Skip, in Later Life
The following story is a collection of Skip’s comments and information he gleaned from TED talk sessions on memory, which he enrolled in last fall.
As we all progress in age, we seem to have at least one thing in common. Memory is the second thing to go! Since I was unable to attend our Wichita High School East reunion last autumn, I purchased a four week TED Memory Course in lieu of that long-awaited and planned experience. Fortunately, my high school classmates were able to remember each other since our reunion committee very considerately made up masks of their graduation pictures.
My introduction to this memory course was interesting and fun. Like anything else, you get out of it what you put into it. We had 28 students, but, not unlike our East High Zooms, only about three or four attended our early Thursday morning Zoom calls.
Notes From the Introductory Session
“In the past 24 hours, did your brain forget anything that you expected it to remember? A word? Where you put your phone? To send an email? An online password? To buy toothpaste? Why you walked into a room? In each of these moments, how did you feel? Worried? Afraid? Embarrassed? Ashamed? Did you judge yourself? Did your inner voice say something like, ‘Ugh, I have such a terrible memory.’ I’m betting many of you carry this false belief that memory is supposed to be perfect, that we’re supposed to remember everything. And so when you forget anything, you think it’s a sign of weakness, aging, or maybe even the beginning of Alzheimer’s. You think, ‘Something must be wrong with me.’
“But here’s what I want you to know. Our brains are not designed to remember people’s names or to do something later, or to catalog everything we encounter. These imperfections are simply the factory settings. There’s a reason that you can remember every word to Hey Jude by The Beatles and can forget why you walked into your living room. Or that you can still remember the Hamlet soliloquy you memorized in tenth grade, but forget what your spouse told you five minutes ago. I want to help you develop a healthier relationship with your memory. I’m going to show you how our brains remember. your memory. I’m going to show you how our brains remember. You’ll learn tools and hacks to strengthen memory creation and retrieval and tips to improve your brain health at any age. And I want to help you shatter this false belief that your brain is supposed to remember everything. You’ll learn why we forget, and that most of what we forget every day is actually a normal part of being human. I’m Lisa Genova. Welcome to “How to Boost Your Brain and Memory.”
Memory Class Notes – I Cook, Therefore I Can Think
In my first week, I learned so much, but it boils down to cooking our food, as only primates do.
10:26 – ” How did we get here, then? Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can’t spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. Cooked foods are softer, so they’re easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long.”
11:22 – “So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. So, I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food.”12:16 -“So what is the human advantage? What is it that we have that no other animal has? My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that’s the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? In two words, we cook. No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. And I think that’s how we got to become human.”12:50 – “Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. Thank you very much.”Memory Class Homework
In my first three Zoom calls, I learned a lot, including that I am the oldest participant; so they also learn much from me! For one thing, some of my new friends are in the movie business and knew some of my friends in that field. I asked Sean to explain his trophies, since that looked like an Oscar behind him, and it was. I looked him up on Wikipedia and learned that he had married a famous actress. I just couldn’t remember much about her, YET! Our facilitator worked for George Lucas, and being from Marin, where Skywalker Ranch is located, we had some fun memories of when I worked with Industrial Light and Magic, George’s company. This was all very magical to me!
We were asked if we had any flashbulb memories like a death or car accident. This is one of mine.
“Our brains are truly breathtaking–and perhaps their most astonishing ability is the capacity to create, store and retrieve a lifetime of memories. See: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-benefits-of-a-good-night-s-sleep-shai-marcu”
Why our East High Friendships are So Important
“If it seems like friendships formed in adolescence are particularly special, that’s because they are. Childhood, adolescent, and adult friendships all manifest differently in part because the brain works in different ways at those stages of life. During adolescence, there are changes in the way you value, understand, and connect to friends.”
Shannon Odell explores the neuroscience of friendship. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-friendship-affects-your-brain-shannon-odell?lesson_collection=mind-matters
And more importantly… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sY4rhvB9LE
“Is love a signal winding through your neural pathways? A cliche? A cult? Love is easy to compare, but difficult to define, maybe because we’re fundamentally biased; we try to define love while falling in or out of it. And love feels differently to every person who feels it, but this subjective emotion has evolutionary explanations, too. “
Brad Troeger takes a shot at the definition of love. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-is-love-brad-troeger
The Not-So-Grand Finale of My Memory Course
I had a bad experience yesterday that provides an ending for my memory story. After almost a month of lessons and Zoom sessions, on Wednesday morning I was to be on our final Zoom call and had a very ironic, unique and disappointing experience. Although I was up quite early, I missed the Zoom call because I could not remember the password to get in!
LOL !
Skip, your story is ultimately quite amusing after introducing engaging topics. I often get sucked into articles about memory and have to change the way I eat and purchase a bottle of specially dried weed from remote mountain tops in Tibet, and presented as the lowest price point if I buy 3 or even 6 bottles at once, while they are almost out of their supply! At least TED talks are entertaining!