It Starts With Attraction
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It Starts With Attraction
Increase Intellectual Attraction by Improving Your Memory
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Curious about how stress might be silently sabotaging your memory? In today’s episode, we unravel the intricate web of memory mechanisms and share actionable techniques to boost your recall. We define memory in its various forms—working, short-term, and long-term—and use engaging examples like letter sequences and favorite bands to illustrate their unique functions. We promise you'll gain knowledge that can elevate both your personal and professional life.
Next, we tackle the impact of stress and trauma on memory recall with some eye-opening statistics and studies. Did you know that women might remember more words than men under stress? We discuss how negative experiences can overshadow positive memories and stress the importance of sleep for memory retention. Drawing on compelling research, including a 2019 study on PTSD, we highlight how personalized memory cues can significantly enhance recall.
Lastly, we shift our focus to practical strategies for memory improvement, emphasizing the importance of physical fitness and reward mechanisms. From repetition techniques to the cognitive prowess of elite athletes, we demonstrate how exercise and personalized strategies can make a remarkable difference. Tune in to learn how these insights can transform your memory performance and hear inspiring stories that showcase the incredible potential of these techniques.
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Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
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In this episode, we're going to be talking about memory techniques. Memory is an important part of how we can become our best selves, because there's so many things in life that could be better if we could remember them. It helps us to do our jobs better. It can help us to remember to pick up the kids or to get certain groceries, or even just memory and being able to hold positive memories from the past. All of these things have a huge impact on our overall well-being, our overall self-esteem and, overall, the way that we feel about ourselves, which is everything that we cover in the it Starts With Attraction podcast.
Speaker 1:So today we're going to be doing another what we call solo episode. What that means is I'm not alone, but I don't have a guest with me. Really, in these episodes, we cover the research in the field in the topic that we're covering for today's episode, and myself and the producer of the it Starts With Attraction podcast, jason, we go through these articles and we talk about them, and we talk about how we can use research to find the key takeaways to make our lives better, and so for this week, we're talking about memory techniques. Thanks for joining me today, jason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:What is memory?
Speaker 2:Oh, you're asking me.
Speaker 1:What is it? Do you know? How would you define it?
Speaker 2:The ability to recall things that have happened before.
Speaker 1:Good job. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good summary of it, yeah. Pretty straightforward, pretty simple.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think everyone knows what memory is, and so the actual definition in the dictionary the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained, especially through associative mechanisms.
Speaker 2:That's pretty dang close.
Speaker 1:You were really close. The associative mechanisms is an interesting part. Those are some of what we're going to be talking about in today's episode, but let's first talk about the different types of memory. Now, this is more so just for your own education. We aren't necessarily breaking down how to work on different types of memory in this episode. We're just talking about memory overall, but it's interesting to know that we actually have several, I believe four main different types of memory that we work through. Yes, so four different types of memory. The first one is working memory. So working memory is memory that involves storing, focusing attention on and manipulating information for a relatively short period of time, like for a few seconds. So, jason, I'm going to demonstrate this with you. So I want you to remember the next six letters that I say to you.
Speaker 1:Okay, the next six letters that I say to you Okay, okay.
Speaker 2:R-H-K-H-E-H-R-H. That was eight letters.
Speaker 1:Oh, remember eight R-H-K-H-E-H-R-H.
Speaker 2:Okay, what were they? R-h-k-h-e-h-r-h. Okay, good job. Okay, good job Okay.
Speaker 1:Now I want you to tell me the name of your favorite band and your favorite song.
Speaker 2:Favorite song by that band Sure Oof, let's go. Coldplay Yellow.
Speaker 1:Is that for real?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've had this conversation before.
Speaker 1:Have. We had this conversation, but you haven't remembered it. I did not, so this episode's for you. But this is not working memory.
Speaker 2:Okay, fine.
Speaker 1:Okay, what are the eight letters?
Speaker 2:R-H R-H shoot R-H. K-h E-H R-H.
Speaker 1:You did a really good job. Those are them yes.
Speaker 2:Those are the letters, yeah those are the letters. I mixed up? Did I mix up K-H and E-H?
Speaker 1:No, you didn't?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's right.
Speaker 1:Okay, your ability to remember the R-H, the letters. Yeah, that is the working memory. Okay, so it's something that you're holding right here. I bet if I ask you now that I tell you this, you're going to like think of them. If you weren't to repeat those letters and at the end of the episode I were to say what were those, you would more than likely be like I don't know. I think there's an RH, I think you know. Or if I had made them way more complicated? Yeah, because those were all just the initials of everyone in my family.
Speaker 1:Oh Well, you should have told me that that would be a mechanism, an associative mechanism to help remember, right? I was wondering.
Speaker 2:I was like why do they all end in H? Why do they all end in H? Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So all of that to say, you're working memories where you're storing just things that you know you need to remember for a few seconds or a few minutes, but you're likely going to forget them. So this is when the customer service person on the phone says here's the number that you need to call next, and you just remember it for the next couple of minutes until you can dial it again. But if you were to be asked that in the next hour, you'd be like oh, I have no idea, it's just what you store. I believe it's even in your prefrontal cortex Don't quote me on that, but I believe that's where it is. But that's what working memory is.
Speaker 1:Then there's short-term memory memory that involves a recall of information for a relatively short time. Now you might be saying this sounds a lot like working memory, and it does. But short-term memory, you're likely to remember it a bit longer, even though you don't have to. It could just be for a few seconds, but this could be. You're remembering something you did an hour ago, two hours ago. It's not just like a thing that you're having to remember. You're remembering episodes that happened or situations that happened or conversations that happened, and you're recalling those events. Now the opposite of that is long-term memory. So long-term memory is a memory that involves the storage and recall over a long period of time days, weeks, years, decades. This is our long-term memory.
Speaker 1:And then there's episodic memory, long-term memory of a specific event that was personally experienced at a particular time or place in the past, which again is similar to long-term memory. But long-term memory can also include things you learned in history class in eighth grade, whereas episodic memory might be more of like your first date, your first prom, your first kiss, things that were more experiential in nature of what you experienced. So, in large, those are the four different types of memory and clearly, at points I don't have a good long-term memory because I did not remember that that was your favorite song. The reason that's so crazy is that was my favorite song by Coldplay. I literally have the lyrics written in the bedroom at my parents' house that I grew up in.
Speaker 2:I remember this because we had this conversation. I do not remember this. I'm pretty sure this is a couple months ago. The entire team was talking about our favorite songs out here.
Speaker 1:Well, I will remember. Now, there you go. Did I ever tell you about how, in high school, we had a worship band that would come like other than the worship band in our, in our um, we had an actual worship band that would come and play at like retreats and camp and things like that. I can't, I can't, I don't remember their name. Anyway, they did a, they did. How great is our God, mixed with yellow. Did I tell you?
Speaker 2:that? No, you didn't say this. It was amazing. Yeah, not bad, you can't go wrong with yellow.
Speaker 1:I should do that at team week. Okay. So the prevalence of memory disorders according to the CDC and again, this episode. We're not really going to talk about memory disorders, but this is why it's so important to focus on taking care of our brain, focusing on memory and all of those things. The prevalence of memory disorders About 1 in 10 US adults 45 years and older report worsening memory loss, 10% starting at the age of 45. This does not have to be you. Adults with at least a college education were less likely to report worsening memory loss than those with less formal education. And of the 1 in 10 adults so the 10% of the population 45 and older that had experienced worsening memory loss, less than half of them so only 5% or less of the population actually ever talked about it with a medical professional actually ever talked about it with a medical professional. 6.7 million older adults have Alzheimer's disease in the US and that number is expected to double by 2060, which is really terrifying. Worsening memory loss ranges from 5% among Asian and Pacific Islanders to nearly 17% among American, indian and Alaska Native adults. So basically, it can be affected differently based on race, based on ethnicity, but the bottom line of it is is that it's important to focus on keeping our brain healthy and keeping our memory healthy as well.
Speaker 1:We're not going to get into this in this episode, but it's kind of been. There's been murmurs in the scientific community about how Alzheimer's disease may actually be the next type 3 diabetes, so there may be something about insulin, blood sugar that's affecting the brain and leading to this increase in dementia and Alzheimer's, so maybe we'll cover that in a future episode. All right, so what causes us to forget things or to struggle to form memories? Well, there are a couple of things. I believe we're going to be covering three or four things that can lead us to struggle and forget things. The first one is cortisol and stress levels. So there was an article that was published in 2010 titled Learning Under Stress Impairs Memory Formation, from the Journal of Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, so they should know what they're talking about.
Speaker 1:In this study, there were 48 men and women between the ages of 19 and 39. And on the first day they took these participants and the participants heard a list of 32 total words, so eight of them were neutral words that were related to a stressor that they would be experiencing, which I'll tell you about in just a minute. Eight of the words were negative words, eight of the words were positive and eight were neutral, not related to the stressor that they might be experiencing. When they got to the next day and they were in their control groups. So I'll tell you the words after we go through what they did the very next day. So the very next day, participants completed a free recall and recognition test for words that they had heard the day before and they were assigned randomly either to the stress group or the control group. So the control group immersed their right hand in room temperature water warm water for three minutes and this group, as their hand was in water, they were asked to remember the words.
Speaker 1:The stress group was instructed to immerse their right hand in ice water for three minutes. During the time that their hand was immersed, they were also videotaped so that they could be analyzed for facial expression and, as the study said, they were monitored by a cold and unsociable experimenter, which sounds like quite the job. So immediately after they removed their hand from the ice water, they were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 100 how stressful, how painful and how unpleasant that experience had been, and I'm sure it was unpleasant, it's hard. I mean, it would be much easier to put just your hand in a bucket of ice water for three minutes. I've put my whole body in a tub of ice water for three minutes. Actually, I don't even know if I got to three minutes. I think I got to 30 seconds and screamed like a cat, you know, like when you put cats in water. That is pretty much what my reaction was. It's very, very painful. And so 10 seconds after they got their hand out of the warm water or the cold water, I think I said that they were asked the questions when their hands were in there, but they weren't. They removed their hands and take.
Speaker 1:10 seconds after that they were presented with the 32 words that they had heard the day before but weren't asked to memorize. And now they were asked to memorize them. So they go through these 32 words. And then they were words like eight neutral nouns that were related to the stressful experience, so cold water, et cetera. Eight neutral words, just completely neutral square ink. Eight positive words like love, party, or eight negative words that were not related to the stress context, like poverty or accident. And then, 24 hours after that, so they put their hands in this water, they hear these words and then the next day they're called back to return to the laboratory and complete a free recall test.
Speaker 1:So the participants were instructed to write down all of the words that they could remember from the experiment the day before and immediately after the participants were given a recognition test. So first it was write down everything you can remember. Then it was okay, we're going to give you 62 words. Pick from this list which of the 32 you heard yesterday? And 30 of them were wrong. So what were the results? Well, the first result was that women remember more words than men, which I thought was really interesting, and I really have no idea why, but that was one of the findings from the group. But then the other was that recognition memory was impaired when participants were stressed during learning. So, actually seeing the words, that group that had put their hand in cold water, they were not able to remember as many words when all of them were presented to them as the group that had put their hand in warm water. And then the other results were that participants in the stress exposure cold water group experienced hand immersion as significantly more stressful, painful and unpleasant than the control.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, obviously.
Speaker 1:You're putting your hand in ice water for three minutes.
Speaker 2:That's kind of an obvious thing, obviously.
Speaker 1:They elicited significant elevations in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, because that was another thing they took. They also took saliva samples and found that cortisol in their saliva had increased due to putting their hand in the cold water. But that did not happen in the control group, of course. Learning under stress reduced both the free recall and the recognition performance. 24 hours after learning, learning under stress reduced their overall memory in both of those by over 30%. So it was definitely a dramatic decrease in what they were able to remember versus the control group. So what is the takeaway from this study? What would your takeaway be from this, jason?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think it's that it's super hard to remember things when you're under extreme stress, like something you know as extreme as sticking your arm in cold water. It exhibits a stress response and you can't. I mean it's you're not focused on trying to remember words, even though that's your objective, like it's going to be almost impossible to do that. So, yeah, it's not really surprising to me that that's what they found, but I mean, it does back up kind of the thought, the theory of it.
Speaker 1:I feel like it back up kind of the thought, the theory of it. I feel like it is the equivalent of putting someone in a nice spa, like they get in a hot tub, maybe they go in a sauna. They come out all relaxed and they're like okay, remember these eight words.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Versus you get out of a cold plunge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's the exact same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, just with your whole body. There's just so much going on in your body when that's happening, so stress and cortisol can, of course, impede your ability to remember things. The second thing that can impede it is trauma or mental health. So this was a study done in 2019, relation of Positive Memory, recall, count and Accessibility with Post Trauma Mental Health. In this study there was 203 participants that averaged 35 years old. 85 participants had probable PTSD based on the PTSD checklist from the DSM-5.
Speaker 1:And then the participants completed several different questionnaires to be a part of this study. They completed a life events questionnaire that asked about lifetime traumatic events that they may have experienced, a PTSD assessment, post-traumatic cognitions inventory to assess thoughts related to experienced trauma. And then they also did an autobiographical memory test where they had to recount specific positive memories from their past. They completed a memory experiences questionnaire, which asked them about their phenomenological experiences or the phenomenological characteristics of the described specific memory. Phenomenological is a very fun research word, which basically means the lived experience, so it's a qualitative type of research. When you do phenomenological research, you're asking a person about their experience living a certain type of situation, and it's just a really fun word to spell and say. Then they did a couple of others, like a patient health questionnaire, which is a depression inventory and a positive and negative affect schedule, where they talked about positive and negative mood symptoms that they may have. So what were the results of this? The count of specific positive memories was significantly correlated negatively correlated with PTSD intrusion severity, ptsd negative alterations in cognitions and mood severity, ptsd arousal and reactivity severity, self-blame and positive affect. What does all of that mean? It means that the more likely a person was to have experienced traumatic events or remembered traumatic experiences from their past, the more difficult it was for them to remember positive memories from their past, more difficult it was for them to remember positive memories from their past. Overall, trauma-exposed individuals with more severe symptomatology demonstrated deficits in positive memory-related processes.
Speaker 1:People who've experienced trauma, their brain, their memory formation, is impeded. They cannot. It's more difficult I'm not going to say it's impossible. It is more difficult for them to actually remember positive things from their past. And I think that, according to the study and I think that one of the interesting parts of this is, we know that the neural pathways in our brain are like trails that go through a forest, so the more that a trail is used a hiking trail, for example, the more run down it gets, the easier it is to find. You can see the trail more easily because it's used more. The less the trails that are not used as much things begin to grow up, you can't find them as easily, and the same is true with neural pathways in our brain.
Speaker 1:So memories that we have, stories we tell ourselves, habits that we have all of those follow neural pathways and the more negative ones that we feel and that we process through on a normal day-to-day basis, the more that neural pathway is used, which means the more positive neural pathways are not used as much, and so it actually has changed the way that a brain can like, process, formulate, process and recall certain things. But that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. It means that it's an opportunity to learn how to shift the narratives that we're telling ourselves in our head. But it can be very difficult to do, especially with all of the impact of trauma and how it can affect a person long-term. The third thing a third thing we have two more that can impact memory is lack of sleep. This comes up every single time.
Speaker 2:I know Every time I'm beginning to think that our research assistant is doing it on purpose.
Speaker 1:It's Alina. Alina does a great job creating outlines for this show.
Speaker 2:Shout out.
Speaker 1:Alina and shout out Alina, you're amazing, couldn't do it without you.
Speaker 2:And also maybe, yeah, I think it's a little targeted.
Speaker 1:But also, it's true, yep, because research, yeah, in this study sleep improves memory, the effect of sleep on long-term memory in early adolescence. So this one was done on kids between the ages of 10 to 14 in Helsinki. They were assigned to sleep or no sleep conditions. Now, this is a bit. Well, I'm going to tell you the study, then I'm going to tell you the part where I'm like ah, okay.
Speaker 1:So participants completed a test of declarative memory. They were presented with repeating semantically related and unrelated pairs of words. After each word pair, the subject repeated the pair out loud to ensure registration of the paired association. So I don't have the list on here of exactly the words, but it would be something like peanut butter and jelly, or it could be something unrelated like peanut butter and cheese, although I know someone who says that's delicious Disgusting. I don't ever want to try it Anyway, but you get the idea.
Speaker 1:List of pairs were administered three times in immediate succession. So they heard each of these pairings, whether they were related or unrelated, three times in a row. And then the participants that were in the sleep condition learned the paired associations at 9 pm and were tested for the cued recall 12 hours later, at 9 am. So they were tested after a night of sleep. The participants in the no sleep group received the same paired association presentation. They went through all of that the exact same way, but they were given the words at 9 am and then they were tested at 9 pm. So it's not like they test, it's not like they gave both of the groups at 9 pm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not like you're depriving them of sleep, exactly, yeah, this is a little.
Speaker 1:Exactly. This is what I don't love about this. I feel like if they were and here's why there's no way it could have passed the IRB or the Ethics Committee to tell children to not get a night of sleep. So this was. I would love to see this in adults, who can, you know, they can volunteer to be a part of a study where they might not get any sleep, and I think the results would be different. But here, well, but we'll look at what these results said, even with where they were. Okay. So what were the results? There was a 20.6, so just under 21% increase in long-term memory in the sleep group compared to the non-sleep group. So, compared to the group that learned it at 9 pm and then got sleep, versus the group that heard it at 9 am and then had to recall it again later at night, the number correct for recall was greater for the sleep group than for the no sleep group. So we already see that there's a significant difference in these groups, but they likely got the same amount of sleep.
Speaker 1:It was just when they were given the information and when they were asked to recall it. So I can only imagine how much more profound the impact of the results would be if they were both given at 9 pm and one group didn't get any sleep.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It would be terrible.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I'm sure it would be if they were both given at 9 pm and one group didn't get any sleep. Yeah, it would be terrible. Oh yeah, I'm sure it would be. I mean you're talking about 20% increase in long-term memory. Yeah, I mean, probably more than double.
Speaker 1:And this is one of the things that we know from a lot of different research studies, not just this one. But it does seem like if you are studying for something, or if you really want to remember something, even if you learned it earlier that day, if you go back through your notes or go back through what you learned, read the chapter again, even just skim it, right before you go to bed. There's something about doing that and then sleeping. That actually helps you to remember it longer term.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had always heard that too when I was in college. I never did it, but well.
Speaker 1:There's no time like the present.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amen.
Speaker 1:Although I don't know what you would need to like recall now yeah, I don't know. Something maybe.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there's something.
Speaker 1:The other thing that can affect ability and memory is medicine. In a 2011 study, memory Disorders Associated with Consumption of Drugs. This was done in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. They looked at several different incidences of people who were taking certain prescription medication and reporting memory loss or difficulty with memory recall as one of the side effects. So overall, for this one, the main takeaway is there could be certain medications that you're on that are actually leading you to have lapses in memory or difficulty remembering things, and that should always be talked about with your doctor. But we will share what some of those are that were found in this study in case you're taking one of them and maybe that does spark a conversation with your doctor or at least lets you know that you're not crazy. If you've been remembering or misremembering things, it could be a side effect of medication you're on. Positive associations with memory loss was found with expected drugs, so these were the ones they kind of knew were going to affect them Benzodiazepines, so this is things like Xanax, anti-anxiety medicines, tricyclic antidepressants not SSRIs tricyclic antidepressants and antipsychotics.
Speaker 1:They could all lead to memory loss for a short amount of time. But there was also associations found with benzodiazepine-like hypnotics such as zolpidem and zopiclone, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, sris fluxatine and paroxetine I don't know if I'm saying those right Now. Those are not selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. We're specifically talking about serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so just SRIs for that category, or second-generation anticonvulsants. So, looking at things like gabapentin, valproate, valproic acid, things in that category, the most represented class was benzodiazepines, which presented anterograde amnesia, which is a well-known effect for this drug class. Now you might be thinking what is anterograde amnesia? It's when people have difficulty forming new memories temporarily. Now these are extreme cases for people who use these types of medications, which mostly are benzodiazepines. But this could be something. If you have been on a Xanax and maybe you take one at night to help you with your anxiety and you wake up the next morning and you don't remember, it could be a side effect of the drug. Like you might think, I watched a TV show last night, like I can't even remember. That could be the anterograde amnesia that you're experiencing. So benzodiazepines were the drug that led to that, the most Lithium, which is commonly given for bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1:This was associated with memory disorders as well as analgesics. They also caused memory disorders, things like morphine, entramadol and things of that class. So if you have been on a painkiller, maybe you had surgery recently, or a pulled muscle, or if you have anxiety, depression, any of the things that we've talked about, your medication could be causing that. So talk with a doctor if that's something concerning you. Well, let's move on to ways to improve memory. So the first point that we're going to talk about here is self-reference cues and self-generated cues. What do you think that means, jason?
Speaker 2:I have no idea. Maybe, maybe this means trying to tie something back to like something that relates to you.
Speaker 1:maybe I think that's. I think you're on it. I think you're on a good path here.
Speaker 1:I'm on to something 36 undergraduate students in a 2021 study titled the effects of audio visual memory cues on working memory recall. There were 36 undergraduate students between 17 and 24 years of years of age. There were six different conditions they were all put into. I'm not going to go through them because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. The participants were basically told a memory cue. They were told that a memory cue was an associated word that would spark their memory of the original word and that they were generating the eyes to see what words would be commonly associated with the base word. Participants were asked to generate one or three cues for every presented word and they only had 20 seconds to do so. So it would be like if I said the word bread, what's the first thing that comes to mind?
Speaker 2:Crumb.
Speaker 1:Bread crumb Great, okay, if I said the word light.
Speaker 2:Bulb.
Speaker 1:Okay, video.
Speaker 2:Camera.
Speaker 1:That's a pretty easy one. So that's basically what they did in this test. And then they had some different groups that they put people into. They assigned words to some people instead of allowing them to generate their own words, and they had other people figure out their own self-generation ones, and overall, here is what they found the use of self-generated memory cues yielded a higher recall than being given a memory cue. So like how you, jason, just I said video, you said camera.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was natural to you. So what you would have done in this test is they would have then written down the word camera. Then they would have given it back to you later just the word camera.
Speaker 2:As camera, and I would have to guess the base one and you would have to it back to you later, just the word camera and I would have to guess that you would have to remember the original word yeah now you're probably more likely to remember that versus if I picked the word like video socket which isn't even a. Thing yeah.
Speaker 1:so it's like how would you I don't think it's a thing, um, and so you see the word socket and you're probably going to be like Ranch. Ranch, ranch.
Speaker 2:Ranch, not ranch. Not like the dressing, I mean like the tool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like a socket wrench.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean that one might have been so crazy that you would have remembered it. Like, socket doesn't go with video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but you see what I mean. Yeah, something like that, yeah.
Speaker 1:So self-reference cues were the most effective memory cue and resulted in a higher accuracy score than other types they did so they did a semantic definitional and a semantic contextual, which we're not going to go into all of that but overall, like having your own thoughts and your own cues for things ended up being the most effective thing. There was another study done in 2015 from the Journal of Memory and Cognition. In the first experiment there were 50 introduction to psychology students. They studied a list of 60 words which they were later going to be tested on. And then there was a second experimental group, 42 intro to psych students. They were given the same experiment, except they received a cue generation. Well, and I will say in that first group, half of them were told to generate their own cues. And then they had a couple of other experimental groups, but what the results ultimately found were the same thing A greater number of cues when the learners remembered more items, when they received their own cues rather than receiving either a peer's cues that they made for their own reasons, or if they were given a cue to go from. The overall results for this test were that learners generated cues that were compatible with their own rich, idiosyncratic knowledge. They thrived when they received their own cues during the test. So this is where our own brains can shine. So this is unique for me. But if I hear peanut butter, jelly and if that's something, I have to remember that word together, not just peanut butter, or that's something I have to remember that word together, not just peanut butter or jelly. If I have to remember peanut butter jelly, the self-generated cue I would give would be Mount Elbert. No one else would understand this, but here's why.
Speaker 1:So when I was in ninth grade, I went with my youth group and we climbed Mount Elbert on this thing called Adventure Trek or Wilderness Trek, up in Colorado or out in Colorado. And when we went from the higher camp up to, it was the morning that we had to wake up at like 3 am to go up to summit, the summit of the mountain. And it was dark, it was freezing, it was high elevation, so there wasn't as much oxygen to be breathing in and so we were all getting out of breath. But one of the ways that we, like stayed focused and kept moving forward was that every time there was a tree in the path and we had to split away from our buddy that we were walking beside we would each say a word like peanut butter, and the other person would say jelly or ham and cheese. Like you would find things that paired. And that's the game we would play with our buddy that we were hiking up this up to summit with to keep us like, to keep us engaged, to keep us mentally fresh and to keep us engaged. So that would be my own cue which would help me remember.
Speaker 1:But everyone has stories like that that they can pick from and help them to remember things long-term. So the real key here is your brain is full of things to help you remember. So dig deep and find things that matter to you. I'm thinking of two specific examples that for adults that it can be used for. So names is one of them. So names like. I was at an event last week. It was a little get together at someone's house and I swear these two ladies introduced themselves to me and I pride myself on being pretty good at names and I'm going to talk about that in just a minute, but I did not shine in this moment. So at the end of the event I was like oh, samantha, it was great to meet you. She's like my name was Caitlin.
Speaker 2:Oh no.
Speaker 1:And the other one is called Hannah and her name was Allison.
Speaker 2:Oh, you got both of them wrong. I got both of them, oh no.
Speaker 1:So wrong, fully paying attention in the moment, but I do use this sometimes with people that I meet, where I'm like, okay, I remember. So when I got the name Allison's name wrong and called her Hannah, well, there was another Hannah standing beside me and she was like no, I'm Hannah. And I was like I know you're Hannah, but now it looks like I don't know anyone's name and so I remembered I was able to remember Allison because I was like she's not Hannah, she's Allison, but doing things like that and a lot of people. I've never done this, but people sometimes will use names and they'll do something it rhymes with.
Speaker 1:Or someone they've met before that could remind them of that. Things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've done that too. It kind of depends on what the name is and the situation that like I mean, like what, what it relates to, like when I was in college, meeting new people in college, I had to do this all the time because, I am.
Speaker 2:I know I made fun of you for forgetting both of their names, but I am terrible at names, for I mean, it takes me a week, maybe two weeks, to remember somebody's name, even if I'm in class like every other day we're going to talk about that in a minute. It's so bad. It's probably cause my lack of sleep.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, maybe. But also, I think it's because you tell yourself that you're bad at remembering names, because I just told you. Alison, kate, I names. I met two, three new people this morning. I can tell you all their names Becky, aaron, nate. Look at me, are you sure? Look at me I am sure. I'm a hundred percent sure. Okay, when I see them again next time at CrossFit, it will be right. Okay, those will be their names.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:But that can help. Another way I can see this helping adults is for the adults who are like going through a secondary education program, so maybe they're finishing undergrad master's. I have a couple of friends who've been studying for their MFT or LPC degrees, becoming counselors, and they are having to memorize a lot of things, Like they have flash cards and everything. So using these self-generated cues to remember things especially if you're going to have to take a test like an MBA, LSAT, pass the bar, any of those this can be incredibly helpful. The other thing that can be helpful is repetition, and that's another thing that I will use, especially with names, is I will look at this person, whoever I just meet, and I will say their name to myself a couple of times after they tell me their name, if I'm doing this right, and then I will repeat their name again to them within like a minute after they've said it to me, and that's just me assuring that I have their name correct. So repetition is another helpful way, and there's several studies that have shown that.
Speaker 1:We're not going to go into the details on those right now, but one of those studies that was done in. I'll just share the results with you. It was done in 2018. And it said that results suggest that multiple learning may, so repetition may increase the connectivity between the hippocampus and neocortical regions during memory retrieval. So there's something about repetition that actually, as we said before, helps those neural pathways to combine together so that you can recall things quicker and solidify them into your memory. Another thing that can help you with your memory is exercise. There are themes.
Speaker 2:There are.
Speaker 1:There are themes with everything we talk about. This is a 2023 study, so very recent. The effects of acute exercise on memory. I love this study. 52 undergraduate and graduate students completed 13 visits in this research study. In the first visit, they did a maximal exercise test on the treadmill to determine the participants' max rate endurance capacity and to familiarize participants with the memory protocol. So they basically had them come in and go as fast as they could on a treadmill.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I want to create an experiment like this. Oh boy, there then ended up being 12 different experimental groups. 12 different, yeah, I mean 12 different groups. There were four control conditions, so they didn't. They ended up throughout the 13 times that they came in. They didn't exercise but they watched a video, so they watched. And then the four exercise but they watched a video, so they watched. And then the four groups were how long the videos were 21 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes or 35 minutes.
Speaker 1:And then, after the video, participants would start a memory task. And then there were four moderate intensity conditions that were one of the experimental groups was moderate intensity exercise, and they exercised on a treadmill for 20 minutes at moderate intensity and then rested for 1, 5, 10, or 15 minutes, and then rested for 1, 5, 10, or 15 minutes before they started the memory task. And they were also given a video to watch while they were doing their moderate intensity exercise. And then there were four vigorous intensity conditions involving exercise for 20 minutes at vig moderate intensity and then resting for 1, 5, 10, or 15 minutes. And then another group doing vigorous exercise while watching a video and then resting 1, 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Then they all do the same test. So control condition. Well, hold on. So then they all start the same test. For the memory task, participants were exposed to five trials, each including 15 words, on a desktop computer. Each word remained on the screen for 1500 milliseconds. I have no clue how many seconds that is 1.5?.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:And participants read the word aloud as it appeared on the screen Okay, After the fifth time of doing this. So again like. This is what happened five times in a row. After the fifth one, participants watched a video. What kind of video? Either the office or the Big Bang Theory. What kind of test is this.
Speaker 2:It's so random.
Speaker 1:It's so random. While viewing the video, participants were asked to draw three small pictures that depict three major scenes from the 20-minute video, and I cannot imagine what they would draw from the office.
Speaker 2:I just I mean, it depends on what episode they showed.
Speaker 1:I know that's what scares me. So, and this was done, so this was just kind of like a distraction part of the test, because they didn't want participants to be rehearsing the words that they had heard, so they had them watch the video and draw pictures for literally no reason other than to forget the words or to not rehearse the words that they heard. Then, after that, after they watched the Office of the Big Bang Theory, participants were to free recall, so to just try and remember as well as they could, as many words as possible, and then, 24 hours later, participants completed a final recall assessment. For both recall assessments, after participants were recalled their final word, the last one that they could remember, they were encouraged to try and recall at least one more word, even though there may not have been one. This was implemented to avoid minimal effort during the memory recall, so it was implemented. For the people who may be like, eh, I'm done. I don't know if these participants were given money, but I just want to be over with it. They were continued to be urged to remember, to remember more.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what were the results? The control, which did no exercise, had a lower memory recall than the moderate and the vigorous groups. The primary finding was that both moderate and vigorous intensity exercise improved memory function at the 24 hours of the next day recall protocol as compared to the non-exercise control. Individuals with higher levels of aerobic endurance compared to their lesser fit counterparts had a greater memory performance after exercise than the 24 hour delayed period. So it wasn't even just if they if they exercised or not, it was also if they were more aerobically fit they tended to have a greater memory recall. Why do you think this?
Speaker 2:is? I don't know. I was going to ask you because it doesn't say it doesn't say and I'm very curious what do you think? I mean, I have a very non-scientific Okay, what's your non-scientific? It's very, very five-year-old. It just gets the blood flowing.
Speaker 1:I think that's part of it.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's the only thing that I know. I mean I'm not a researcher or anything like that, but I don't know. I wish it told us.
Speaker 1:It doesn't say it says individuals with higher levels of aerobic endurance. It doesn't say just the people assigned to the vigorous group. So I'm thinking that it included. I'm assuming that that is equally done whether they were in moderate or vigorous intensity.
Speaker 2:Just the people who were more fit If they had a higher level of aerobic endurance.
Speaker 1:Do you know what? What do you think higher level of aerobic endurance means?
Speaker 2:People who have more stamina. This is their VO2 max. Yes, it has to do with it.
Speaker 1:So they're not saying that they did it by VO2 max, but that is one of the best ways to look at aerobic endurance, and so part of me thinks that this has to do with that, because VO2 max is how much oxygen your body can effectively utilize during exercise, because oxygen is what fuels performance. So the most elite athletes in the world have like incredibly high VO2 max because they can use more oxygen more efficiently, which powers them, whereas someone like me I'm not going to have the seven millimole per kilogram per minute. I think that's the way that they do it. It's a lot. I think that's the way that they do it. It's a lot. I'm not going to have that, but I know how to effectively use oxygen to power myself, and I think that has something to do with it, which makes me wonder if they were to take the world's most elite athletes and have them do a memory test and then compare to them with non-fit people what those results would be.
Speaker 2:Oh, they'd be night and day. I really think they would so.
Speaker 1:so these elite athletes, it's not just there that they're also genetically like ahead of the curve of everyone else. Will you think they're also like mentally?
Speaker 2:Potentially, I don't know, I it depends, I think. I think it would depend on the athlete what sport they play, because when you think about like a quarterback, quarterback's brains are.
Speaker 1:But they have a lot of concussions.
Speaker 2:Well, quarterback's not.
Speaker 1:Not exactly that position.
Speaker 2:But their brain, like in terms of having to recall stuff? Have you ever heard like a play being recited that they're insane?
Speaker 1:Oh, you're saying, they have good memory recall.
Speaker 2:Yes, like they have to know what every single player on the field is doing. Plus, they'll get like a crazy play call in their headset and have to recite it. We're talking like a 15 word thing that they'll have to recite for every, you know every play, every time they get in the huddle. Yeah, Interesting.
Speaker 1:This is interesting and you know I can remember.
Speaker 1:Hmm, this kind of goes into the next thing that we're going to cover, and I didn't think that these would link together and and this may very much be a stretch, because I don't know, I don't know why yeah, but yeah, with athletes, with, and even people, I'm assuming, like people who have higher levels of aerobic endurance, like to work out or like to be fit, so they probably link part of what they do, like their times and their pace and their whatever it is that they do, like they probably know it when you're in this like and they can remember it.
Speaker 1:So they can remember, like this is my one minute mile time. This is my half my, you know, 800 meter time. This is how much I squat, this was my time for this set, like we tend to remember I say we when I'm at a workout class, like I remember how long it took me for each set, if that's part of what the workout is. So there's this reward mechanism. I think as well that we're like used to having when we work out, but would that relate to them having to remember something afterwards?
Speaker 2:anyway, it's unknown yeah, I just looked up. We had to include this let's hear it.
Speaker 2:But I looked up like this is just a normal, like a normal football play call oh my gosh that a quarterback will receive in his headset and he'll have to recite the entire thing like word for word after he hears it and know exactly what it means. Again, quarterback has to recite this as soon as he hears it and know exactly what this means brown right, a right flanker. Short post to jet dino x, shake y, shallow cross, ready break. And then he breaks the huddle this is that self-generated cue.
Speaker 1:That's how he remembers those repetition.
Speaker 2:Self-generated cue and, like he memorizes 75 to 120 of these plays for the entire season are you serious? Yes, plus like for each. They'll add 10 to 15 new plays per team for every game. So every week they're learning what do you mean per team? Like they'll have certain plays for, like, whatever team they're playing that go up against a certain defensive scheme. So every week they're learning 10 to 15 new plays, on top of the 75 to 100 plus that they have to memorize.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so like you talk about you know athletes, like if you get a quarterback and compare it with a person, or like a normal person who's not an athlete and measure their memory, like of course, I mean, it's going to be night and day. That's immediately what I thought of when you were talking about comparing the two.
Speaker 1:Okay, this does link. This is a good segue into the next point that we're going to cover, which is reward. So in this study, the reward reward can help us with our memory. How, what does that mean? In this study done in 2006, reward-motivated learning, mesolimbic activation precedes memory formation. Okay, what does mesolimbic activation precedes memory formation? Okay, what does this mean?
Speaker 1:So in this study, they took I actually don't know how many participants, but they had participants. Basically, they saw a screen that said this next thing that you're about to see, if you can remember it, it's worth a certain amount of money. And so they were. And it could be a low value, such as 10 cents, it could be no value, so just $ were. And it could be a low value, such as 10 cents, it could be no value, so just $0, or it could be a high value, such as $5. And for everyone they could remember later to get right, they would get that amount of money. And so what they found was that, for the ones that had $0 associated with it, respondents had no like they weren't quick to respond, they didn't really have an incentive to, but what they found was that subjects were significantly more likely to remember the scenes that followed cues for high value rather than low value reward.
Speaker 1:So the high value reward clues or cues activated the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens and the hippocampus preceding high-value scenes that were later remembered, but not those later forgotten. So what does that mean? High-reward cues like this next thing is going to be worth $5. All of these parts of the brain would light up and then they would see the scene which led them to remember it. And then, but for the other ones, like they just forgot it, but they remembered the ones that had a high reward attached to them. These results provide initial evidence that brain activation preceding encoding, preceding remembering what they're about to see, predicts declarative memory formation for subsequent events.
Speaker 1:So how does this apply to what you just talked about? For an athlete like, it is high value to remember those plays. Therefore they're rewarded when they remember them correctly. And it continues the feedback loop, like it's the basic premise of psychology which is operant. Is it operant or is it? Which kind of conditioning is it? It's the conditioning where, like, here's the carrot, you get it, you get it, and then, like, you have to get it in order to get the reward. And that's what continues the the cycle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes sense, especially when I mean you're talking about quarterbacks, are making a lot of money $30 million a year. Yeah, there's a lot riding on on remembering these places a lot.
Speaker 1:There's a lot, yeah, but also it's interesting because it's what, like this, is the reward cycle that can occur for anyone in any job.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because when you do the thing that then leads to getting a promotion, getting a raise, making more money, getting favorable remarks from your director, like those are the things you continue to do again. And so when you know what those things are, those are the ones you're more likely to care about rather than anything else. And I think that this can even be I mean, we're not really talking about memory as much here, but I think that this is even important for, just like how we work on our pies, because that's why we've tried to boil it down to. So what are the key ones to focus on in each area of the pies? Like this is the most bang for your buck, and so, like with physical sleep, nutrition, exercise. These are the key things that we wanna focus on.
Speaker 1:Again, it doesn't relate to memory, but it's when you do these things you're more likely to have a greater reward from doing it after you do it and therefore it leads you to want to do it again, and the same thing can happen with memory. So what are the things you need to remember that you would be rewarded by? When Alina and I were like discussing this, this part of it we actually talked about we actually talked about the um, like the monetization of our YouTube channel.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And like if you knew cause we were like who has a role here at marriage helper? That's like kind of related to and it's like, well, if Jason would be able to see, like you know, if the monetization of the YouTube channel, like doing these things, led to a better or even not just monetization, even if it was like subscribers or clicks or reviews or whatever like those are the things. Then you would probably be more likely to remember those things and then do them again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true, that's 100% correct.
Speaker 1:So reward is important.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All this to say all this, to say reward is important. So the final one that we're going to talk about and this might be something that many of you have heard about is the magical number seven plus or minus two. So you may have grown up hearing or maybe you learned about it in a psychology class or something like that that the human brain can really only hold on to seven things at one time in our working memory plus or minus two. So plus or minus two is quite the deviation, because it could be five to nine, but either way. But that's kind of why they say like oh you know, that's how we remember phone numbers, like, or why phone numbers are seven numbers X, y, z.
Speaker 1:But here's the funny thing about it the magical number plus or minus two, the magical number seven plus or minus two, is not exactly backed by science. You see, it initially came from a man named George Miller who, in 1956, wrote an article indicating that short-term memory has the capacity to remember seven things at one time, plus or minus two. It's been widely cited in psychology for decades and it's had over 20,000 scientific articles written about it. But the interesting thing is it wasn't true.
Speaker 1:Yeah it wasn't true.
Speaker 2:I know me and Alina talked about this the other day. It's like how does this guy go unchecked for 40 years?
Speaker 1:He just made a claim and decided to argue it, which is much of what Freud did. Interestingly, there is very little of what Freud actually did. In psychology that was backed by literally any evidence. None. I can't even think of maybe one thing that he talked about, but all of his like stages of development and anyway we won't get it.
Speaker 2:We won't get on that.
Speaker 1:Freudian psychology is its own interesting mess, but he was basically just like. He researched things with working memory, with memory capacity, but he was never really, but he never really brought those two things together. But he was asked to speak at a conference and he was asked to speak on absolute judgments and memory span, which were his two main areas that he focused on for an hour long, and he initially thought like you know what I'm just going to say? No, I'm just going to turn it down. But they persisted, they wanted him to talk, and so he tried to knit together his findings in a story and made a commonality to it.
Speaker 1:And so in that he said the number of bits of capacity in absolute judgment amounted to about seven categories. Capacity in absolute judgment amounted to about seven categories, similar to the number of chunks making up the limit in memory span. And then he threw in some newly awakening subsidizing literature in there. But the bottom line of it is is he made it up and it wasn't totally true. Now here's what I find so interesting I wonder if we have limited ourselves to how much we can remember, because we've always been told it's seven numbers at a time, and so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or if it would be better if we I mean, one of the things Alina said was maybe we were meant to remember less and remember it better.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:So many implications, yeah.
Speaker 2:This is. It's a crazy story to end on.
Speaker 1:It is a crazy story to end on. So, yes, so what can we do? What are well before before we ask? There's one final one that I will share as an anecdotal evidence.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So a couple of years ago I heard this guy speak and he spoke about memory, and I really don't remember much of what he said, except this I remember him saying that if you tell yourself you have a bad memory, you will because you're giving yourself a pass. So if you tell yourself, like I'm bad with the names or I always lose my keys or I always lose my computer, you will continue to forget those things because you have given your brain and your body permission to do so. So his encouragement. So there were two things that I remember as the key takeaways. The first one was stop telling yourself you're bad at memory or you're bad at remembering names, and begin telling yourself I have a great memory and I'm great at remembering people's names. That is literally the change I made and I became really good at remembering people's names. Am I a hundred percent? Clearly not, but I still remember Caitlin and Allison, not Hannah and Samantha.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is not at all similar.
Speaker 1:Not at all similar, but I remember. I remember the name Because I tell myself I am good at remembering their names and this person is important.
Speaker 1:And when I make that shift in my head, I am much more likely to remember someone's name. The second thing he said was whenever you place something like sometimes I'll take my ring off to go work out or whatever, or sometimes I'll put my keys somewhere, he said, whenever you do that, like, take off your ring, and if you're just putting it somewhere, like maybe you're putting it in your bathroom or whatever, look at it and this is going to look crazy, but you look at it and you go ring and you like tell yourself really loudly, and you look at it when you're saying it because it interrupts your brain's processes and you're more likely to remember where it is. And every time I've done it that way, I do remember where that item is, but I lose my keys all the time because I don't, because I don't take the time to be like here is where they are, but every time I do that I remember.
Speaker 1:Now this is anecdotal, very similar to George Miller making up seven plus or minus two but it's something that whether it's placebo effect or self-fulfilling prophecy it has absolutely worked for me to remember things better.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:What are your takeaways?
Speaker 2:Uh, I think so for me. The things that I know that have worked for me in the past were repetition and the reward. Um. So, like I said, I was a terrible student in college, but now, if I need to remember something, repetition is usually the route that I go, um, and it works for me. So I mean, try any of these techniques, any of the ones that we listed.
Speaker 1:Remember, you can always come back and listen again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's it Find the ones that work for you and, depending on where you are in your life, what it is, you need to remember how high the stakes are. All of those things can make a difference, but the bottom line of it is that this is one area of the amazing thing that our brain does memory, memory, recall, remembering things that we've learned and there are ways that we can be more intentional about intentionally looking at the things that we're learning in order to have them available for recall later as we need them. And so use these, and we would love to hear which ones you liked, maybe which ones you disagree with, or ones that we didn't mention that worked for you. If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave that in the comments, and we always love reading your comments.
Speaker 2:R-H-K-H-E-H-R-H. Look at you, I remembered.
Speaker 1:Because you know my kids' names, yeah, and because I told you that I was going to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:But can you remember the mountain that I climbed in Colorado?
Speaker 2:Mount Elbert Dang it.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to remember a part of the episode.
Speaker 2:Well, you're not going to get me no gotchas today. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. If you're listening on podcast, make sure and follow so that you don't miss any upcoming episodes. And until next week, stay strong.
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