Speaker 1: My fellow Inner Cosmonauts. With this episode, I am wrapping
Speaker 1: up season two, and I am so excited for all
Speaker 1: the new topics coming in season three, like longevity and
Speaker 1: the self and dementia and so many more things about
Speaker 1: the brain that will come to understand In the new season.
Speaker 1: I can have monologues, and I can have guests, and
Speaker 1: I'm introducing some new formats. Until then, I'm going to
Speaker 1: be taking a short break until mid November, and in
Speaker 1: the meantime playing some of our favorite episodes. What do
Speaker 1: we find beautiful? What is intelligence? Why do brains become depressed?
Speaker 1: And one of my favorites, why do we see the
Speaker 1: dress differently? Thank you so much for being part of
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos, where we get to take a deep dive
Speaker 1: together to better understand our lives, our choices, and our experiences.
Speaker 1: I'll see you next month. What would it be like
Speaker 1: to have a vastly better memory than you do now?
Speaker 1: What if you could remember what you were wearing on
Speaker 1: any day back twelve years ago, or who you were with,
Speaker 1: or what that conversation was, or whether it rained, or
Speaker 1: what you heard on the radio. Would this be a
Speaker 1: blessing or a curse? Or could it be a balance
Speaker 1: of the two. And if you're forgetting a lot of
Speaker 1: your life, what might you do to better remember it?
Speaker 1: Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we
Speaker 1: dive deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some
Speaker 1: of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is about memory, and specifically the most extraordinary capacities for
Speaker 1: memory that we have witnessed on the planet. Now. It
Speaker 1: happens that one of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a short story in nineteen forty two
Speaker 1: called Funes the Memorius. This is about a young man
Speaker 1: who falls off his horse and hits his head, and
Speaker 1: as a consequence of this accident, he develops an extraordinary
Speaker 1: ability to remember everything. He can no longer forget anything.
Speaker 1: Fus's memory becomes so vast that he can recall every
Speaker 1: moment of his life and every nuance of what he perceives,
Speaker 1: down to the exact positions of the clouds on any
Speaker 1: given day. Now, obviously, keep in mind this is a
Speaker 1: story of fiction. Borjes was a great writer of fantasy
Speaker 1: and the genre that came to be known as magical realism.
Speaker 1: So back to the story, this ability becomes, for Fuse
Speaker 1: more of a burden than a gift. He finds himself
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, and he becomes
Speaker 1: incapable of thinking abstractly because he can remember all the
Speaker 1: fine details of everything. He drowns in a world of
Speaker 1: infinite detail. In story foodates can no longer even sleep,
Speaker 1: as he recalls quote every crevice and every molding of
Speaker 1: the various houses which surround him end quote. It's a
Speaker 1: great fictional short story, and very creative. But there's a
Speaker 1: debate in the literature about whether Borhaes made up the
Speaker 1: story whole cloth, or whether instead he knew about a
Speaker 1: Soviet neuropsychologist named Alexander Luria, because Lauria had for a
Speaker 1: couple of decades at this point been studying a man
Speaker 1: named Solomon Shrishevski. Now Sharyshevski came from a modest background
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't think he'd become internationally known and immortalized.
Speaker 1: But everything started in the mid nineteen twenties when Sharyshevski
Speaker 1: was working as a journalist and attended a meeting and
Speaker 1: afterwards his editor reprimanded him for not taking any notes,
Speaker 1: and the editor was then astonished to find out that
Speaker 1: shar Arshevski was able to recall every detail of the
Speaker 1: meeting word for word, just from memory. So that led
Speaker 1: Sharyshevski to get referred to Lauria, who is one of
Speaker 1: the most prominent neuropsychologists of the time, and Lauria studied
Speaker 1: Sheryshevski and his remarkable memory over the course of several decades.
Speaker 1: Lauria eventually wrote a book called The Mind of Aneminist.
Speaker 1: Now a neminist is a term for a person who
Speaker 1: just has an untaxable memory. Because the key was that
Speaker 1: Sharyshevski could memorize essentially anything. He could memorize whole strings
Speaker 1: of random numbers, or long lists of nonsense words, or
Speaker 1: really any kind of data presented in any kind of
Speaker 1: random order. He had nearly perfect recall. So Lauria tested
Speaker 1: him over time, and Sharyshevski could even recall these random
Speaker 1: sequences years later, and this led Lauria to conclude that
Speaker 1: Sharyshevski's memory was virtual, limitless, and this was of course
Speaker 1: a very rare phenomenon. Now you may know that my
Speaker 1: laboratory has studied synesthesia for many years. Synesthesia is a
Speaker 1: harmless condition where people have a blending of the senses.
Speaker 1: You can check out my books and episodes on that.
Speaker 1: So it turns out that Sherishevski had a very rich
Speaker 1: combination of synesthesias and this is what gave him his
Speaker 1: memory abilities. For him, numbers would appear in colors and
Speaker 1: shapes and with personalities, Sounds triggered textures, words evoked images
Speaker 1: where they might feel heavy or light. Here's an example
Speaker 1: of Sharyshevski's internal experience as he described it. Quote, take
Speaker 1: the number one. This is a proud, well built man.
Speaker 1: Two is a high spirited woman. Three is a gloomy person.
Speaker 1: Six is a man with a swollen foot. Seven is
Speaker 1: a man with a mustache. Eight is a very stout woman,
Speaker 1: and so on and all. This sensory overlap allowed him
Speaker 1: to store information in a rich multisensory format, which in
Speaker 1: turn enhanced his recollection. So if you're not synesthetic, just
Speaker 1: think about your own examples of how a second sense
Speaker 1: helps you with recall. So, for example, you might have
Speaker 1: a hard time memorizing a poem. But if it's put
Speaker 1: to music, then we call that lyrics, and you memorize
Speaker 1: all the words perfectly because now you have some other
Speaker 1: data stream the music that you can tie it to.
Speaker 1: So what Schershevski had was one example of an extraordinary
Speaker 1: memory where he could memorize these random lists. But more
Speaker 1: recently in history, there's been the discovery of another type
Speaker 1: of off the charts memory. And this began in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six when my colleagues at U SEE Irvine
Speaker 1: came in contact with a very special woman named Jill.
Speaker 1: Jill can recite details of every day of her life
Speaker 1: from the time she was about fourteen years old that
Speaker 1: she does this in great detail. Her specialty is in
Speaker 1: autobiographical memory. That means memory about your own life, like
Speaker 1: what you did and who you were with, and what
Speaker 1: you were and what happened to you. This is called
Speaker 1: autobiographical memory. It's not about random chess positions or the
Speaker 1: details of the history of Cambodia. It's about you and
Speaker 1: what has happened in your life. Now, if you are
Speaker 1: like most human beings, your autobiographical memory is reasonably good,
Speaker 1: but it's not that good. You can't really remember what
Speaker 1: you were wearing on October fifth, twenty seventeen, or what
Speaker 1: you heard on the radio on April twenty first of
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, and so on, because generally speaking,
Speaker 1: the brain is tuned to drop as many details as
Speaker 1: it can if they're not highly important. In other words,
Speaker 1: forgetting is often as important as remembering. But for Jill Price,
Speaker 1: her autobiographical memory was way, way, way above average, so
Speaker 1: the researchers termed her condition hyperthymesia. But since people thought
Speaker 1: that sounded something like a disease, they later termed it
Speaker 1: highly superior autobiographical memory or HSAM for highly superior autobiographical memory. Now,
Speaker 1: most of us can remember significant events in our lives,
Speaker 1: like the birth of a child, or a graduation or
Speaker 1: a nice vacation, but those memories eventually fade where they blur,
Speaker 1: where they become harder to pull up details as time passes.
Speaker 1: But for a person with h SAM, they have the
Speaker 1: ability to recall nearly every day of their lives with
Speaker 1: extraordinary clarity. They can tell you what they were doing
Speaker 1: on some random Tuesday fifteen years ago, down to the weather,
Speaker 1: the clothes they were wearing, even the smallest details of
Speaker 1: conversations they had. Their memories aren't just stored, they're accessible
Speaker 1: on demand with incredible richness. Maybe you have a reasonably
Speaker 1: good memory, but almost certainly you can't remember what the
Speaker 1: weather was like on October fifth, twenty nineteen, or precisely
Speaker 1: what you chose out of your closet on that day,
Speaker 1: and whether it rained or not, what piece of news
Speaker 1: you've heard on the radio that day. But some people can.
Speaker 1: Now this highly superior autobiographical memory is very rare as
Speaker 1: right now, there's only been about one hundred people who
Speaker 1: have been diagnosed with h SAM, And so I wanted
Speaker 1: to find someone one of these rare people with h
Speaker 1: SAM who I could talk to about this for the show.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that one person who has this
Speaker 1: is also someone you might have heard of for a
Speaker 1: different reason. She's a famous actor, and that is Mary
Speaker 1: Lou Henner. You may know that Mary Lou became a
Speaker 1: well known stage actor in nineteen seventy one, appearing in
Speaker 1: the the original production of the musical Grease with John
Speaker 1: Travolta on stage, and then in seventy seven she began
Speaker 1: in the movies, and in nineteen seventy eight she had
Speaker 1: her breakthrough role on the television sitcom Taxi, where she
Speaker 1: played a single mother who was working as a cabby,
Speaker 1: and she got several Golden Globe nominations for that. She
Speaker 1: later had co starring roles in a number of films
Speaker 1: through the eighties nineties, and she continues to appear on
Speaker 1: screen through the present day. Now, most of you will
Speaker 1: recognize her face. But the thing that not everyone knows
Speaker 1: about Mary Lou is that she is one of these
Speaker 1: one hundred people. She has an extraordinary autobiographical memory, remembering
Speaker 1: every day of her life. So here's my interview with
Speaker 1: Mary Lou Henner. So, Mary Lou, we all assume that
Speaker 1: everyone is having the same experience on the inside that
Speaker 1: we are, but you, at this point in your life,
Speaker 1: know that most people have a different sort of memory
Speaker 1: than you do. So, so can you tell us what
Speaker 1: is it like to have a memory like yours? What
Speaker 1: is your experience?
Speaker 2: Well, from the time I was six years old, everybody
Speaker 2: in my sphere, my family, friends who came over, everybody
Speaker 2: knew I had something unusual. Now, I was one of
Speaker 2: six children, and you know, when you're one of six,
Speaker 2: you look for anything that makes you a little bit different.
Speaker 2: From your brothers and sisters, and so I was just
Speaker 2: always called the memory kid, memory girl. I was called Univac,
Speaker 2: which was an old computer. People would say, well tell
Speaker 2: it to Mary Lucas, Sho'll remember it. So I was
Speaker 2: clan of the family historian. And at six years old,
Speaker 2: I started falling asleep at night plan of doing what
Speaker 2: I call time travel. You know, I would think what
Speaker 2: did I do when I was exactly all week ago,
Speaker 2: two weeks ago, when I was this day in kindergarten,
Speaker 2: when I was my little brother's aid, And it was
Speaker 2: something that I became very good at doing. Now there
Speaker 2: is no doubt in my mind that I was born
Speaker 2: with something unusual. You know, They've wired me, put me
Speaker 2: through an MRI. They took three hundred measurements of my brain.
Speaker 2: They found nine areas ten times larger than the normal rain.
Speaker 2: But it was definitely something that was that was nurture
Speaker 2: as well. So there was nature and nurture because I
Speaker 2: just loved having this. It was so it was so
Speaker 2: unusual and it was kind of fun. And you know,
Speaker 2: people would say you're such a little lo at all
Speaker 2: and they'd say, no, I'm a remember it all, you know.
Speaker 2: So It was kind of my claim to fain give.
Speaker 1: Us an example of the kind of thing that you
Speaker 1: would remember as a kid.
Speaker 2: I remember like every day in school where I could remember,
Speaker 2: you know, things People would come over and I would
Speaker 2: tell them the last time they were at my house
Speaker 2: with my parents, or what they were wearing or things
Speaker 2: like that, you know. So it was it was just
Speaker 2: memory work. It was just I would never forget anything.
Speaker 2: And so I knew it was within my family. I
Speaker 2: knew it was unusual, and everybody in my family has
Speaker 2: a great memory. But I had this date thing I had,
Speaker 2: you know, just the specificity of what I remembered was
Speaker 2: so intense. And so what happened was my sphere got bigger,
Speaker 2: and I realized, well, my friends don't have this either,
Speaker 2: you know. And finally, when I was around eighteen years old,
Speaker 2: a friend of mine said to me, when are you
Speaker 2: going to realize that nobody else has this crazy memory.
Speaker 2: So people in college knew that I had something unusual.
Speaker 2: And in fact, I'm on my third and final husband.
Speaker 2: But we knew each other in college, went to University
Speaker 2: of Chicago. He was my roommate's boyfriend, but he knew
Speaker 2: that I had this unusual memory, and so we make
Speaker 2: jokes about it. Now. We always says, well, when you're
Speaker 2: eighteen and you remember, you know, if you remember your life,
Speaker 2: that doesn't seem down unusual. So he didn't like, let
Speaker 2: onto the whole idea of it as much as he
Speaker 2: has now that we spent twenty one years together.
Speaker 1: So let me drill down on this. So you you
Speaker 1: remember things that are autobiographical part of your life stories.
Speaker 1: And this person came over. I had this conversation. I
Speaker 1: heard this on the radio. I was wearing this, But
Speaker 1: what about other things? Like if I gave you a
Speaker 1: long list of nonsense words.
Speaker 2: Let me go back to the story and then that'll
Speaker 2: answer some of your questions. So I had this unusual
Speaker 2: autobiographical memory. And I was a great student. I went
Speaker 2: to the University of Chicago. I was named Outstanding Teenager
Speaker 2: of Illinois. I were scholarships, so I was really quite
Speaker 2: the student, and people who knew me knew that I
Speaker 2: had this unusual memory. So when a story came up
Speaker 2: for Leslie Stall, who was a friend of mine because
Speaker 2: I worked with her husband, Aaron Latham, I'm a movie
Speaker 2: perfect she called me and she said, I want you
Speaker 2: to have lunch with me. So we had lunch together
Speaker 2: September twenty in two thousand and six. It was a Wednesday.
Speaker 2: We went to the slune and she's naming, Oh, when
Speaker 2: did we meet? When did we do this? Blah blah blah,
Speaker 2: and then her her producer said oh. She mentioned that
Speaker 2: she had gotten married on June the fifteenth of nineteen,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety eight, and I said, oh, my god, that's
Speaker 2: so unusual. Why did you get married out on Monday?
Speaker 2: And she was like, oh, she is it. I said,
Speaker 2: what's going on with you guys? She said, well, we've
Speaker 2: been offered a story at sixty minutes about a woman
Speaker 2: by the name of Jill Price who came to doctor
Speaker 2: Legau and she had a very unusual memory and she
Speaker 2: never forgot anything. So they did all this testing on
Speaker 2: her and they offered the story to sixteen minutes and
Speaker 2: I told him, forget it. My friend, it's not that unusual.
Speaker 2: My friend married a vender has the exact same memory.
Speaker 2: So that was in two thousand and six, and then
Speaker 2: in two thousand and nine, Leslie callin. She said, oh,
Speaker 2: because they gave the story to Primetime Live in Diamond Sawyer.
Speaker 2: So in two thousand and nine, Leslie called and she said,
Speaker 2: she said, I want you to be tested. It's very unusual.
Speaker 2: They have found very few other people, so we're going
Speaker 2: to have you tested on camera. And on camera they
Speaker 2: tested me. They didn't use it all, but they tested
Speaker 2: me for everything, sequencing, everything that you're talking about. The
Speaker 2: list of items. They had me look at something for
Speaker 2: fifteen second and then identify what corner was it. They
Speaker 2: had me look at a face with all any hair
Speaker 2: or you couldn't even tell what gender it was, and
Speaker 2: they told me names associated with it. I scored high
Speaker 2: on everything pretty much, but I really of course the
Speaker 2: autobiographical stuff. I answered over five hundred questions within the day,
Speaker 2: and then they did their wiring and asking questions and
Speaker 2: so how it's fired up and stuff. So yeah, so
Speaker 2: it's like it's a different part of the brain than
Speaker 2: is the sequencing or anything like that. But I did still,
Speaker 2: especially as an actress, I trained myself to be sort
Speaker 2: of like a script supervisor. I mean, I'm sort of
Speaker 2: a frustrated script supervisor where I can notice something's off
Speaker 2: or where something is. In fact, they showed us a
Speaker 2: fifteen minute movie and then asked us specific questions that
Speaker 2: you might not notice an issue or a script supervisor
Speaker 2: or somebody with HSAM. So yeah, there were a lot
Speaker 2: of different types of testing that went on that day.
Speaker 2: Most people, if you ask them, remember or eight to
Speaker 2: eleven events within any given year, and people with h
Speaker 2: SAM we remember two hundred to three hundred and sixty five.
Speaker 2: The criteria cut off was two hundred all though I
Speaker 2: scored in ninety nine percent off for three sixty five
Speaker 2: because I can do a whole year. But you know,
Speaker 2: it's like, it's like if people try to remember what
Speaker 2: their year was like, they can probably come up with
Speaker 2: eight to eleven and that's all, which is insane to me,
Speaker 2: you know, because there's somebody who never loses anything. It's like,
Speaker 2: I mean, except my assins or something key. So I
Speaker 2: mean that I, as an actress, have trained enough to
Speaker 2: be able to look at a script a couple times
Speaker 2: and have it down. But I'll also remember where I
Speaker 2: was when I read the script, what the character's life
Speaker 2: reminds me of in my own life, you know, what
Speaker 2: the weather was like, things like that.
Speaker 1: So give us an example. Let's say it shows October fifth,
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. Are you able to.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, that was in one day.
Speaker 1: And do you remember what you were doing that day?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Of course, I was at a rehearsal for one
Speaker 2: of my son's shows. We were putting on a little
Speaker 2: play at there and he was doing he was doing
Speaker 2: Willy Wonk and the Chocolate Factory. So there was a
Speaker 2: rehearsal that day and I did all the hair and
Speaker 2: makeup from my chid's school. Don't score warning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you remember what you were wearing that day?
Speaker 2: Yes, I was wearing like a navy blue shirt with jeans. Now,
Speaker 2: to me, everyone has something they remember, especially well, it's
Speaker 2: what I call their primary track. It's like in the
Speaker 2: jigsaw puzzle of your life, what are your hard edged
Speaker 2: pieces by which you can interlock all your other memories too?
Speaker 2: And for some people it's places they live, places they worked.
Speaker 2: It's sports is a huge one. For guys, they might
Speaker 2: forget their anniversary, but remember how many chicken wings they
Speaker 2: had that day and what the score was. And also
Speaker 2: you know places that people's children. I've heard everything from
Speaker 2: food to clothes to baths. There was a guy who
Speaker 2: was obsessed with baths and new light fag information. So
Speaker 2: that's called your primary trap and the jigsaw puzzle of
Speaker 2: your life. What are the hardage pieces by which you
Speaker 2: can inter other memories. Then everyone I believe has a
Speaker 2: dominant sense. Everyone is a site cell, touch taste or
Speaker 2: smell person. And if you can figure out what you
Speaker 2: are site cell, touch taste or smell, you can figure
Speaker 2: out how you receive and you cross connected with your
Speaker 2: primary trap. You can figure out how you receive, retain,
Speaker 2: and then retrieve memories. Because we just happen to have
Speaker 2: an extraordinary retrieval system. Everything you have been through in
Speaker 2: your life is on your emotional hard drive, and it
Speaker 2: makes you behave in certain ways. So you might walk
Speaker 2: into a room go like, oh my god, this smells
Speaker 2: like my grandmother's or wow, that song on the radio
Speaker 2: that reminds me this. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: So you people do this all day long. But people
Speaker 2: with ASAM we remember everything in first person, in our
Speaker 2: bodies looking out. You know, if I asked you, if
Speaker 2: I said to you when you woke up this morning,
Speaker 2: describe your warning, you'd probably be in first person and
Speaker 2: talking about it, and you could say, oh, I got
Speaker 2: to a bathroom or make coffee, or I walk my
Speaker 2: dog or whatever but if I asked you, like three
Speaker 2: weeks ago, you probably would be a third person. Most
Speaker 2: people when they go back three weeks or beyond, they're
Speaker 2: in third person. I gave a whole speech to all
Speaker 2: these three hundred doctors in a cedar siginer, and nobody
Speaker 2: had ever described the things that I'm describing from the
Speaker 2: inside out. Now, I also believe that memory comes to
Speaker 2: us in four different ways, what I call horizontally, vertically, mushrewingly,
Speaker 2: or sporadically. So if I said to you, hey, how
Speaker 2: is that wedding you went to a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 2: and you said, oh, man, it was brave. Friday night,
Speaker 2: we went to the bar, we all had a drink,
Speaker 2: there was a rehearsal dinner, we had a drink. The
Speaker 2: next morning, I got up in jog and you start
Speaker 2: telling me the whole weekend, sort of a linear horizontal,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of a narrative way. If I said
Speaker 2: to you, that would be a horizontal him. But I
Speaker 2: said how is the wedding? And you said, oh, my
Speaker 2: cousin and I got into a whole discussion at the wedding,
Speaker 2: and you could probably just a pinpoint, a specific on
Speaker 2: a line and go deep into a memory. So that's
Speaker 2: kind of like a vertical memory. And if I said,
Speaker 2: how is that wedding? And you said, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 2: there was somebody I met. We decided to have lunch.
Speaker 2: Two weeks later we're going to do a project together.
Speaker 2: That's like a mushrooming memory. That means it came out
Speaker 2: of the event I asked you about. But if mushrooms
Speaker 2: somewhere else. And then if I said to you, oh,
Speaker 2: how is that wedding and you said, oh my god,
Speaker 2: there was a guy there who looked like when my
Speaker 2: old boss, and I was instantly back and when I
Speaker 2: off is thinking about what a jerk this guy was
Speaker 2: because he took credit for my work. So that's a
Speaker 2: sporadic memory. So all day long, we do memory like that,
Speaker 2: especially people of age Sam, And you can ask about
Speaker 2: some specific day and it can be told in a
Speaker 2: linear horizontal way, or a vertical way, or a mushrooming way,
Speaker 2: or a sporadic way, do you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So we go all over, so you have to not
Speaker 2: think the way it happens differently for us. It just
Speaker 2: is And it's not even like we're all consistent but
Speaker 2: this is how it happens for me.
Speaker 1: How far back does it go for you? What's your
Speaker 1: earliest memory being baptized?
Speaker 2: So I was like three weeks old, yeah, and you
Speaker 2: know and say, oh, it was a day. I just
Speaker 2: remember the feeling. I remember, you know, just the whiteness.
Speaker 2: I remember things like that. I didn't have words yet,
Speaker 2: but I can go way back.
Speaker 1: And is that generally true that you can remember things
Speaker 1: from when you were one or two?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, oh wow, yeah. I mean it's much more
Speaker 2: visual and it has a language to it for later on.
Speaker 2: You know, what made you interest in neuroscience?
Speaker 1: Oh, I've been you know, my father was a psychiatrist
Speaker 1: and my mother was a biology teacher, and so it
Speaker 1: was natural enough. I ended up becoming a writer first,
Speaker 1: and then I went to neuroscience. So I'm very interested
Speaker 1: in the human condition and all the different ways of
Speaker 1: getting there. So let me ask you this. We can
Speaker 1: never step outside of our own experience of the world.
Speaker 1: But do you feel like your highly superior autobiographical memory
Speaker 1: is something that's good or bad or you feel mixed
Speaker 1: feelings about it?
Speaker 2: People always say is it a blessing or a curse?
Speaker 2: And my stock answer is it's always a blessing for me,
Speaker 2: which is absolutely one hundred percent. Tu Now, for one
Speaker 2: second did I think this was a curse. Not the
Speaker 2: one second in my life. But I always say, but
Speaker 2: it's a curse for my husband, which is probably why
Speaker 2: I'm on my third and final because you know, like
Speaker 2: we just had to fight two days ago, and he
Speaker 2: said something and you know, in March of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: and I went, no, it didn't it had been on No, Michael,
Speaker 2: it had been on September the twenty third of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two. You know that I was wearing this you
Speaker 2: were talking about. He was like, well, you know, and
Speaker 2: then it became this. I said. It's not like I
Speaker 2: have to be right. I just believe in accuracy. And
Speaker 2: if you're talking about something that happened in this season,
Speaker 2: you're in the wrong season, you know. But it's funny
Speaker 2: because yeah, so he but he always says, what man
Speaker 2: ever loses an argument against his wife anyway, at least
Speaker 2: he has excuse because I sech an individual memory, you know.
Speaker 2: But no, it's always been it's always been a blessing
Speaker 2: for me. Here here's the thing, as you know, and
Speaker 2: doctor Rabaut proved this. Doctor James mcgobre does the whole study.
Speaker 2: He memories tied to adrenaline. So people are going to
Speaker 2: remember the highs like getting married, having a baby, you know,
Speaker 2: a promotion at work, a fabulous something or other, buying
Speaker 2: a house, whatever, and they're also going to remember the lows,
Speaker 2: whether it's you know, whether they've been embarrassed or a
Speaker 2: breakup or a death of someone. You know. So those
Speaker 2: highs and lows are being recorded constantly by us people
Speaker 2: with h SAM. We're lucky enough to have all those
Speaker 2: middle of the road kind of our tone moments recorded
Speaker 2: and kept and talked about, you know, I mean that,
Speaker 2: and they're available to us. So I'm always trying to
Speaker 2: help people. You know, I don't have to show off
Speaker 2: my memory anymore. It's just it's the way it is.
Speaker 2: People stop me at the airport and until throw dates
Speaker 2: at me and stuff I means hilarious. And the thing
Speaker 2: is that's it's really you know, I'm what I'm trying
Speaker 2: to do is I'm trying to help people bring back
Speaker 2: those little summers nights, you know, the little fabric of
Speaker 2: their lives kind of thing, things that they may have
Speaker 2: forgotten because they didn't get recorded on those high tone
Speaker 2: or low tone scales.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we write down everything that's emotionally sales. That's really
Speaker 1: what what memory is for, is to write things down
Speaker 1: so that we can better plan for the future. That's
Speaker 1: why we have memory.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't say if all you do is you
Speaker 2: wake up, you live your life, you turn off the light,
Speaker 2: you go to sleep, you wake up, you live your life,
Speaker 2: you turn off the light, you go to sleep, and
Speaker 2: nothing has moved forward, well then what does it all mean?
Speaker 2: So by developing a better autobiographical memory, you are able.
Speaker 2: It's actually your strongest line of defense against meaninglessness that
Speaker 2: you have because you are able to bring information from
Speaker 2: your past to your present and let it inform a
Speaker 2: better future. I work with people all the time on memory.
Speaker 2: I work with people who have like a roadblock somehow
Speaker 2: and trying to get them past a roadblock, or women
Speaker 2: who pick the same kind of guy all the time
Speaker 2: because they're not noticing the red flags they're wind to them,
Speaker 2: you know. So I mean I do one tree with people.
Speaker 2: One of the things I love to do the most
Speaker 2: is for like school auctions or any kind of you know,
Speaker 2: any kind of option. I will option my self off
Speaker 2: as a memory person who will take people back and
Speaker 2: do memory sessions with them. And it's really farm, it's
Speaker 2: really amazing what happens in a couple hour hours.
Speaker 1: Are you able to help other people improve their memories?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah all the time. I might might not be
Speaker 2: able to give them h sam, but you have. But
Speaker 2: people have gotten so lazy, especially because everything is on
Speaker 2: the you know, on their phones, and so we just
Speaker 2: throw it there. I mean yeah. I always say, if
Speaker 2: let's say you're a visual person, you know, you know
Speaker 2: that your dominant sentenced visual well, during the day, during
Speaker 2: your day, at some point, take the picture of the day. Okay,
Speaker 2: just take a picture of the day and put it away.
Speaker 2: And then at the end of the month, if you've
Speaker 2: taken thirty pictures, you think like, oh, what were some
Speaker 2: of those pictures? And see how many you can bring
Speaker 2: forward again, because it's really a muscle, you know. And
Speaker 2: the thing is, if you're only remembering eight to eleven
Speaker 2: events within any given year, which is just so sad
Speaker 2: and pathetic to me, I feel like, if you can
Speaker 2: bring three forward and carry them with you, you'll have
Speaker 2: at least thirty six in the first year that you
Speaker 2: do it and maybe the following year you'll have even more,
Speaker 2: you know, seventy two or something. You know. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm always helping people with their memories.
Speaker 1: Some of my research has to do with how long
Speaker 1: we think something has lasted, what the duration of let's say,
Speaker 1: your past year has been. And what my research has
Speaker 1: pointed to is that the more memory you have, the
Speaker 1: longer things seem to have lasted. And so if you
Speaker 1: can only draw on eight to eleven things, then it
Speaker 1: seems like, wow, the year disappeared. What do you feel
Speaker 1: like you have a different experience than other people in
Speaker 1: terms of how long your life has been going on
Speaker 1: or the past year was or the past month.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well sure, I mean because I you know, I
Speaker 2: mean sometimes I'll put on you know, I'll listen on
Speaker 2: my soul and I'll do like a you know, a
Speaker 2: mile two or three walk, a three mile walk or something,
Speaker 2: and I'll just pick an alibum or you know, usually
Speaker 2: like that, and I'll go through every date of the
Speaker 2: year that that album came out, things like that. You know.
Speaker 2: It's just it's I love the exercise of it, and
Speaker 2: I love well, I love being able to do it,
Speaker 2: and it's like fun and refreshing. There's always something when
Speaker 2: I go through it where I go like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know what I'm gonna call that person? Or damn,
Speaker 2: where is that blouse? You know? Or oh there's you know,
Speaker 2: things like that, and it's just there's always something that's
Speaker 2: revealed to me like oh, yes, that's why I had
Speaker 2: this reaction later, you know, things like that.
Speaker 1: It's probably a difficult question to answer, but what fraction
Speaker 1: of your time do you suppose you spend in uh,
Speaker 1: in reminiscence.
Speaker 2: Probably not that much, not as much as people think.
Speaker 2: It's happens so quickly for me. And it's not like
Speaker 2: it's not like oh I can't wait too you know,
Speaker 2: it's not like that at all. I mean I could
Speaker 2: be driving in the car talking mysel and I'll hevor
Speaker 2: a song and I'll think about, you know, like oh,
Speaker 2: I remember the last summer the first time I for
Speaker 2: what this remaints. But it's it happens so quickly. It's
Speaker 2: not like I probably spend laice of time because it's faster.
Speaker 2: I just have a better computer system, do you know
Speaker 2: what I mean? Yeah, I probably well last time because
Speaker 2: I know where things are and I can always access them.
Speaker 1: Do you know what synesthesia is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't have that.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, interesting, there's no So for example, thinking about
Speaker 1: things spatially, if you think about the months or things
Speaker 1: like that or years, do you have any spatial location
Speaker 1: to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, i'd see things or I
Speaker 2: feel things. Let's say, on like a timeline, so it
Speaker 2: is like from my timeline, you know, let's say this
Speaker 2: is all from your perspective. This would be January and
Speaker 2: this would be December, let's say. But it scrolls quickly,
Speaker 2: you know, it doesn't urger page flip. It's almost like
Speaker 2: on a live and I can stop it and the
Speaker 2: videos for the video from each day can show up
Speaker 2: or not. You know. Sometimes things it's like developing a picture.
Speaker 2: Some things take longer than others, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: By the way, that is a form of synesthesia called
Speaker 1: spatial sequence synesthesia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it sounds like I and I definitely think
Speaker 2: like certain days or certain numbers in general have a
Speaker 2: masculine or feminine stuff like that. But I don't have
Speaker 2: the smell thing. I don't haven't, you know.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, there are many different forms of synesesia,
Speaker 1: but it sounds it sounds like you definitely have special
Speaker 1: sequence synesthesia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1: I have a question. Do you ever find that some
Speaker 1: of your memories are inaccurate? Do you have ways of.
Speaker 2: Testing literally self correct? It's like unbelievable, Like I'll say
Speaker 2: something happened out a blubb of them. It's like Rura,
Speaker 2: you will oh like no, be like something self correct immediately.
Speaker 1: And does your remembory feel like a constant stream of
Speaker 1: information or do you turn it off and not think
Speaker 1: about it?
Speaker 2: No? I mean, first of all, I've done seventy eight
Speaker 2: movies in my lifetime, two huge television series, seven Broadway shows.
Speaker 2: I've bringing ten books, So I don't think I you know,
Speaker 2: I'm not sitting talking holy about memory or only you
Speaker 2: know and it brings two fabulous sons and so you know,
Speaker 2: it's not like this is such a preoccupation of marine.
Speaker 2: I love talking about it. I love helping other people.
Speaker 2: I love describing it and trying to get people to
Speaker 2: sort of see what I see in their own lives. Possibly,
Speaker 2: you know, when people come to me go, oh my
Speaker 2: granddaughter has this or oh my son has this, I'll
Speaker 2: go get them into acting class. If you're really troubled
Speaker 2: by it, because as an actor, you will celebrate being
Speaker 2: able to access your emotional your emotional drive. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like we used to do a sense memory exercise
Speaker 2: in class, talk about to sits on touch, taste, smell.
Speaker 2: You'd have to bring in an object or a scent
Speaker 2: or a piece of music or or you know, we
Speaker 2: just one for each sense and people would say, okay.
Speaker 2: The teacher would say, okay, go back in the memory.
Speaker 2: And instantly I could cry, if you go, how'd you
Speaker 2: get there so fast? And I'd say, how could you
Speaker 2: not if that's what you're thinking of some painful memory?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I teach classes and memory live on it all over
Speaker 2: the country. And one of the things that I do
Speaker 2: is I have people bring in a turning point memory
Speaker 2: or object and talk about it, you know, and it's like,
Speaker 2: where was the fork in the road where you went
Speaker 2: this way instead of going that way? Or what's that impact?
Speaker 2: And you can't imagine the things people bring in and
Speaker 2: talk how they talk about the fork in the road,
Speaker 2: you know, how they talk about that turning point. And
Speaker 2: people tell the most unbelievable stories, and you see the
Speaker 2: life changing things happen over the course of the class
Speaker 2: because people have gone back and processed it. Because you know,
Speaker 2: I'm always saying, if you let memories become emotional boogeymen,
Speaker 2: then they control you. But if you process them, it's
Speaker 2: like how many times can you see a scary movie
Speaker 2: without going Okay, Now I can see the camera was
Speaker 2: at that angle when there's probably a craft service table
Speaker 2: and on the corn. You know where you start processing
Speaker 2: it different and you don't. It doesn't have quite the
Speaker 2: same impact. I mean, I'm making a joke about being
Speaker 2: on a set, but it's like it doesn't have the
Speaker 2: same impact on your life when you process it. Otherwise
Speaker 2: it's far away.
Speaker 1: So do you feel like you process memories more, you've
Speaker 1: gone through them, you've reviewed them more.
Speaker 2: Well, Yeah, And I also went into therapy at a
Speaker 2: very young age because my father had just passed away
Speaker 2: and I was going through a lot of life changes.
Speaker 2: So but I mean, I know I could help my
Speaker 2: family that way. But yeah, I mean, I've never been
Speaker 2: somebody who backed away from self reflection because it's like
Speaker 2: verre and available to play with anytime. I'm well. One
Speaker 2: of the things I'm always telling people to do because
Speaker 2: we have gotten lazy, you know, with our smirkles and stuff.
Speaker 2: Is at night, when you're brushing your teeth, it's just
Speaker 2: supposed to do it for true med Just scroll through
Speaker 2: your day, just see what was maybe worth remembering from
Speaker 2: your day, because that second time through might steer it
Speaker 2: in a little more indelibly, you know, because we just
Speaker 2: we walk around with such a fog. People are in
Speaker 2: a fond these dayscase they paying no attention to anything
Speaker 2: that's not on their own, and it's kind of scary.
Speaker 2: We're not living our lives.
Speaker 1: Oh I love that. Great. I'm going to do that
Speaker 1: tonight and every night from now on.
Speaker 2: Do it tonight.
Speaker 1: Terrific.
Speaker 2: Well, we must be an auditory person. That's why you've
Speaker 2: got a podcast and all that. Right, very auditory, I
Speaker 2: guess I am. I listen to most of my books
Speaker 2: now in audible.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So if you're very auditory, then you should, you know,
Speaker 2: do a sound check at some point during the day
Speaker 2: and write it down somewhere and then later on at
Speaker 2: the end of the lefth go like, how many of
Speaker 2: my little cell checks? Can I actually remember where was
Speaker 2: I on this day or that day? Because we've just
Speaker 2: gotten so lazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And we all carry around our exo
Speaker 1: brains now in our cell phones, and so we uh
Speaker 1: we put stuff off to our devices.
Speaker 2: People don't even remember their own phone numbers, you know,
Speaker 2: or their best friends phone member. And as kids, we
Speaker 2: can you know, we always an were our phone numbers.
Speaker 2: I did our seminar once with three hundred people, and
Speaker 2: I said to them, how there's no memories? And I said,
Speaker 2: how many of you remember your freshman in high school schedule?
Speaker 2: And the little girl raised her hand and I said,
Speaker 2: hold you. She said, fifteen? Were you battering omber? That
Speaker 2: was last year? I said, what about the rest of you?
Speaker 2: Nobody remembered. I said, okay, I'm going to give you
Speaker 2: some prompting questions, because it's about prompting sometimes, And so
Speaker 2: within within fifteen minutes, every single person except for to me,
Speaker 2: just didn't want to play. Every single person had their
Speaker 2: freshman in high school schedule.
Speaker 1: What's an example of a prompting question?
Speaker 2: What rugby question would be? How did you get to school?
Speaker 2: Do you remember what your first period was, what was
Speaker 2: your lunchroom situation? Who'd you sit with? Did you have sports? After?
Speaker 2: You know? You just go through like a list of questions,
Speaker 2: and it just starts to build in and it's like
Speaker 2: what class were you most hired or somebody said mac
Speaker 2: I said, I bet that was your lunch. That was
Speaker 2: right after lunch. Yeah, but you know, and you just
Speaker 2: start prompting and then things be one another.
Speaker 1: That was the actor Mary Lou Henner, who has highly
Speaker 1: superior autobiographical memory. So in answer to the question that
Speaker 1: we started with, which is whether everyone has the same
Speaker 1: level of memory, the answers clearly know. I want to
Speaker 1: wrap up by returning to two points. The first is
Speaker 1: this question of whether a memory like this is a
Speaker 1: good thing or a bad thing. I asked Mary Lou
Speaker 1: what she thought of this, and she said it was
Speaker 1: unambiguously good. But I just want to note that we
Speaker 1: each live in our own heads, and you can never
Speaker 1: really run a control experiment. Would you be happier or
Speaker 1: less happy if you had a different memory, better or
Speaker 1: worse than what you have now? We can each speculate,
Speaker 1: but we can't really know. I will say that other
Speaker 1: people with h sam, like Jill Price what I mentioned before,
Speaker 1: she feels pretty clearly the opposite of Mary Lou. She
Speaker 1: feels like it is a burden and let's return to
Speaker 1: the Jorge Luis Borges story. Funes the memorious Borhes uses
Speaker 1: the character to suggest that while perfect memory might seem desirable,
Speaker 1: it comes at a cost. The character is cast down
Speaker 1: in a flood of memory and loses an ability to
Speaker 1: generalize or abstract or find appropriate meaning in the world
Speaker 1: that has too many details. Now, again, that was a
Speaker 1: fiction author's interpretation, But maybe fictional stories are as close
Speaker 1: as we ever come to running a control experiment on
Speaker 1: our own line. It is the case that Jill Price,
Speaker 1: the real woman who can Never Forget, has stated that
Speaker 1: she liked the character of Fuones is cursed by her
Speaker 1: inability to forget. Whatever the case, all this points to
Speaker 1: the possibility that forgetting is actually a useful thing. It
Speaker 1: points to the possibility that natural selection has tuned the
Speaker 1: amount we remember and don't remember to be roughly optimal,
Speaker 1: at least in the environments in which humans evolved over
Speaker 1: the past several million years. It at least encourages us
Speaker 1: to consider that forgetting is an essential feature of memory,
Speaker 1: rather than a flaw. Our brains are constantly bombarded with
Speaker 1: information every site and sound and experience we have, and
Speaker 1: most of it if it's not emotionally salient, really doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: like where I parked my car at the airport in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. As the writer Honora de Balzac said, memories
Speaker 1: beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable. However,
Speaker 1: on the flip side, I was moved and inspired by
Speaker 1: what Mary Luce said about the importance of putting some
Speaker 1: effort into remembering our lives. After all this, I've published
Speaker 1: and argued in other episodes the apparent duration of your life,
Speaker 1: In other words, how long you think it's been since
Speaker 1: last summer, or last year or last decade. This depends
Speaker 1: on how much memory you can draw upon, And what
Speaker 1: tends to happen to us as we get older is
Speaker 1: that we lay down less and less new memory, and
Speaker 1: so we end up thinking, gosh, where did this year go?
Speaker 1: We're already pulling up to the end of a new year,
Speaker 1: and it feels like this one went by in the
Speaker 1: blink of an eye. But if we have rich memories
Speaker 1: that we can draw on from the year, then we think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: let's see, there was this event, and oh and then
Speaker 1: there was that, and there was that, and the whole
Speaker 1: thing doesn't seem like it disappeared in a blink anymore.
Speaker 1: One of the most important things from the point of
Speaker 1: view of brain plasticity is to keep your brain well
Speaker 1: exercised and not falling into routine. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that I recommended in a different episode is that
Speaker 1: when you brush your teeth, you should try it with
Speaker 1: your other hand, because that gets your brain out of
Speaker 1: its routine and forces it to confront a little novelty.
Speaker 1: So I loved Mary Lou's suggestion about thinking through your
Speaker 1: day while you brush your teeth and really writing down
Speaker 1: mentally what you did so tonight and hereafter, I would
Speaker 1: like to suggest that you brush your teeth with your
Speaker 1: other hand while recounting your day from beginning to end.
Speaker 1: This will not only kick your brain off its natural
Speaker 1: path of least resistance, but it will also lock down
Speaker 1: a little more memory in your life. I'm not telling
Speaker 1: you here how to live longer. Instead, I'm suggesting how
Speaker 1: to make it seem as though you have lived longer
Speaker 1: by internally writing down more of your health human journey
Speaker 1: so that you have more of its richness to draw from.
Speaker 1: Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading, Send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and
Speaker 1: check out on Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
Speaker 1: videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos