Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Amnesia Works

Episode Date: December 7, 2019

Those movies where someone gets hit on the head and can't remember who they are anymore? They're actually not too far off from the reality of amnesia. Learn everything about this bizarre and life-robbing condition with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi friends, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our episode on amnesia. I'm not going to make any sort of joke here.

You can just insert your own. Instead, I will describe this as a great thick episode that is about an astoundingly interesting topic. And it's one of those topics where the movies actually get their depictions of this stuff right because amnesia is just that bizarre. So sit in, buckle up, and listen to this, possibly again, possibly for the first time. Who can remember these things? Sorry.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry, and it's Stuff You Should Know, The Rodeo. Yeah, ironically, I asked if we've done a podcast on memory, and neither one of us could remember. Nope. I'm looking it up on our site, and I don't see it anywhere.

I got to feel like it. It doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't exist. I know. It's tough now with 630, 540 plus. Yeah, I mean, we'll delve into a subject, but it's not necessarily what the whole podcast is about. Yeah, yeah. It was one of the stupid non-how X works titles, so that just throws it off even further.

We may have named it a podcast to remember. Boom. Boom. Pneumonic device. Bitching. Yeah, we totally did one on memory. Yeah. Wow, good job.

Thank you. That was real time. We just worked it out. All right. Well, we're definitely going to go over memory some, because you can't talk about it and amnesia without talking about memory, so we'll just reinforce that. Right. Knowledge.

I'm excited about this one. I thought it was pretty good. Amnesia's, sometimes it's like TV and movies, but not usually. It can be, but yeah, that's a very rare case. So rare that whoever has that kind of amnesia gets to be the intro for our podcasts. Okay. Who? We named Clive Wearing.

Yeah, man. This dude. Yeah. I feel sorry for him. Did you see the cover of the book? He has this look on his face like, what are you doing? That's because he wakes up again every 20 seconds and goes, what just happened? Yeah.

There's a poor man named Clive Wearing. He's a musician and a musicologist, and he is the man with the world's poorest memory, which means Oliver Sacks sleeps on his couch, and he has a memory that refreshes itself every few seconds. He comes out and goes, who's that guy on my couch? Yeah. And he goes, I'm Oliver Sacks. And he goes, oh, hey, Oliver.

It's tattooed on your forearm. And then he goes, Oliver, what are you doing here? That's how it is. It refreshes like that. So this guy, there was a New Yorker profile in him that Conger who wrote this article cites saying that eating an apple is kind of like a magic trick to this guy. Like one second, like he's got the apple in his hand and it's intact. And then he'll look down again and it's just the core a few seconds later.

Yeah. He has no memory whatsoever of eating the apple. He may not even, he probably doesn't remember getting the apple. He just knows there's an apple core in his hand now. So he must have eaten it. Yeah. And we'll go over this later. He has a journaling system because you kind of have to, like in the movie Memento.

And it had some excerpts and it was literally like 905 woke up feeling refreshed, 908, completely awake now, feeling really good, 910, I am fully awake at this point. And he scratches through previous entries just to keep track on where he is in the day. And then it takes like a really jarring turn once in a while, it'll be like 912, I no longer trust my wife. Yeah. There's some weird guy on my couch. She's out to get me.

She could really mess with this guy. Yeah. You know? She could be like Joey Pants and Memento. Yeah. I mean, how many times in an argument do I say, I don't know what you're talking about? That would be so great if that was actually effective. I mean, an argument would just stop.

After a few seconds, it'd be like, but that would be one of the horrible side effects of having amnesia like Clive wearing has. Imagine coming to and your adrenaline is still pumping and you feel the sensation of anger. Right. You have no idea why. Yeah. That is what happens to this guy. Yeah.

So we should say that he's not just like a walking noodle. Like he does have some memories. He has the ability to still play the piano, which is amazing. Yeah. He was an accomplished piano player, but he can play the piano if you ask him to and he'll play it well. But then when he finishes, you can say, oh, what was that piece? And he will say, what piece?

Yeah. And that's that. Yeah. He has both retrograde and enterograde amnesia, which is pretty rare to have both of those at once and we'll get to what all that means, but and we'll get to why as well that he can go make a cup of coffee. We're going to get to it. You know, maybe we already have that's a nice tease.

Apparently one of the symptoms that he first exhibited was he couldn't remember his daughter's name though. Oh, really? One of his earliest symptoms was a headache and then all of a sudden he's like, what's your name kid? Right. And then he thought maybe something's not right here. Well, and this is one of the things about amnesia that is different for everyone and

it's all dependent on what happened to you and the extent of whatever damage you may have suffered. Right. And even two people who have identical types of amnesia, it's going to be different for them. And here's why. Memory is different for everybody. Yeah, exactly.

We all form memories following similar constructs, but for each individual person, what we remember for. Yeah. What makes us remember something, all of that is highly individualized, highly personalized. So much so that Chuck, have you ever wondered if we all see the color green the same? No. You've never wondered? No, I've never wondered that, but now I am and it's fascinating.

You haven't ever wondered that really? Uh-uh. Oh, yeah. Like if our visual cues are subjective? Well, I mean, like I see green and you see green and it's similar, but I haven't ever wondered if like the shade is slightly different or I've never wondered that. Just because of the information coming to our optic nerves, our eyes are slightly different. Like all of those little nuances, like what's green to me is not necessarily green to you,

even though it really is because we both say that's green. Yeah, but if you think about it, there'd be no way to really describe that because if it's all subjective. Right. I would say green is like a combination of these two colors is like, but what are those two colors? Yeah, it's easier to just point and be like, that's green and you go, no, that's not green. Yeah.

We should do one on color blindness. I have it on the list, but it's pretty tough, believe it or not. I did a don't be dumb on color blindness. Yeah. Dogs being colorblind. Right. They're not. They're not?

No. No. They see how you prove that. They see a spectrum. I can't remember. You'll have to watch the don't be dumb on it. Let's talk about the memory process that humans typically follow, even though it is highly individualized.

Yeah. There's a couple of types of memory we all know and love as short-term and long-term. Short-term is good because you remember what you want and you get rid of what you don't. If you didn't, you would be like Mary Lou Henner from Taxi. Oh, did she have an amazing memory? She has a condition that only another dozen people have in the U.S. called H. Sam, highly superior autobiographical memory. Wow.

They just discovered it in 2006 period, not just in her. It's only autobiographical though, but for these people, you say June 1, 1976, and Mary Lou Henner can go, oh, well, that was an off day for taxi. We weren't shooting and I went shopping at Saks and bought the scarf and had a Cobb salad. Like I said, though, it's only autobiographical. They can't necessarily remember everything, just about details of their life, but it's just nuts.

She literally remembers everything that's ever happened to her. That's cool that she remembers that Cobb salad because it was probably pretty good. It's pretty tough to screw up the Cobb salad. Next trip, that's fun, so that's good. But if she had a low, latent inhibition where all of the things, like the click of a light bulb turning on, buzzing from somebody's electric razor next door, the sound of water rushing, the look of everything, the feel of everything, all of that information was coming in and flooding her memory and asking for her attention.

She'd go crazy. Yeah. One of the roles of short-term memory, specifically the hippocampus, is to say, keep that, keep that, throw that away, throw that away, throw that away. This one seems kind of important. Oh, this one has an emotion attached. We definitely need to keep that. That's what's going on with short-term memory.

Apparently, we keep about seven pieces of information up to 30 seconds, which sounds to me like a statement that is going to be utterly debunked as ridiculous in 10 years when we understand memory more, but for the time being, that's our concept of short-term memory. It does seem sort of like a stab at something. It's overly concise, agreed. So that's short-term memory, and short-term memory is basically just holding immediate information in the front of your mind, figuratively and literally.

If it's sorted, it's sorted into long-term memory. That's right. How we store memories, how we make memories, the first thing that happens is we have something called sensory memories, so you hear Josh pass gas, and you hear a sound, and you might smell something. You would not hear that. That's true. You're an SBD guy.

Or let's say you see a strawberry, and you taste the strawberry, and you see what it looks like that is red, and you taste it, and you know it's tart. Those are sensory memories, and our nerve cells detect that. They send that as an electrical impulse along to the end of a nerve. It turns on the little neurotransmitter, which sends a chemical message, a hops, we've talked about synapses, those gaps between nerve cells, the neurotransmitter sends it across that little great divide to the neuron, which is your brain cell, and immediately your brain registers that as a short-term memory.

Whether or not it becomes a long-term memory is whether or not you need to remember that and encode it. That encoding process is what moves it to the deep freeze. You know what I'm curious about. I wish I'd thought to look this up. How does science quantify the present? Can you, is the present 0.8 nanoseconds? Is it the 30 seconds that you're working memories chewing on something?

How quickly does a sensation or an experience become the past? The nanosecond after it happens, I guess. Why a nanosecond? Why not a microsecond? Why not five seconds? Whatever the smallest amount of time is, technically probably. I guess so. That's a pretty deep thought, though, for a Tuesday afternoon.

That green? It's like I took acid earlier. Sweet. Encoding for long-term memory is where we were. All of this stuff is coming to the hippocampus, and the hippocampus works in concert with some other parts of the brain, the amygdala, the thalamus. The amygdala is big on emotion, the thalamus is big on routing sensory stuff, and pairing it with emotion.

Emotions play a big role in memory, because if you pair an experience with an emotion, it's going to have that much more of an impact on our neural pathways that are formed. That's what encoding is. The things you remember most, you're basically leaving a trail of breadcrumbs along this pathway if you want to retrieve a memory. The stronger, like you said, if it's tied to emotion, it might be stronger, more reinforced, or if it's something you have to remember a lot, that breadcrumb trail is going to be with larger pieces of bread, easier to spot.

The more times it's traversed, the more well-worn the path grows, the stronger that memory is. That's a mechanism called long-term potentiation, where an initial sensory experience becomes a hard encoded memory in our long-term memory. You could crack open one of our brains and say, see this neural circuit right here? That's my memory of my last birthday. See that donut? That's just there. It just started growing a few years ago.

I'm waiting for it to fully mature before I harvest it. That was always one of the early Simpsons had that, I think. It showed people's thought bubbles at one point, and Homer's was just a donut. Yeah. It was pretty good. I can see that. Like you said, this is all part of the limbic system. I don't think we said that.

No, we didn't. Which is your reward system. You experience emotions through it. Yeah, learning memory, all that is tied to the limbic system. Our thoughts are being stored in the cerebral cortex. I should say, is it our episodic? Well, short-term. That's in the cerebral cortex.

That's right, because if you take a specific type of memory, which we'll get to in a second, it usually gets stored in the region that's responsible for processing it as it happens in the first place. Broca's area, responsible for processing language, there's also your language-related memories are stored there. That's a good point. That time that guy shouted at you in Spanish, you didn't know what he was saying. You can crack open the Broca's area, and there it is.

The cortex is where you temporarily put it. It works with the hippocampus to send it to, like you said, whatever part of the brain. I didn't know that. That's interesting, though. It lives where it was originated. Makes total sense. Yeah, again, I have a feeling that our understanding of memory is tenuous enough that a lot of this stuff is going to change in 10 years, 5 years, 15 years, but for the time being,

this is our understanding. Well, like with anything in the brain, it's just like, there's still so much mystery, you know? Yeah. It's shrouded in it. The gray area. All right, so there's many types of long-term memory. They are as follows, and these will come up throughout the show.

Your explicit or episodic memory is what we do when we study for a podcast, basically. It's like facts and information, specific stuff. Right. We read it, we learn it, we know it. Yeah. Cramming for an exam. That's how you do it. You've got procedural or implicit.

These are sensory and motor memories. That's how you know how to make a cup of coffee. It's like muscle memory. Yeah, it becomes less a memory and more something that you've done by repetition over and over. That's why Clive can make that cup of coffee. Or can play the piano still. Yeah, he doesn't remember how to play the piano. His fingers just do it from muscle memory.

Right, he doesn't consciously remember. He does have procedural memories. Exactly. We've got semantic memory, which is organized and categorized memories. So it's kind of like a meta version of type of memory, where if you're thinking about what your favorite bands are or something, you have a file of all the bands you ever listened to that maybe there's a subfolder in that file of the ones that you've ever heard that you like.

And all of those are based on your experiences of listening to Led Zeppelin or Boogie Down Productions or The Carpenters. I can go on. So when someone asks you what your favorite band is, you're scrolling through that folder. Right, and what you're doing is accessing your semantic memory. Or you could just say pavement. You could be like, look at the t-shirt, bud. You just default and say pavement and you're good to go.

Let's go. Pixies for you, probably, huh? Yeah, I would say these days I would go more with Morrissey. Oh yeah? Yeah. Whoa. Oh, he's always been up there nipping at the Pixies heels, but I would say Morrissey may have taken the lead recently.

Yeah, I remember hearing the Smiths for the first time in like ninth grade. I was like, man, who are these guys? They still hold up. Oh yeah. And if you listen though, it's like, well, no, you mean the Smiths? No, I love the Smiths. But if you listen to Morrissey's career, like all it was was the evolution of Morrissey started with the Smiths and he just kept going and he just hit his stride even more

after the Smiths. Yeah, I like Morrissey even more than the Smiths. Man. All right. That felt good to get off my chest. You won't find me dissing Maz under any circumstances. No, why would you? He's the man.

So you've got emotional, long-term memory. Those are, well, emotional, like super intense memories about something that may have happened to you and then spatial, which are just the spacing of an area. I remember that in the dark, when I go to the bathroom, that I have to walk around my nightstand. Oh yeah. That's the good one. Running right into it.

Man. That'll break your toe. Although that happens. And I kind of, I don't necessarily take issue with emotional memories being broken out as their own thing, but it seems like emotion is one of the drivers of memory formation. Even if it's just the slightest feeling, it seems like emotion is attached to all memories. Like it's a signal like, remember this. Right.

It's also a way, it's an aspect of memory as well. Like when you recall a memory, strawberry, if you have your first strawberry after somebody mashes it in your face and like twists your nipples and walks away, right? You're probably going to associate that bad feeling with strawberries for a while. There's nothing worse than strawberry tuffs. So all memories have some amount of emotion to them, which means all memories are emotional. But Chuck, that doesn't mean that for the rest of your life, you're going to have kind of a sour taste in your mouth when you're eating a sweet strawberry because of that

initial experience, because memories are subject to change because of neuroplasticity. That's right. Although you may as well like. You might remember it, but I'll bet you don't have the emotional experience of it over and over again if you eat enough strawberries and experience them in different situations and settings. Right. I guess you're right.

Like if something has made me sick in the past, I have an aversion to it, but I don't power through it. Like I just leave it there. I won't drink Milwaukee's best beer anymore. Really get sick of that? Yeah, like 25 years ago. And just the smell of it now, immediately I'm just like, boo-boo. That's funny.

If you wanted to, you could power through it. And after enough times, what you'd be doing is activating that neural circuit, that long-term potentiation and refreshing it a little bit, changing your idea of what Milwaukee's best is all about. Boy, that's a commercial. They should send us some beer and I'll get over it. There you go. But I won't get so drunk that I pass out and forget because we'll get to that.

That's a real thing. Yeah, it is. It's a kind of amnesia. It is. Literally. That's what I want. No, thanks. I'm going to see Stephen Malkman tonight, full circle.

You want to remember that? I do. And then the third type of memory is where you combine short-term memory with long-term memory and you come up with working memory. One example I saw during research is when you're looking at a menu, you're going down a menu to decide what you want to eat. You're taking in that information from that menu and you're creating a little bit of an episodic stimulus in your short-term memory and then you're accessing your long-term memories

maybe from having pork chops before and you're comparing the two, that's your working memory. So that's a huge aspect of memory as well and they think as it stands right now that it's basically a combination of short-term memory and long-term memory, mixing them together and there you have your menu choice. And that's just your day-to-day kind of deciding things. Exactly. That's what your working memory is. Yeah.

And it's a very dumb way to say it, but you know what I mean? Your day-to-day. All right, so I guess we can talk about amnesia a little bit now, right? Yeah. Forgetfulness is good. It's not a bad thing to forget. You should remember the important things, but like we said, it frees up your brain of the stuff we don't need and amnesia is nothing more than a really bad case of the forgets

brought on by, it can be brought on by a lot of things, but a lot of times it's literally an injury to your brain. Yeah. Well, that's neurological amnesia. Yeah. Which is the first kind that we're talking about here. It can come on from a stroke. Yeah.

It can come on from your, you're just not having enough oxygen for a little while, drugs, drugs can bring it on. Alcohol. Yeah. What else? Like blunt force trauma. Yeah. Tumor.

Electroconvulsive therapy. That was another good episode we did. Yeah. In the case of Cly wearing, he had herpes encephalitis, a viral infection. That can do it. It destroyed his, basically cut the cord of the hippocampus and the cortex. Well, give them that analogy. That's a great analogy, the telephone cord.

Yeah. And then this is thanks to Kristen Conger who wrote this. I don't know if we mentioned that. If your memory is a telephone, the hippocampus is the phone cord. And the synapses that we talked about are the, in the cortex, those are the voicemail messages. So in his case, he had damaged to his cortex, I believe, and the hippocampus, right? Yeah.

He has one of the more severe versions of amnesia. So because the phone cord was cut in the hippocampus, that's why he has no ability to form any long-term memory, because there's just no pathway. And the voice messages are erased, essentially, because of the damage to the cortex. And there's no way to, they may be there still, but there's no way for him to access his voicemail account any longer. Right. So he is a really bad case of neurological amnesia.

And analogy. I had Mr. Telephone Man in my head, that new edition song. Oh yeah. The only way to get it out was to go listen to it. It worked, too. So when you dial your baby's number, you get a click every time. Mr. Telephone Man. It's a good song.

It is a good song. New edition was pretty good. Yeah. And while we've gone over Bel Biv DeVoe. When? I've dropped a couple of references over the years that very few people notice. Were you a Bel Biv DeVoe fan? Sure.

Okay. A little bit. I mean, you know, that wasn't really my music, but. I was a Bel Biv DeVoe edition man myself. Gotcha. That was a big Bobby Brown guy. So with this, with neurological amnesia, there is damage to the structure. And it just shuts down the whole system.

Right? Yeah. It cuts that cord. And we talked about all of the different ways you can get that. Yeah. And it can be, like we said, depending on how severe the injuries are, it's not always completely cut, but it just may be damaged, so you may have either really bad amnesia, like live wearing, or maybe not so bad.

Right. And neurological amnesia is very often permanent, but it's also very often stable, unless it's associated with a degenerative brain disease. Right. It's usually like after whatever event happened to you, whatever you come to remembering, or maybe after you fully recover, after you hit that point where you're like, I don't remember anything else, or I can't form new memories after X number of minutes or seconds or whatever.

Right. It's going to stay like that. Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse, and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for

her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we were talking about neurological amnesia. That's one type, and the other type, and there's different ways to break them out, but the

other main type is dissociative amnesia, which is brought on by intense amounts of stress. Yeah, it can be a trauma. The good news is it's usually temporary, and it can come to light in a couple of different ways. Let's say you had some super traumatic event. That can either damage your memory as a whole because of massive amounts of cortisol from stress, or it could just be the one event that you blocked out, like a really bad mugging that scared you or a car accident or something.

You might not have any memory just of that. That's actually how they divide or subdivide dissociative amnesia. There's a global dissociative amnesia, which is autobiographical, which is like, who am I? What happened after witnessing your family be murdered or something horrific like that? You don't remember anything about anything. The other type is situational dissociative amnesia, where you remember yourself, you remember who you are, your address, everything except that murder that you witnessed.

Which can be a good thing. Yeah, it can be. You can't get rid of that memory. You could definitely interpret it as a safeguard by the brain. Either way though, what's happened is, like you said, cortisol has been released, which has been shown to affect the hippocampus, and it also affects the brain's plasticity, or its ability to form new memory. Basically, one way to put it, especially with situational dissociative amnesia, is the brain

says, this is so stressful that I'm overwhelmed with cortisol and I can't form new memories right now. Therefore, this never happened. You know, one thing that was interesting is hippopotamuses. I saw this on Animal Planet the other day. They are so stressed out, especially sadly, little babies that are orphaned because of poaching for rhino horns. Did I say hippopotamus?

Rhinoceros. Yeah, they feel for the rhinoceros. The rhinoceros, I was thinking hippocampus, I think, they can die from too much cortisol from being stressed. Yeah, so sad. Like a little baby rhino might die because their parents died just from cortisol, like massive amounts of cortisol. We have to update our, can you die of a broken heart episode then?

I think we just did. Okay, we can check that off the list. That's right. Okay, yes, stress is a killer, you know this, literally, and it can cause amnesia. This is not, I think a lot of people suspect that when it's not neurological and there's not an organic cause, like a brain injury for amnesia that it's possibly somebody faking or something like that, no, they are so stressed out that the chemicals, the chemical composition in their brain has prevented new memories from forming.

Not plastic anymore. The thing is, dissociative amnesia is very frequently temporary. There might be something that triggers a memory that leads to a cascade of memories that restores the person's memory fully. Yeah, you see that in movies too, that's a big popular one for fiction. Yeah, it's crazy that there's like, I mean, it's in movies, it happens far more frequently than in real life, but it's not terribly far off. Not because the movies are really kind of keeping it close to reality, just that amnesia

is like, can be that crazy. Right, right. You can kind of do anything and someone's probably had that kind. So we mentioned weaving, wearing, Clive wearing has both retrograde and enterograde, and that is a couple of other ways that doctors can categorize it is by the type of memory. He has both. Retrograde means you can't remember the past, and enterograde means you can't make the new memories, and since he has both, he's in big trouble.

Enterograde is a little more like the movie Memento, when every 30 or 40 seconds you're born anew. But even still, if you haven't seen Memento, just go ahead and fast forward through this part, but he wrongly remembers his own past, which is a symptom of retrograde amnesia that you confabulate. You basically come up with imaginary things your mind does to fill in the gaps, and you believe them to be real, but they're not real. It's imagined.

Yeah. Remember, that's how he turned out at the end, like he wasn't the insurance adjuster. That wasn't a case like that was his life. Right. Yeah. And also very, especially in that movie, very easily to be taken advantage of, the one scene when he was paying rent, when he kept paying rent, like I was like, yeah, your rent's due.

Right. And yeah, like I was a jerk. But he has a system, and we'll talk about that coming up too. So let's talk about enterograde. Enterograde is the inability to form new memories. Yes. And it's pretty simple. Basically, there's something wrong with the hippocampus right then.

Could be permanent, in which case you end up like Clive wearing, and you can't form new memories, or it could be temporary. Could be drunk. That is why enterograde amnesia is far more common than retrograde. Yeah. It's one reason. We can easily assault our hippocampus through booze, and as an example of how procedural memory still stays intact, you can walk and talk and move around and everything, and then

wake up the next morning and be like, how did I get here? No matter how hard you try, you're not going to remember specific details if you've fully blacked out, because when you were fully blacked out, your hippocampus was no longer taking all this information and forming memories, like they just don't exist. That's enterograde amnesia. And it depends on who you are. Some people might have an alcohol blackout way easier than others, but if you're blacking out from alcohol, you're drinking too much.

Sure. Yeah. Or someone with a super low tolerance and blacks out really easily. Yeah. Blacking out is blacking out. It's a line for everyone. It doesn't mean you're passing out. You're still doing stuff and saying stuff.

You're blacked out. You're blacked out. But it can be kind of tricky, because if you think about it, you wake up the next morning and you're like, how did I get here? What happened? And by that time, last night was the past, which makes you think, oh, that's retrograde amnesia. The amnesia is related to your ability to form memories or access old memories.

So with enterograde, your ability to form new memories in the present, which was while you were drunk and blacked out, that was enterograde amnesia. That's right. Retrograde amnesia is totally different, because it is the destruction of those voicemail messages. Of your past. Yes. Which is super sad. Yeah, because what's life if it's not a collection of memories and hope for the future.

Look at you. And this microsecond right now. With retrograde, if it's severe, basically your most recent memories, which aren't as strong and reinforced yet, are the ones to go first. And then depending on how severe your retrograde amnesia is, it'll go further and further back in your little memory file and start destroying them. Or if you're the case of wearing, if you have it super bad, you might not remember your past at all.

Right. He does remember his wife. He does remember his wife. And that theory, or that is called, is that Rebot's law, R-I-B-O-T? I would say Rebo. Rebo. It looks pretty French. It does look French.

That is that pattern of destroying those newer memories first and then going back and back depending on how severe it is. And there's a reasoning to it behind the whole thing. It's that your more recent memories haven't had years to potentiate and become these well worn paths, so they're easier to wipe out than your longer term ones. But it is totally different retrograde amnesia because it can attack those parts of your brain where those memories are stored. So it might not have anything to do with any kind of damage to your hippocampus.

It can say attack the part of your brain where, again, the language memories are stored in your broker's area. Yeah. Like if you have a stroke, you might not remember how to speak. And that means that broker's area has been damaged via lack of blood flow and oxygen. That might be different. That might be like you lose your ability to speak. I wonder if it does have to do with memory, though, now that you mentioned it.

I don't know. Like when my grandfather had a stroke, he still talked, but they weren't words. But he thought he was talking. In his head, he was saying, no, you turn left up here to go to the gas station to his wife, but it came out as walk and walk and dook and walk and be so walk and walk. But that was unsettling. It was sad and unsettling. How long did he live like this?

And he could see the frustration, too, because in his head, he was saying the right words. But could he hear himself like what was coming out of his, I don't know, because he couldn't tell us. Or he could see on your faces that he wasn't saying what he was saying. I don't know. I mean, I was pretty young, so this is all kind of distant. How long did he live like that? I feel like a few years.

Could he write? I don't remember that. Usually that's separate. Oh, yeah? So, but he could write still. You should find out. I'm curious. Yeah, I should ask my mom.

Was he a good guy? I used to best. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry, Chuck. Yeah, that's right. It happens. It's in my bloodline, too, so I'm sure the same thing will happen to me. Is it really?

Well, I will crop you up in front of the microphone and we'll do a podcast like that. And you'll just translate for me? Yeah. That's very nice. He's saying he likes pavement. You could just default to that, and that would always be sort of happy. I'd be like, oh, that's fine. I was really saying I was hungry, but...

You'd go, walko. Yeah. It was weird, though. His language was very consistent. It had that familiar like, there was a lot of walk and walk and like that sound coming out. Like he made up his own language? Yeah, sort of.

It was really interesting. Man, that's interesting. And the thing is, is that's how they figured out that different parts of the brain are responsible for different, I guess, different aspects of our personality or life. Like speaking is different than hearing and writing. And if you're just because you can't talk or form words doesn't mean you can't hear and understand words or write words. Write or think in your head the right words, even though they're not coming out right.

So with both of these kinds of amnesia, we should point out that your explicit or episodic memory is what you're losing, but your implicit or procedural memory is usually still intact. Long as your cerebellum is good, that's why you might be able to make the cup of coffee or ride a bike, these things that are just ingrained in your brain. And that's why Clyde Wearing can play the piano. But he can't remember who his favorite composer is. So Wearing is a really good example of how somebody can live with amnesia. Number one, he has an amazing caretaker, his wife, who basically she takes care of him.

Yeah. I bet she does little things, just where she wants to eat that night. It's like, no, we ate there last night. I'm not going there again. Right. He's like, we did? Sure. Or she can really get him going where every time he looks down, he's like, ooh, her, she's

kiss. Right. Ooh, her, she's kiss. Just to delight him a little bit. Yeah. It'd be fun to do that. Yeah, exactly. But yes, he has a good caretaker, which is important because there's no treatment for

amnesia. There's no cure. Right. They can't inject you with something and all of a sudden your memories come back. So most treatments for amnesia deal with figuring out how to navigate life under the new change to the way you remember things. Yeah. It's all about systems.

There's a system in place that you don't deviate from in Clive's case. In the case of a Minto, he used tattoos and Polaroids. Yeah. And notes for himself. Yeah. Sticky notes. And that's what Wearing does, basically. He keeps a journal.

And like I said, he crosses things out as he goes, so he knows where he is in the day. Right. He also... As he can look at his journal and says, no, I woke up three times already. Right. I don't need to keep writing that. You can stop writing that. Yeah.

So the other aspect of forming routines is that they involve habits and the habits, remember your procedural memory is still intact. So you end up just knowing, how does he know to get up and go to the journal if his memory refreshes every few minutes or every few seconds? It's because he's formed a habit, a procedural memory of there's a journal and you should go to it. So he knows what we would call instinctively through his procedural memory of using the journal over and over again.

He's formed a habit. So that helps big time. Also smartphones help big time too. Yeah. Because he can access all sorts of stuff. Set reminders. He's got a calendar right there. Basically what most of us do, except take into the nth degree, you know.

Like I rely... I have a terrible memory, you know this. So I rely heavily on calendars and notes and reminders. And I don't even have amnesia as far as I know. Can't you imagine like every time he pulls his iPhone out, he's like, wow. Right. Look at this thing. It's reminding me and it's a computer in my hand.

Yeah. The future is here. I'll bet his wife is so sick of hearing him say, the future is here. We really poked fun at this guy a lot. Yeah. I hope he's not listening to this. He won't remember anyway. There it was.

Psychotherapy if you have disassociated amnesia can help out. I imagine that's a tough case to tackle, because not only do you have to get to the root of this, like you have to figure out everything else first, you know, and then sort through this lost. You have to regenerate the autobiographical information and figure out which part of it is the real problem. So it's like this huge massive layer on top of a normal case that's already a very pronounced one because this stressful event was so bad that it wiped out their ability to form memories.

Yeah. That's a good point. That's got to be, I'm sure not every psychiatrist can handle that. No, I would say you'd go to a specialist for something like that. An amnesia specialist. Do you think there are those? Sure. Well, I'd like to hear from you if you listen to the podcast.

Okay. An early shout out. Yeah. If you have amnesia from drinking too much, Korsakov syndrome, you should quit drinking so much and maybe take some B1 because what's it called, thiamine deficiency. Yeah. That's all it is. It's just B, vitamin B.

Mm-hmm. Don't you remember, you said that, I can't remember which episode it was, but we were talking about hardcore alcoholics degenerate basically, physically, mentally. That's that. Yeah. And part of it is the thiamine deficiency, which leads to amnesia, which can be treated by laying off the sauce and taking B1. It's so sad.

Have you ever known someone that was truly like pickled themselves? No. It's sad, especially when you know it's from drinking, you know? Sure. It's like a form of dementia, really. Yeah. From booze. Yeah.

And I like to drink, you know? I'm not like poo-pooing the whole thing, but like when you're blacking out and forgetting things and... Getting the DTs. Yeah. That's like, that's bad news. I know that's obvious, but we should point that out because we have kids that listen to this.

That's true. You know? All right. So Chuck, habits. Oh, I read another one. I wrote a review of a woman who wrote a memoir and she had amnesia, huge, big-time amnesia. Was it short? No, but the first line is something like, everything you're about to read, I don't remember.

It was told to me. Oh, wow. She was playing with her kid and the kid, she was spinning him around and I guess he knocked the ceiling fan loose and it was like poorly installed and it came down on her head. And it was like Gilligan's Island level amnesia. Like she gets bonked and forgets things immediately. Everything. Wow.

Yes. She has like world-class amnesia, almost on a clive-wearing level. And she wrote this memoir and in it, she's basically saying like how she navigates through life with amnesia and a lot of it is just faking it. Really? Yeah. She didn't lose her ability to pick up on social cues so she can pick up on what's expected of her and she can kind of guess.

A lot of confabulation probably. Yeah. She says she has no idea why people celebrate birthdays or holidays or anything, but she still does it because she realizes she's expected to. So she's, no, it's not with her, surely there probably is confabulation. She doesn't believe what she's imagining. She's faking it. And apparently she's so good at it that people forget she has amnesia.

But she's saying like, no, I really genuinely don't remember. I'm just good at making it seem like I do so I can fit in. That must be so weird and frustrating. It sounds pretty weird. Like if to have to sing happy birthday at a birthday party and she's like her singing this song, I know I'm supposed to do it, but I don't know why. Like why do these people do this? Wow.

All right, well, let's take another break and then we'll come back with some more amnesia. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so Chuck, you want to talk about amnesia detection, which seems like, oh, that person can't remember anything. They have amnesia or they just got hit on the head with a coconut. Well for wearing, he had a headache, that was the first thing that happened.

The next thing that happened a couple of days later, like you said earlier, he could remember his daughter's name. So warning signs flashing at that point and it really spiraled out of control from there in his case. Sometimes it's super obvious. Like you said, if you injure your head and you can't remember things, then you've got some form of amnesia. Can you recall your past events?

Do you confabulate? Do you confabulate? And the difference between a confabulation and a lie, by the way, is there's intent with a lie. Right, dishonest intent. This person doesn't realize they're filling in the gaps with imagined stuff. Or if they do, they don't want to think about, yeah, there's no malice involved, they're just trying to be normal.

You might have tremors or be uncoordinated, you might be confused and disoriented. You might be in a fugue state, which is where you're wandering around. Yeah, that's with the disassociative identity that can be present for sure. You remember when John McCain entered that fugue state in the 2008 debate against Obama? Did you see that? Yeah. Man, I couldn't believe it. Even Obama was like, what is this guy doing?

Yeah. He even made that face and I think he pointed his thumb off to the side. He went to a different place briefly. Fugue state. One thing you want to do is get a CAT scan or an MRI or both and see a doctor immediately and find out what the heck's going on. If you can't remember things that you usually can, don't mess around. It could be a sign of early Alzheimer's.

It could be a sign of mild cognitive impairment or both kinds of dementia, going to mess around with that. You can get amnesia from those or it can be a symptom of dementia. Dementia and amnesia are not one and the same. Chuck, why don't you see people wearing prevent amnesia t-shirts on like a 5K run walk to fight amnesia? I don't know. Because there's no way to prevent it, aside from maybe wearing a helmet when you're riding

a bike, avoiding trees with loose coconuts, doing what you can to prevent a stroke or cut down on your risk of stroke and steering clear of highly stressful events apparently. There's really not a lot you can do with amnesia. It's bad luck is something that happens to you that causes it. But again, there are possible, they're working on some treatments. There's no pill now, but they're working on treatments in the cutting edge field that's starting to yield possibly results that could be used to treat amnesia are studying fear extinction, the opposite.

They're trying to induce amnesia and PTSD patients, which I think we talked about this in our PTSD episode. I think so. If you've ever seen the movie Eternal Sunshine, The Spotless Mind. That was one of the greatest. Yeah. Was that on your top 100? No.

And I actually had people say, how was that not on there? That was a good movie. It was a good movie. We'll call it 101. Okay. And in that movie, people would pay money to have certain, in the case of the movie, certain people remove from their mind. Like a former girlfriend that was so painful, you just wanted no trace over in your memory.

But they are researching that at LaDue Laboratory at NYU in New York. They did an experiment with rats where they would associate a sound with them being shocked and they found that in adult rats, when they heard that sound, of course, they would freeze up like they were going to get shocked. But in baby rats, they didn't. And what they learned was after about three weeks of age, a sort of a molecular sheath would form around the cells in the amygdala. So they found a drug that would dissolve that sheath and basically leave it prone to manipulation.

Replasticization? Yeah. And then they basically found that if that sheath is gone and dissolved, that they could erase fear memories and the adult rats were not affected any longer by that sound, the buzzing sound. And they don't know about humans yet, but that's obviously why they're studying it. Well, they just don't want to learn about rats in their memory. We know a pretty decent amount of human and memory formation thanks to a specific patient

named... Well, for many, many years, until just a couple of years ago, he was known only as H.M. And he was a man who, now that he's died, his identity has been revealed as Henry Moleson. He was a lot like Clive Waring. His memory didn't refresh quite as frequently, but he was the initial memory patient. Yeah. He had a bike wreck when he was a kid and was epileptic from then on. And those seizures, to relieve those seizures, they removed part of his amygdala, I'm sorry,

all of his amygdala and most of his hippocampus, and it stopped the seizures, which is great. But then they found out, hey, we've got a really good memory patient on our hands now. Right. Because he just couldn't remember. And he was also a very good, easygoing guy. Yeah. They studied him for life. Yes.

From like 1953 on, I think, or 1955 on. Yeah. From then on, we mean to 2008, he just died semi-recently, and they're still slicing his brain apart and sending it out to people to study. And he also, his brain, I should say, proved that memory is not one long circuit. The process is in one long circuit where like with a string of Christmas light bulbs, if one bulb burns out, the whole thing does. Because he could remember stuff from his past up to the time when he got the surgery.

He just couldn't form new memories. So they figured out that long-term memory storage and retrieval was distinct from new memory formation, which, as we've seen, you and I explained fully. Yeah. They should do, I wish more people like Henrietta Lacks and HM were honored. These people should have statues in front of hospitals. These people who suffered for the greater good as far as research and scientific study goes.

The twins that were separated by the New York Family Services for twin studies. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Those kids need some statues. Or who's the kid in the box? The girl in the box? No, the most awful case ever. Oh, B.F. Skinner's kid?

Was that the one that they basically tortured as a child? Oh, very recently. She was recently discovered. I think it was a boy. I heard about a girl who was kept in a closet for her whole life in Texas. I remember that, too. But not to study as abuse, right? Yeah, it was total abuse.

I know we've talked about it before, some boy who was purposefully abused for the purposes of research. Oh, are you talking about... And they didn't have his real name and know who it was for many years. Oh, little Albert. Little Albert. Where they studied fear extinction in him by making him scared of things. He definitely deserves a statue.

See, you remember that and I didn't. So you said something that they couldn't remember his name, I think, is what triggered it. Yeah. And that's part of encoding. I encoded it. That's right. The idea.

Little Albert, they didn't remember his original name. Your trail of breadcrumbs is more solid. So let's talk pop culture real quick, man. Good movies. Memento, you mentioned. Eternal Sunshine of the Spallows. Mind. What else?

One of my favorites is Mulholland Drive. I don't remember amnesia being a part of that, but... Yeah, the one girl couldn't remember anything. The main character? Yeah, the brunette. Yeah. Vanilla Sky. Yeah.

I did not care for. I like the original. I had no problem with it. I know everybody didn't like it. No, I didn't like it. There was original Open My Eyes, I think was the original Spanish language film that was based on. It was really good.

Gotcha. What else? I don't know. Jason Bourne. Yeah. He had amnesia. Yeah. 51st Dates.

That was the cute one about amnesia. It's a cute movie. I didn't see it. And if you... Oh, you used to see it. Okay. And if you reverse your perspective a little bit, Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray has a tremendously excellent memory and everyone else has amnesia every day.

And I think this is a great time to acknowledge the great, great Harold Ramis of Groundhog Day and Stripes and Animal House and Caddyshack and Ghostbusters. And Ghostbusters. Yeah. And what a loss. He defined comedy for our generation. He died at 69, which is so young. So young.

And Chuck, there's no way we could do an amnesia episode without mentioning Benjamin Kyle. You remember him? He was found in 2004 in a dumpster naked and unconscious in Richmond Hill, Georgia. What? And he came... We've talked about him before in like one of those one minute BS things. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he cannot remember anything.

He has complete autobiographical episodic amnesia, retrograde amnesia. And nothing is helping. They've put him on NPR, they've put him on CNN, they put him on ABC, they've put him on news channel, they've done stories on him around the world. He has a website called FindingBenjamin, B-E-N-J-A-M-A-N dot com. And they want to figure out who this guy is. He wants to know who he is. They have not figured it out.

The case is still cold. So he's not faking it? No. If he's faking it, he has totally given himself over to the idea that he will never be found out because he has put himself out there. He lives in a bureaucratic limbo because he doesn't have a social security number. He can't get a new one because he's like 60 years old and the feds are like, what do you need a new...

Use your old one. We gave you one before. And he has no idea. There's a documentary that's coming out about him or that might be out now. Interesting. That's totally legitimate case of full retrograde amnesia waking up in a dumpster naked in Georgia. That is nuts. And the reason he's called Benjamin Kyle is because he's pretty sure his first name

was Benjamin. But when he was taken to the hospital, there was already a John Doe there. So they called him BK because they was found behind a Burger King. So he took the name Benjamin Kyle. So his name could have been Mickey D? Could be anything. Wow. Well, faking it is a thing.

I think Hesse, Rudolph Hesse, the Nazi, I didn't look this up, but I think I remember somewhere that he faked amnesia to get out of his war crimes for a period. I believe it. That guy was at SOB all around. Yeah. He was a Nazi. I don't know. I think he did fake amnesia.

And I think he even fooled his doctors for a time, but then later admitted that he had faked it. I might be wrong. Degenerate. I didn't do specific research on that. We'll see. He was a black shirt, though. No, wait.

He was a brown shirt. I got it wrong again. Brown shirts with the German black shirts were Italian. Okay. All right. Well, that's amnesia. You got anything else? No, sir.

Man, if you want to read more about it, you should type amnesia into the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring up this article. Since I said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. This is from a termite expert. He was a pest control operator for seven and a half years and on the board of the New York State Pest Management Association. Wow. That's high up.

Hey, guys. When you talked about a termiticide treatment, you stated it is injected into the colony. This isn't quite right. It could be misleading to the average homeowner. It makes them think that the colony will be killed off. What really happens is that termiticide is injected to form a barrier on a few inches of treated soil around the foundation of the house and termites come into contact with it. They shortly die.

Eventually, the colony realizes something is wrong and send out alarm pheromones for the others to avoid it. As to the bait, you stated it might leach into the soil. This makes for good radio or podcasting, but again, it's an alarm to the homeowner that's not necessarily true. Bait is solid and small and it will not leach, but it will explode. When I was in the business, there were two types of bait. The first was a poison like bait for mice you put in your home.

We didn't use that, but that's about it and simple to understand. The idea is hopefully they will realize something is wrong and not come back. The second type of bait, which we used, interfered with the molting process. You could actually see them turn a milky white. As young termites could not grow, the colony died as a nation would die if no new children were born, like the movie Children of Men. Man, that's a good movie. This program was the only one at the time that would eliminate a colony.

I hate to nitpick. You guys run a good show and I just want to see it done right. That is from Sean Duffy of Pitsburg. A termite expert who likes to pick nits. Hey. Thanks, Sean. We appreciate that, actually. I'm just teasing.

If you want to tell us something we misstated slightly or otherwise, you can let us know. Join us on Twitter at SYSK Podcasts is our handle. Join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Check out our YouTube channel. Just search Josh and Chuck and, as always, join us at our home on the web, the luxurious estate stuff you should know.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

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