September 18, 2013 • 32 mins
Do men and women have different memory mechanisms? Cristen and Caroline explore sex differences in memory and who's more susceptible to forgetfulness and memory loss.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff. Mom never told you from house to books,
not color. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline.
Then I'm Kristin Kristen. A couple of years ago, I
used to be obsessed with the qv show House until
I realized that like every episode the same, but it
(00:23):
is very entertaining. And and they had this great episode
about this person who had this crazy, like beyond photographic memory,
this person who could just like bring up any memory
from any day that you gave them in the past
and tell you what happened. Um, they ended up like
quote unquote curing that person on the show. And so
(00:44):
when you showed me this article from Wired about this woman,
Jill Price, it reminded me, Hello a memory. It reminded
me of that House episode. Jill Price has hyper thymestic syndrome.
Hyperthymestic syndrome is essentially Greek for a really really, really
(01:04):
really great memory. Uh. She was this woman who was
in the news a lot a few years ago when
she wrote an autobiography about this condition. Um and all
of us started out in two thousand and six when
some UC Irvine neuroscientists published an article about her called
(01:27):
a case of unusual autobiographical remembering, and it turns out
that there's a good chance she more has an O
c D related memory issue because a lot of her
photographic memory is focused solely on her early life, right, Um,
(01:49):
But it was really fascinating, and they've done brain scans actually,
and it shows that her hippocampus in the frontal cortex,
which as we'll talk about, are really closely involved with
the memory formation process. They're normally size, so it might
be something more psychological than neurological going on. But I
hadn't heard of hyperthymestic syndrome before. I hadn't either, And
(02:12):
the guy who wrote the article, cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus,
was a little bit skeptical when he heard of this
price because he was like, you know, human memory has
evolved to a certain point, to a certain degree, and
it would be crazy to find someone who functions completely
outside of that, you know, like it would have to
be something insane to have formed this brain so differently.
(02:34):
And in talking with her, that's when he realized, like, Okay,
this woman has a compulsion and obsessive compulsion to catalog
her own memories because, like you said, those key areas
of the brain that function to create in store memories
were the same as everybody else's. Yeah, so why don't
we talk a little bit about how the brain stores
memories because in this conversation we're going to look into
(02:58):
forgetfulness in men versus women, and not going so much
into things like dementia and Alzheimer's, but just looking at
basic memory because I wanted to call out this deal
price story to start off with, because Okay, here's a
woman who seems to be this rare case of a
(03:18):
photographic memory, or as close as you can get to it.
So does that mean maybe she's a gold standard of
female memory or what's going on? How? How how to
start out with do we make those memories? Well, the
whole thing is kind of hazy, honestly, Like nobody is
one percent shure as far as how our memory works
(03:41):
and how we create memories. But it basically goes like this.
We have this encoding that happens with the hippocampus and
the frontal cortex. The hippocampus kind of integrates all your
different perceptions into a single experience. So like if I
were to remember this moment, you know, so I'm seeing you,
I'm hearing you. I'm smelling the studio if it had
(04:03):
a smell, it's pretend it smells like sandwiches. You're smelling
my musk. I know, I'm so gross showered. I hope
you're not. You can't smell me right now, so yes,
site smell um sounds. The hip hippocampus integrates all of
this different stuff, whereas the frontal cortex basically kind of
(04:24):
helps you decide if someone is something is worth remembering.
So like you know, if something crazy or emotion will
happen in the studio, I might remember that a year
from now, whereas like that would actually differentiate it from
any other day in the studio. So that's the frontal
cortex telling you, like, hey, you should hang onto that.
So that's the encoding part. And add to it your
(04:44):
short term memory, so remembering what you just said about
your musk, Kristen, How do short term memory work? Usually
the short term memory stores up to seven items for
no more than twenty to thirty seconds at a time.
This is one reason, for instance, why telephone numbers are
broken down into the three digit area code and then
(05:07):
three numbers followed by four numbers, because by breaking it
down that makes it easier for us to remember. But
if you were to tell me a cell phone number,
I wouldn't remember it that long. It would probably stay
in my mind unless I start repeating it over and
over and over again. It's pretty fleeting. If it's not
gonna be something important, it's just going to dissipate unless
(05:31):
I retrieve that number over and over again so that
those neural pathways get paved even more. Right, Exactly, Like
when I was thinking about this, I realized I still
remember my childhood best friend's phone number. You know, before
we all had cell phones and didn't commit any phone
(05:51):
numbers to memory, Like I actually remember a bunch of
those old phone numbers. So it's because I called her
all the time to talk about boys. So that means
that your best friend's phone number is stored in your
long term memory. But if your brain was not able
to retrieve that phone number, that is what we call forgetting.
(06:14):
For getting. Yeah, so the science of forgetting is just
as interesting as the science of remembering. So your hippocampus
loses about five per cent of nerve cells each decade,
and this creates the you know, stereotypical age related memory
loss and the breakdown actually begins in our twenties. So,
so hey millennials out there, you're you're starting to lose
(06:37):
your memory um making it worse though if you have
unhealthy genes. They also said poisons, but things like you're
drinking too much or you're smoking too much, all of
these things can affect your memory. But the good news
is the average seventy year old performs as well on
certain cognitive tests as many twenty year olds because there
(06:58):
are things like stimulating environ ments, exercise, et cetera that
can help ward off that age related memory loss um.
But in our day to day, Caroline, there's so many
things in our environments and our lifestyles, especially in our
twenty one century lifestyles, that can contribute to memory loss,
(07:20):
not just that gradual wearing down of the hippocampus. Right,
I didn't realize that food can affect your memory um.
One study showed that things like carbs that spike your
insulin negatively affect your memory because it's that insulin spike,
not the carve itself, for you know, not your pretzel.
The pretzel is not causing you to forget things. That's
(07:40):
the spike and insulin that affects your memory. Fish, on
the other hand, helps, but not fried, So no fish
and chips to help your memory actual like broiled or
grilled and kind of related to that, kind of related
to the food thing. Medication taking cholesterol lowering statins may
actually lower that high insulin in the brain associated with dementia.
(08:03):
So I can I can eat microssant and just pop
some cholesterol film. Perfect. There we go. That's a recipe
for a wonderful outcome. I'm sure Google could actually be
another thing contributing to our memory loss. Uh. There was
a two thousand eleven study out of Columbia University which
found that our reliance on Internet search engines like Google
(08:27):
can influence what's called our transactive memory. And these are
those bits of minutia, the trivial details that we don't
necessarily feel an immediate need to encode over and over
it again to get into that long term memory storage,
because we can rely on other people or now our smartphones, say,
(08:50):
to retrieve that information for us. And this is something
that I've started trying to do more often, Caroline, whether
it's simple arithmetic or thinking up say a capital of
a state that I don't immediately recall actually making myself
sit there and think of what it is rather than
(09:10):
just going to Google, right, because it's good for our
brain to do that. It is good. But I mean,
one concern expressed in that article about the Internet shaping
our brains is that we are literally shaping our brains.
That our brains are adapting to this new technology, and
pretty soon we'll all be like, I don't know, with
empty memories, just drooling on ourselves, just popping insulin pills.
(09:36):
Let's eating baggetts. I mean, I mean, that doesn't sound terrible. One.
One other thing to keep in mind is that sleep
affects how we remember things also, and poor quality sleep,
as you might imagine, is linked to poor memory. Yeah,
and different types of sleep correlate to different types of
(09:57):
memory processes. For instance, slow way of sleep is linked
to declarative memory, recalling facts and events, So if you
don't get a good night's sleep, your memory might be
a little hazy in the morning. And then rem sleep,
for instance, is related to memory processing. There's this idea
(10:17):
that the dreaming that tends to go on during rem
sleep is your brain processing past events stead have happened,
sort of cataloging things that frontal cortex saying okay, do
we want to remember this or not? Right? And so, actually,
if you get fewer than six hours of sleep a night,
it'll likely have an adverse effect on memory. And I
was actually just talking about sleep side note with a friend,
(10:39):
and we were talking about how tired we were. Even
though we've been going to bed earlier, like trying to
get really good sleep, We've been even more tired the
day after. Whereas sometimes if I get like four hours
of sleep, I'm like rre and to go. But I
honestly think maybe I'm just getting by on adrenaline. Yeah,
I know exactly what you're talking about. Although I have
a feeling if we were chronically getting right the four
(11:01):
hours of sleep, things would be bad and I would
just look ragged. I would be cranky. I would be
very cranky. And speaking of crankiness, stress is another big
strain on our memories. Uh. There was a two thousand
eight U See Irvine study on stress which found that
acute stress activate something called cortico trope and releasing hormones
(11:25):
that disrupt the process by which the brain collects and
stores memories because it degrades the synapses, those connections between
neurons that carry that sensory information that make up our memories. Yeah,
I act absolutely by that, Like I absolutely have felt
that when I'm like super stressed out and I'm hitting
(11:47):
a wall and I'm just like, it's the limits of
my abilities. That's when i have to make to do
lists and have to fill up my calendar because when
I'm super stressed out, it almost feels like I can't
hold onto anything and I've got to chart at all out.
So I totally have experienced that. It's just your synapse
is degrading. No big deal. Lord. Another thing health related
(12:12):
is women with type two diabetes are actually at a
greater risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, which is the
stage between normal brain aging and dementia. And then, finally,
to round out this list of things that are contributing
to memory loss, UH and forgetfulness in general, depression. Depression
(12:32):
is strongly linked to memorily lost because of increased amounts
of cortisol and other stress hormone in our bloodstream, right,
and that actually shrinks certain areas of the brain, particularly
the hippocampus, which we said is responsible for a large
part of our memory. And something I found very intriguing
(12:53):
about this depression memory link is that depressed people remember
mostly negative memory. I mean interesting, So you're if you're
depressed that's linked to poor memory. However, you're really good
at remembering the negative, which probably makes it even more
it's kind of perpetuates that depressive cycle. Um, but what
(13:15):
about sex differences, because obviously these kinds of things sleep, stress,
google can affect men and women alike. But there's one
area that memory researchers have really started zeroing in on,
and that is sex differences. How are these memory formation
(13:37):
processes different in male brains versus female brains? And then
that brings up the question, while you know our men
or women more forgetful, Uh, we're just different, were very different. Yeah.
For instance, men will typically rely more on right hemisphere
brain activity to encode memory, and so they tend to
(14:00):
retain the gist of things better than details intrusferring. And
an unfortunate thing that men are more likely to experience
in terms of memory is a mild cognitive impairment, which
we just mentioned a minute ago. A study tracking two
thousand people over the age of seventy found that men
were one point five times more likely to develop him
(14:22):
C I, which is, like we said that stage between
normal brain aging and dementia, we should say that m
CI doesn't always develop into dementia Alzheimer's necessarily, but men
are more likely to get it. And this is surprising
since previous studies have found that more women suffer from dementia. Yeah,
and we're not going to get into, like I said,
the dementia and Alzheimer's aspect of memory loss today, but
(14:48):
going back into earlier age, you know, we've said that
men tend to remember the gist of things better, whereas
women remember more details. And this was confirmed in a
two thousand third team study out of McMaster University that
looked at how men and women remember faces and facial features,
and women were better at remembering faces because they look
(15:12):
more at new faces and especially our facial features. And
they figured this out the scientists did by using eye
tracking technology to actually look and see where women were
looking on the faces and for how long. And on
top of that, women especially remember other women's faces better,
which is so not surprising to me because just anecdotally,
(15:37):
I find myself quote unquote checking out women a lot
more than men, whether it's like looking at how her
hair is done or makeup or what she's wearing. And
my Boyfriendly would call me out on this. Sometimes if
all like follow a woman with my eyes is walking
down the street, I'm like, what are you doing? Like looking,
I'm checking around. I'm just checking her out, just curious
to see. That's funny because I actually had a really
(16:00):
embarrassing This caused an embarrassing social situation. I met a
friend of a friend, um, this guy, and I met
him at a party, so there was drinking and whatever.
And then the next time I encountered him, it was
in a completely different context and he was like Caroline, hey,
and I was just like hey, um stranger waving at me,
(16:22):
and he's like, it's it's me. I remember it's so
and So's friend. I was like, oh, yeah, hey, how
are you doing. It's so weird that I'm seeing you
here completely out of context. This happened three more times.
That has never happened to me. I remember faces like no,
I won't remember your name, but I remember faces like
nobody's business. And this poor guy like such a friendly
he's such a friendly FI and I recognize him now,
(16:44):
although he doesn't like approach me this Like I read
it to him in the grocery store one time, and
I made a point of being like, hey, how are
you doing? Because I had forgotten his face like seventeen times.
Do you think if it had been a woman's face,
if he had been a she, maybe you would remember
it better. I mean maybe, I don't know what the
deal was. It was actually really embarrassing, and I was
(17:05):
mad at my memory. But now he's I'm sure in
your brain. He is burned into my brain. He and
his wife, like like the whole everybody that is surrounding him.
I'm like, yes, remember these people because it was really embarrassing. Yeah,
that would contradict this finding that women have superior episodic memories,
(17:27):
that that memory, for instance, of going to that party,
of who you met, who you talked to, who you
saw right. Well, see, that's the thing. That's why I'm
That's why I mentioned context, because like I remember that party,
and so I remember meeting a person, you know, and
then I remember the various times that I ran into
him very clearly. It's just when I saw him, I
was like, oh, you're talking to me, like you know,
(17:49):
me so embarrassing. But yeah, So speaking of episodic memory,
that is a type of long term memory based on
personal experiences. And according to a Swedish study looking at
sex differences in different types of memory like episodic, semantic,
and primary, they found that women outperformed men only an
(18:10):
episodic memory, possibly due to our higher verbal ability. Yeah,
they found that women excelled in remembering things like words, objects, pictures,
or everyday events, whereas men outperformed women in remembering symbolic,
non linguistic information. It goes back to the whole thing
(18:31):
we think about a lot of times in terms of uh,
you know, men can read maps really well, whereas women
might get from point A to point B by using
more landmarks. Right, So that would be called the type
of symbolic memory that men uses visuo spatial processing. There,
we got it out. That's a long word. And women's
(18:53):
memory skills actually are reduced when we are forced to
use visuospatial processing. So that's interesting. But that's not like
an ingrained born with it. That is simply something that
is different in the way you are educated, trained to think,
et cetera. Another point, women are better recognizing familiar odors.
(19:14):
Oh huh, yeah, because I mean, you know, you know
how strongly like odor is attached to memory, Like I
can smell something and be like kindergarten, lunch room, elementary school.
You know, like I can have those memories. But apparently
I can do that so well because I am a woman.
Women are better at it. I wonder if that is
linked it all. Then to palette, the taste palette. For
(19:35):
some reason, the first thing that popped in my head
when you said women and odor, I thought about, um
Somalia's you know, the expert wine tasters, because you know,
you have to smell the wine and take in all
of the different notes and then you taste it right.
And I wonder if podcast idea women and wine. Here
we go. Oh, we'll have to do some really heavy
(19:55):
duty research for that. But what's up with these sex differences?
I've a sleep with things like videospatial You talked about
how it can be made up for with socialization, just teaching,
for instance, people how to read maps or other things. Um.
But one thing that researchers are homing in on our
(20:16):
sex hormones is it a difference between levels of estrogen
and testosterone in the brain. Yes, sex hormones do have
an effect to a degree, especially on our brains, not
just our memory. Yeah, there was a blog posts over
at the Encyclopedia Britannica that had a tidy explanation of
(20:39):
how estrogen and testosterone hormones impact our memory formation, because
it says that it really boils down to how the
hormones influenced the flow of blood through blood vessels and
how that influence how much blood reaches different parts of
the brain, which in turn could affect the growth of
(21:01):
neurons that are critical for memory formation. So it's like
estrogen and testaccone might serve as gate keepers in a
way of activating different synapses and neurons in different parts
of the brain. So test saserone perhaps, And I'm just
kind of going out on a limb here. Testas foe
might light up those visuospatial aspects of the brain, whereas
(21:26):
estrogen maybe is lighting up more of verbal centers and
the odor sensors and the nose. The estrogen goes straight
to the nose. Uh No, it actually doesn't. I was
I was joking about that, But what I'm not joking
about is how hormonal birth control can influence how we remember,
and this idea of the influence of hormonal birth control
(21:48):
was significant for researchers because they're like, Okay, here's a
great way to see how we can control estrogen in
a woman's body and progesterom and see whether or not
that influences is their memory process, And yes, it totally does. Yeah. So,
this study on hormonal birth control found that women on
(22:10):
birth control remembered the gist of emotional events more accurately,
whereas naturally cycling women were more likely to remember specific details.
And the science kind of in the middle of that
is that hormonal birth control suppresses ganatotropin releasing hormone that
suppresses the levels of estrogen and progeson, likely disrupting sex
(22:33):
and stress hormone interactions and therefore cognitive performance and memory.
And one way that this could be applied to future
research is really exploring why women are more likely two
to three times more likely to experience post traumatic stress disorder.
They suspect that it has to do with sex hormones
involved in that memory and coding process and just offer
(22:57):
more evidence for how strongly tied uh the memory process
might be to sex hormones. There have been some findings
about the influence of menopause actually on memory, because a
symptom of menopause or side effect of it is memory loss.
(23:17):
Women who are not only having those hot flashes also
report not having the best short term memory. Yeah, it's
actually linked. Researchers at University of Illinois, Chicago found that
the number of hot flashes a woman has is linked
to poorer memory performance. They also found, however, that hormone
(23:37):
therapy does not appear to interact with memory function, and
that's tied into a Melbourne University study that found that
post menopausal women treated with a testosterone gel showed better
improvement in verbal learning and memory compared to women who
received a placebo. But the good news for any women
(23:58):
listening who are going through menopause or approaching menopause, menopause
related cognitive declines appear to be temporary. So it's kind
of like what happens with quote unquote pregnancy brain. A
lot of pregnant women will report just being incredibly scatter
brained and not remembering things that they normally would and
(24:19):
that goes away. Similar type of things seems to be
going on. Uh, post Menopausally, after you're out of it,
your brain recovers, right. And there are some other things
I found online that help older women who feel like
they are experiencing this decline. Losing weight is one. After
weight loss, women's brain activity changes in the regions that
(24:40):
are vital for memory tasks. That's coming out of a
Swedish study from earlier this year. And there's also been
I feel like not only a lot of research, but
a lot of more conversation and publicity about how for
older adults brain activities keeping your your mind more active.
My mom, for instance, has taken up sudoku so that
(25:03):
she can just kind of exercise her brain a little
bit more, just toward off memory loss. Again, we're not
talking about things like to mention Alzheimer's, which do tend
to affect older women more than older men um but
there are definitely things that can be done to keep
the brain sharp age absolutely exercise, staying active mentally and physically.
(25:25):
So the episode title for this podcast is are men
more forgetful? Because I think the stereotype is that, or
maybe it's just a stereotype of your old woman, is
that men tend to be more forgetful. But I don't
think that's the case. I think it's just a difference
in how we remember. They know that something happened, they
(25:46):
can tell you the gist of what's going on, but
maybe we just focus in more on the nitty gritty,
the details. I wish I could remember where I put
my keys though, and see, but see, that's I'm That's
another reason why I'm an exception to the because women
tend to remember more things like that, like where you
put your keys. But I have to have a bowl
(26:06):
next to the front door where I can drop my
keys and my work badge and anything else important in
because otherwise I'll be running around, like you know, last
minute in the morning trying to find it. Yeah. I'm
definitely a habitual list maker for that reason. The to
do list is crucial for my day. Yeah, and I
that that whole like short term memory seven things, seven
(26:27):
items thing is exactly why I have to make a
grocery list too, because I'll go in. Yeah, I went
to the grocery store the other day and I was like,
I was mainly there for one thing, beans canned beans,
and I ran into like I had some other things
I wanted to get. I ran into a friend in
the parking lot, got into a really long conversation, went in,
got everything but the freaking being. Oh I hate it
(26:48):
when that happens. I don't know. Maybe my list was
eight items and I forgot the being. The beans tipped
it over. That's all your brain could take. Um. So yeah,
I mean in terms of of like who wins it remembering,
I think it's a toss up there. But it's fascinating
to look at the differences though, and and all the
(27:10):
different things that affected. Maybe I should take up sudok
who also. Yeah, I mean, and sometimes people get uh
nervous with conversations about differences between the mole and the
female brain, but the evidence seems pretty clear that there
are some influences, possibly mediated by differences into how we
(27:30):
process sense, reinformation and encoded into our brains. Yeah. I mean, obviously,
if there are differences between naturally cycling women and women
on hormonal birth control, I mean, yeah, they're obviously some
spects hormone differences that affect memory, and differences don't necessarily
imply superiority, absolutely not, So any thoughts about memory if
(27:55):
you do, though, anecdotally find that men are more forgive
al women more forgetful or if any of this resonated
with you, email us. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is where you can send letters. You can also message
us on Facebook or tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast.
And we have a couple of letters to share. And
(28:15):
now back to our letters. So you've got a couple
of letters here from listeners about our episode on Instagram.
And by the way, if you are not following Being
Caroline on Instagram, head over today we are at stuff.
Mom never told you follow us. There are lots of
adorable pictures. So this first one is from Ali and
(28:39):
she writes, I'm a fashion designer and I work from
home by myself. I love working from home, and there
are two things that I think really make it work
for me. Podcasts and Instagram. When you don't have any
real colleagues, you missed that random chatter that happens at work.
And I find that listening to a variety of podcasts
and following other creative people on Instagram am fills this
(29:01):
void in a way that creates two kinds of virtual colleagues.
They're the colleagues that chat to you all day while
you're working that's you, guys, and the ones you catch
up with on your lunch breaker after work, the instagrammers.
I love stopping work and sitting to see what everybody
has been up to that day and what they've been
working on. Because most of the people I follow are
(29:22):
also small creative businesses, most of the photos in my
feet are their finished products, work in progress, their workspaces, materials,
and processes. It's interesting and inspiring and often motivates me
to work harder because I want to have something pretty
to show them to. I also love it because it's
an extremely positive place when you follow the right people,
(29:43):
and there are lots of pictures of dogs, so things
are writing in there are pictures of dogs. I just
love puppy pictures. I could waste an entire day looking
at them. Alrighty, well, I have an email here from Brooke.
She's says, I just listened to the episode on Instagram
and enjoyed it. I wanted to mention another category of
(30:07):
picks I frequently see on Instagram, mainly because I am
one of the ones posting them pictures of adorable children
winky face. I originally started posting pictures of my kids
on blogs and Facebook for grandparents and relatives who don't
get to see my two girls very often. But now
I have incorporated Instagram as well. None of my relatives
are on Instagram, but my friends enjoy seeing pictures of
(30:29):
my kids, and I enjoy seeing pictures of their kids.
Sometimes the pictures of our kids together, smiley faith. Now.
I know this is the modern day equivalent to a
proud parent pulling photos out of their wallets, but I
figure if someone gets tired of seeing pictures of my kids,
they can just stop following me. Winky face won't hurt
my feelings anyway. Just wanted to mention this. Also, thank
(30:49):
you for reading the listener mail from Joanna about miscarriage
before my two kids were born. I experienced both infertility
and a devastating loss at twenty one week, so I
could really relate to what she said. I too, would
like to hear a podcast on miscarriage and pregnancy laws.
It helps to hear other stories and know you are
not alone. So thanks so much to Brook for sharing
(31:11):
her stories, and uh we hope we hear from more
of you. Yeah, you can email us at Mom's Stuff
at Discovery dot com. You can also send us a
message on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at mom
Stuff Podcast. We're on Tumbler as well at stuff mom
Never Told You dot tumbler dot com, also of course
on Instagram. Now check out all of our little ruble
(31:34):
pictures at Mom's Stuff Podcasts there. And finally, we are
on YouTube. We've got four brand new videos that come
out every week, so you should head over to YouTube
dot com slash stuff Mom Never Told You and subscribe
for more on this and thousands of other topics dot com.
(32:00):
Four
Welcome to stuff. Mom never told you from house to books,
not color. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline.
Then I'm Kristin Kristen. A couple of years ago, I
used to be obsessed with the qv show House until
I realized that like every episode the same, but it
(00:23):
is very entertaining. And and they had this great episode
about this person who had this crazy, like beyond photographic memory,
this person who could just like bring up any memory
from any day that you gave them in the past
and tell you what happened. Um, they ended up like
quote unquote curing that person on the show. And so
(00:44):
when you showed me this article from Wired about this woman,
Jill Price, it reminded me, Hello a memory. It reminded
me of that House episode. Jill Price has hyper thymestic syndrome.
Hyperthymestic syndrome is essentially Greek for a really really, really
(01:04):
really great memory. Uh. She was this woman who was
in the news a lot a few years ago when
she wrote an autobiography about this condition. Um and all
of us started out in two thousand and six when
some UC Irvine neuroscientists published an article about her called
(01:27):
a case of unusual autobiographical remembering, and it turns out
that there's a good chance she more has an O
c D related memory issue because a lot of her
photographic memory is focused solely on her early life, right, Um,
(01:49):
But it was really fascinating, and they've done brain scans actually,
and it shows that her hippocampus in the frontal cortex,
which as we'll talk about, are really closely involved with
the memory formation process. They're normally size, so it might
be something more psychological than neurological going on. But I
hadn't heard of hyperthymestic syndrome before. I hadn't either, And
(02:12):
the guy who wrote the article, cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus,
was a little bit skeptical when he heard of this
price because he was like, you know, human memory has
evolved to a certain point, to a certain degree, and
it would be crazy to find someone who functions completely
outside of that, you know, like it would have to
be something insane to have formed this brain so differently.
(02:34):
And in talking with her, that's when he realized, like, Okay,
this woman has a compulsion and obsessive compulsion to catalog
her own memories because, like you said, those key areas
of the brain that function to create in store memories
were the same as everybody else's. Yeah, so why don't
we talk a little bit about how the brain stores
memories because in this conversation we're going to look into
(02:58):
forgetfulness in men versus women, and not going so much
into things like dementia and Alzheimer's, but just looking at
basic memory because I wanted to call out this deal
price story to start off with, because Okay, here's a
woman who seems to be this rare case of a
(03:18):
photographic memory, or as close as you can get to it.
So does that mean maybe she's a gold standard of
female memory or what's going on? How? How how to
start out with do we make those memories? Well, the
whole thing is kind of hazy, honestly, Like nobody is
one percent shure as far as how our memory works
(03:41):
and how we create memories. But it basically goes like this.
We have this encoding that happens with the hippocampus and
the frontal cortex. The hippocampus kind of integrates all your
different perceptions into a single experience. So like if I
were to remember this moment, you know, so I'm seeing you,
I'm hearing you. I'm smelling the studio if it had
(04:03):
a smell, it's pretend it smells like sandwiches. You're smelling
my musk. I know, I'm so gross showered. I hope
you're not. You can't smell me right now, so yes,
site smell um sounds. The hip hippocampus integrates all of
this different stuff, whereas the frontal cortex basically kind of
(04:24):
helps you decide if someone is something is worth remembering.
So like you know, if something crazy or emotion will
happen in the studio, I might remember that a year
from now, whereas like that would actually differentiate it from
any other day in the studio. So that's the frontal
cortex telling you, like, hey, you should hang onto that.
So that's the encoding part. And add to it your
(04:44):
short term memory, so remembering what you just said about
your musk, Kristen, How do short term memory work? Usually
the short term memory stores up to seven items for
no more than twenty to thirty seconds at a time.
This is one reason, for instance, why telephone numbers are
broken down into the three digit area code and then
(05:07):
three numbers followed by four numbers, because by breaking it
down that makes it easier for us to remember. But
if you were to tell me a cell phone number,
I wouldn't remember it that long. It would probably stay
in my mind unless I start repeating it over and
over and over again. It's pretty fleeting. If it's not
gonna be something important, it's just going to dissipate unless
(05:31):
I retrieve that number over and over again so that
those neural pathways get paved even more. Right, Exactly, Like
when I was thinking about this, I realized I still
remember my childhood best friend's phone number. You know, before
we all had cell phones and didn't commit any phone
(05:51):
numbers to memory, Like I actually remember a bunch of
those old phone numbers. So it's because I called her
all the time to talk about boys. So that means
that your best friend's phone number is stored in your
long term memory. But if your brain was not able
to retrieve that phone number, that is what we call forgetting.
(06:14):
For getting. Yeah, so the science of forgetting is just
as interesting as the science of remembering. So your hippocampus
loses about five per cent of nerve cells each decade,
and this creates the you know, stereotypical age related memory
loss and the breakdown actually begins in our twenties. So,
so hey millennials out there, you're you're starting to lose
(06:37):
your memory um making it worse though if you have
unhealthy genes. They also said poisons, but things like you're
drinking too much or you're smoking too much, all of
these things can affect your memory. But the good news
is the average seventy year old performs as well on
certain cognitive tests as many twenty year olds because there
(06:58):
are things like stimulating environ ments, exercise, et cetera that
can help ward off that age related memory loss um.
But in our day to day, Caroline, there's so many
things in our environments and our lifestyles, especially in our
twenty one century lifestyles, that can contribute to memory loss,
(07:20):
not just that gradual wearing down of the hippocampus. Right,
I didn't realize that food can affect your memory um.
One study showed that things like carbs that spike your
insulin negatively affect your memory because it's that insulin spike,
not the carve itself, for you know, not your pretzel.
The pretzel is not causing you to forget things. That's
(07:40):
the spike and insulin that affects your memory. Fish, on
the other hand, helps, but not fried, So no fish
and chips to help your memory actual like broiled or
grilled and kind of related to that, kind of related
to the food thing. Medication taking cholesterol lowering statins may
actually lower that high insulin in the brain associated with dementia.
(08:03):
So I can I can eat microssant and just pop
some cholesterol film. Perfect. There we go. That's a recipe
for a wonderful outcome. I'm sure Google could actually be
another thing contributing to our memory loss. Uh. There was
a two thousand eleven study out of Columbia University which
found that our reliance on Internet search engines like Google
(08:27):
can influence what's called our transactive memory. And these are
those bits of minutia, the trivial details that we don't
necessarily feel an immediate need to encode over and over
it again to get into that long term memory storage,
because we can rely on other people or now our smartphones, say,
(08:50):
to retrieve that information for us. And this is something
that I've started trying to do more often, Caroline, whether
it's simple arithmetic or thinking up say a capital of
a state that I don't immediately recall actually making myself
sit there and think of what it is rather than
(09:10):
just going to Google, right, because it's good for our
brain to do that. It is good. But I mean,
one concern expressed in that article about the Internet shaping
our brains is that we are literally shaping our brains.
That our brains are adapting to this new technology, and
pretty soon we'll all be like, I don't know, with
empty memories, just drooling on ourselves, just popping insulin pills.
(09:36):
Let's eating baggetts. I mean, I mean, that doesn't sound terrible. One.
One other thing to keep in mind is that sleep
affects how we remember things also, and poor quality sleep,
as you might imagine, is linked to poor memory. Yeah,
and different types of sleep correlate to different types of
(09:57):
memory processes. For instance, slow way of sleep is linked
to declarative memory, recalling facts and events, So if you
don't get a good night's sleep, your memory might be
a little hazy in the morning. And then rem sleep,
for instance, is related to memory processing. There's this idea
(10:17):
that the dreaming that tends to go on during rem
sleep is your brain processing past events stead have happened,
sort of cataloging things that frontal cortex saying okay, do
we want to remember this or not? Right? And so, actually,
if you get fewer than six hours of sleep a night,
it'll likely have an adverse effect on memory. And I
was actually just talking about sleep side note with a friend,
(10:39):
and we were talking about how tired we were. Even
though we've been going to bed earlier, like trying to
get really good sleep, We've been even more tired the
day after. Whereas sometimes if I get like four hours
of sleep, I'm like rre and to go. But I
honestly think maybe I'm just getting by on adrenaline. Yeah,
I know exactly what you're talking about. Although I have
a feeling if we were chronically getting right the four
(11:01):
hours of sleep, things would be bad and I would
just look ragged. I would be cranky. I would be
very cranky. And speaking of crankiness, stress is another big
strain on our memories. Uh. There was a two thousand
eight U See Irvine study on stress which found that
acute stress activate something called cortico trope and releasing hormones
(11:25):
that disrupt the process by which the brain collects and
stores memories because it degrades the synapses, those connections between
neurons that carry that sensory information that make up our memories. Yeah,
I act absolutely by that, Like I absolutely have felt
that when I'm like super stressed out and I'm hitting
(11:47):
a wall and I'm just like, it's the limits of
my abilities. That's when i have to make to do
lists and have to fill up my calendar because when
I'm super stressed out, it almost feels like I can't
hold onto anything and I've got to chart at all out.
So I totally have experienced that. It's just your synapse
is degrading. No big deal. Lord. Another thing health related
(12:12):
is women with type two diabetes are actually at a
greater risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, which is the
stage between normal brain aging and dementia. And then, finally,
to round out this list of things that are contributing
to memory loss, UH and forgetfulness in general, depression. Depression
(12:32):
is strongly linked to memorily lost because of increased amounts
of cortisol and other stress hormone in our bloodstream, right,
and that actually shrinks certain areas of the brain, particularly
the hippocampus, which we said is responsible for a large
part of our memory. And something I found very intriguing
(12:53):
about this depression memory link is that depressed people remember
mostly negative memory. I mean interesting, So you're if you're
depressed that's linked to poor memory. However, you're really good
at remembering the negative, which probably makes it even more
it's kind of perpetuates that depressive cycle. Um, but what
(13:15):
about sex differences, because obviously these kinds of things sleep, stress,
google can affect men and women alike. But there's one
area that memory researchers have really started zeroing in on,
and that is sex differences. How are these memory formation
(13:37):
processes different in male brains versus female brains? And then
that brings up the question, while you know our men
or women more forgetful, Uh, we're just different, were very different. Yeah.
For instance, men will typically rely more on right hemisphere
brain activity to encode memory, and so they tend to
(14:00):
retain the gist of things better than details intrusferring. And
an unfortunate thing that men are more likely to experience
in terms of memory is a mild cognitive impairment, which
we just mentioned a minute ago. A study tracking two
thousand people over the age of seventy found that men
were one point five times more likely to develop him
(14:22):
C I, which is, like we said that stage between
normal brain aging and dementia, we should say that m
CI doesn't always develop into dementia Alzheimer's necessarily, but men
are more likely to get it. And this is surprising
since previous studies have found that more women suffer from dementia. Yeah,
and we're not going to get into, like I said,
the dementia and Alzheimer's aspect of memory loss today, but
(14:48):
going back into earlier age, you know, we've said that
men tend to remember the gist of things better, whereas
women remember more details. And this was confirmed in a
two thousand third team study out of McMaster University that
looked at how men and women remember faces and facial features,
and women were better at remembering faces because they look
(15:12):
more at new faces and especially our facial features. And
they figured this out the scientists did by using eye
tracking technology to actually look and see where women were
looking on the faces and for how long. And on
top of that, women especially remember other women's faces better,
which is so not surprising to me because just anecdotally,
(15:37):
I find myself quote unquote checking out women a lot
more than men, whether it's like looking at how her
hair is done or makeup or what she's wearing. And
my Boyfriendly would call me out on this. Sometimes if
all like follow a woman with my eyes is walking
down the street, I'm like, what are you doing? Like looking,
I'm checking around. I'm just checking her out, just curious
to see. That's funny because I actually had a really
(16:00):
embarrassing This caused an embarrassing social situation. I met a
friend of a friend, um, this guy, and I met
him at a party, so there was drinking and whatever.
And then the next time I encountered him, it was
in a completely different context and he was like Caroline, hey,
and I was just like hey, um stranger waving at me,
(16:22):
and he's like, it's it's me. I remember it's so
and So's friend. I was like, oh, yeah, hey, how
are you doing. It's so weird that I'm seeing you
here completely out of context. This happened three more times.
That has never happened to me. I remember faces like no,
I won't remember your name, but I remember faces like
nobody's business. And this poor guy like such a friendly
he's such a friendly FI and I recognize him now,
(16:44):
although he doesn't like approach me this Like I read
it to him in the grocery store one time, and
I made a point of being like, hey, how are
you doing? Because I had forgotten his face like seventeen times.
Do you think if it had been a woman's face,
if he had been a she, maybe you would remember
it better. I mean maybe, I don't know what the
deal was. It was actually really embarrassing, and I was
(17:05):
mad at my memory. But now he's I'm sure in
your brain. He is burned into my brain. He and
his wife, like like the whole everybody that is surrounding him.
I'm like, yes, remember these people because it was really embarrassing. Yeah,
that would contradict this finding that women have superior episodic memories,
(17:27):
that that memory, for instance, of going to that party,
of who you met, who you talked to, who you
saw right. Well, see, that's the thing. That's why I'm
That's why I mentioned context, because like I remember that party,
and so I remember meeting a person, you know, and
then I remember the various times that I ran into
him very clearly. It's just when I saw him, I
was like, oh, you're talking to me, like you know,
(17:49):
me so embarrassing. But yeah, So speaking of episodic memory,
that is a type of long term memory based on
personal experiences. And according to a Swedish study looking at
sex differences in different types of memory like episodic, semantic,
and primary, they found that women outperformed men only an
(18:10):
episodic memory, possibly due to our higher verbal ability. Yeah,
they found that women excelled in remembering things like words, objects, pictures,
or everyday events, whereas men outperformed women in remembering symbolic,
non linguistic information. It goes back to the whole thing
(18:31):
we think about a lot of times in terms of uh,
you know, men can read maps really well, whereas women
might get from point A to point B by using
more landmarks. Right, So that would be called the type
of symbolic memory that men uses visuo spatial processing. There,
we got it out. That's a long word. And women's
(18:53):
memory skills actually are reduced when we are forced to
use visuospatial processing. So that's interesting. But that's not like
an ingrained born with it. That is simply something that
is different in the way you are educated, trained to think,
et cetera. Another point, women are better recognizing familiar odors.
(19:14):
Oh huh, yeah, because I mean, you know, you know
how strongly like odor is attached to memory, Like I
can smell something and be like kindergarten, lunch room, elementary school.
You know, like I can have those memories. But apparently
I can do that so well because I am a woman.
Women are better at it. I wonder if that is
linked it all. Then to palette, the taste palette. For
(19:35):
some reason, the first thing that popped in my head
when you said women and odor, I thought about, um
Somalia's you know, the expert wine tasters, because you know,
you have to smell the wine and take in all
of the different notes and then you taste it right.
And I wonder if podcast idea women and wine. Here
we go. Oh, we'll have to do some really heavy
(19:55):
duty research for that. But what's up with these sex differences?
I've a sleep with things like videospatial You talked about
how it can be made up for with socialization, just teaching,
for instance, people how to read maps or other things. Um.
But one thing that researchers are homing in on our
(20:16):
sex hormones is it a difference between levels of estrogen
and testosterone in the brain. Yes, sex hormones do have
an effect to a degree, especially on our brains, not
just our memory. Yeah, there was a blog posts over
at the Encyclopedia Britannica that had a tidy explanation of
(20:39):
how estrogen and testosterone hormones impact our memory formation, because
it says that it really boils down to how the
hormones influenced the flow of blood through blood vessels and
how that influence how much blood reaches different parts of
the brain, which in turn could affect the growth of
(21:01):
neurons that are critical for memory formation. So it's like
estrogen and testaccone might serve as gate keepers in a
way of activating different synapses and neurons in different parts
of the brain. So test saserone perhaps, And I'm just
kind of going out on a limb here. Testas foe
might light up those visuospatial aspects of the brain, whereas
(21:26):
estrogen maybe is lighting up more of verbal centers and
the odor sensors and the nose. The estrogen goes straight
to the nose. Uh No, it actually doesn't. I was
I was joking about that, But what I'm not joking
about is how hormonal birth control can influence how we remember,
and this idea of the influence of hormonal birth control
(21:48):
was significant for researchers because they're like, Okay, here's a
great way to see how we can control estrogen in
a woman's body and progesterom and see whether or not
that influences is their memory process, And yes, it totally does. Yeah. So,
this study on hormonal birth control found that women on
(22:10):
birth control remembered the gist of emotional events more accurately,
whereas naturally cycling women were more likely to remember specific details.
And the science kind of in the middle of that
is that hormonal birth control suppresses ganatotropin releasing hormone that
suppresses the levels of estrogen and progeson, likely disrupting sex
(22:33):
and stress hormone interactions and therefore cognitive performance and memory.
And one way that this could be applied to future
research is really exploring why women are more likely two
to three times more likely to experience post traumatic stress disorder.
They suspect that it has to do with sex hormones
involved in that memory and coding process and just offer
(22:57):
more evidence for how strongly tied uh the memory process
might be to sex hormones. There have been some findings
about the influence of menopause actually on memory, because a
symptom of menopause or side effect of it is memory loss.
(23:17):
Women who are not only having those hot flashes also
report not having the best short term memory. Yeah, it's
actually linked. Researchers at University of Illinois, Chicago found that
the number of hot flashes a woman has is linked
to poorer memory performance. They also found, however, that hormone
(23:37):
therapy does not appear to interact with memory function, and
that's tied into a Melbourne University study that found that
post menopausal women treated with a testosterone gel showed better
improvement in verbal learning and memory compared to women who
received a placebo. But the good news for any women
(23:58):
listening who are going through menopause or approaching menopause, menopause
related cognitive declines appear to be temporary. So it's kind
of like what happens with quote unquote pregnancy brain. A
lot of pregnant women will report just being incredibly scatter
brained and not remembering things that they normally would and
(24:19):
that goes away. Similar type of things seems to be
going on. Uh, post Menopausally, after you're out of it,
your brain recovers, right. And there are some other things
I found online that help older women who feel like
they are experiencing this decline. Losing weight is one. After
weight loss, women's brain activity changes in the regions that
(24:40):
are vital for memory tasks. That's coming out of a
Swedish study from earlier this year. And there's also been
I feel like not only a lot of research, but
a lot of more conversation and publicity about how for
older adults brain activities keeping your your mind more active.
My mom, for instance, has taken up sudoku so that
(25:03):
she can just kind of exercise her brain a little
bit more, just toward off memory loss. Again, we're not
talking about things like to mention Alzheimer's, which do tend
to affect older women more than older men um but
there are definitely things that can be done to keep
the brain sharp age absolutely exercise, staying active mentally and physically.
(25:25):
So the episode title for this podcast is are men
more forgetful? Because I think the stereotype is that, or
maybe it's just a stereotype of your old woman, is
that men tend to be more forgetful. But I don't
think that's the case. I think it's just a difference
in how we remember. They know that something happened, they
(25:46):
can tell you the gist of what's going on, but
maybe we just focus in more on the nitty gritty,
the details. I wish I could remember where I put
my keys though, and see, but see, that's I'm That's
another reason why I'm an exception to the because women
tend to remember more things like that, like where you
put your keys. But I have to have a bowl
(26:06):
next to the front door where I can drop my
keys and my work badge and anything else important in
because otherwise I'll be running around, like you know, last
minute in the morning trying to find it. Yeah. I'm
definitely a habitual list maker for that reason. The to
do list is crucial for my day. Yeah, and I
that that whole like short term memory seven things, seven
(26:27):
items thing is exactly why I have to make a
grocery list too, because I'll go in. Yeah, I went
to the grocery store the other day and I was like,
I was mainly there for one thing, beans canned beans,
and I ran into like I had some other things
I wanted to get. I ran into a friend in
the parking lot, got into a really long conversation, went in,
got everything but the freaking being. Oh I hate it
(26:48):
when that happens. I don't know. Maybe my list was
eight items and I forgot the being. The beans tipped
it over. That's all your brain could take. Um. So yeah,
I mean in terms of of like who wins it remembering,
I think it's a toss up there. But it's fascinating
to look at the differences though, and and all the
(27:10):
different things that affected. Maybe I should take up sudok
who also. Yeah, I mean, and sometimes people get uh
nervous with conversations about differences between the mole and the
female brain, but the evidence seems pretty clear that there
are some influences, possibly mediated by differences into how we
(27:30):
process sense, reinformation and encoded into our brains. Yeah. I mean, obviously,
if there are differences between naturally cycling women and women
on hormonal birth control, I mean, yeah, they're obviously some
spects hormone differences that affect memory, and differences don't necessarily
imply superiority, absolutely not, So any thoughts about memory if
(27:55):
you do, though, anecdotally find that men are more forgive
al women more forgetful or if any of this resonated
with you, email us. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is where you can send letters. You can also message
us on Facebook or tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast.
And we have a couple of letters to share. And
(28:15):
now back to our letters. So you've got a couple
of letters here from listeners about our episode on Instagram.
And by the way, if you are not following Being
Caroline on Instagram, head over today we are at stuff.
Mom never told you follow us. There are lots of
adorable pictures. So this first one is from Ali and
(28:39):
she writes, I'm a fashion designer and I work from
home by myself. I love working from home, and there
are two things that I think really make it work
for me. Podcasts and Instagram. When you don't have any
real colleagues, you missed that random chatter that happens at work.
And I find that listening to a variety of podcasts
and following other creative people on Instagram am fills this
(29:01):
void in a way that creates two kinds of virtual colleagues.
They're the colleagues that chat to you all day while
you're working that's you, guys, and the ones you catch
up with on your lunch breaker after work, the instagrammers.
I love stopping work and sitting to see what everybody
has been up to that day and what they've been
working on. Because most of the people I follow are
(29:22):
also small creative businesses, most of the photos in my
feet are their finished products, work in progress, their workspaces, materials,
and processes. It's interesting and inspiring and often motivates me
to work harder because I want to have something pretty
to show them to. I also love it because it's
an extremely positive place when you follow the right people,
(29:43):
and there are lots of pictures of dogs, so things
are writing in there are pictures of dogs. I just
love puppy pictures. I could waste an entire day looking
at them. Alrighty, well, I have an email here from Brooke.
She's says, I just listened to the episode on Instagram
and enjoyed it. I wanted to mention another category of
(30:07):
picks I frequently see on Instagram, mainly because I am
one of the ones posting them pictures of adorable children
winky face. I originally started posting pictures of my kids
on blogs and Facebook for grandparents and relatives who don't
get to see my two girls very often. But now
I have incorporated Instagram as well. None of my relatives
are on Instagram, but my friends enjoy seeing pictures of
(30:29):
my kids, and I enjoy seeing pictures of their kids.
Sometimes the pictures of our kids together, smiley faith. Now.
I know this is the modern day equivalent to a
proud parent pulling photos out of their wallets, but I
figure if someone gets tired of seeing pictures of my kids,
they can just stop following me. Winky face won't hurt
my feelings anyway. Just wanted to mention this. Also, thank
(30:49):
you for reading the listener mail from Joanna about miscarriage
before my two kids were born. I experienced both infertility
and a devastating loss at twenty one week, so I
could really relate to what she said. I too, would
like to hear a podcast on miscarriage and pregnancy laws.
It helps to hear other stories and know you are
not alone. So thanks so much to Brook for sharing
(31:11):
her stories, and uh we hope we hear from more
of you. Yeah, you can email us at Mom's Stuff
at Discovery dot com. You can also send us a
message on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at mom
Stuff Podcast. We're on Tumbler as well at stuff mom
Never Told You dot tumbler dot com, also of course
on Instagram. Now check out all of our little ruble
(31:34):
pictures at Mom's Stuff Podcasts there. And finally, we are
on YouTube. We've got four brand new videos that come
out every week, so you should head over to YouTube
dot com slash stuff Mom Never Told You and subscribe
for more on this and thousands of other topics dot com.
(32:00):
Four
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.