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

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now, for my discussion with Doctor. Wendy Suzuki. Wendy, great to see you again and to have you here. It's been a little while. It's been a while. So great to be here, Andrew. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Delighted. I'd like to start off by talking about memory generally. And then I'd love to chat about your incredible work discovering how exercise and memory interface and what people can do to improve their memory and brain function generally. Yes. Maybe you could just step us through the basic elements of memory. Well, I like to see there are four things that make things memorable. Number one is novelty. If it's something new, the very first thing, the very first time we've seen something or experienced something, our brains are drawn to that. Our attentional systems draw us to that. And when you are paying attention to something, that's part of what makes things memorable. Second is repetition. Third is association. So if you meet somebody new that knows lots of people that you know, so you and I share many, many, many, many people that we both know, It's easy to it's easier to remember you, especially if you were somebody new that I hadn't met before, we have met before. So association. And then the fourth one is emotional resonance. So we remember the happiest and the saddest moments of our lives. And that also includes, you know, funny, surprising things. That is the interaction between two key brain structures, the amygdala, which is important for processing, lots of emotional, particularly threatening kinds of situations. But, those threatening, surprising kinds of situations, the amygdala takes that information and makes another key structure called the hippocampus work better to put new long term memories in your brain. So that, in fact, is the key structure for long term memory, the structure called the hippocampus. Now step us through kinda what this structure is, what it looks like. The word hippocampus means seahorse. It is visually, anatomically beautiful with these kind of intertwining sub regions within it. So that's anatomically. Functionally, what does it do? Well, it's easiest to understand what it does when you, look at what happens when you don't have a hippocampus anymore. We know this from the most famous neurological patient patient of all time. His, initials were H. M. So all psychology neuroscientists, neuroscience students know him. He was operated in 1954, and the paper was published in 1957. They removed both his hippocampi because he had very terrible epilepsy. And, they knew that the hippocampus was the genesis of epilepsy, and this was experimental. His epilepsy was so bad that they decided not just to remove one hippocampus, …