other things being equal, we tend to remember experiences and information that are recent in time better than those that occurred long ago. Memories tend to fade over time. The second sin of omission I call absent-mindedness. So this is not memory fading over time. This is kind of a breakdown at the interface of memory and attention. So we may be distracted, focused on.

upcoming tasks and we put our keys down. We don't notice where we put those keys down. The event really never gets into memory. That would be an absent-minded kind of forgetting. Or we may put our keys down and know exactly where they are, but then we're distracted at the time of retrieval and we walk out the door without our keys. That would be another example of absent-mindedness. Third kind of forgetting sins, sin of omission I call blocking. This is when memories available, it hasn't faded away over time. We're trying to remember, doing our best to remember, but we can't come up with information that's actually stored in memory,

and that I call blocking. So those are three sins of omission. Sins of co-mission, one I call misattribution. So this is when we recall some aspect of an event correctly, but we get the source wrong. So we might recall someone told us this interesting fact and we might remember what the fact is and say that it was my cousin who told me that

when in fact it was somebody else or I actually heard it on the radio. So we misattribute the source. Related to that is something I call suggestibility. This is when misinformation is suggested to us. We incorporate that into our memory, So a suggestion about something that might have happened in the past that didn't happen becomes incorporated into our memories and we're prone to this kind of sin of suggestibility,

which can be very dangerous. And then the third kind of distortion-related sin I call bias. And this refers to how our current knowledge, beliefs, and feelings impact and sometimes skewer, distort our past memories. And then the final seven sin, I call it. I call persistence, and that refers to intrusive memories. This is typically something that happens when we've had an emotion or even traumatic experience and we just can't get it out of our mind. We have these very persistent memories.

So those are the seven. So one of the most frustrating memory failures that a lot of us experience is that tip of the tongue feeling when we're trying to remember someone's name or a word and we just can't pull it out. why does this happen and when it does, is there anything that we can do that will help us retrieve the lost word? One of the things we know is that we tend to be vulnerable to tip of the tongue experiences for information that's available in memory, but we haven't used recently. So it's there for sure, but we haven't brought it to mind recently. It becomes harder to retrieve. And we may be even able to

recall certain aspects of the information, so we can't come up with someone's name, but we are able to remember all, you know, many things about them. And one reason why the name in particular seems to be the most susceptible to tip of the tongue, particularly as we get older, and that's because in part a name is not inherently meaningful. So there was an experiment done a number of years ago, known as the Baker-Baker experiment, and basically showed that if you're trying to remember the name of someone named John Baker, you're much more prone to tip of the tongue than if you're trying to recall the term Baker. So it's Baker in both cases. In one case, you've got all kinds of semantic information closely integrated to the name.

And in another case of the proper name, there's nothing inherently meaningful about that. But one thing we can do to try to prevent that because it really does seem to occur most often for information that we haven't retrieved recently or frequently. For example, if you're going to a party and you know you're going to see people at the party who you haven't seen recently and you might anticipate possibly feeling embarrassed if you can't come up with the name of someone who you've met before, you haven't seen recently, kind of review the names of people who are going. You can. Or a parent who is going to a school function is going to see other parents.

They don't see these people very often. They feel like they should know the names, but you can anticipate the possibility of an embarrassing tip of the tongue. Review the material in advance and that can really help with a problem. Once the tip of the tongue is started, then it's too late in most cases to do much about it. Sometimes just waiting. The information will come over time.

We all know that experience. It comes a day later. It's as if you've sent the signal that takes time to percolate in the brain. But I think the proactive strategy, when it can be used, can be effective. So my technique of just faking it and not saying the person's name and hoping that somebody else will walk up and say, hey, John, then I'll get it. That's not really a good solution. Well, it's not a solution, but we've all done that because those are exactly. the situations in which this is most likely to occur.

So that raises in my mind the question about where we store certain kinds of memories. So are names in a particular place and say numbers are somewhere else and images of, I don't know, I don't know, landscape, but it's someplace else. Do we know? Yeah, I think we do know. We do know that there are elements of memory storage that have the character that you just described. They're kind of distributed in different parts of the brain. different kinds of information, different features of an experience. They're not just sitting in one spot in the brain, and then suddenly there's a explosion,

and that's the memory. You have to pull together information stored in different parts of the brain. And for quite a while now, people, researchers have thought that there's a particular region that's important for helping us to pull together those. distributed bits of information, and that's the hippocampus. The key region for memory, spatial function, and we know that when the hippocampus is damaged, you're going to have a significant memory problem.

And although people are still debating exactly what's the best way to characterize the functions of the hippocampus, one of the things that it does is help us to pull together bits and pieces of information that are stored in different parts of the brain. And that underscores the fundamental point about memory that it's really a constructive process. It's not just simply a matter of reactivating a picture in the mind. It's a much more constructive process than that.

Let's talk a little bit about one of the sins of a mission that you mentioned earlier, transients. Why do our memories fade over time? and why don't we remember, say, our earliest childhood? There are a number of reasons why memories fade over time. One of them is that we simply don't rehearse the memory. There's kind of a use-it-or-lose-it principle in memory, such that experiences, facts that we retrieve,

we reflect back on are those that tend to persist, whereas experiences that we don't retrieve after an event has occurred, tend to all things being equal, fade away. And that kind of makes sense from an adaptive perspective in that the things that are really important to are so things we're going to be more likely to retrieve again in the future, and that kind of boosts them and prevents them from fading over time. One of the really interesting things that we've learned in the last 20 years, and it's one of the findings that I highlighted in the update section on transients and related to what we're just discussing, is that there's a technique referred to as in the literature sometimes as retrieval practice. It's also known as the testing effect. Although this was discovered in some form many over a century ago, it's only real in the last time. 20 years that psychologists have really characterized and really studied intensively this effect.

Basically, what this refers to is the idea that, for example, suppose you read a story. Later on, you could either restudy parts of that story to help you remember it better in the future, or I could test you on parts of the story. And what has been found is that if you get tested, that really provides a long, long-term boost to the memory such that you forget over time much more slowly. So testing versus restudding reduces the transience of memory, which I think is a very interesting finding and consistent with what I was saying before, that information that we retrieve tends to persist more into the future. And the forgetting curve or the curve of transients in the terms of the

Seven Sins of Memory is much less steep when we retrieve and test ourselves. So there are a couple of lessons there. One, for example, for students, and I think this is becoming pretty widely known now, that for preparing for a test, self-testing versus just restudying the same thing over and over again can be really helpful, particularly for boosting long-term learning. There's another tie-in to this, and this is something in memory that has been observed only, again, during the last 20 years, and I talk about it in one of the update sections of the new Seven Sins book coming out, is an interesting group of people who some listeners may be familiar with because they've been shown on 60 Minutes and other TV shows who are associated with the condition known as highly superior autobiographical memory. So these are people who seem to be able to remember events from their personal past from a long time ago with an uncanny ability. So if you ask one of these folks, you know, what happened to you on May 17, 1998, chances are they're going to be able to tell you that.

And of course, most of us, if we're asked what happened to us on May 17, 1998, unless it's our birthday or some highly, the significant date are going to have no clue what happened to us then. And there are a number of these people have now been identified. They've been studied with both brain scanning and psychological studies and tying into our discussion of transients. What seems to be happening with these folks is that they have a much less deep forgetting curve for personal experiences. So if you ask them about something that happened yesterday,

their memory is not going to be much different from my memory or your memory or anybody else's memory. But that memory doesn't fade over time. And they don't have a photographic memory. They're prone to various kinds of memory distortions and errors just like everybody else. The memory holds up well over time. And the reason for that may link back to what we were just talking about about the testing effect. A lot of these people tend to retrieve and rehash their personal memories quite extensively.

And so it may be kind of an extreme form of self-testing that is preventing these memories from fading over time. We did an episode just a few weeks back on that very topic and had a guest, we had a researcher who works in the area and a guest who has highly superior autobiographical memory. And one of the interesting things that she said was that the pandemic, the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns had an effect on her memory. She talked about the fact that because the days were all so similar and blended together that she had lost track and she really felt like her H-SAM was very attenuated. And I'm just thinking, is that going to happen to all of us? I mean, should we all

expect that there's a kind of a big blur for the last, you know, however long this is going to last? I think so. In fact, that's very interesting to me that that was. what happened to a person with H-HM, but it makes a lot of sense for the reasons you describe. I think that going into and coming out of the pandemic, we're probably going to see something along the lines you describe that fits with what psychologists have studied for years and is known as a serial position curve. So we tend to have really good memories like in a standard wordless memory experiment in the laboratory.

we remember the first few words in the list very well, then we don't remember the stuff in the middle so much, and we remember the last couple at the end. Similarly, I think that probably most of us will have like a vivid memory of what happened, you know, in March 2020, where everything changed and, you know, went to work one day and then we didn't the next day. I, you know, I have my own memory of that when the COVID onset. But then for exactly the reasons you described, we didn't. don't have, you know, the normal event boundaries or segmentation or going on vacation,

going out to dinner, all the things that allow us to make one event distinctive from another. And so I would expect a kind of blurring for all these experiences in the middle of COVID. And then maybe, you know, some recovery at the end, we remember, oh, the first time I, you know, I went on a restaurant, went to a restaurant as the pandemic was easing. or the first time I went back on an airplane. So, but it's very interesting for me to hear that that extends to someone with age set. Most people think that memory gets worse as we age. Is that backed up by the research and do people have better,

do younger people always have better memories than older adults? I think in general it's backed up by the research, but it depends what kind of memory you're talking about. So, for example, semantic memory, our general, you know, our store of general knowledge, facts, associations, that holds up very well with age. And older adults can sometimes be as good as younger adults in, you know, accessing general knowledge or even better. What tends to really fade with age more is episodic memory, what we think of as memory for specific personal experiences. And the extent of age-related memory loss there depends on a host of factors.

So, for example, as we get older, we tend to have more difficulty retrieving information on our own without cues. But if we can be given effective cues, then older adults can often remember at or close to the level of younger adults. So it's not a, you know, a one-year-olds. So it's not a, you know, a one-size-fits-all kind of situation with aging. It very much depends on the specific circumstances and the kind of memory that we're talking about. So you mentioned cues as things that can help people to remember, which raises in my mind the question of what's happening to us with the advent of so many new technologies. Are technologies like GPS and the Internet affecting our memories? Is it harming our memories because we can look up everything that we want on Google?

I mean, you know, you don't have to remember the multiplication tables anymore, right? You don't have to remember anything. Just go to Google. Right. It's a great question, and it's, it is really an issue that's only coming to the four over the past 20 years, and it's one of the issues that I delve into in one of the updates in the Seventh Sins. And I think there was a lot of angst out there about the potentially negative effects of technology, media, the internet on memory for the reasons that you state. We have these other options. Maybe our memory systems are kind of dry up and we won't be using them in the way we have and therefore they're going to be less effective when we try to use them. My read on the literature is that the situation isn't as dire as

Some make it out to be. You know, you read headlines, why the Internet is killing your memory or how the Internet is ruining your memory. I don't see a lot of evidence yet that that's happened. So, you know, I looked at studies on Google, studies on reviewing photographs, you know, through Instagram, use of GPS, things like media multitasking, where we may. you know, be distracted from paying attention from a lecture, for example, by activities on our smartphone. And what I concluded is the following. I think that there is no doubt evidence that when we rely on technology, our memory for a particular task can be impacted in a negative way. Let's just focus on GPS, for example.

If I use GPS to get me from point A to point B, there is evidence in the literature that indicates that I will probably have worse memory for that particular route that I just took than if I navigate it on my own. I'd probably have a better memory for what I did because I'm more actively using my stored knowledge to get from point A to point B, as opposed to just relying on navigation. And there's even evidence from neuroimaging, a very nice study done in London from the group of Hugo Spears published a couple of years ago, where they took people on a tour of the London Soho district, and then the next day they scanned them while they were either using their memory

to kind of navigate, do a virtual navigation of the area they toured, or they could rely on a GPS-like device, two different conditions, the same people. And interestingly, what they found is that there was robust activity in the hippocampus that we talked about before in a couple of other regions related to memory, but only when people were relying on using memory to navigate around that area in London. when they're relying on the navigational aid, you weren't seeing that activation. So, you know, that suggests that that might be a reason why you would have, you know,

less memory for a route when you're relying on navigation. You're not engaging some of those key memory structures. So for a specific task, yes. But then we can ask, well, are there broader effects? For example, if I rely on GPS a lot, am I going to have a more general problem remembering routes or other kinds of spatial information, information in the domain of the GPS? And there's only, I would say, there's some suggestive evidence, but not much evidence, that the effects extend beyond the specific task. And then finally we can ask, well, if I rely on GPS a lot, would I have not only problems remembering routes in general, but maybe my entire memory system, memory for personal experiences, for facts, maybe it would be impacted in a general way. And for that, there's almost no evidence. So I think, yes, there is evidence that when we rely on technology, we may have worse memory for specific task. but there's very limited evidence that it extends beyond that.

Another domain that I briefly mentioned that's relevant to this discussion is media multitasking. So again, I'm supposed to be paying attention to a lecture, but I'm distracted by what's going on on my smartphone. There's definitely evidence from studies like in the classroom and laboratory analogs that when you media multitask, not surprisingly, you're going to have reduced memory for the content. of the lecture. So again, a task-specific effect, just like having bad memory for the route on which you're using GPS. But suppose you're a chronic media multitasker, you do it a lot. Does that have a more general effect in memory? And again, I would say there's maybe suggestive evidence. So there have been studies that show that people who subjectively say, yeah, I do this

a lot, tend to perform worse, for example, in remembering lectures than people. who say, I don't do that a lot. But what the research hasn't yet clearly shown is whether that's because people who have poor memory and attention abilities to begin with are the ones that end up doing media multitasking or whether it's media multitasking that causes these problems. So we really don't know yet. So it's a very interesting, important area. And we've been learning a lot about it, but we need to learn a lot more. Speaking of smartphones, we all walk around with them, and they all have cameras these days,

and everybody is constantly taking pictures and posting them, and that's sort of how we live our lives today, especially for younger folks. Do we know what that's doing to people's memories of the experiences that they actually had? I mean, I've gone to places with tourists who they're taking picture, picture, picture, picture. But are they really experiencing the place that they're very experiencing the place that they're visiting. Yeah, really important question as well. There is a lot of work on that,

and I do review some of that in the update on Seven Sins. And again, it's kind of a somewhat of a complex picture, but there is evidence that when you pay a lot of attention to taking a photo, you may have worse memory for the experience as a result. If you're really just focused on figuring out the lighting and what's the best way to get the picture and stuff like that, then your later memory can suffer. It doesn't always suffer, but it's been shown that you can have a poorer memory when you really focus on things related to taking the picture. If you focus, for example, on, you know, trying to really hone in on a particular feature of an object and you really focus on the object, you may have pretty good memory for that. But activity, that's more

focused on getting the correct lighting, correct angles, stuff like that can impair memory. Now, you might say maybe it's just a function of the fact that when people take a picture, they know that they're going to be able to come back to it later on. So it's like a cognitive offloading, if you will. But you still see these detrimental effects even when people delete the photo right afterwards. And so they realize they can't come back to it. Another interesting question has to do with photo review. So looking at photos on Instagram and other kind of online platforms.

There are some beneficial effects of that because, as we discussed earlier, simply using a photograph to retrieve a past experience is going to strengthen that past experience. So there can be a beneficial effect of photo review. but actually going back to some work that was initiated in my lab way back in the late 1990s before social media platforms came on the scene, we were interested in the effects of photo review. And what we found is that, yeah, it can benefit your memory, but it can also impair memory for related experiences that you don't review. So if you have a photograph of vacation,

vacation and you repeatedly retrieve exactly what happened in that event, related information from that vacation that you don't retrieve may suffer. And this is an example that's been established of something been established in laboratory studies known as retrieval-induced forgetting, where if we retrieve information about a past event, it strengthens that event, but related information that's not retrieved, suffers. And I think that there's a real application to photos there as well. Have you looked at all into the question of recovered memories? I ask because it's very controversial in psychology, whether people, you know, can remember 30 years later that they

were abused as a child and a whole lot of controversy as to whether such memories like that are accurate. Do we know? Yeah, I think we know and brought outline. So this is something I dealt with at length in the Seven Sins of Memory 2001 book, because that's one that controversy was really active. And, you know, I think by conclusion at that time was some recovered memories can be accurate, recovered memories that occur outside the context of therapy and outside the context, without suggestion. People can be spontaneously reminded, typically of events.

that they just haven't really thought about for a while. And that's not an unusual occurrence. Memory of a past event that I haven't thought about for a while may be triggered by a queue. And that seems to kind of fit a lot of the recovered memory experiences that people report that can be corroborated, those spontaneous reminders. And it's not necessarily the case that those memories were actively repressed. it's just something people hadn't thought about for a while, and then it can be reminded of later. On the other side of that, there's also, you know, there was even by 2001 a lot of evidence that many of

these recovered memories are not accurate. The ones that are cued by suggestive influences turn out to be memories that are very difficult to corroborate. So I think that that controversy has died down quite a bit over the last 20 years. It was much more heated in the late 1990s than it is now, perhaps because as more knowledge of the potential corrupting effects of suggestion on memory has become available, people who are engaging in suggestive practices that led to these spurious recovered memories are not doing it as much. And I do provide a little update on the recovered memories controversy in my chapter on suggestibility in the new seven sins book and how some views have changed over the years. But to me, what's most striking is that

there's so few of these cases being reported. Not zero, but it's nothing like the eruption that occurred in the early to mid-1990s. And I think there's a reason for that. I think that individual who are engaging in suggestive practices that had the potential to lead to false memories are not doing it as much. So you don't see these cases to anywhere near the degree that you did 25 years ago. One of your more recent research interests is the link between memory and planning for the future. What's the connection between those two things? And why is this an important connection to make?

I think it's important for a few different reasons. The connection empirically is that many of the same processes that we engage when we remember a past experience are engaged when we project into the future and imagine a possible experience. For example, in my lab, we first began on this line of work systematically about 15 years ago, put people. in the scanner, they were given simple word cues and asked to either remember a past experience or imagine a future experience related to the word cue. So for vacation, if you were in the memory condition, you would try to retrieve a specific memory of a vacation from the past few years. In the future condition, if you were given that same word cue, you would imagine some vacation that might occur to you in the next few years. We compare brain activity.

in those two conditions to a control condition where you'd be given the same kinds of cues and asked to perform tasks that involve both visual and conceptual processing, but didn't involve remembering or imagining a specific event. And what we saw was very striking increases in a network of brain regions during remembering the past and imagining the future that were nearly, not entirely, but nearly identical, suggesting a strong link between. between the two. And indeed, that work was in part stimulated by an interesting observation from the 1980s that was made by Endel Tollving, an eminent memory researcher, my old PhD advisor and colleague at the University of Toronto when I was there back in the 70s and 80s. And this

concerned an amnesic patient, a severely amnesic patient known in literature by the initials KC, who I did a lot of testing with. And one day, both Tolving and I, were testing KC. We were seated across a testing table from him, and Tulving asked him the seemingly innocent question, what do you think you're going to be doing tomorrow? And KC. just sat there and drew a blank. Just sat there and said, gee, I can't really conjure up any image of what I'm going to be doing tomorrow. It was the same kind of response you would get from him if you asked, what did you do yesterday. He can't tell you what he did yesterday. And after a while, he could be prompted to say, well, I'd have breakfast, I'd have lunch.

He would sort of run out a script. But what was striking from that observation of KC, it suggested, again, a link between remembering the past, imagining the future. Eventually, that led to the FMRI study that I just described. And a bunch of other work from my lab and other labs has shown this tight inner linkage. Now, one of the reasons I think this is important theoretically has to do with a critical point about the seven sins of memory that I made way back in 2001 and have elaborated upon more recently. And that's the idea that these memory sins, while they can be annoying in everyday life,

are not necessarily bad things in memory. Rather, I see them as kind of the costs that are associated with benefits in the memory system. So, for example, maybe the clearest example of that, would be persistence that I talked about earlier. We have persisting memories of emotionally arousing and traumatic events, but we want our memory system to preserve a very vivid record of experiences that could threaten us in the future. So that's a good feature of memory, that we do have very strong memories for highly arousing and emotional events. And generally, those are the things that we remember vividly, but they can also keep us up at night. How does this relate to imagining the future, well, if we look at memory as something that's not necessarily just

for reminiscing about the past, but for using past experience to plan ahead to simulate future events, which is kind of the way I look at it, memory is useful to the extent that it can help us predict, anticipate, simulate the future. For a memory system to be helpful as a guide to future thinking, we need it to be a flexible system. we need to be able to recombine bits and pieces of our past experience to simulate novel upcoming events, because after all, the future is rarely identical to the past. So one of my arguments over the past 15 years has been that one of the reasons why we have memory errors, certain memory misattributions, where we mix up elements of different events,

is because our memory is built so that we can use it to simulate future events. We need a flexible system that allows us to recombine different aspects of experience, and that very flexibility that I would argue makes memory useful for simulating the future can also lead to certain kinds of memory errors. And I go over some of the empirical evidence now that's mounted over the last 10 or 15 years, years that supports that idea that there's a link between this flexible ability to flexibly recombine elements of past experience, which is a good thing for simulating the future and other adaptive aspects of memory, but it can also lead to memory distortions and errors.

Last question, taking us back to the new edition of your book. Can you say what you think has been the biggest change or advance in our understanding of memory? in the 20 years since you published the first edition? That's a really good question. What I would like to be able to do is go through each of the seven sins and say what I think is the most important thing. I would, you know, from where I sit, I think it relates to this last point I was making.

That in 2001, yeah, I try to argue for some of the adaptive aspects of memory errors, but that argument was mostly based on theory. I incorporated evolutionary theory and a variety of conceptual considerations, but there really wasn't much experimental support for that idea. And now 20 years later, and this is I go over a lot of this stuff in the book, now there is. So to me, I think that's one of the biggest advances. We now have a lot more experimental support for this fundamental idea that various kinds of memory errors actually reflect adaptive aspects of the system. That would be the thing that I would single out, although there's evidence for each of the seven scenes that I think has been very

important and instructive. Well, thank you. This has been very interesting and illuminating. I'm sure that our listeners are going to learn a great deal about their own memories from this. Thank you. I hope so. I enjoyed the conversation. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www. www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts,

you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condiion. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.