Stuff You Should Know - A Podcast to Remember (How Memory Works)

Episode Date: May 5, 2011

How does memory work? How is internet access changing the function of the human brain? In this podcast, Josh and Chuck take a closer look at the science behind memory -- and how modern technology may be changing it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I remembered your name. Yeah. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

Lizzie, had you cracked up there, if that makes it into the cut? It's not going to. Okay. Because it was pre-hey and welcome to the podcast. Everything before that always gets cut out. You know that. I don't think a little giggle beforehand might be endearing. We would be fired if we didn't cut out everything that came before that. Right? Maybe. Chuck. Yes, Josh. You ever heard of a guy named Nicholas Carr? Yeah, sure. I know you have. You ever heard of a little rag called The Atlantic? Yes, I have. Back in 2008, those two things collided. Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic, and he had a very great headlined article called, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

And Nicholas Carr, he went on to write a book. He followed that normal process where you're writing the book and you're like, I need some extra cash. So I'll accept this or rewrite 15 pages of it, sell it to The Atlantic or whatever. Yeah, we need to get in that gig. Well, we have to write a book or be writing a book. I'd write a book. We should do that. I can't remember what the book was called, but the article actually made a bigger splash than the book did. But basically, he was saying, we are reconfiguring the way we learn through our interactions with the Internet. There's constantly things trying to get our attention on a web page. It's not like a book without pictures or flashing lights. We read horizontally,

he put it, rather than vertically, meaning we just skim the surface of a bunch of different stuff rather than really deeply get into one thing. Fiction, which helps flex the imagination, is pretty much non-existent on the web unless you're like in the live journal, Harry Potter or Erotica. But at the basis of his argument is Google Making Us Stupid was the idea that it's actually reforming the way we form memories. Not Google. He chose Google just to get a headline because the editor did. But the idea that the Internet, the way we read, is changing the way that we absorb information and therefore form memory. It says a lot that he was asking if it's making us stupid because we here in the West equate memory, a good memory, to intelligence,

to smarts. I guess what I'm trying to drive at very clumsily is how does memory work? I thought that was a great setup. Who knows what the heck we're going to look like in 100 years as a species? How our brains are going to be firing? What the effect it's going to have on us? We're going to have mighty humps. Well, that's the thing. You can debate all day long. Is it stupid or are we just in the middle of an evolution? Probably in the middle of an evolution. I don't think we're going to end up like an idiocracy. Although you never know. Possibility. You never know. I watched Idiocracy so that might mean I'm on that road myself. It's a great movie. Did you like it? I did. I thought it was funny. I liked it for what it was. But the one joke

premise of most times when a movie has the one joke premise, it kind of gets old for me. What one joke? Sort of the one joke. Everybody's stupid. It worked then. All right. Moving on. Memories, Josh. Yes. Are what make us who we are? If we, you know, I imagine if someone has complete amnesia, they usually don't have a sense of self. Yeah. You know, it depends. If you remember H.M. Henry Mollison. No. So he was the patient that proved there's this big debate over when we think of memory, whether there's like one part of the brain that's responsible for memory, right? Or whether it's a bunch of different parts of the brain. And he proved that the multiple memory systems works. Yeah. Cause they used to think like, oh, you just got a big old

filing cabinet and your brain just sticks it in whatever file it belongs in. And then you go and pull it out when you need it. Exactly. And that's very, it's a very sesame street way of putting it. It is. But you know, they were working with what they had to work with at the time. Yeah. And they were wrong. But H.M., like age 23, this guy who became known as H.M., patient H.M., had a temporal lobectomy to cure his epilepsy. Oh, that guy. Also removed his hippocampus. So he could tell you, you know, where he went to high school, who his oldest friend was, that kind of thing. But he couldn't tell you what he had for lunch that day because he lost the ability to form new memories. Yeah. So the fact that he could maintain old memories but couldn't

form new memories proved that there's multiple systems involved for different types of memory. Yeah. Like Memento. Right. Great movie. That he would have proven it to. And Memento did not have Ellen Page. No, it didn't. So it's on your list of acceptable films. I really hope Ellen Page isn't listening to this podcast. She would have written in by now. Or not. She may just be like, I hate those guys so much. Yeah, maybe so. So let's talk a bit about memory, Josh. Let's say we were talking about breakfast this morning. If you remember what you had for breakfast, you might think that that is a very simple thing that happened when, in fact, it is very complex reconstruction from different parts of your brain putting together maybe the

smell of your eggs. Bacon. Is that what you ate? You didn't eat that. Slab of ham. What it looked like maybe, what it felt like in your mouth, how it tasted. So you're recalling all these different parts. But not even just that. I mean, there's so much more to it than the tablecloth. Whether you were angry at the weather guy. To remember even what eggs are. Yeah. You know, these memories that go way back. But we conceive of it as this one little snapshot of a memory called what you had for breakfast. Right. Right. But all of those different things put together are called neural projections, right, Chuck? Yes, Josh. Okay. So go ahead. Well, the other instance too that they always mention is writing about, you never forget how to ride a bike. And it seems

like a very easy thing. But there are so many things going on when you ride a bike, how you get on the bike, how you mount the bike, where your feet go, how you move it forward. Where should I put my hands? What about this car barreling down? I should probably not ride in the center of the road going the wrong way. Yeah. So it's just like hundreds of memories. I can't put a number on it. Who knows how many there are. Well, the reason why it's so difficult is because this is all a seamless process, right? Exactly. It makes it appear writing a bike as if it's one single file that you pull out of your cabinet called ride a bike. Yeah. And at times it's so, so it's so second nature. It's so natural to us that we kind of detach ourselves from it and call

it things like muscle memory. So this thing is muscle memory. Your muscles are there. They don't have a capacity for member remembering anything. Well, and we don't even know how we recall still, even though we have a better handle on storage of memory. And no, and we should, we should disclaim this episode by saying that there is a lot of, there's a, this is the rough sketch of what we know right now about how we form and retrieve memories, which is more than we've ever known. Yeah. And I think we're hot on the trail. It's really starting to come together and make sense. So should we start with encoding? Yeah. Which is basically your senses is rooted in your senses. Encoding is the first step to create a memory. It begins with perception. And when we talk about

perception, we're talking about your sensory perception, right? Which like right now you appear to me as, you know, a little scruffy looking good. You've got your, um, brave cap on. You got a smile, right? The, uh, the Ikeolites gleaming off of your eyeballs a little bit. Okay. All of this is visual information, right? But in my brain, it's nothing more than electrical impulses traveling through the optic nerve to my hippocampus, right? Right. You might smell me. You might, you know, the example they use in the article is the first girlfriend, and, but that's right on the money, man. I mean, I still remember all that stuff, but when you, when you see that first girl that you fall in love with, you know,

what she looked like, what she smelled like the first time she shook your hand. I hate to say this, but it's the exact same thing as breakfast this morning or riding the bike. Well, true in a way, but there's also a point made later on that we'll talk about that things that are more important to you are more likely to be rooted in your long-term memory. So, huh? Yeah. Okay. Breakfast is pretty important to me. Right. True. Is that, that's not gonna be in your long-term memory though. I remember every breakfast I've ever eaten. Really? Okay. It's because you've only had breakfast four times.

The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly.

And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Ready, set, slay. Squirrel friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast is taking you behind the scenes of RuPaul's Drag Race season 15 on MTV with me, Alec Moppa and my co-host, Lonnie Love. Alec and I will recap the latest episode, the best and worst looks,

and we'll even be joined by some of your favorite queens along the way. One thing's for sure, there is no shortage of queens this season because we are witnessing the biggest cast in RuPaul's Drag Race herstory and the stakes are higher than ever with the largest cast prize in drag race herstory. So make no mistake, the competition is going to rev up. Watch season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race every Friday on MTV. Then join us on the podcast right after the show to recap the episode, debrief on all the looks and more. Listen to Squirrel Friends,

the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So where are we? In the hippocampus? Well, yeah, we're within coding. So basically what's just happened is the light bouncing off of you that gives you shape and all that is coming into my eyes and transforming into electrical information. It doesn't matter what it is. That's the language of the brain, right? Translate electrical information, yes. And stores it in the hippocampus initially, right?

That's like the big processing sorting routing hub. Yeah. So your hippocampus is like this region of the brain shaped like a seahorse, which hence the name, that basically says, okay, so I don't get that part. Hippocampus? It's not shaped like a hippopotamus? No. Shaped like a seahorse. Well, then why plus the name? Hippocampus means seahorse. Oh, it does? Yeah. I did not realize that. Man, I hope it does. Okay. That's how I've always taken it. So let's call it the seahorse of campus.

Basically what the hippocampus does is it takes in all this information, including stuff that I have no idea I'm taking in at the moment. Yeah. And says, this is important. This is an important, you can leave this out. Let's send this over here. Let's send this over there. Let's create this neural projection by combining this, this and this. Right. And it's like basically the man behind the curtain, the hippocampus is the center of forming new memories. Right. And along with the frontal cortex, they work in hand and hand at this.

Yeah. Okay. And it's a really efficient way to deal with your surroundings, Chuck, because consider this, let's say you or I, well, let's say we're doing it together. We're coming out of the woods into a meadow and it is a primal area and we're scared of bears. So we're scanning the meadow for bears, right? We don't see any bears, but there's birds, there's flowers, there's butterflies. And we're kind of taking in all of these things, but we're not really taking it in because none of them are the bear, which is what we're tasked with finding right then. Right. Right. So the hippocampus isn't forming any memories of the butterfly or the daisies or

whatever. Maybe we would know, oh, well, there's a splash of light against the green. So there are flowers there, but if we were asked later on what kind of flowers were in that meadow, we couldn't say. So it's just filtering that what we would consider unnecessary information out. Exactly. Okay. It travels while we said this perception and encoding is where it starts, but then it has to go somewhere from there. Right. And this is where the chemistry of the brain comes in, which is endlessly fascinating to me. Yes. Josh, we have nerve cells. Neurons. And these connect with other cells at a point called a synapse. Right. Well, which is actually, it's funny that the author of this article put it like that because

it's actually not a point, it's a gap. Yeah, which is odd. You think that all these things connect, but there is a gap and the leap to the other side, the leap of the gap is performed via neurotransmitters. Is that right? Yes. And then latched onto by a dintrite, the little feathery things on the cells collect this. Yeah, they accept the transmission. Come on in, transmission. Welcome to my cell. So Chuck, I'm going to give a couple of stats real quick. Okay. Let's hear. There's possibly as many as a hundred billion neurons in your brain. It's a lot. Each of them have many tens of thousands or many, many thousands of connections up to which are synapses. Yes. Which are, which leads to as many as a quadrillion synapses in the human brain.

And they can connect. Is it an infinite amount of times? If need be. What do you mean? Is there any limit to the amount of neural connections these cells can make? Well, I think 10,000 is the high end that I've heard. Okay. But I love the chin and answer for that. Thank you. And they're constantly going too. Right. And forming new connections. I think it's something like 30 to 60 times a second near neurons are firing all over your head. That is crazy. It is. And they're not set in stone. They're always changing, always forming new connections. The more that you do something, the stronger the connections going to be. We might know that in the real world as practice or repetition. Right. But the, another word for it is plasticity. Where the brain,

the organizational structure of your brain actually changes shape. Yeah. It, as, as you're saying, like through practicing something like the, the repeated firing of a neural connection, right? Which is just an electrical impulse that triggers the release of neurotransmitters that cross the synapse or accepted in the dendrite. Right. Right. And the neurotransmitters are the message carried like a certain type of neurotransmitter like dopamine says, Hey, everything's just I read. Right. And this information is just passed along from one neuron to another. If the impulse is strong enough, right? Right. But then when you do it again and again and again, more channels that allow the neurotransmitters to, to be released from one and accepted by another

are dug, which means that this thing fires more efficiently. And all of a sudden after firing them by practicing your violin, this one piece of music, slowly over and over again, you get faster and faster and faster at it until you can play it perfectly. Yeah. That's exactly what's going on. Your, your neural connection is, is at top performance, peak performance. Practice makes perfect. I like how to play the intro to stairway to heaven when I first got my guitar and I played it over and over and over and over until I learned it. Give me a guitar today. I can monkey through about a third of it. Yeah. Very clumsily because I forget, or I can't write in cursive anymore. I can either. I mean, I'd really have to concentrate and there are definitely letters

that I would forget how to write. Yeah. That was a jarring realization for me that like, I, how do you make the Q and whatever happened to that Z, that weird Z? Yeah. Like it's all gone and even like the S and the R and all that like normal stuff, it's just gone. Yeah. I, you don't want to see my cursive writing. So what, what you're talking about is a, while you can refine the organization of your brain to peak performance, your neural connections also have a kind of use it or lose it aspect to them as well. Yes. Remember that study with the kittens? No. That's the really sad study. I think it's funny that you asked me how much I remember and I keep saying no. Yeah. There was this study that, that involved kittens having one eye so

in shot from birth. That's right. And then they would, they were allowed to frolic and play and do whatever, but they just had one eye so in shot. Right. And then after I think like eight or 10 or 12 weeks, the, the eye was released. Yeah. Yeah. Open up again and the kittens were blind for life. And I guess they killed the kittens and looked at what was going on in the brain and they found that the, they say the left eye had been so in shot during the stage of development. The neural connections had all traveled to the right eye, which was seeing and the ones that had been there on the left eye that formed the optic nerve were withered and dead. You know what they call that experiment? They call it the saddest experiment in the history of the world. It's

pretty bad. Yeah. It's a pretty bad experiment, but it basically goes to show you that not only will neural connections, whether and die if they're not used, they'll also migrate to places where they can be used. There's kind of like a survival of the fittest like jungle grab for firing because the more fired a neural connection is, the more important it is, the stronger it's going to be. Right? Right. And FYI, giraffe neurons can grow up to three feet in length. Really? Yeah. Are they all in the neck? Yep. Isn't that cool? That is pretty cool. So we were talking about encoding. You have to really be paying attention to properly encode. And we also talked about filtering things out. What they don't know again is, or this may be the first time we've said it,

is are we screening this stimuli out during the first initial sensory stage or are we literally processing it and saying, no, we don't need this. Get rid of it. Yeah. It would make sense to me that it comes afterward, but they don't know. Yeah. It makes sense to me too, like the hippocampus is like, that's not a bear. Yeah. So forget it. Yeah. Forget that. So are we at short-term and long-term, Josh? Yeah. You have to store all memories. Even if it's just for a blip, you're going to be storing it or it's not a memory. Right. Even the shortest of short-term memories is a memory. And there are three ways they believe that we store these memories. We already talked about the sensory stage. Then you have the short-term, if it's deemed important

enough to remember, at least for a little while, and then eventually long-term. Yeah. If it's really important to you. Which there's different ways to look at long-term memory. The way that I found is that long-term memory is this dormant neural projection. All the different neural connections that make up that rich memory from long ago, that it's there. It can be activated. That's long-term memory. Short-term memory is when it's active. And then working memory, which isn't in this article, working memory is like bringing something to mind and then the action of consciously keeping it in mind. Right. Like repeating a phone number over and over again. Right. That you knew before, but you're having to remind yourself you're keeping it in your working memory. Well,

it's funny you mentioned phone number because short-term memory is really limited. I love this stat. It says that short-term memory can hold about seven items for no more than 20 or 30 seconds at a time. Yeah. So that's why when you see something like a phone number, you shouldn't be able to remember that. So what you do is you break it down, or it's already broken down, usually for you, into three sets of three, or two sets of three and one set of four. Right. I would be missing a digit. And that's how you remember things. And then saying it over and over, and there's all sorts of exercises you can do to remember things like when you meet somebody, that's where I'm bad. You know how I am with remembering names. Yeah. I can never remember

names. But you're also very friendly. You can be like, hey, I recognize your face. What's your name? Well, yeah. And I might remember, you could say, you met this girl, Francis, at this thing that we did. And I'd say, who? I'd say, oh, the lady who wore the overalls and the flip flops. Like, I'll remember things like that forever. Names, forget about it. Yeah. I don't know what that says about me. That's why you have all the names of everyone you've ever met written down on your hand. That's why I have no friends. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take to America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute

2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Step out of piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Ready, set, slay. Squirrel Friends, the official

RuPaul's Drag Race podcast is taking you behind the scenes of RuPaul's Drag Race season 15 on MTV with me, Alec Moppa, and my co-host, Lonnie Love. Alec and I will recap the latest episode, The Best and Worst Looks, and we'll even be joined by some of your favorite queens along the way. One thing's for sure, there is no shortage of queens this season because we are witnessing the biggest cast in RuPaul's Drag Race Herstory and the stakes are higher than ever with the largest cast prize in Drag Race Herstory. So make no mistake, the competition is going to rev up. Watch season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race every Friday on MTV. Then join us on the podcast right after the show to recap the episode.

Deep brief on all the looks and more. Listen to Squirrel Friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. But long-term memory can store everything forever if you wanted to. Yeah, that seems like a G-Wiz. We don't really know exactly what's going on kind of statement. I totally agree. When I read that, I was like, really? Yeah, unlimited capacity forever. Yeah, I don't know about that one, but I would agree that it's at least as much as we need. Or another way to look at it is, what if we are all operating pretty much at capacity? How much more incredibly intelligent would we be if we had even like 25% more memory storage? Yeah, true. But like we mentioned earlier,

things that are important to you, you're more likely to remember. And then when you're encoding, how you're perceiving things. That's why I probably, when I meet someone, I look at their shoes and what they're wearing, I guess. And I'm distracted. I'm not thinking of the fact that they said their name when they shook my hand. Well, you just hit two big points. One, that something that is meaningful to you, you're going to remember more. Yeah. That's because emotion is usually attached. The emotion, the seed of emotion is the amygdala and it is directly connected to the hippocampus. It's got like a direct line to the hippocampus like coming through, I'm first, right? The saddle on the seahorse, if you will. Yes. And that's great. That was really

good. Thank you. And there's, I guess, one of the big theories behind what emotions are, why we have them is they're basically like learning guides, they're teaching guides. Like, you feel fear, you're going to remember that you feel fear when you see a bear and you're going to stay away from bears. Right. Or joy makes us all, you know, makes us feel familial with other people. So we live in groups, which is, which is safe, right? Yeah. Away from it keeps bears away, you know, eight people could beat up a bear rather than just one. Right. So we have emotions and we learn from our emotions, which is why we managed to remember things so much more clearly when there's an emotion attached. And if you examine most of your memories, there's probably going to be some sort of emotional

memory, I guess, beneath the surface there. Like, have you ever watched a movie and, you know, it's really dramatic and intense. And that scene ends and you kind of come out of it like you were just totally sucked in. Yeah. And you kind of come out of it because the next scene started and it's, it's, you know, the buildup hasn't happened yet for that scene. But you realize you have this kind of remnant, uneasy feeling that you have no idea what it belongs to any longer. Yeah. And then you realize for, wait a minute, I was just identifying with the movie. Right. So I, that's, I think that's kind of the, the same kind of underlying emotional memory that can be attached to anything. And that makes it more poignant and more likely to be remembered. Yeah, exactly. And that, and that may

be more important to one person than another. So it's typical to say you have a good memory or a bad memory. And what's probably more likely is that you might be really good at remembering some things, but not others. You know what I'm saying? I do. And if you're having trouble remembering something, it's not like your entire memory system is, is not working. It's probably like one part because I think there's three stages to actually keeping a memory around. Right. And it just means one of those is not working quite well. Well, what are they? Why don't you tell me? Okay. Well, basically that you can say that when, well, let's take an example of eyeglasses. Okay. Um, which you neither one of us wear. Right. But let's say we did. And we're going to bed,

right? You're going to bed in a separate for me. Okay. And, um, you're, you take your glasses off and you, you toss them, you know, off to on the nightstand and go to sleep. Right. If you looked at your eyeglasses, where you set them, you were, you would be perceiving their placement encoding, right? Which is going to make it like clear for that memory to be retained. Right. And then when you wake up, since the memory is retained, you'll be able to retrieve it. Right. So those are the three steps. It's awareness, retention, and then retrieval. Right. And any of those three is where the breakdown can occur. Yeah. And I've heard, you know, there's all sorts of tips. Like if you say out loud as you're, as you're doing it, I'm putting my eyeglasses on the nightstand.

That might help you. You might seem a little weird, but that'll help you remember it. Yeah. Yeah. So Chuck, what about aging? Like there's this underlying fear among everybody that as we get older, our memories are going to go. And that's, that's true in a lot of cases, but it's not necessarily, you know, it's often associated with Alzheimer's or dementia or something. That's not necessarily the underlying mechanism. It's not the mechanism, but it does happen. There is a breakdown that starts with the onset of sexual maturity. Oddly, it's linked to that. You start forgetting things. Yeah. And it, I think it gets worse and worse until we reach our 50s. Yeah. It's like 20s to 50s is when you're, you really have some trouble initially.

Right. But the brain isn't changing its structure or anything. It's the connections that start to fail. Is that right? That's what I understand. Yeah. Although they did say the brain in the hippocampus shrink in your 70s. It depends. Yes. I think what they're finding though is that a lot of it has to do with the lack of stimulation. Well, that's huge. Yeah. They found that rats that are raised with lots of toys or they are given lots of toys in a stimulating environment later on in life have literally fatter, healthier cells, brain cells, neurons, bones than their counterparts. And the same is in humans as well. At the very least, we know that our neurons shrink as we get older, like you said, but they found, they found that stimulating

environments, like, you know, if you're in a nursing home and there's a lot going on rather than just like, go sit in your room. Right. The people at the lots going on nursing home are going to be a lot more, I guess, intelligent later in life or at the very least, they're going to have better memories is another way to put it. Yeah. Well, Emily's grandmother, as you know, is 90. And she is has a very robust personality and memory. And she is, I think it's all due to the fact that she exercises that muscle quite a bit. She does word puzzles every day. She's she's on the internet more than I am. Yeah. She's on all over our Facebook page. And she just, you know, that's how you stay vital. If you don't Facebook, that'd be a heck of a endorsement. Yeah.

Facebook lets you live forever. But it's true though. I mean, any way you want to go about it, if you're exercising that noodle, sure, it's going to stay strong. And you can regenerate and stay vital and not not slip darkly into the night. And also, they're, they're pretty sure that a reduction in production of acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter that's strongly associated with memory formation. Yeah, they kind of pinpointed that. Yeah, they're not exactly sure how that works. But they know that like if you the more acetylcholine you have the better memory you have and vice versa. But they can actually reverse that, right? What through the mental exercises? Yeah. Yeah, I think you can boost production like that. And

I'm sure pretty soon I'll have acetylcholine shots where you can just shoot right into our brains like kind of like memory junkies. If you're a smoker or a drinker or generally unhealthy, it's going to, you know, impact your memory too. And then lastly, sadly, I say that sadly, this is the one that I find the most fascinating about memory. There's something called sleep dependent memory consolidation. And basically what happens, remember when we were talking about sleepwalking, your brain goes through your, you go through two phases, one where your body's active, but your brain is out. Right. And then the REM sleep, the deepest sleep, which where your body can't move, but your brain's going, right, basically taking advantage of your, you napping,

so that it can do some paperwork or whatever. Right. And it goes through and fires all the neural connections that were used that day. Maybe some are kind of fading a little bit here, there fires those. And while you're sleeping, your brain is basically creating perception again. Right. Gotcha. By firing your, your neural projections, which I think is probably the best explanation for dreams I've ever heard. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Well, I will just close by saying, if I have ever met you and I don't remember your name, please don't be offended, because I guarantee you, I recognize your face. Who was it Tammy with the overalls in the flip flops? I'll remember all that stuff. I remember, I wouldn't say who last time I was in, last time

I was in New York, Emily marveled at, I saw, I think two different people that I said, Hey, that person was at our, our trivia night, you know, a year and a half ago or two years ago or whatever. She said, you remember that? I went, yeah. So I remember all those faces. That's very good. Just not the names. And if you think your memory's going, try paying more attention. Distraction is one of the greatest threats to memory formation. And if you don't form a memory properly, you're not going to remember it. Yeah. And you'll still be yourself. That sounds so basic. But yeah, proper encoding requires concentration and really, you know, look at the glasses as you set them next to the alarm clock and think, I just put them there. Yeah. So obey humans. Boom. If you

want to learn more about memory type memory, you should probably type human memory, because I'm pretty sure if you just type memory, a lot of computer stuff is going to come up in the handy search bar, howstuffworks.com. You don't want to read any of that. It's, well, I'm, yeah. Now it's time for a listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this maggot mania. Yeah, they really got the people. I always find it like eye opening when I just tell a story for my life and everybody's like, oh my God, I couldn't eat. Yeah. I'm like, oh, sorry. All right. This is from Kath in Australia. Oh, hello guys. I have done the exact same thing as you, Josh. I put some meat in a plastic bag in the kitchen garbage bin, which also had a lid and woke up to a moving floor. Only I was not wearing

my glasses, so she might forget where she laid them. I was doing a little cleaning and it slowly dawned on me what had happened. I had begun my morning by sweeping. I had made cookies the night prior and was noticing all these little balls of dough on the floor. They were very hard to sweep up. I became more and more confused at the huge amount of tiny balls of dough until I bent down and had a closer look. It was like a horror movie. My blood went cold and I crouched in utter panic. I then looked across the floor and these little dough balls had made their way across the entire apartment and they made it to the bedroom carpet. Wow. I was totally disgusted and horrified. I think I was even doing that half panic cry, swearing quietly to myself thing. I'm not aware of that.

No, me neither. I got rid of them by patiently sweeping them up. I couldn't bear to squish them and have to clean up that mess and I put them into a plastic bag that I left sitting outside. I sprayed the bag with disinfectant and bug spray after every dump of maggots, but they were still, they were still squirming. I will never, ever, ever leave meat unattended again. I live in Australia where I should have been aware of this. I thought she made cookies. Did she make meat cookies? What was that just unrelated? I think it was unrelated and that maybe explained why she thought there was dough on the floor. Oh no, she said she made cookies night before. This is Australia. Maybe they have meat cookies down under. Oh, I want some meat cookies. I do too.

That's it. That's from Kat. Wow. That was a weird exposition there, Chuck. That was Kat. Yeah. From Australia. Well, thanks, Kat. The maggot hater. With an H or just Kat. K-A-T-H. I'm kind of short for Catherine or Kat. Well, thanks a lot. We appreciate it. I imagine you've moved by now and very sensible of you. Yes. If you've ever made meat cookies or anything that sounds equally awesome, we want to hear it. And if you've got a recipe, cool. And if you're willing to send us some of these things, even better, right? Right. So you can get our mailing address by sending us an email, right? Right. At StuffPodcast.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the

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