May 5, 2011 • 33 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Davis, Charles W Chuck Bryant.
(00:21):
I remembered your name, and this is stuff you should know. Lizzy,
had you cracked up there? If that makes it into
the gut, it's not going to because that was pre
hay and welcome to the podcast. Everything before that I
always gets cut out. You know that. I don't think
a little giggle beforehand might be in. We would be
fired if we didn't cut out everything that came before that, right, maybe, Chuck,
(00:43):
you ever heard of a guy named Nicolas Carr? Yeah? Sure,
I know you. Have you ever heard of a little
rag called The Atlantic? Yes? I have. Back in two
thousand and eight, those two things collided, Nicholas Carr in
the Atlantic and he had a very great UM headlined
article called his Google making Us Stupid and Nicholas Carr.
(01:05):
He went on to write a book. He followed that
normal process where like you're writing the book and you're like,
I need some extra cash, so I'll excerpt this or
rewrite you know, like fifteen pages of it, celts to
the Atlantic or whatever. We need to get in that gig. Well,
we have to write a book or be writing a book.
I write a book. We should do that. But it
was I can't remember what the book was was called.
(01:27):
But the article actually made a bigger splash than the book.
Din But basically he was saying, like, we are re
configuring the way we learn through our interactions with the internet. Um, Like,
there's constantly things trying to get our attention on a
web page. You know, it's not like a book with
with without pictures or um, you know, flashing lights, that
(01:49):
kind of thing. We we read horizontally he put it,
rather than vertically, meaning you know, we just kind of
skimmed the surface of a bunch of different stuff rather
than really deeply get into one thing. Action which helps
flex the imagination. Um is pretty much non existent on
the web unless you're like into live journal, you know,
Harry Potter erotica. Right. So, but at the basis of
(02:12):
his argument is Google making a stupid was the idea
that it's actually reforming the way we form memories that
Google he chose Google, You know, just to get a headline,
as the editor did. But um, the the idea that
the internet, the way we read, is re changing or
changing the way that we absorb information and therefore form memory.
(02:36):
It says a lot that he was asking if it's
making as stupid because we here in the West equate
memory a good memory, too, intelligence, too smart. Um, I
guess what I'm trying to drive at, very clumsily, is
how does memory work? I thought that was a great
set up, And who knows what the heck we're gonna
(02:59):
look like in a hundred years as a species, how
our brains are gonna be firing, and what the effect
it's gonna have on us. We're gonna have mighty humps. Yeah,
well that's the thing. I mean, you can you can
debate all all day long. Is it stupid? Or are
we just in the middle of evolution? Probably in the
middle of an evolution. I don't think we're gonna end
up like a in idiocricy. You although never possibility, you
(03:21):
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 what it was,
But like the one joke premise of most most times
when a movie has the one joke premise, that kind
of gets old for me. What one joke? Sort of
the one joke everybody's stupid? Yeah, it worth than all right?
(03:43):
Moving on, memories, Josh, are what makes us who we
are if we you know, I imagine if someone has
complete amnesia, they usually don't have a sense of self. Well, yeah,
you know, it depends if you remember h M. Henry Mullison. No.
So he was the patient that proved there's this big
(04:05):
debate over when we think of memory, whether there's like
one part of the brain that's responsible for memory or
whether it's a bunch of different parts of the brain.
And he proved that the multiple memory systems works because
they used to think like, oh, you just got a
big old filing cabinet and your brain just sticks it
in whatever filet belongs in and then you go and
pull it out when you need it exactly. And that's
(04:25):
very it's very sesame street way of putting it. It is, um,
But you know, they were working with what they had
to work with at the time, and they were wrong.
But Hm, like age twenty three, this guy UM who
became known as HM. Patient HM had temporal labectomy to
cure his epilepsy. Oh, that guy also removed his hippocampus
(04:48):
so he could tell you, 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. 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, like Memento. Right,
(05:08):
great movie that he would have proven it to a
memento did not have Ellen page. No it didn't, So
it's on your list of acceptable films. She would have
written in by now Um or not. She may just
be like, I hate those guys so much. Maybe so
(05:29):
uh so, let's let's talk a bit about memory, josh Um.
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,
(05:51):
of your eggs bacon is octuating you didn't need that
slab of ham. What it looked like, maybe, what it
felt like, um in your mouth, how it tasted. So
you're recalling all these different parts, but not complex thing,
not and even just that. I mean, there's so much
more to it, the the tablecloth, whether you were angry
(06:11):
at the weather guy, to remember even what eggs are. Yeah,
you know these memories that go way back, but we
we conceive of it as this one little snapshot of
a memory called what what you had for breakfast? Right? Um?
But all of those different things put together are called
neural projections, right chuck, Okay, so go ahead. Well the
(06:33):
other instance too, that they always mentioned is riding. 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? Um? What about this car barreling down?
I should probably not ride in the center of the
(06:54):
road going the wrong way. So it's just like hundreds
of memories. I can't put a number on it, you
know how many there are? Well, the reason why it's
so difficult is because it's this is all a seamless process,
right exactly. It ding 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 it's
(07:14):
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 just things 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 now, and we should we should disclaim this
(07:35):
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 memory, 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. It's rooted in your senses.
(07:58):
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, um, right, which like, right
now you appear to me as you know, a little
scruffy looking good. You've got your braves cap on, almost
smile right the the ikea lights gleaming off of your eye,
about eyeballs a little bit. All of this is visual information, right,
(08:22):
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, um, you might. You know. The
example they use in the article is the first girlfriend.
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,
(08:44):
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 oh yeah, yeah, okay, breakfast is pretty important to me, right? True?
(09:07):
Is that that is that that's something been your long
term memory though I remember every breakfast I've ever eaten. Okay,
it's because you've only had breakfast four times. Uh So
where are we within the hippocampus, Well, yeah, we're with encoding.
So basically what just happened is the light bouncing off
of you that gives you shape, and all that is
coming into my eyes and be in transforming into electrical information.
(09:29):
It doesn't matter what it is. Like, that's the language
of the brain, right, translates information and stores it in
the hippocampus initially. Right, that's like the big processing, sorting,
routing hub. Yeah. So your hippocampus is like this, uh,
this region of the brain shaped like a sea horse,
which hence the name um that basically says, okay, so
(09:54):
I don't get that part hippocampus. It's not shaped like
a hippopotamus, shape like a sea horse. And why Plus
the name hippocampus means seahorse. I did not realize that, man,
I hope it does. That's how I've always taken it.
So let's call it the seahorse a campus. But basically,
what the hippocampus does is it takes in all this information,
(10:14):
including stuff that I have no idea I'm taking in
at the moment um 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 by combining this, this, and this,
and it's like basically, the the the man behind the curtain.
The hippocampus is the sent center of forming new memories,
(10:38):
and along with the frontal cortex, they work in hand
in 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, um, well, let's say we're
doing it together. We're coming out of the woods into
a meadow and it is um a primal area, and
we're scared of bears, so we're scanning the meadow for bears.
(10:59):
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, So the the hippocampus isn't
in forming any memories of the butterfly or the daisies
or whatever. Maybe we would know, oh, well, there's a
(11:21):
splash of white against the green, so there are flowers there.
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, Um,
it travels while we said this perception and encoding is
where it starts. But then you have to it has
to go somewhere from there, and this is where the
(11:43):
chemistry of the brain comes in, which is endlessly fascinating
to me. Yes, Josh, we have nerve cells, neurons and
these uh, these connect with other cells, not a point
called the synapse, right well, which is actually that's funny
that the author of this article put it like that
because it's actually not a point. It's a gap. You
think that all these things connect, but there is a gap,
(12:05):
and the leap to the other side. The leap of
the gap is uh performed via neurotransmitters that right, and
then latched onto by a dentrite. The little feathery things
on the cells collect. Yeah, they accept the transmission. Come
on in transmission. Welcome to my cell. So Chuck I'm
going to give a couple of stature quick. Okay, there's
(12:27):
possibly as many as a hundred billion neurons in your brain.
It's a lot um. Each of them have many tens
of thousands, are many, many thousands of connections up to
UM which are synapsis, yes, which are which leads to
as many as a quadrillion synapses in the human brain.
(12:49):
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 ten thousand is the high
end that I've heard, But I love that you had
an answer for that. UM. And they're constantly going to
(13:10):
and forming new connections. I think it's something like thirty
to sixty times the second. Near neurons are firing all
over your head and they're not sentence down. They're always changing,
always forming new connections. The more that you do something,
the stronger the connection is going to be. We might
know that in the real world as practice or repetition, right,
(13:32):
but the another word for it is plasticity, where the
brain you're the organizational structure of your brain actually changes
shape it as as you're saying, like, through practicing something
like the repeated firing of a neural connection, right, which
is just an electrical impulse that triggers the release of
neurotransmitters that crosses synapse are accepted in the den drite right,
(13:56):
and the neurotransmitters are the message carried like a certain
type of neurotransmit or like dopamine says hey, everything's just
ire right um, And this information has just passed along
from one neur onto another if the the impulse is
strong enough. Right. But then when you do it again
and again and again, more channels that allow the neurotransmitters
(14:17):
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. That's exactly what's
going on your your neural connection is is that top performance,
(14:42):
peak performance practice makes perfect How to play uh 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 very
clumsily because I forget or I can't write in cursive anymore.
(15:03):
I can't either. I mean, I'd really have to concentrate.
And they're definitely letters that I would forget how to write.
That was a jarring realization for me, that, like, how
do you make the cue? And whatever happened to that Z?
That weird Z like it's all gone and even like
the S and the R and all that like normal stuff,
it's just gone. Yeah, you don't want to see my
(15:25):
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.
Remember that study with the kittens. No, this the really
(15:45):
sad study. I think it's funny that you're asking me
how much I remember and I keep saying no. Um.
There was this study that um that involved kittens having
one eye so and shut from birth, and they would
they were allowed to frolic and play and do whatever,
but they just had one eye so and shut UM.
And then after I think like eight or ten or
(16:07):
twelve weeks, the eye was um released opened 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 that they say,
the left eye had been so and shut during the
stage of development. UM. The neural connections had all traveled
(16:28):
to the right eye, which was seeing, and the ones
that had been there on the left eye that formed
the optic were withered and dead. You know what they
called that experiment, They called the saddest experiment in the
history of the world. It's pretty bad. It's a pretty
bad experiment, but it basically goes to show you that
not only will neural connections wither and die if they're
not used, they'll also migrate to places where they can
(16:51):
be used. There's kind of like a survival of the fittest,
like um 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 f I
I Giraffe neurons can grow up to three ft in length. Really,
(17:11):
are they all in the neck. Isn't that cool? That
is pretty cool. Uh. So we were talking about encoding, Um,
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 this maybe the first time we've
said it, is are we screening this stimuli out during
(17:32):
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, so forget it. Yeah, forget that. So
are we at short term and long term? Josh? Yeah,
(17:53):
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, even the shortest of short term
memories as a memory. And there are three ways they
believe that we store these memories. We've 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
(18:15):
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 all the different neural connections that make up that
rich memory you know from long ago. Um that it's there,
(18:36):
like it can be activated again. It's long term memories,
short term memories 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, like repeating a phone number over and
over again that you knew before, but you're having to
to remind yourself you're keeping it in your working memory. Well,
(18:58):
it's funny you mentioned phone number because short term memory
is really limited. UM. I love the status. It says
that short term memory can hold about seven items for
no more than twenty or thirty seconds at a time.
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
(19:18):
down usually for you UH into three sets of three
or two sets of three and one set of four.
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.
You know how I am with remembering names. I can
(19:39):
never remember names. But you're also very friendly. You can
be like, hey, I 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, that the lady who wore
the overalls in the flip flops. Like I'll remember things
like that forever. Names forget about it. That's why you
(20:03):
have all the names of everyone you've ever met written
down on your hand. That's why I have no friends.
But long term memory can store everything forever if you
wanted to. Yeah, that seems like a ge whiz we
don't really know exactly what's going on kind of statement,
you know, I totally agree. When I read that, I
was like, really, yeah, I don't know about that one,
(20:27):
but it is I would agree that it's um at
least as much as we need or another way to
look at it is, what if we are all operating
pretty much a capacity. How much more incredibly intelligent would
we be if we had even like more memory storage.
But like we mentioned earlier, things that are important to you,
(20:48):
you're more likely to remember. Um. 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 they're
wearing I guess, and and 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's something that is meaningful to you. You're going
(21:11):
to remember more. That's because emotion is usually attached the emotion.
The seat of emotion is the amygdala, and it is
directly connected to the hippocampus. It's got like a direct
line to the hippocampus, like up coming through I'm first
right the saddle on the sea horse, if you will, Yes,
and that's great. Um, the uh, that's really good, and
(21:33):
the there's a I guess. The 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, um, you're going to remember that you feel
fear when you see a bear, and you're going to
stay away from bears. Um Or joy makes us all
you know, what makes us feel familiar with other people groups,
(21:58):
which is which is right away from it keeps bears away.
You know, eight people could beat up a bear rather
than just one. So we have emotions, and we learned
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
(22:22):
beneath the surface there. Like have you ever watched the
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, and you
kind of come out of it because the next scene
started and it's it's you know, the build up hasn't
happened yet for that scene, but you realize you have
(22:42):
this kind of um remnant, uneasy feeling that you have
no idea what it belongs to any longer. And then
you realize, wait a minute, I was just identifying with
the movie, 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
(23:04):
and more likely to be remembered. Yeah, exactly, and that
and and that may be more important to one person
than another. So it's typical to say I 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.
And if you're having trouble remembering something, it's not like
(23:25):
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, and it just means one
of those is not working quite well. Uh, why don't
you tell me? Okay, Well, basically that you can say
that when well, let's take an example of eyeglasses. Um,
(23:46):
would you neither one of us were right, But let's
say we did, and we're going to bed. Right, You're
going to bed in a separate from 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,
(24:08):
you were, you would be perceiving their placement encoding, right,
which is going to make it likelier for that memory
to be retained. And then when you wake up, since
the memory is retained, you'll be able to retrieve it.
So those are the three steps. It's awareness, retention, and
then retrieval, and any of those three is where the
breakdown can occur. Yeah, and I've heard you know, there's
(24:30):
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 will help you remember it.
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
(24:53):
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. Um,
there is a breakdown that starts with the onset of
sexual maturity. Oddly, it's linked to that then you start
forgetting things. Um and it uh, I think it gets
(25:16):
worse and worse until we reach our fifties. It's like
twenties to fifties is when you're you really have some
trouble initially, right, But the brain isn't changing it it's
structure or anything. It's the connections that start to fail.
Is that right? That's what I understand. Although they did
say the brain in the in hippocampus shrink in your seventies.
(25:38):
It depends, yes, I think. Um. What they're finding though,
is that a lot of it has to do with
the lack of stimulation. Well that's huge. Yeah. Um. They
found that rats that are raised with lots of toys
or they are given lots of toys and stimulating environment
later on in life have literally fatter, healthier cells, brain cells,
neurons um then their counterparts, and the same as in
(26:01):
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 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 um
(26:22):
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 ninety and she is uh 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
(26:44):
a bit. She does word puzzles every day, she's she's
on the internet more than I am. She's on all
of our Facebook page and she just you know, that's
how you stay vital. If you don't Facebook, I'd be
a heck of a endorsement. Facebook let you live forever.
But it's true though, I mean, anyway you want to
go about it, if you're exercising that noodle, it's gonna
(27:07):
stay strong and 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
acetal colin, which is a neurotransmitter that's strongly associated with
um memory formation. Yeah, they kind of pinpointed that. Yeah,
they're not exactly sure how that works, but they know
(27:30):
that like if you the more a setal colin you have,
the better memory you have and vice versa. But they
can you 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 they'll have a
setal coline shots where you can just shoot right into
our brains like memory junkies. If you're a smoker or
(27:53):
a drinker or generally unhealthy, it's gonna you know, impact
your memory too. And then last, sadly, this is the
this is the one that um 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,
(28:16):
Your brain goes through your your you go through two phases,
one where your body is active but your brain is out,
and then the R E M sleep, the deepest sleep,
which where your body can't move but your brain's going.
It's basically taking advantage of your you napping so that
it can do some paperwork or whatever, and it goes
through and fires all the neural connections that were used
(28:37):
that day. Maybe some are kind of fading a little
bit here there, fires those and um, while you're sleeping,
your brain is basically creating perception again, right, got by
firing your your neural projections, which I think is probably
the best explanation for dreams I've ever heard. Yeah, that's it. Uh. Well,
(29:03):
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 and the flip flops.
I'll remember all that stuff. I remember. I feel like
last time I was, last time I was in New York,
Emily marveled at I saw I think two different people
(29:24):
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 want? Yeah, so I remember all those faces. That's
very good, just not the names. And if you think
your memory is going try paying more attention. Distraction is
one of the greatest threats to memory formation. And if
(29:45):
you don't form a memory properly, you're not gonna remember it.
I mean it sounds 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 the there. Yeah, so
obey humans boom. If you want to learn more about
memory type memory, you should probably type human memory because
(30:09):
I'm pretty sure if you just type memory, a lot
of computer stuff is gonna come up in the handy
search bar how stuff works dot com And you don't
want to read any of that. It's uh well, I'm yeah,
uh now it's time for a listener made Josh. I'm
gonna call this uh maggot mania. Yeah, that really got
(30:33):
to people. I always find it like, um I opening
when I just tell a story from my life and
everybody's like, oh my god, I couldn't eat. Yeah I'm
I'm like, oh sorry, all right. This is from cath
in Australia. Oh hello, guys. I have done the exact
same thing as you, Josh. I put some meat in
(30:54):
a plastic bag in the kitchen garbage bin, which also
had a lid, and woke up to a moving floor.
Or only I was was not wearing my glasses so
she might forget where she laid them. Um I was
doing a little cleaning, and it's slowly dawned at me
what had happened. I had begun my morning by sweeping.
I had made cookies a night prior and was noticing
(31:15):
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 had bent down and had a closer look.
It was like a horror movie. My blood went cold,
and I crouched an 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
(31:37):
the bedroom carpet. 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. 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
(31:59):
that I left sitting outside. I sprayed the bag with
disinfectant and bug spray after every dump of maggots, but
there 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 mc cookies, she need meat cookies. Was that just unrelated?
(32:19):
I think it was unrelated and that maybe explained that
why she thought there was dough on the floor. Now
she's said a meat cookies night before. This is Australia.
Maybe have meat cookies down and there. I want some
meat cookie. That's it. That's from cat. Wow. That was
a weird exposition there, Chuck, that was cat. Yeah from Australia.
(32:40):
Well thanks Cat the maggot hata h you're just Cat
k A t h cant short for Katherine or Cat. Well,
thanks a lot. We appreciate it. Um, I imagine you've
moved by now and and um, 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
(33:04):
us some of these things even better, right right so
you can get our mailing address by sending us an
email right right at Stuff podcast at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(33:26):
Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more
about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the
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to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Davis, Charles W Chuck Bryant.
(00:21):
I remembered your name, and this is stuff you should know. Lizzy,
had you cracked up there? If that makes it into
the gut, it's not going to because that was pre
hay and welcome to the podcast. Everything before that I
always gets cut out. You know that. I don't think
a little giggle beforehand might be in. We would be
fired if we didn't cut out everything that came before that, right, maybe, Chuck,
(00:43):
you ever heard of a guy named Nicolas Carr? Yeah? Sure,
I know you. Have you ever heard of a little
rag called The Atlantic? Yes? I have. Back in two
thousand and eight, those two things collided, Nicholas Carr in
the Atlantic and he had a very great UM headlined
article called his Google making Us Stupid and Nicholas Carr.
(01:05):
He went on to write a book. He followed that
normal process where like you're writing the book and you're like,
I need some extra cash, so I'll excerpt this or
rewrite you know, like fifteen pages of it, celts to
the Atlantic or whatever. We need to get in that gig. Well,
we have to write a book or be writing a book.
I write a book. We should do that. But it
was I can't remember what the book was was called.
(01:27):
But the article actually made a bigger splash than the book.
Din But basically he was saying, like, we are re
configuring the way we learn through our interactions with the internet. Um, Like,
there's constantly things trying to get our attention on a
web page. You know, it's not like a book with
with without pictures or um, you know, flashing lights, that
(01:49):
kind of thing. We we read horizontally he put it,
rather than vertically, meaning you know, we just kind of
skimmed the surface of a bunch of different stuff rather
than really deeply get into one thing. Action which helps
flex the imagination. Um is pretty much non existent on
the web unless you're like into live journal, you know,
Harry Potter erotica. Right. So, but at the basis of
(02:12):
his argument is Google making a stupid was the idea
that it's actually reforming the way we form memories that
Google he chose Google, You know, just to get a headline,
as the editor did. But um, the the idea that
the internet, the way we read, is re changing or
changing the way that we absorb information and therefore form memory.
(02:36):
It says a lot that he was asking if it's
making as stupid because we here in the West equate
memory a good memory, too, intelligence, too smart. Um, I
guess what I'm trying to drive at, very clumsily, is
how does memory work? I thought that was a great
set up, And who knows what the heck we're gonna
(02:59):
look like in a hundred years as a species, how
our brains are gonna be firing, and what the effect
it's gonna have on us. We're gonna have mighty humps. Yeah,
well that's the thing. I mean, you can you can
debate all all day long. Is it stupid? Or are
we just in the middle of evolution? Probably in the
middle of an evolution. I don't think we're gonna end
up like a in idiocricy. You although never possibility, you
(03:21):
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 what it was,
But like the one joke premise of most most times
when a movie has the one joke premise, that kind
of gets old for me. What one joke? Sort of
the one joke everybody's stupid? Yeah, it worth than all right?
(03:43):
Moving on, memories, Josh, are what makes us who we
are if we you know, I imagine if someone has
complete amnesia, they usually don't have a sense of self. Well, yeah,
you know, it depends if you remember h M. Henry Mullison. No.
So he was the patient that proved there's this big
(04:05):
debate over when we think of memory, whether there's like
one part of the brain that's responsible for memory or
whether it's a bunch of different parts of the brain.
And he proved that the multiple memory systems works because
they used to think like, oh, you just got a
big old filing cabinet and your brain just sticks it
in whatever filet belongs in and then you go and
pull it out when you need it exactly. And that's
(04:25):
very it's very sesame street way of putting it. It is, um,
But you know, they were working with what they had
to work with at the time, and they were wrong.
But Hm, like age twenty three, this guy UM who
became known as HM. Patient HM had temporal labectomy to
cure his epilepsy. Oh, that guy also removed his hippocampus
(04:48):
so he could tell you, 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. 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, like Memento. Right,
(05:08):
great movie that he would have proven it to a
memento did not have Ellen page. No it didn't, So
it's on your list of acceptable films. She would have
written in by now Um or not. She may just
be like, I hate those guys so much. Maybe so
(05:29):
uh so, let's let's talk a bit about memory, josh Um.
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,
(05:51):
of your eggs bacon is octuating you didn't need that
slab of ham. What it looked like, maybe, what it
felt like, um in your mouth, how it tasted. So
you're recalling all these different parts, but not complex thing,
not and even just that. I mean, there's so much
more to it, the the tablecloth, whether you were angry
(06:11):
at the weather guy, to remember even what eggs are. Yeah,
you know these memories that go way back, but we
we conceive of it as this one little snapshot of
a memory called what what you had for breakfast? Right? Um?
But all of those different things put together are called
neural projections, right chuck, Okay, so go ahead. Well the
(06:33):
other instance too, that they always mentioned is riding. 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? Um? What about this car barreling down?
I should probably not ride in the center of the
(06:54):
road going the wrong way. So it's just like hundreds
of memories. I can't put a number on it, you
know how many there are? Well, the reason why it's
so difficult is because it's this is all a seamless process,
right exactly. It ding 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 it's
(07:14):
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 just things 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 now, and we should we should disclaim this
(07:35):
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 memory, 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. It's rooted in your senses.
(07:58):
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, um, right, which like, right
now you appear to me as you know, a little
scruffy looking good. You've got your braves cap on, almost
smile right the the ikea lights gleaming off of your eye,
about eyeballs a little bit. All of this is visual information, right,
(08:22):
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, um, you might. You know. The
example they use in the article is the first girlfriend.
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,
(08:44):
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 oh yeah, yeah, okay, breakfast is pretty important to me, right? True?
(09:07):
Is that that is that that's something been your long
term memory though I remember every breakfast I've ever eaten. Okay,
it's because you've only had breakfast four times. Uh So
where are we within the hippocampus, Well, yeah, we're with encoding.
So basically what just happened is the light bouncing off
of you that gives you shape, and all that is
coming into my eyes and be in transforming into electrical information.
(09:29):
It doesn't matter what it is. Like, that's the language
of the brain, right, translates information and stores it in
the hippocampus initially. Right, that's like the big processing, sorting,
routing hub. Yeah. So your hippocampus is like this, uh,
this region of the brain shaped like a sea horse,
which hence the name um that basically says, okay, so
(09:54):
I don't get that part hippocampus. It's not shaped like
a hippopotamus, shape like a sea horse. And why Plus
the name hippocampus means seahorse. I did not realize that, man,
I hope it does. That's how I've always taken it.
So let's call it the seahorse a campus. But basically,
what the hippocampus does is it takes in all this information,
(10:14):
including stuff that I have no idea I'm taking in
at the moment um 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 by combining this, this, and this,
and it's like basically, the the the man behind the curtain.
The hippocampus is the sent center of forming new memories,
(10:38):
and along with the frontal cortex, they work in hand
in 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, um, well, let's say we're
doing it together. We're coming out of the woods into
a meadow and it is um a primal area, and
we're scared of bears, so we're scanning the meadow for bears.
(10:59):
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, So the the hippocampus isn't
in forming any memories of the butterfly or the daisies
or whatever. Maybe we would know, oh, well, there's a
(11:21):
splash of white against the green, so there are flowers there.
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, Um,
it travels while we said this perception and encoding is
where it starts. But then you have to it has
to go somewhere from there, and this is where the
(11:43):
chemistry of the brain comes in, which is endlessly fascinating
to me. Yes, Josh, we have nerve cells, neurons and
these uh, these connect with other cells, not a point
called the synapse, right well, which is actually that's funny
that the author of this article put it like that
because it's actually not a point. It's a gap. You
think that all these things connect, but there is a gap,
(12:05):
and the leap to the other side. The leap of
the gap is uh performed via neurotransmitters that right, and
then latched onto by a dentrite. The little feathery things
on the cells collect. Yeah, they accept the transmission. Come
on in transmission. Welcome to my cell. So Chuck I'm
going to give a couple of stature quick. Okay, there's
(12:27):
possibly as many as a hundred billion neurons in your brain.
It's a lot um. Each of them have many tens
of thousands, are many, many thousands of connections up to
UM which are synapsis, yes, which are which leads to
as many as a quadrillion synapses in the human brain.
(12:49):
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 ten thousand is the high
end that I've heard, But I love that you had
an answer for that. UM. And they're constantly going to
(13:10):
and forming new connections. I think it's something like thirty
to sixty times the second. Near neurons are firing all
over your head and they're not sentence down. They're always changing,
always forming new connections. The more that you do something,
the stronger the connection is going to be. We might
know that in the real world as practice or repetition, right,
(13:32):
but the another word for it is plasticity, where the
brain you're the organizational structure of your brain actually changes
shape it as as you're saying, like, through practicing something
like the repeated firing of a neural connection, right, which
is just an electrical impulse that triggers the release of
neurotransmitters that crosses synapse are accepted in the den drite right,
(13:56):
and the neurotransmitters are the message carried like a certain
type of neurotransmit or like dopamine says hey, everything's just
ire right um, And this information has just passed along
from one neur onto another if the the impulse is
strong enough. Right. But then when you do it again
and again and again, more channels that allow the neurotransmitters
(14:17):
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. That's exactly what's
going on your your neural connection is is that top performance,
(14:42):
peak performance practice makes perfect How to play uh 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 very
clumsily because I forget or I can't write in cursive anymore.
(15:03):
I can't either. I mean, I'd really have to concentrate.
And they're definitely letters that I would forget how to write.
That was a jarring realization for me, that, like, how
do you make the cue? And whatever happened to that Z?
That weird Z like it's all gone and even like
the S and the R and all that like normal stuff,
it's just gone. Yeah, you don't want to see my
(15:25):
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.
Remember that study with the kittens. No, this the really
(15:45):
sad study. I think it's funny that you're asking me
how much I remember and I keep saying no. Um.
There was this study that um that involved kittens having
one eye so and shut from birth, and they would
they were allowed to frolic and play and do whatever,
but they just had one eye so and shut UM.
And then after I think like eight or ten or
(16:07):
twelve weeks, the eye was um released opened 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 that they say,
the left eye had been so and shut during the
stage of development. UM. The neural connections had all traveled
(16:28):
to the right eye, which was seeing, and the ones
that had been there on the left eye that formed
the optic were withered and dead. You know what they
called that experiment, They called the saddest experiment in the
history of the world. It's pretty bad. It's a pretty
bad experiment, but it basically goes to show you that
not only will neural connections wither and die if they're
not used, they'll also migrate to places where they can
(16:51):
be used. There's kind of like a survival of the fittest,
like um 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 f I
I Giraffe neurons can grow up to three ft in length. Really,
(17:11):
are they all in the neck. Isn't that cool? That
is pretty cool. Uh. So we were talking about encoding, Um,
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 this maybe the first time we've
said it, is are we screening this stimuli out during
(17:32):
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, so forget it. Yeah, forget that. So
are we at short term and long term? Josh? Yeah,
(17:53):
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, even the shortest of short term
memories as a memory. And there are three ways they
believe that we store these memories. We've 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
(18:15):
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 all the different neural connections that make up that
rich memory you know from long ago. Um that it's there,
(18:36):
like it can be activated again. It's long term memories,
short term memories 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, like repeating a phone number over and
over again that you knew before, but you're having to
to remind yourself you're keeping it in your working memory. Well,
(18:58):
it's funny you mentioned phone number because short term memory
is really limited. UM. I love the status. It says
that short term memory can hold about seven items for
no more than twenty or thirty seconds at a time.
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
(19:18):
down usually for you UH into three sets of three
or two sets of three and one set of four.
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.
You know how I am with remembering names. I can
(19:39):
never remember names. But you're also very friendly. You can
be like, hey, I 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, that the lady who wore
the overalls in the flip flops. Like I'll remember things
like that forever. Names forget about it. That's why you
(20:03):
have all the names of everyone you've ever met written
down on your hand. That's why I have no friends.
But long term memory can store everything forever if you
wanted to. Yeah, that seems like a ge whiz we
don't really know exactly what's going on kind of statement,
you know, I totally agree. When I read that, I
was like, really, yeah, I don't know about that one,
(20:27):
but it is I would agree that it's um at
least as much as we need or another way to
look at it is, what if we are all operating
pretty much a capacity. How much more incredibly intelligent would
we be if we had even like more memory storage.
But like we mentioned earlier, things that are important to you,
(20:48):
you're more likely to remember. Um. 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 they're
wearing I guess, and and 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's something that is meaningful to you. You're going
(21:11):
to remember more. That's because emotion is usually attached the emotion.
The seat of emotion is the amygdala, and it is
directly connected to the hippocampus. It's got like a direct
line to the hippocampus, like up coming through I'm first
right the saddle on the sea horse, if you will, Yes,
and that's great. Um, the uh, that's really good, and
(21:33):
the there's a I guess. The 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, um, you're going to remember that you feel
fear when you see a bear, and you're going to
stay away from bears. Um Or joy makes us all
you know, what makes us feel familiar with other people groups,
(21:58):
which is which is right away from it keeps bears away.
You know, eight people could beat up a bear rather
than just one. So we have emotions, and we learned
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
(22:22):
beneath the surface there. Like have you ever watched the
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, and you
kind of come out of it because the next scene
started and it's it's you know, the build up hasn't
happened yet for that scene, but you realize you have
(22:42):
this kind of um remnant, uneasy feeling that you have
no idea what it belongs to any longer. And then
you realize, wait a minute, I was just identifying with
the movie, 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
(23:04):
and more likely to be remembered. Yeah, exactly, and that
and and that may be more important to one person
than another. So it's typical to say I 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.
And if you're having trouble remembering something, it's not like
(23:25):
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, and it just means one
of those is not working quite well. Uh, why don't
you tell me? Okay, Well, basically that you can say
that when well, let's take an example of eyeglasses. Um,
(23:46):
would you neither one of us were right, But let's
say we did, and we're going to bed. Right, You're
going to bed in a separate from 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,
(24:08):
you were, you would be perceiving their placement encoding, right,
which is going to make it likelier for that memory
to be retained. And then when you wake up, since
the memory is retained, you'll be able to retrieve it.
So those are the three steps. It's awareness, retention, and
then retrieval, and any of those three is where the
breakdown can occur. Yeah, and I've heard you know, there's
(24:30):
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 will help you remember it.
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
(24:53):
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. Um,
there is a breakdown that starts with the onset of
sexual maturity. Oddly, it's linked to that then you start
forgetting things. Um and it uh, I think it gets
(25:16):
worse and worse until we reach our fifties. It's like
twenties to fifties is when you're you really have some
trouble initially, right, But the brain isn't changing it it's
structure or anything. It's the connections that start to fail.
Is that right? That's what I understand. Although they did
say the brain in the in hippocampus shrink in your seventies.
(25:38):
It depends, yes, I think. Um. What they're finding though,
is that a lot of it has to do with
the lack of stimulation. Well that's huge. Yeah. Um. They
found that rats that are raised with lots of toys
or they are given lots of toys and stimulating environment
later on in life have literally fatter, healthier cells, brain cells,
neurons um then their counterparts, and the same as in
(26:01):
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 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 um
(26:22):
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 ninety and she is uh 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
(26:44):
a bit. She does word puzzles every day, she's she's
on the internet more than I am. She's on all
of our Facebook page and she just you know, that's
how you stay vital. If you don't Facebook, I'd be
a heck of a endorsement. Facebook let you live forever.
But it's true though, I mean, anyway you want to
go about it, if you're exercising that noodle, it's gonna
(27:07):
stay strong and 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
acetal colin, which is a neurotransmitter that's strongly associated with
um memory formation. Yeah, they kind of pinpointed that. Yeah,
they're not exactly sure how that works, but they know
(27:30):
that like if you the more a setal colin you have,
the better memory you have and vice versa. But they
can you 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 they'll have a
setal coline shots where you can just shoot right into
our brains like memory junkies. If you're a smoker or
(27:53):
a drinker or generally unhealthy, it's gonna you know, impact
your memory too. And then last, sadly, this is the
this is the one that um 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,
(28:16):
Your brain goes through your your you go through two phases,
one where your body is active but your brain is out,
and then the R E M sleep, the deepest sleep,
which where your body can't move but your brain's going.
It's basically taking advantage of your you napping so that
it can do some paperwork or whatever, and it goes
through and fires all the neural connections that were used
(28:37):
that day. Maybe some are kind of fading a little
bit here there, fires those and um, while you're sleeping,
your brain is basically creating perception again, right, got by
firing your your neural projections, which I think is probably
the best explanation for dreams I've ever heard. Yeah, that's it. Uh. Well,
(29:03):
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 and the flip flops.
I'll remember all that stuff. I remember. I feel like
last time I was, last time I was in New York,
Emily marveled at I saw I think two different people
(29:24):
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 want? Yeah, so I remember all those faces. That's
very good, just not the names. And if you think
your memory is going try paying more attention. Distraction is
one of the greatest threats to memory formation. And if
(29:45):
you don't form a memory properly, you're not gonna remember it.
I mean it sounds 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 the there. Yeah, so
obey humans boom. If you want to learn more about
memory type memory, you should probably type human memory because
(30:09):
I'm pretty sure if you just type memory, a lot
of computer stuff is gonna come up in the handy
search bar how stuff works dot com And you don't
want to read any of that. It's uh well, I'm yeah,
uh now it's time for a listener made Josh. I'm
gonna call this uh maggot mania. Yeah, that really got
(30:33):
to people. I always find it like, um I opening
when I just tell a story from my life and
everybody's like, oh my god, I couldn't eat. Yeah I'm
I'm like, oh sorry, all right. This is from cath
in Australia. Oh hello, guys. I have done the exact
same thing as you, Josh. I put some meat in
(30:54):
a plastic bag in the kitchen garbage bin, which also
had a lid, and woke up to a moving floor.
Or only I was was not wearing my glasses so
she might forget where she laid them. Um I was
doing a little cleaning, and it's slowly dawned at me
what had happened. I had begun my morning by sweeping.
I had made cookies a night prior and was noticing
(31:15):
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 had bent down and had a closer look.
It was like a horror movie. My blood went cold,
and I crouched an 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
(31:37):
the bedroom carpet. 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. 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
(31:59):
that I left sitting outside. I sprayed the bag with
disinfectant and bug spray after every dump of maggots, but
there 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 mc cookies, she need meat cookies. Was that just unrelated?
(32:19):
I think it was unrelated and that maybe explained that
why she thought there was dough on the floor. Now
she's said a meat cookies night before. This is Australia.
Maybe have meat cookies down and there. I want some
meat cookie. That's it. That's from cat. Wow. That was
a weird exposition there, Chuck, that was cat. Yeah from Australia.
(32:40):
Well thanks Cat the maggot hata h you're just Cat
k A t h cant short for Katherine or Cat. Well,
thanks a lot. We appreciate it. Um, I imagine you've
moved by now and and um, 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
(33:04):
us some of these things even better, right right so
you can get our mailing address by sending us an
email right right at Stuff podcast at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(33:26):
Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more
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