Focus 580; The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers

This morning in this part of focus 580 will be talking about memory how it works and sometimes how it is that it doesn't work the way we would like. Our guest is Daniel Schacter And he's chairman of Harvard University's department of psychology where he researches aspects of both memory and amnesia. And we'll be talking about a new book that he's written which is entitled The Seven Sins of Memory how the mind forgets and remembers. It's published by Houghton Mifflin and it takes a look at seven common memory lapses the kinds of things that really plague almost everybody from time to time. The fact that memories do decay over time. That phenomenon we've all experienced when someone comes up to you on the street and you know that you know them and everything about them except that you can't remember their name. And also the idea that some people may tell you that they have very very clear memories of places they've gone experiences that they have had that in fact never occurred at all. We talk about these and some other subjects this morning with Professor Schachter and take whatever

comments and questions you. May have the number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 we also have toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us and that is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 W I L L and a toll free 800 1:58 wy Lo at any point you have questions you're invited to come. Fester Shakhtar Hello. Hi thanks for talking with us. Thanks for having me. It seems that we are you know maybe a little bit particular people of a certain age are preoccupied with the issue of memory and forgetting. It seems to be yet another one of those things that baby boomers like to worry about that you know the first time it is you can't remember where you put your car keys then immediately you decided well it's all timers disease and it's going to be done. Hill from there and the fact of the matter is that in a variety of ways that we can talk about you know memory does doesn't always Service as well as maybe we would like and that in fact is quite

normal and maybe in that there are good reasons for memory in the way it works in the way it doesn't. Yeah I think that one of the keys for people who are worried about their memories particularly people who are getting older and experience episodes of forgetting is to understand some of the basic ways in which memory fails. Some of the differences between them and what kinds of things are worrisome and not possible indicators of a serious condition like Alzheimer's disease and what kinds of things are completely normal. And I guess that's where the seven sins concept and the Seven Sins book based on that concept can be helpful because basically what I try to do is provide a framework for thinking about different ways in which memory can lead us down memory does fade. And I think in the book you make the argument that that's probably necessary. One can't really expect to remember everything that you've ever experienced in your life.

You know that and there are some things that you don't really after well maybe you don't need to remember that thing anymore is there. Is it predictable the way that memory fades and and does that change in a predictable way as one ages. Yeah. I think we want to talk but here are the first two of my seven memory sins which I call transience and that refers to the natural tendency of memory to fade over time all things being equal and absent mindedness which is more of a memory failure due to failure to pay attention and taken for information into memory so let's first consider transience one of the basic features of memory is that as I mentioned earlier all other things being equal it's harder to remember as we all know what happened. Let's say three months ago then what happened yesterday. Sometimes we can remember the distant past very well when we were a hearse and talk about experiences from the from distant past

but if we don't then there's kind of a natural fading or a gradual inaccessibility that occurs and to some extent that celebrated with normal aging but not to a great extent on the roads. Memory tends to fade and maybe it fades a little bit more as well as we get older. But when you look at a serious condition like Alzheimer's disease there you see a dramatic acceleration of what I call transients and a dramatic speed up in the forgetting of recent experiences. So to give one example an old example now way back in the 1900s I tell it briefly in the book but it illustrates what a really severe. Case of transience can be like there's a patient who was studying many years ago and we shared a common interest in playing golf. And one day I took him out on the golf course just curiosity to see

how memory would manifest itself in a patient with such a significant memory disorder in a natural environment. And there was one incident there that really illustrates what I mean when I talk about a severe acceleration of transience. This guy had a wonderful tee shot tearing over a creek about 150 yards down the fairway. He was excited about it. He was thinking about his next shot to the green. He he did what cognitive psychologists called elaborative encoding he thought about the event in a way that would normally produce a very durable memory would hold up well over time and he'd be you know telling all his friends about this for weeks and months later. Then I got up hit my drive walked off the tee turned around and there he was putting the ball up again and said What are you doing and he said why. I want him iced tea shot also. I don't remember he just had that great tee shot he had no recollection whatsoever of what he had just done. So that is transients as it's at is extreme. He encoded the events in a normal way he took it in.

Appreciated it but it was gone within minutes. So far as we can tell and that is a characteristic features of Alzheimer's disease. This great acceleration in transience. Now you mentioned earlier people often get worried that they're headed for such a devastating condition. When things happen like they can't remember where they just put their keys. And I have found particularly in talking to people in relation to this book for that is very very common. And I think what's going on here is a confusion between transients which we just discussed and the second sin of memory which I call absent mindedness. When we forget where we just put our keys a few minutes ago we may get worried because we think My God my memory can hold on to information for more than a few minutes. We may think that we're becoming like that guy. I played golf with he couldn't hold on to information for more than a couple minutes. But in fact most of the time I think there's another explanation namely that the information was never encoded in memory properly to

begin with. We're preoccupied with other things we're thinking about other things we operate on automatic we put our keys in unfamiliar place the information is really never taken in a way that it could be remembered later on. Then we panic. A couple of minutes later because we think My God I just took this action a couple of minutes ago and I can't remember it. So absent mindedness though very irritating and annoying I think of it as the most annoying of the seven memory sins is not any necessary indication of serious condition. It may reflect you know in part the circumstances of one's ever you know over busy life and so forth. But the two can be confused I think can lead people to needless worry. We have a caller to talk with. We'll do that and would welcome others. Into the conversation perhaps I should introduce it again. Our guest was speaking with Daniel Schacter. He's the chairman of Harvard University's department of psychology where he does research on memory and amnesia. He's written many articles on his research that have appeared in scholarly journals.

He's also appeared on many programs and programs on the Discovery Channel 20 20 PBS a Scientific American Frontiers programs like that. And his book that is out now if you're interested in reading about memory and how it works. The book is titled The Seven Sins of Memory how the mind forgets and remembers published by Houghton Mifflin. We do have a caller to start out here with an gaze and that is line number four. Well I just want to gush for a moment. I'm a tremendous fan of yours that you said that I most psychology instructor at a local college and I've used your 7 since it was your first published article in American psychologists and you say that. Sense but also that they are very adaptive because of fire memory were just set in stone. We would have too much going in. I also used the clip that you had with Bell an old Scientific American in my

classes and it's only one I use your little trick of the memory task with bed and sleep and everything that I can convince my students that their memories are not as good as they think they are going to be getting a little bit off of what you've been talking about. But you like mentioned that you had done a study and the only way to tell it to memory. So I'm of false memory in this one study was in the auditory cortex. There was a slight difference in the subject. I'd like to know if you've done any more work on that since that early study on the 12 subjects and whether indeed it's only in the auditory cortex that we can tell true from false memories. Contempt on high now OK. Well first of all thanks thanks for your interest in my work I appreciate that and the

interest in the seven sins. Let me take up your first point which I think we have alluded to earlier. I do argue in the concluding chapter of the book to try to make the argument that indeed these things that I call sins are adaptive features of memory and in the sense that you point out and was alluded to earlier for example with with transience the argument would be that as time goes on if you don't use and recall and strengthen a memory in some way the chances are that you're not going to need that information in the future. And so in essence it's a good thing to let those memories become more inaccessible because unless you bring them up and use them chances are not to need them and you know want to. You don't want to overload the system with more information than than it than it needs. And a similar similar spirit argument for absent mindedness which is that one of the reason why the absent minded errors occur is that we don't

automatically take in every aspect in every detail of our experience every time we put our keys down we don't automatically record like a camera everything that's happened and nor would we want to because we would run the risk again of being overloaded with all kinds of trivial details our memories work in a very different way they're more selective and dependent on encoding processes that selects certain aspects of the environment for processing in a way that can result in enduring memory so that's a very important point. Second you raise the issue about true and false memories. This gets us. Into the domain within the first seven sins framework of what I call misattribution this is one of the sins of coma Sion where memory can be present but wrong. So you remember some aspect of something that happened but you mis remember the time or place you were referring to. Wordless technique that's become popular in experimental psychology recently in which you can induce false memories or false recognition of a sort by

presenting a list of associated words. So for example as you know that I've done with your class apparently successfully if I say Candy sour sugar bitter good taste to nice honey soda chocolate hard cake eat pie. And I ask you to remember those words and I later give you a memory test. If I say the words taste on the list and listeners out there can test their own memories. Many people think it was and it was if I say was the word. Point on the list. Most people will say no it wasn't and in fact it wasn't. If I say was the word sweet on the list most people say yes and I'm quite confident that it was. But in fact it wasn't. Those were all words related to the suite and some of you listening to the show may have just had the experience of a false recognition yourself fairly confident that I said sweet when I didn't. We did a brain imaging study using PET scanning a number of years ago as you allude to where we look people in the scanner and

we tried to see whether there are any differences brain activity when you're remembering words like taste that were on the list and you remember and words like sweet that weren't there but you think you remember. And in that early study we did find a difference in the in the auditory cortex. We've done some more studies as have others since then. And it really looks like you can't there are certain differences that do appear between true and false. There are many similarities the similarities tend to outweigh the differences. But whether you see it in the auditory cortex we have a more recent study that's come out. I'm just been published in the proceedings the National Academy of Sciences the lead author on it is Roberta Baeza from university we find some very interesting differences between true and false and parts of the medial temporal lobe the inner parts of the temporal lobe. So it looks as though it very much depends on how the experiment is set up how the what the test conditions are as to whether you see brain differences and where those differences are between true and false memory so that workers really still at a very

early stages a lot more to do. Thank you very much. OK thanks other questions are welcome. Three three three. W. while toll free 800 to 2 2. We talked earlier about the notion of the fact that memory does fade and that it's. Probably necessary that it does that you can't remember everything and that what happens is that the brain is kind of making a bet that if there's some particular piece of information that you haven't used and that maybe it's something that you actually don't need to remember there is a. It is also of course true that some people will have memories or perhaps a memory of some experience. And as again as you point out later in the book sometimes it may be a very bad or traumatic experience something that they will never forget. But how is it that in Indeed there are some things that are so firmly seem to be so firmly implanted in our memory that even if we would like to forget them we can't.

Yeah it's an interesting feature of memory that it that it can kind of. Cause problems going both ways we want to remember. We forget some things were we want to remember remember and then as you allude to we sometimes remember things we wish we could forget. This relates to the seventh sin which I call persistence and basically refers to the phenomenon you describe usually as a result of emotionally arousing experiences quite often negative or even traumatic experiences. We have these intrusive memories they persist. We can't get them out of our minds. I tend to look at this again through the adaptive perspective that we talked about earlier. One of the good things about memory is that we tend to all of things being equal have exceptionally good memory for events that result in emotional arousal during an experience or for aroused either positively or negatively. We tend to have very good memory for that event. And again one can see that this is the feature you want to have in memory

we seem to have. Specialized circuitry that's dedicated to processing emotionally arousing events. And. This is a positive feature of memory and that you want a system that is going to do particularly well about in with respect to preserving information about experiences that might threaten your survival for example so you can avoid those things in the future. However the price we pay for this exceptionally good memory for emotionally rousing events is that we sometimes can't can can't get them out of our minds even though we wish we could. Going back I realize we're sort of jumping around a little bit but going back to the the idea that there are the sins of omission and commission was again one of the troubling sorts of memory lapses that probably everyone experiences is the one where you're you're walking down the street and someone comes up to you and starts talking to you. Obviously they know you and actually you know them you know you know them maybe you could supply some details

about who they are and what they do and you know why it is you know them but the one thing you cannot remember their name what and why is it that that seems to be you. You would you would recognize the person and you might have access to other information about them. But this one key item their name. Somehow you can't summon that up. Yeah that's a great question and a very striking memory failure we've all experienced that and it relates to us in number three in the seven sins which I call blocking is basically a phenomenon you describe. And one key to understanding these blocking episodes is that they tend to occur most often for proper names as in your example names of people and places. And one idea that makes some sense as to why this occurs so often or predominantly for proper names is that if you think about it proper names are stored in a sense separately

from other kinds of information in memory or have weaker links to other kinds of information in memory than common names do. They're stored in a more isolated manner. So the example I like to give is what psychologists call the baker Baker paradox. If I tell you that my friend's name is Baker that really tells you nothing about that person it doesn't provide you access to other associations or information or anything it's just meaningless. Meaningless sound essentially. On the other hand if I tell you that my friend is a baker you immediately can think of where he might work things he might do close he might one and so forth. So there's easier access to other associations and semantic networks and memory from common and proper names. And so one idea is that this is why they're susceptible to blocking because there's more of a fragile link between a proper name and other information in memory now exactly why it is that that fragile link sometimes

becomes disrupted is still not well understood and I guess that's that's why it is frequently that. If people have difficulty remembering names or maybe maybe you're in a profession where it's very very important for you to remember names names of your customers names of people that you deal with that one of the tricks is often suggested is that developing some sort of image association with that with the person's name so that then you can have something to grab onto and that indeed would as well have the person's name really was Baker. That would help but there are other sorts of things that that will help you you some images you can summon that will help you grab onto that person's name. You know anything that you can do with names to make them meaningful either through images or associations to construct some sort of meaningful links is going to be enormously helpful because on their own they they sort of tend to stand alone. So that is very important for encoding new names into memory.

I do talk about various things people can do to deal with each of the seven sins. Now with blocking once a retrieval block has occurred it's difficult to do much to counteract it. People have various strategies. You know they go through the alphabet trying to think of letters of the Block name. Sometimes a helpful thing is simply to turn your attention away from the blocking incident because often what happens is that will come up with a similar name or similar word and that makes us feel really close to the target item so we kind of focus our attention on that because we think that we're on the verge of getting it. And some studies suggest that. That actually can prolong the blocking state focusing on a related name because it creates interference that makes it more difficult for you to get to the actual correct name. So that may be why sometimes you know you just turn away and then it pops up later because if you give a chance for that interference to kind of dissipate Another thing I

recommend is taking more of a which will work in some situations and blocking is taking more of a proactive stance. In other words suppose you know that you're going to a you know a business meeting they're going to be people there you haven't seen frequently or recently. Turns out that those are the kinds of proper names in which we're likely to block people. People who are familiar with we haven't used their name recently or frequently. One thing you might do is try to get a list of who's going to be there and review that list before you go thereby reducing the chances of retrieval block occurring spontaneously in you being put in the embarrassing situation of not knowing the person's name even though the person might expect that you would. We have someone else to talk with here locally champagne. Line 1. Hello. Oh hello yes. I am curious about people who forget the events that happened and recall them totally and correctly. An example is

just recently I went to Disneyland about four years ago with my sister and brother in law and he has difficulty has bad arthritis so we used a wheelchair you know for him. He doesn't normally use a wheelchair but since we were going to be walking around a lot from that this would be helpful. I just saw him the other day and I don't know how it came up but I sort of casually mentioned it and he said Oh no I never use a wheelchair. I was just curious. You know that he totally didn't remember this when when was the time when he was about 4 years ago. And did you further prob know him because I. It seemed to make him uncomfortable so I didn't push it and I just had never used Wilcher pardon. You said he had never used a wheel tell all he may have I don't know. Why don't you know we don't live near each other but in this instance he used a wheelchair

right. Right and but he he seemed to. Accept that I even suggested that he used it. So I write that there's no point in pursuing it if it made him uncomfortable right. And that. There was another incident where that was even more extreme. My. When my daughter was born my then husband. We were living in Seattle but I moved to my but I have a baby in Miami and he mentioned to my daughter at one point how he remembers vividly when she was born. He wasn't even there and I told her not to push it. You know if if he feels better thinking that he if he remembers it that way. And I'm just curious about people who totally remember things. Wrong. Right.

Well in this latter case it's very interesting and we may relate to it again a couple of memory since I call misattribution which we discussed earlier. The other another called suggestibility and another where memories are implanted through suggestions it may have been you know years ago in conversation somebody suggested to him that he had been there and he incorporated that memory you know wished that he'd been there and then took it on as a as his own. There's a lot of research showing that it doesn't take all that much in terms of suggestion in order for people to begin to believe that they've experienced events that never happened. As in this case. So for example there was a study I talk about this in the in the chapter of The Seven Sins on suggestibility that was carried out in the Netherlands a number of years ago following a terrible airline crash where an El Al

cargo plane crashed into an apartment building in the suburbs of Amsterdam and wreaked havoc all kinds of. Damage to property and people injured and just a terrible scene. A few months after the incident a group of Dutch researchers asked people who had who were in the university community. And this thing had been widely covered in the news. Do you remember the television footage of the moment that the plane hit the building and a significant portion. More than a majority of these people said yeah they do remember that moment and went on to elaborate various details of the you know the angle at which the plane hit the building and what happened right afterwards and so on. Now that all might seem fine but there is one problem which is that there was no television footage footage of the moment that the plane hit the building. So this very mild suggestion. Do you remember the moment the television footage of the moment a plane hit the building was enough for people to start conjuring up images maybe of other.

Television coverage and seeing you know a few days or weeks later and construct that into memory of an event that never happened and similar processes could be operating. In the case you mention. Back. You know the person who absolutely denied ever here. Well that then then we get back to transients. It's remarkable some of the events as you know assuming that this was his best memory and just wasn't a case of being socially embarrassed or something of that nature. It's remarkable some of the kinds of things that with the passing of time people will forget now that's not to say that the information is totally gone out of his memory one thing we do know from memory research is that seemingly forgotten experiences that you can't remember when prompted with one set of cues. You might remember one prompted with another set of cues. So if you had said well don't you remember. You know when you want to x in X

hospital or other detail it's possible you could trigger the memory. Are we going to have to wait in line because we had a real write something or something of that nature. There might be a way of getting at it. Thank you. Thanks I think so isn't it. Also true press shocker that one of the things that we do with memory is that we attempt to rewrite history. Yeah absolutely this relates to the six of the seven sins I call it bias. And it basically refers to the fact that memories are greatly influenced by our current knowledge feelings and beliefs. So. It really drives home the point that memory is not a tape recorder. It's not just the recording of what's happened in the past in a playback but it's more a construction based on aspects of what happened combined with aspects of the present situation. And there are many examples that talk about five different kinds of memory biases in in this chapter but I'll just mention one which

psychologists call consistency bias which basically refers to the fact we tend to rewrite history our own history and often in ways that make it consistent with our current feelings knowledge and beliefs. So there's been some very interesting studies done of people people in married and dating relationships. And what the researchers do is track how these how the couples feel about the relationship at different points in time and then later ask them to remember back to how they once felt. And one finding that's turned up in a number of studies is that if you're currently feeling good about the state of your relationship you tend to remember the past State of the relationship as being better than you actually said it was at the time. Converse Lee if you're currently feeling poorly negatively about the state of the relationship you tend to remember the past State of the relationship as being worse than you actually said it was at the time. So that would be one of many examples of how current

feelings are and also knowledge and beliefs can shape how we remember the past. We have about ten minutes are well enough 15 minutes left in this part of focus 580 Our guest is Daniel Schacter He's chairman of Harvard University's department of psychology where he does research on memory and amnesia. He's written articles for scholarly publications and has of course talked many times with people in the scientific community but also is often interviewed in popular media. And he's authored a book that explores this territory and if you're interested in the subject you might look at it. The book is titled The Seven Sins of Memory how the mind forgets and remembers and it's published by Hoden Mifflin. We have several callers here lined up ready to go. Let's go next talk with someone in rural champagne. Why number two. Hello. I have had experience several times with older family members who either have various sorts of dimensions or have had severe stroke that it damaged their memory and their cognitive abilities that they normally cannot

participate or understand a normal conversation that you might have even though they may be sitting there appeared to be listening. Once in a great while and with all these people we've had an experience where it might be weeks or months between these events. But they are sitting there trying to participate and they respond with a phone that is totally appropriate to the subject that's being discussed. Maybe even using a proper noun that you've a name of something that you've never heard them use in years. I'm wondering if we know anything about how they are able to access memory for just a moment. I'm assuming that's what happened. Or is this just an accident or what might be happening here. Oh it's a very interesting phenomenon. I haven't observed that myself because I tend to work more on the. More on more on the futures of memory related to personal experience as opposed to you know producing sentences understanding language and so forth. Why that would be

so we don't know and maybe that part of the problem is in accessing the network of facts and associations. Psychologists call semantic memory and we you know we don't have a good understanding of why it would be that you know at one moment in time you suddenly can gain access whereas most of the time you can't. Alternatively it may be that you know the network itself is really degraded and you know there there just may be little bits and fragments of information that are that are still preserved and somehow you tap into those occasionally. But it's an interesting observation I don't think we have going to answers for. Do you have any idea for something a phenomena I theorize in older people or anybody older and then people when they're getting older came to tell a story or in that book and even today same person within a very short period of time will repeat the whole thing again with no awareness that they just did that. You know these are generally normal people who don't have dimensions there's something quite phenomenal

happening there. That that may be some that's probably you know some a feature of transients or possibly misattribution that as we get older that kind of thing of repeating a story without remembering that we've told it before tends to happen and it happens because people as we get older were particularly prone to forgetting the context in which an event has occurred. So we may know perfectly well that we've told the story but we may not remember that we've told it to this person before. And so that aspect of the event is is forgotten. And then people go ahead and tell the tell the same story multiple times. You're hearing way that you know of where people can help their memory to keep him from doing this. Well that's an interesting one because. You know people people hope or wish that there were some

kind of general purpose memory cure out there that you know we could just tell you will do x y and z and that'll be the end of your problems with forgetting Unfortunately there really isn't. There are things that you can do to do with specific kinds of memory problems. You know for transients For example there's a certain body of information you want to remember. There are techniques that can help you take in that information in ways that will make it last longer. I review some of these in the chapter on transients for absent mindedness. The important thing is making effective use of reminders and cues for the specific problem that you you mention I suppose. Just making someone aware of the fact that they do it and maybe putting them on guard in the future that you know they may want to do a more careful check of their memory before they proceed with with the story. But that's a hard one to come up with a specific solution for.

Thank you. Let's go to. This is line 3. Yes good morning. When I turned 50 I I began to lose my nouns. And you know I try to make light of it and. But it was very embarrassing to see offense before me but not find the words then. And a friend suggested go buy Loba which I started taking. And you know I can't say I remember every known but I do pretty well and I have read reviews of studies involving ginko biloba and they usually say that it doesn't help memory very much. They've done studies and people aren't better remembers with or without the ginko biloba. But I found it very helpful.

And I wonder if there are any. Studies that do say that this particular herb is useful for the kind of memory loss I was having. I reviewed the literature on that in the chapter on transients and I guess I'm fortunate come to the same conclusion that the others do you refer to that there really isn't much in the in the research literature that would suggest any general effects there are a couple of studies that suggest some some mildly positive effects and people actually have diagnosed Alzheimer's disease. But I think we just need we need more work I know there are larger clinical trials going on. But in terms of the scientific literature as it now exists there's really not much there that would encourage you to believe that Kinko has any significant effects that it doesn't or that it can't but the literature really doesn't support

that. Well yeah I understand that gingko biloba is a blood thinner and it's been suggested in the blog in the brain area and I don't know if that scientific fact or not. I don't know much about the actual mechanism of exactly how it works but again I think we need or are more studies we do have anecdotal reports you know for people who are good and my memory seems to improve as others have said I took it and nothing's happened. So we just don't really understand very well what its effects are in memory and well if anybody's interested I take nature's way. Gold is a trade name and its ginko biloba and. It's 60 milligrams and there and they say my nouns have come back.

So I thought I would just pass that along. Okay here let's continue have another urban person here. This is line number one. Hello. Hi I have two questions one whether any research has been done where the effects of nutrition and memory and the other was that I was under anesthesia for a long time like nine hours between biopsy with done and then a complicated surgery was done. When I came out of it my my memory had changed my previous good memory had been auditory and when I finished that and came out of that I had lost that and now I'm very much a visual memory person and I get to hang up and listen the answer to thank you. OK. Oh yes Jack you're reeling why I've never heard of of anything quite like the last anecdote regarding the

anesthesia effects of that actually changing the sensory modality of memory. You know we know that anesthesia pretty well knocks out memory during the during an operation or during the experience itself although there have been an intra few interesting studies a purchase paid in a couple of these myself back in the late 1980s and early 90s that have looked at memory in anesthesia from the perspective of what I've called the distinction between explicit memory and implicit memory explicit memory is the kind of memory we've been talking about for this for this hour. It's calling to mind facts and events and experiences from the past and in a conscious way so that you experience an event for example implicit memory is something that occurs without conscious awareness where you're influenced by an event from the past. But you have no conscious recollection that the event occurred and several studies suggest that there's

some implicit memory effects that go on during anesthesia or so if you read people a list of words. During anesthesia later on you present them the words in the saddle. Remember hearing any of this have no memory. But if you give for example a free association test and you ask people to free associate to words that are related to some of those that they heard. Well sometimes you know produce the words that were presented during anesthesia more than they would if they had not been exposed to those words during anesthesia suggesting there's some influence. So I've never heard of of of exactly the effect that the caller describes but there is some interesting work going on linking anesthesia and memory. And as to the other question whether there we think that there's any or anything to suggest that as you know that eating a particular diet for example or using a supplement in particular things would.

Would improve one's memory. Again not as I'm not really an expert on that area. I'm not aware of of research that is actually looked at that. I would suspect that you know it's possible through poor diet lack of exercise and other things that there could be a generally negative impact on cognition and memory as well. I might be more surprised to find that there would actually be nutrition that would boost memory above its otherwise baseline level. But I'm not really an expert in interesting areas. I can't give a firm answer on that one. OK let's talk with someone in Chicago line for a while going to ask another question about photographic memory but I'd like to comment on the last questions or ask. There had been an observation that people who had to go on heart bypass or other heart operation if they could avoid being on the standby machine their memory would be more intact rather than those who are on a machine basis systems and then the other one

about nutrition. Not so much of what they were taking in the way of nutritional supplements but to avoid certain things. Dr. Abrams Hoffer in Canada in a book on smart nutrients in reversing and preventing the knowledge they suggested among other hypotheses that having a hypoglycemic diet is avoiding a glucose levels that are too high and remaining at a fasting level almost all hypo. Glycemic diet would be more beneficial for people and they would have fewer strokes and if they do have strokes it would lead to a better chance of surviving with their brain intact. So it's Avoid processed sugar of any kind and they have a helpful solution as well as avoiding glucose solutions in hospital administration care and unearthing pregnant women and so forth. So but I thought of going back to a question about that I have a photographic memory could you make any comment about this aspect. Well you know photographic memory is an interesting concept but it's also fairly

controversial one in that one is really no good evidence for photographic memory in the literal sense of the word some people do have very accurate memories and can give very detailed and accurate reports of things have happened to them. When you really put them to the test. There's there's very little evidence of the memory actually photographic just selective moments of probably some selected moments where they remember everything clear and were they remember you know much much of a situation but one when these kinds of claims have been tested in detail there hasn't really been much evidence of true photographic memory people with you know who can exhibit extraordinary memory usually are employing various kinds of demonic techniques such as using visual imagery or other like techniques that convert incoming information into much more memorable form rather than there just being some photographic input and imprint that they read out.

You know I've known some people that I like and Cyclopedia in the breath and scope and you think that they have a built in memory capacity. Right. OK thank you very much. Thanks but I think it's interesting that even one of the things that I think I came away from the book was with the idea that in fact that's the wrong model they think of a photograph or you think of a videotape or something as a way that memory isn't coated. That's the wrong model because in fact we may indeed think that we have very clear memories of things but that the that we may only really be remembering parts and that other things were filling in and that that's one of the reasons why it is that memory is not so trustworthy and why in fact we might remember things that actually didn't happen or we would remember things differently than they happened right. I think that's such a fundamental point. And it's one that I try to drive home in the book. And once you can get away from that misleading metaphor I think you know memory just as well literal reproduction. Then it's much easier to understand

some of the errors and mistakes that can otherwise seem quite baffling and even shocking. Yeah. Well we're going to have to finish I'm sorry we have something that we can't take but certainly there is much more in this book and I found it quite interesting and if you'd like to read more about memory and common memory lapses and perhaps why they occur and what they tell us about the way memory in the brain works. You can look for this book that we mentioned it's titled The Seven Sins of Memory. It's published by Houghton Mifflin by our guest Daniel Schacter. He's chairman of Harvard University's department of psychology. Professor Schachter thanks very much for talking with us today. Thanks for having me.