Essentials: Tools to Boost Attention & Memory | Dr. Wendy Suzuki

Huberman opens by asking Wendy Suzuki to lay out the basic elements of memory, and promises to then turn to her research on how exercise and memory interact. Suzuki answers with a framework of four things that make experiences memorable. The first is novelty: the first time we see or experience something, the brain is drawn to it, and attentional systems pull us toward it. Paying attention is part of what makes something memorable. The second is repetition. The third is association. Her example is meeting someone new who knows many of the same people you do, which makes that person easier to remember.

The fourth feature is emotional resonance. We remember the happiest and saddest moments of our lives, along with funny and surprising ones. Suzuki links this to an interaction between two brain structures. The amygdala processes emotional and especially threatening situations, and it uses that information to make the hippocampus work better at laying down new long-term memories. She names the hippocampus as the key structure for long-term memory.

Suzuki explains that the word hippocampus means seahorse, and describes the structure as anatomically beautiful, with intertwining subregions. She says its function is easiest to see in what happens when it is gone. Her example is patient H.M., whom she calls the most famous neurological patient of all time. He was operated on in 1954, and the paper was published in 1957. Because his epilepsy was so severe, and the hippocampus was known as its source, surgeons took the experimental step of removing both hippocampi rather than one. The result was an immediate loss of all ability to form new memories for facts and events.

From this, Suzuki argues that the hippocampus works on the stream of everyday perceptions. It does not encode all of them, only some, especially those with the features she listed earlier: novelty, association, emotional relevance or repetition. Those facts and events go into long-term memory. She says this process defines our personal histories and therefore who we are.

She then widens the picture. Without a hippocampus, people cannot remember, and they also cannot imagine events or situations they have never experienced. For that reason, she calls the statement that the hippocampus is important for memory too simple. Its broader role is associating things together, whether for the past, the present or the future. She describes this as "the new hippocampus" that neuroscientists study today.

Anytime you need to associate something together, either for your past, your present, or your future, you are using your hippocampus