Are you invading our space with nonfiction . You are already the queen of fiction. Its like youve got a gigantic kingdom and its not enough for you. You need to come over to the nonfiction Writers World and just demolish us as well. Whats going on here . Host i did want to start by asking youve written i think five novels before this book, why not fiction . Whats finally tempted you over and im wondering do you see this very much as a blip in your nonfiction writing career or now more fluidly kind of going back and forth . The reason for writing this and the intention talking about alzheimers around the world for over a decade now, thats super important work to me personally. I know it is for you as well trying to help folks understand this disease and encourage earlier Diagnosis And Resource for care and research. It turns out every time i spoke about alzheimers, the conversation eventually shifted to memory and forgetting in general. I found that folks over the age of 40, definitely over the age of 50 are kind of freaked out, stressed out, worried, ashamed of every day moments of normal forgetting that they dont know its normal. So they think especially after a certain age every time i walk into a room and i cant remember why or i cant come up with the name of an actor i saw in a movie, i went to the store to buy milk and came home with a bunch of groceries. People worry this is a sign of impending dementia is specially especially ifthey have a Lot Goh alzheimers. So it became we have enough to stress about in the world and if i can take this off of peoples plates, you dont have to stress about these things this is a normal outcome how our human brains are designed. This is how you remember things and how you forget, these are things you can do to protect and improve it and heres how you have to worry about with respect to alzheimers, but most of what everybody forgets every day whether you are 25 or 65, its totally normal. Host youve written five books in a lot of details exploring with these various neurological diseases are including alzheimers so why did you have to switch over what was necessary about coming over to nonfiction since you do not need to do fiction yourself, you are such an artist at it. Guest im going to go back to that. Im not going to say that i will never go back to nonfiction. I enjoyed writing fiction, theres so much more room to play and run so my next is going to be a novel about a woman with bipolar disorder. This deserved a platform to really be a vehicle in this case to feel like a friendly accessible conversation with a friend that happens to be a neuroscientist and can explain this to you people come to me and they are confessing almost looking to get a diagnosis on the conversation, these are the things happening to me. I have to write everything down if i need to do something later. If i dont do something now, im going to forget. You can see the fear is rising as we need to let them know yes youve got alzheimers, but i can see the relief and so it was very clear that there is a need out there to understand our everyday lives and everyday moments of forgetting why that happened and also to help like you walked into her Room And Cant remember why youre there i can help you figure out why youre in there. It was a mission to help everybody that is worried about memory. I dont think theres any person over 40, and im 54 so ive been putting up with this anxiety for a bunch of years now of just having that if what im forgetting is normal forgetting is it just getting older or me being paranoid about getting older or something i should be worried about here and even though i am trained in being able to understand the difference, i still experience that feeling and the second Thing I Resignation you do all these book talks about alzheimers and what people want to talk about. They want to be told you are there conduit to the medical community in a way so just trying to put those answers down in a Book Form and i found those personally assuring answering the questions that i had and that i started to answer from my Research But Hadnt really put down so thank you for that first of all. Guest you may have a sense of i cant remember where i put my phone or my glasses again and its like whats going on with me. Theres something going on with my memory getting older and impaired. Whats happening. But it was never even probably involved in these instances because you cant create a memory if you dont pay attention to it in a place so it is likely we were such distracted. Thinking of the next thing you need to do and youre not paying attention to where you put your glasses down it is a symptom of distraction. Really understanding that like i cant find my phone probably because i didnt pay attention to where i put it rather than jumping 20 my god my memory is failing. So laying it on paper and seeing it explained can really help. Host lets talk about the biggest idea in the book. Everything is narcissistic. Im so glad you spent a bunch of time on this. Before we get in this conversation to the ins and outs of how memory works in different kinds of memory and things like that, the big idea for me that we are not designed to remember every detail. In fact, if we were to member every single detail we wouldnt have the kind of power of intelligence and broad thinking that we do have. People that are encumbered by remembering too much detail. If you could talk about in a big way how our brains are designed to not remember most things and then we can kind of get to what we are designed to remember and whats working and what isnt. Again it is helpful to take some time to think about what we do remember and what we dont. I dont remember as much from ten years ago or five years ago and worry about like im forgetting a lot of details from the past. And i would argue you dont remember your most recent past. So, today is monday. A week ago monday can you tell me all the text messages you sent and received . What did you have for lunch, tell me about your Morning Shower a week ago. We dont remember. Our brains are designed to remember what is meaningful and the emotional. Kind of. What is meaningful and matters but we forget what isnt so most of our lives are spent doing things that are kind of routine, daytoday, same old. Our days dont our brains dont remember so we get up, get dressed, sit in on zoom calls. Now its even more. We dont go as many places, so its feeling fuzzy from the past year, feeling a little foggy. Its because we didnt get out and do as many things. It was the same Day Today and our brains forget what his routine. If you want to remember what happened you have to get out of your routine and put things in it that are new and meaningful and emotional that matter to you and stand out. A. All those vacation days that you can remember very specific things, the context of that day was like no other in your life. We talked about the things that are new and meaningful and exciting. The chance to revisit that memory helps us and reinforces the strength of those connections. When i did something really cool and exciting im going to tell my friends and family about it and that helps reinforce the memory. Lets dive into neuroscience. You have a phd and basically you are Superwoman Or Wonder woman. My question is very specifically you said most memories are meaningful or emotional and thats what we are designed to remember most. Is the reason we remember those because of that emotional moment of the challenger blowing up or whatever and its seared in our memory or is the reason that thats the memory and the event we keep going over and over in our head in conversations and things like that or is it both and how does that work in the biology of our brain . Its a bit of both. Thats different biologically from the memory of stuff you know. The speed of light or my birthday, stuff you know. The memory for how to do things, how to type, thats different. So we are talking about the stuff that happened which is episodic memory. Episodic memory is the stuff that happened thats really influenced and enhanced by emotion so something happens that is emotionally neutral i might remember it, but is it scary or exciting or joyful that will contribute to that being very strong and longlasting theres a part of our brain called the amygdala and that has a lot of direct Connection And Influence over the campus that is also in the system. But this is a structure that is required to the formation of any new consciously held memories and so because of the relationship we have a tight bond between a motion and busy connecting the different aspects and elements that contain the remember the moment or experience. So on the one hand, emotions strongly influence whether we are going to remember something or not. On the other hand, it is the emotional and we are going to talk about it. Thats the stuff that matters. Thats the stuff that gets our attention. Like a positive feedback loop. What do we pay attention to . That was a big attachment and you cant remember something if you dont pay attention to it. If im driving from boston to cape cod, ive done this thousands of times. I might be 10 miles past the bridge and suddenly think did i already go over the bridge, i cant remember. Ive never paid attention to it. But if theres been a Car Accident on the Bridge And Someone calls and others like amazing news, someones getting married and i happen to be on the bridge, i will remember driving over the bridge that day. A motion helps us pay Attention And Form memories. This is the part of the interview im not sure where to go because theres so many different things i want to ask. The top at my mind right now i think you talked about in the book how you remember things that didnt happen. Can we talk about how that happened . Because thats another huge misunderstanding theres been stuff wound up into the story that didnt happen the way they actually remember it. It might not have happened at all but you didnt experience it. If you are borrowing from other people. Lets back up. Memories are the stuff that happened unlike stuff you know or how to do or plan to do. Very vulnerable editing. The stuff that happened that you remember is probably wildly inaccurate about who you are, where and what he remember and if you are interviewed a year later or two years later and the memories are totally different versus right after and then they tend to be college students. Theres a great study out of emory college. These are young people not that have aging brains that might be memory impaired. If you are a 20yearold interviewed immediately after the space shuttle challenger, who were you with, what were you doing, what did you see, how did you feel and two years later the answers dont match almost at all and then shown their original handwriting they look at that and think thats strange. That cant be right. They would stick to the false memories. Its humbling and theres testimony much of the time given how we rely on that. Theres a video of a Car Accident and then if i ask you afterwards how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other. If i said how fast were the cars going when they crashed or when they smashed into each other, you would probably say they were going faster. Heres the deal, what happens after we remember something influences how we later restore it. If i witness Something Or Experience something, my Brain Isnt a video camera, my Mind Isnt Recording every Sight And Sound im exposed to. Im only going to capture a certain slice of what actually happened. So to begin with, my memory is biased and distorted from what someone else sees. A54yearold man witnessing something might notice different elements of and a 22yearold would. Memories of the same event will differ to begin with. Heres the weird part of our brain. Every time we recall a memory for what happens we have the ability to add, subtract, change, bring new information. If im on the phone with someone, maybe what she says and notices influences what i remember. Whatever has happened in the retelling or the reminiscing then gets stored over and rewrites. It saves the original memory. The further it has the opportunity to migrate away from what originally was my first memory of that event. Years later im likely to be far from what i originally experienced. So if we have siblings this is a cool exercise. If you have brothers or sisters remember a holiday from your childhood or an event all of you witnessed. Remember christmas when i was ten and you were eight and i might say i might have a memory of what we got and he might have a completely different memory of that same day. What im trying to help folks understand, you dont know who is right and who is wrong. You likely both have misinformation in your own memory. I dont know which one to start with so i will go to the first one i thought of. Our brains are the most fantastic machines invented and its going to take a while for that to change even with the incredible machines we invent these days. Why would Evolution Design a brain that could change the way we remember something that happened and that would make us unable to know whether that memory is a true Memory Or Something that was subsequently edited in. I understand how we want to keep improving on that and make it more accurate, but to not be able to know in your own head whether this is a true Memory Or Something that you changed along the way, to insist when you are looking at Evidence Guest the obvious answer to me our Memory System Isnt perfect. This isnt the only instance where our brains are not designed well for remembering everything. On the one hand if i want to have, my brain can do that, yours can. A japanese engineer at the age of 69 memorized over 100,000 because he wanted to. We can remember everything. Its going to forget to take your vitamin later or return a library book. Its the most astounding piece of equipment ever imagined. I dont have the exact answer for you so like i said i can only remember what i paid attention to. Im going to miss a large portion of what happened just from the beginning. People talk about eyewitness testimony if theres a Bank Robbery and im the only person that witnessed what happened, i might have only seen the gun but not the gunmans face because i was so focused on the thing that could kill me. But someone else that is maybe not in the line of fire could have seen its face. So this ability to collaborate helps us get a full picture of what happened and eventually we cant tell what was my experience versus someone elses because we are great storytellers and we love stories. Anything we can wrap a story around. The viewer will note i almost stumped to you but i couldnt. In this Micro Subject is there any way as remembering something this important if we care to know lets say we are in the witness, is there a way to know if something is a true and accurate Memory Or Something that weve edited along the way or do we need to just give up and acknowledge that it is simply the Story Weve taught ourselves to tell . For those that are padding the pavement our episodic memories are fallible and can contribute to a case and creating a picture because obviously we dont need to entirely. If we witness or Experience Something certainly theres an element of truth. It doesnt just distort wildly that its completely off. But its subject to all kinds of errors and so to hold someones testimony as this is truth is dangerous. I think that it is a piece of the puzzle and for example, if you keep a diary and write down what happens you are more likely to remember both what you wrote down and other elements because what you wrote down can be a. Q. For other pieces of what happened that day so it helps you unleash the rest of the memory so those can be more accurate but on the flipside, if i write something down it can also limit what i remember, what i wrote down and i emphasize that so much that i might miss some other things that had happened but have now erased that from the memory that is so far gone because i have ive red only this aspect and you cant convince me that they actually occurred. A. It is incredibly flawed and i dont think anybody should be convicted on testimony alone. That is just an injustice. The Law Enforcement Community does understand that. Weve gone through the revolution in the last 20 years. Please correct me if im wrong. I would imagine that most responsible judges and attorneys no this fact. But you have to back it up because i would note to most Knt Police officers are trained in the influence of their language on what someone is going to remember like the video if i change a verb in the question how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other or smashed into each other im going to change your memory from what you saw so if im a Police Officer and im questioning a witness, interrogating someone, talking about what did you see, my language can very much influence what the person will say they saw and therefore what they consolidated to the memory of this is what i believe i saw but the language of what we use to describe what happened will influence the future recollection of what happened. We will see who can be the first to get a book going on eyewitness testimony. My agent is on speed dial. I hope yours is. [laughter] back to the book. You do a bunch of interesting things on the book. Is it to reassure people, your entry into the book and that kind of purvey is the book for people going through normal things this is the way the frames are built and what we are supposed to be experiencing and that of it itself is huge medicine but then you help people understand the differences and the workings of memory they dont want to learn the science. They want to understand the basics. Guest i didnt want it to be a long book. I wanted to keep the chapter short and each chapter to feel like something people could take away with and tell their friends it was easy enough and understandable enough they could tell their friends i learned this cool thing about how memory works or what happens and i have the word on the tip of my tongue. I think it was each chapter lets look under the hood, like heres what happened. I hope it isnt dumbed down so much. This is how memory works and then there are some tips for what helps your memory and what improves it, things like getting enough Sleep And Managing stress and what can and pair it, the difference between alzheimers and normal for getting. Everybody wants to supplement how do i stop having a word stuck on the tip of my tongue or what can i do to remember where i parked my car its designed in such a way we will forget things regularly. I find that reassuring and not frustrating or scary, and thats my hope. And then i think theres an appendix at the back thats a sort of quick Hit List of what to do to improve your memory from day to day, people like that. But theres also this idea that its a memory paradox. Its essential for the functioning of almost everything we do. You remember last week or last month we only remember a handful of things from the past year really well and thats okay. I think there is a Zen Thing in their which i dont feel all the time that i had experience for and its this kind of sensation of i cant remember. Its frustrating i would love to remember the exact thing. As a professional writer you want to remember the details to report it accurately but at the same time, you have a sense of i know the essence of what im saying, the larger point is there and not that im going to fudge the details if i dont have them in my brain right now, but if we had to choose between having the larger truth like the best most collaborative perspective, overarching perspective on something that happened and having some sort of Tunnel Vision Memory of the actual things that you saw and heard you would choose the larger picture. One hundred times out of 100. Thats what is great about being human is that a big field of vision. Our brains are great at remembering the gist of what happened were the body of knowledge. Whats kind of beautiful about living today is life is an open book test. You can look up the details and go through it. The ability to google the name or the statistics we were not holding all of that information before the internet. This is now a way to expand what we have access to and what we know and what we can use. We get the gist of what is going on. There are about 100 or so people diagnosed on the planet that have highly superior autobiographical memory and these folks remember in great detail every day of their lives they do remember last weeks Morning Shower and what they had for lunch and all the text messages. For some folks this is a superpower. I tried to stop her and i couldnt. I will pick a date like august 4th, 1986. That was a saturday and i went to visit john travolta. She has the whole day and what she wore and what the weather was. It isnt the superpower that we imagined it would be. If they cant stop reliving the worst days of their lives all technicolor detail. Then theres a famous man a case study, neuroscience studied by alexander and he remembered everything and could memorize mass quantities of text in a foreign language and mathematical formulas he didnt understand and could regurgitate these in perfect detail years later but he was there was no background and foreground. Everything was remembered so what was meaningful is just as memorable as what was consequential so he was burdened by this. Its useful for our ability to function. Let me press you on something you said. Is it true not having to remember all the phone numbers we have to remember like we used to remember dozens just to stand out to people. We would have little books and now we dont remember maybe one or two phone numbers. Is that okay or are we getting lazy about some types. Would it be worse if we exercised that part of our memory a little bit more . We are old enough i remember my childhood Friends Phone numbers and i literally dont know my two youngest Kids Phone numbers, like i dont know what they are and that seems like bad parenting. [laughter] this is bad for me. I should be memorizing these things i use to memorize all kinds of things. Better for what . Will you improve your ability, are you going to improve your ability to remember in detail the Documentary Film you watched or the book you read or are you going to be able to find your phone when it goes missing if i memorize those phone numbers . It doesnt translate. We can memorize 100 digits if we wanted to. I can sit down and through repetition and maybe some associations, i can remember my Childrens Phone numbers and a dozen others. There was no problem. It doesnt improve my Memory Or Ability for never murdering other things whatsoever and it doesnt improve my life because i dont need to memorize that i have it. Our smart phones are sort of an externalization of our memory and we can job share the job of memory and all kinds of cool ways that dont have to be fearful for us. I wear glasses because my eyes need help seeing. We dont think twice about that. I can use google or my Contact List to remember things for me to help aid in remembering and it doesnt impair my ability to do other things so its not like i have it memorized and now just sitting on the couch staring. We dont have enough downtime probably. When i was a kid when we drove in the car we stared out the window or looked at the wall. Now its like i should listen to a podcast. I remember some of that so i can tell you about it. Its not going to help you in other ways. I think hearing you say it that way, i not only agree with you but i would take it a step further its addressed again very me looking at myself i would say now being in my mid50s, i think that my life has improved and my skills have improved over the last 25 years or so in that i am wiser because i dont pay as much attention to every little detail even in the events i should remember the details i should pay attention to more the big picture. I dont want to paint it as a zerosum game, but its a little hunch that i have about myself. Its the accumulation of knowledge and that doesnt diminish with age. Some people think as we diminish in age sometimes you feel you le you can see the wheels turning so that happens but we dont have an impairment in what we learned so the stuff stays with you. You have this body of wisdom that is better than ever you have a memory for the concepts and patterns. Weve lived enough to be able to have Experience And Notice theres a similar pattern between this and that or that concept feels like that concept or i now can make conclusions based on the body of knowledge that i wouldnt have understood or noticed when i was younger. Our memories for the stuff we know accumulate over time and we as we age we are more attuned to the patterns and concepts and with wisdom comes age in part because of that. Host thats what i keep telling myself, wisdom comes with age. I am sure this book is going to sell 2 million copies. So statistically should i say 10 million . Lets say 10 million or 100 million. So statistically those hundred million people some of them will pass it to another person so we are talking hundreds of millions will see the book and those people know lets say 2 billion people so in the whole world will come into contact with the book and im getting to my point some of those people statistically well either personally be at the beginning of alzheimers disease or know someone, be observing someone and so the same with this interview seen by probably a billion people. Lets talk to those people. What is a disturbing thing to notice that doesnt a normal functioning, what do we look out for like if thats happening you should probably go see a neurologist and have a couple of basic tests. Normalizing Brain Health and getting people comfortable with talking about Brain Health we are happy to go to our primary Care Physician and check our Heart Health and get our Blood Pressure taken and get checked for cholesterol and a number of steps in a day. Anything from the neck up we seem to think we have no influence over. One of the things we would love to see people get comfortable with is get in conversation with your dr. About here are the kind of things i am forgetting and this is what my health feels like today and the next appointment we can compare this to last year. What are the kind of things that could be potentially concerning that i talk about the tip of the tongue because this plagues all of us. What is the name of the movie my friend recommended on netflix. It tends to be pronouns. Biologically speaking they are in little neurological culdesacs as opposed to intersections in the middle of main street downtown, easy to come by so if you have a lot of tip of the Tongue Book titles, cities, a persons name, dont sweat it but if you are starting to go like whats the name of the thing i write with, you know, the thing i write words on a paper with, a pen . Yes. Words that are common go missing aloft and this happened to our friend all day long. He cant remember the name of the stuff we use. The thing i drink water from. A glass . So thats happening. Bring that to your doctor. Thats concerning. If you lose your keys and your phone, that is probably an attention, Distraction Problem but if you find your keys in your phone and think what do i do with this and youre suddenly like i dont know how to work this, thats more concerning, thats different. People talk about i cant remember where i parked my car. Thats normal and again likely an attention issue. Its something more concerning. Our friend will not recognize his car. He will be standing in front of it but it wont compute that it belongs to him or he wont remember how he got there. This happens to folks with alzheimers. They will walk to the Parking Lot and remember i dont know how i got here. The first thing to go with alzheimers is to hit the canvas, the part that is necessary for the formation of new consciously held memories. I cant remember having driven to the store because that happened a few minutes ago and im a little fuzzy about how i got here. You start repeating yourself because you dont remember you told someone or something. Youre repeating yourself and you dont remember, youre not aware. This is a conversation to bring to your primary Care Physician and its treated like Heart Health. It doesnt mean if i admit i have a Memory Problem im going to fall off a cliff. Its like heart disease. We have ways we can prolong the Distance And Push alzheimers off into the distance and do the right thing for your Brain Health, so we know Heart Healthy Mediterranean Diet can reduce the alzheimers and dementia by half. If we had a biopharmaceutical say this will reduce your risk of alzheimers by half, you would take it. Its hugely important and i have a whole chapter in my book as to why because i think again part of the book is i can tell you its important to get to sleep every night. This is going to help you lock in the memory of stuff you created Today And Help prevent alzheimers. But in the book i said this is what your brain is doing while you sleep that helps so you know every time you can give yourself seven or nine hours of sleep its like i just prevented alzheimers a little bit. All of that is already done. What are you going to do now. Host there was a period in my life i thought sleep was for suckers and i felt guilty about getting too much which is so silly. Host dont feel that way. I posted something that was about the importance of sleep and a lot of comments of people saying i get nine hours a night and i feel so guilty about that. As a culture we are like that. Like did i get enough done, are you lazy, if youre sleeping your lazy. Host we have two or three minutes. People need to understand sleep is not like wasted time. We are designed, every living thing, every living animal needs sleep. A big part of the reason is our brains are consolidating these memories. We need that time to keep our brain and functioning order from day to day. To devote so much time to sleeping, we have spent years of our lives asleep at this point. Its not a state of doing nothing. We are not conscious but our body is busy doing things essential to the Health And Functioning of every Organ System in our body including the brain so we needed to consolidate memories and clear away the metabolic debris that accumulated during the business of being awake so we dont get alzheimers. Its vital to your mental health, cardiovascular, not getting cancer. It helps folks understand my Brain And Body are busy cleaning up and doing business while i sleep. It isnt a state of unconscious nothingness. Host like you said, dont worry about the sleep that youve missed. Weve all done stuff but we can be smarter and wiser as we go on. This has been missed such a privilege to talk to you for an hour straight. We made it almost an hour. Im throwing this name out there because ive never not talked about rudy. I hope this sells the 100 million copies that it deserves to sell, and i cant wait to see what your next one is and we will hopefully talk about that one. Guest cant wait to see you in real life. Host take care. Guest thanks. You too. After words is available as a podcast. Visit to cspan. Org Podcast Or Search cspan after words on your Podcast App and watch this and all previous interviews at booktv. Org. Click the button near the top of the page. Booktv on cspan2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Funding comes from these television companies and more. Teachers are doing whatever it takes to connect with other students. And cox connecting eligible students with low Cost Internet with the connect to compete program from cox. Cox along with supporting booktv on cspan2 as a public service during a recent virtual program hosted by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco publisher shared his aftermath in the future direction of the country. Heres an important part of that conversation. Im still searching for answers and i was just thinking about this. There are three qualities. We make it complicated. Its not that complicated. Humanity, Courage And Passion. If we can have a little bit more of those things in the public discussion and the conversations we have with people we would be a lot better off. I will give an example. One i got to be a friend within this book. When he wrote his essay in the book which i highly recommend, he was a republican congressman in the state of virginia. He runs a Whiskey Distillery with his wife and he performed a gay marriage and he was thrown out. The freedom caucus, anyone. He became persona non grata. He spoke out against q and his own mother has called him a traitor to his country. Showing humanity, Courage And Passion for democracy. We need a Truth Commission but we also need to focus on personal qualities. This might feel like a digression but i want to talk about a conversation i had with a friend of mine who i wanted to contribute to the book and he had a lot to say but he works for espn and hes not allowed to talk about politics. We were discussing anthony scaramouci. You can say what you want about him, he helped donald trump. Anthony worked very hard against the reelection and we talked about how do they remember you later. This is the conversation i had. What will they remember you for. Humanity, Courage And Passion are Qualities Anthony has shown i think we can all agree. Pedro showed those qualities and i wont go on long but i will talk briefly in 1999 pedro who was conceived in cuba and then his Mother And Father fleet to O Havana when his mother was eight months pregnant, a Sports Writer he was in havana for a game between the orioles and the cuban national team, a very big Deal And Pedro was there where his family lived and they recognized him. They left in 1962 but they recognized him. One of the things he did while he was there is write an open letter to bill clinton for the end of the economic embargo. Pedro lost friends over that but he showed courage so theres been an outpouring in the world. We lost pedro on sunday. Its that speaking with passion, what you stand for, knowing what you stand for and not being afraid to talk about it even when its a difficult situation are qualities i would point to in anthony and pedro. Its on a level of values i believe this Essay Collection has importance. I know we will move on to topical matters but thats the way that i wanted to set it up. If we cannot talk to people as each other that we cant get anywhere. To which the rest of the program visit booktv. Org and search for the title of the book now what