>> lisa, it's great to see

you. i have to start out by saying not cool, you're a fiction writer. why are you invading our space with nonfiction? you're already the queen of fiction. you've got this gigantic kingdom and it's not enough for you. you need to come over to the nonfiction writers world and just demolish us as well. what's going on here? >> says the man writes nonfiction, as a podcast and is now a famous musician. >> but i did want to start out by asking you, you've read i think it's five novels

before this book and to say you've carved out a niche is a greatunderstatement and will get to that in a second . but why nonfiction? what finally tempted you over to nonfiction and i'm wondering is this, do you see this is very much a blip in your long fiction writing career or do you see yourself now more fluently going back and forth? >> the reason for writing this, the intention behind this was i've been talking aboutalzheimer's around the world for over a decade now . that's super important work to me personally. i know it is to you as well. it helps us understand this disease. it hard to find resources for diagnosis and research but it turns out every time i spoke about alzheimer's the

conversation eventually shifted to memory and forgetting in general . i found over the age of 40 definitely over the age of 50 are all really freaked out, stressed out, worried, ashamed of everyday moments of the normal forgetting but they don't know it's normal. so they think that especially after a certain age every time i walk into a room and can't remember why iwent in there or i can't come up with the name of the actor in that movie . i went to the store to buy milk and i came home with a bunch of groceries and nomilk . people think this is a sign of impending dementia especially have to have a loved one with alzheimer's . so the intention came, we have enough distress about in this world. if i can take this off of people's place, you don't have to stress about these things. this is a normal outcome of how our human brains are designed. and it's very distinct from forgetting so i wanted to

help people understand, their own brains, this is what normally what you can do to protect it and improve it and here's what you have to really worry about with respect to alzheimer's but most of what everybody forgets every day whether your 25 or 65 is totally normal. >> let me do one follow up on my question before we get into the book content and that is you've written five books which went into a lot of detail and explore what these various neurological diseases are. why did you have to switch over to, what was necessary about coming over to nonfiction since you, since you do fiction andyou're such an artist at ? >> i'm going to go back to that and i'll never say that i'll never go back to nonfiction . i enjoy writing fiction a lot more than so much more place so my next book will be a

novel about a woman with bipolar disorder. i'll probably write about addiction after that. but i reserve the right to write nonfiction because i thought this served the nonfiction platform as a great vehicle because i wanted this to feel like a friendly accessible conversation with a friend who just happens to be a neuroscientist and can explain this to you. so i've been doing this on purpose, one at a time. people come to me, they're confessing almost looking to get diagnosed. they're saying lisa, these are the things that have been happening to me. i have to write everything down and if i don't write it down i'm going to forget. you can see the fear rising as i let them know that yeah,

that you've got alzheimer's and they don't explain what's going on . i see the release so this book was very clear that there's a need out there to understand our everyday lives . the everyday moments of forgetting. why that happens and what to be concerned about and what not to be and also to help. you walk into a room and you can't remember why you're in there i can help you figure out why you're in there. so it really was just a mission to sort of help everyone who's worried about memory worry about the right kinds of things. >> this resonates with me on several different levels that you can probably understand. just as a person i don't think there's any person under 40 and i'm 54 so i've been knitting with this anxiety for a bunch of years. there's now just having that not just one panic moment but just a never

ending series of deep concern moments where what i'm forgetting is normal forgetting, is it just getting older? is it just me being paranoid about getting older or is there something i should be worried about here ? even though i'm now kind of trained in being able to understand the difference, even i still experience that feeling. the second thing i resonate with strongly is this as you say in the book and as you said here, literally you go and you do all these book talks and in my case about alzheimer's disease and all these other diseases . and one that people want to talk about is they want to talk about their own fear that they have virtually. and want to be told you should go see a doctor. your their conduit to the medical community in a way. so just trying to put those answers down in book form, i

found this book so personally reassuring and answering a lot of the questions that i had an eye, but also that i had started to answer in my mind for my research but haven'tput down . so thank you for that first of all. >> you're welcome, thank you. i think you may have a sense of man, i can't find my phone or i'm misplacing or i can't remember where i put my phone or where i put my glasses again and what's going on with me ? the misconception is to jump to there's something going on with my memory. it's impaired, what's happening so memory was probably never even involved in any of these instances because you can't create a memory if you don't pay attention to the information in the first place . so very likely we live these

protracted lives and where probably thinking of the next thing you need to do and you're not paying attention to when you put your glasses down and later when you can't findthem this isn't a failure of memory. this is a symptom of distraction . really understanding that like oh, when i can't find that it's probably because i didn't pay attention to where i put it rather than jumping to all my god, my memory is failing. i think really like laying it down on paper and seeing and explain it really helps. >> let's talk about what i think is the very biggest idea in the book or at least the, everything is narcissistic so this is how i see the world but i'm so glad you spent a bunch of time on this which is thiskind of , before you get to, before we get in this conversation to the ins and outs of actually how memory works and different kinds of memory, the big idea for me that we

are not designed to remember every detail. in fact, if we were to designed to remember every detail, we would not have the kind of powers of intelligence and kind of broad thinking that we do have. so we are designed to forget the vast majority of the details that we come across and there are examples of people who are encumbered by remembering too much detail. so if you could talk about in a big way, how our brains are designed to not remember most things and then we can get to what we are designed to remember and what's working and what isn't working. >> it's helpful to take some time to think about what we really do remember andwhat we don't . people talk about i don't remember as much from 10

years ago or five years ago and they sort of worried about wow, i'm forgetting a lot of details from the past. and i would argue that you actually don't remember your most recent past . 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 don't remember. our brains are designed to remember what's meaningful and what is emotional . kind of. . surprise goes in there because of surprise elicits emotion but what matters, we remember and we forget what isn't. most of our lives are spent doing things that are kind of routine, just have actual day-to-day same old same old. our brains don't remember name old same old. so we spend much of our days doing the same thing. we sit on 1 million zoom calls and our days are from even more.

so if you're feeling fuzzy from the past year, feeling a little foggy about this year is a big blur, it's because we didn't get or do as many things. it wasn't different. it was the same day today and our brains forget what's routine. so that's kind of most of our day. if you want to remember more of what happens you've got to get ouof your routine . if got to put new things in it . that are meaningful and emotional, things that matter to you, that stand out , that's what we remember. >> all those vacation days and cities that you never go back to. the context of that day was like no other context in your life. >> we tend to talk about the things that were new and meaningful and exciting to us . we have to revisit that memory and repetition of the memory helps us remember and reinforces the strength of those neural connections.

when i did something cool and exciting i want to tell my friends and family about it again and again and that leads to the recognition that helps me enforce memory to. >> let's dive into neuroscience. you are literally a neuroscientist. you have a phd in neuroscience and you're basically superwoman or wonder woman or whatever. so my question is very specifically that you just said most memories we remember are either meaningful or emotional and that's what we are designed to remember most. is the reason that we remember those because of that emotional moments, the challenge you're blowing up or whatever and it's seared in our memory work is the reason that that memory and the event that we keep going over and over in our heads and in conversations and things like that which is both and how does that work

in the biology of our brains? >> it's a bit of both. right now we're talking about a specific kind of memory which is a memory for something that happens. that's different biologically from the memoryof stuff you know . the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second or my birthday, stuff you know. the memories for how you do things, how to ride a bike, how to drive a car . that'sdifferent . memory for stuff you plan to do later so right now we're talking about the stuff that happened. it's called episodic memory. and episodic memory is memory for the stuff that happened is really influenced and enhanced by the motion. so if something happens and it's emotionally neutral i might remember it but if it's scary, if it'sexciting, if it's joyful , it's tragic, if

it's an emotion in the same time, that will contribute to that emotion being very strong and long-lasting. so biologically that's because there's part of our brain called the amygdala and that has a lot of direct connection and a lot of influence over the hippocampus which is alsoin our limbic system . the hippocampus is a structure required for the formation of any new consciously held memories. because of their relationship , we have a tight bond between emotion, the amygdala and hippocampus which is busy connecting the different aspects and elements that contain a remember moment. so on the one hand emotion strongly influences whether

we're going to remember something or not. on the other if it's emotional where also going to talk about it . that's the stuff that matters. that's the stuff that gets our attention. sort of like it's positive feedback, we will pay attention to. that was a big emotion attached to that, that gets your attention. you can't remember something if you don't pay attention to it. if i'm driving from boston to cape cod, i crossed the sagamore bridge. i've done this thousands of times. i might be 10 miles past the bridge and somebody thinks did i already go overthe bridge ? i can't remember. i can't remember driving over a colossal four-lane bridge because i couldn't pay attention to it but it's if someone were standing on the bridge about to drop offand there's been a car accident on the bridge . if someone called and there

was amazing news and someone'sgetting married and i happen to be on the bridge i'll remember driving over the bridge that day . emotion helps us pay attention but italso helps us form memories .>> this is the part of the interview where i'm not sure where to go because there's so many different things i want to ask about memory at the top of my mind right now is i think you talked about in the book how you remember things that actually didn't happen, can we talk about how that happens because that's another huge misunderstanding about memory is that people have vivid memories from long ago and some of the stuff they remember and some stuff that's been wound into the story that didn't potentially happen the way they remember it. >> it might not have happened at all or it might have happened but you didn't experience it , you're borrowing from other people but let's back up. memory for the stuff that happened again , like stuff you know how to do, stuff you plan to do later are very vulnerable to editing.

so the stuff that happens that you remember is probably wildly inaccurate. and people have done all kinds of studies of eyewitnesstestimony . people who are interviewed just after the space shuttle challenger blew up or after 9/11 about where you were, who you were with, what do you remember and then interviewed two years later. their memories are totally different years later versus right after. these tend to be college students to. there's a great study out of emory of college students, these are young people, not people who have eating brains that might be memory impaired . there are 20-year-olds interviewed after the space shuttle challenger who you were with, what were you doing, what did you see, how did you feel interviewed again 2 years later, their answers don'tmatch at all .

and then shown their original handwriting, they look at that and think that's strange or that can't be right. it actually willstick to their false memories . so it's humbling. then eyewitness testimony is wrong much of the time which is kind of frightening given how much we rely on that to convict folks. and i want to show you a video done by elizabeth loftus of a car accident and then i ask you afterwards how fast were the cars going when they contacted eachother ? give me an answer, and if i instead said how fast were the cars going when they crashed, when they smashed into each other you can probably say they were going faster. so here's the deal, what happens after we remember something influences how we later restore it. we can only capture what we pay attention to in the first

place if i witness something, if i experience something, my brain is not a video camera. my memories are scoring a constant stream of every site and sound, i'm only going to capture certain parts or slices ofwhat happens . so to begin with my memory is biased and distorted from what someone else sees. so a 54-year-old man witnessing something but notice different elements and a 22-year-old woman. your memories of the same event will differ to begin with . here's the weird part of our brain. every time we recall a memory for what happened, we have the ability to add, subtract, bring in new information so if it's after 9/11, i then watch news reports and i might incorporate some of that information into what happened immediately after.

if i'm on the phone with someone maybe what she says and what she notices influences what i remember. leave some information out. i make the story sounds better and add some pieces of information to connect the dots . but here's what happens. what ever happened in the retelling or the reminiscing then gets stored over and rewrites. it's like saving in microsoft word. it saves over the original memory . so now it's like a telephone game. the more i retell these memories the further it had the opportunity to migrate away from what originally was my first memory of that event . years later i'm likely to be far off from what i originally experienced. if you have siblings, this is a cool exercise. if you have brothers and sisters, remember a holiday from your childhood or an

event that all of you witnessed . so my brother tommy, remember christmas when i was 10 and you were eight ? i might say, i might have a memory. i only got skis and we did this. we might have a completely different memory of that past day so we don't know, i'm trying to help folks understand. you don't know or youcan't know who's right and who's wrong in these instances and you likely both have information in your own memory . >> now there are two follow-ups to that, i don't know which one to start with but i'll go with the first one i thought of . why? our brains are the most fantastic machines ever invented and it's probably going to take a while for that tochange even with all the incredible machines we invent . why would evolution design a brain that could change the

way we actually remember something that happened? and would give us, would make us unable to know whether that memory is a true memory or something that was then subsequently edited in? i can understand how we want to form a big intelligent picture and keep improving on that intelligence picture so you get a new piece of information . you make it more accurate i guess to not be able to know in your own head whether this is a true memory or something that you changed along the way. or to even make it worse, you said to take, to insist that it's your memory and you're even looking at evidence that it's not. what's the design of our brains that makes that possible? >> the first obvious answer is our memories are not perfect. it's so fallible and this is not the only instance where

our brains are not designed well for remembering everything. there's this strange paradox with memory. on the one hand if i decided i wanted to memorize 1000 digits of pi, my brain is capable of that. anyonecan do that . a japanese engineer at the age of 69 memorize over 100,000 digits of pi because he wanted to we can learn new languages, play guitar. we can memorize and remember anything . and it's going to forget to take your vitamin later or return a library book. it's strangely like the most astounding equipment ever imagined and it's a total dunce. it's going to make this are the simple mistakes. i don't have an exact answer for you. i can also imagine

evolutionarily, our memories for what happened are somewhatcollaborative . it's not dependent on just, i can only remember what i paid attention to . i'm going to miss a large portion of what actually happened just from the beginning. i'm going to only have noticed people talk about eyewitness testimony that there's a bank robbery. if i'm the only person who witnessed what happened i might have only seen thegun but not the gunman's face because i was so focused on the thing that could kill me . but someone else who was maybe not in the line of fire could have seen his face. maybe the ability to collaborate on memory helps us get a fuller picture for what happened and as a byproduct, we eventually can't tell what was originally my experience as opposed to someone else's

versus stuff we made up because we got great imaginations and we are great storytellers or it's a great love story. anything we can wrap a story around, our brains remember that. >> so the viewer will note i almost stumped you. i tried and i couldn't but i came closer than some maybe. my next follow-up to that, to this little micro subject is is there any way for us to know that remembering something is important if we really care to know, let's we are on the witness stand, is there any way for us to know or have tips about whether something is a true accurate memory or it's something that we've edited along the way. do we just need to give up and acknowledged that whatever we're remembering is simply the story we have taught ourselves to tell? >> i think it's the best we can do. there needs to be an acknowledgment and there's psychologists and others out there are, i mean they're

having this message that are episodic memories are so fallible they can contribute to a case in creating a picture because obviously we don't need to sparkle it out entirely. if we witness something, if we experience certainly there's elements of truth there. it doesn't distort so wildly that it's completely off. but it's subject to all kinds of errors so to withhold someone's testimony as this is truth, it's dangerous. i think it's a piece of the puzzle. i think that for example if someone, if you keep a diary and you write down what happens on your days, you're more likely to remember both what you wrote down and other elements because what you wrote down in the hq and a trigger for other pieces of

what happened that day. so it helps you, it helps unleash the rest of the memory so those can be more accurate. it can also, if i write something down it can limit what i remember to only what i wrote down and i can emphasize that so much i might miss other things that had happened but have now erased that from my memory that's so far gone because i've restored and revisited only this aspect of what happened and the other pieces have gone away. it's tricky. i eyewitness testimony is incredibly broad and i don't think anyone should ever be convicted based on eyewitness testimony alone. nora biologically, that's just an injustice.

>> i think the law enforcement community does by and large understandit now . we gone through a revolution in the last 20 years where at least most professionals, correct me if i'm wrong but i feel like i'm in the memory field so i know about this but i would imagine that most at least responsible judges and attorneys know this fact. >> but you have to back it up from there because i don't know and i would note that most police officers are trained in the influence of their language on what someone's going to remember. like the example i gave of the if i show you a simple video and i change one for in my question to you after you watch the video , how fast were the cars going, did they

run into each other or smashed into each other, i'm going to changeyour memory for what you saw based on that verb . if i'm a police officer i'm questioning a witness. i'm interrogating someone or talking to someone after what did you see? my language can very much influence what the person will say they saw and then there for what they consolidated to memory of this is what i thought and believe i saw. so the language of what we use to describe what happened will influence our future recollection of what happened . >> so when this interview ends we can really politely say goodbye and call our agents to see who can be the first book going on about eyewitness testimony. my agent is on speed dial so ihope yours is to . >> ..

>> guest: and that in itselfs is huge medicine. but then you get into helping people actually understand the differences, the workings of memory. and i wonder kind of how you thought about as you were writing the book, how much -- because it's going to, at a certain point, people want to know stuff that they don't really a want to learn the science, you know -- [laughter] they want to understand, like, kind of the basics of it. so how do you kind of navigate that? >> guest: yeah. so i very intentionally did not want this to feel like an academic textbook with. i did not want it to be too long

of a book. i wanted to keep the chapters short. i wanted each chapter to feel like something people could take away with and tell their friends. it was easy enough and understandable enough that they could then tell their friends, oh, i learned this really cool thing about how memory works, or i understand now what happens when i have a word on the tip of my tongue. so i think it was each chapter i was hoping to give people a little of, like, let's look under the hood. here's what happens. this is how memory works. >> host: right. >> guest: and i hope it's not dumbed down so much, but it's -- you know, i'm not writing a neurobiological textbook at all. so this is here's how memory works, here's what happens when it's not working and why. and then, you know, there are some tips in there for what helps your memory, so what improves it, things like getting

enough sleep and managing stress and what can impair it, the difference between alzheimer's and normal forgetting. but, yeah, i think mostly i wanted folks to really recognize that, you know, there's not a supplement in this world, everybody wants a supplement, right? everybody wants the rabbit out of the hat or the magic pill. everybody wants the pill for, like, how do i stop having a word stuck on the tip of my tongue, or how can i always -- what can i do so that i always remember where i parked my car. and there isn't a supplement out there for this. our brains are designed in such a way that we're going to forget certain kinds of things regularly forever. >> host: exactly. >> guest: and i find that reassuring and not frustrating or scary. that's my hope. that is one of biggest hopes. and i think, you know, there's an appendix at the back which is sort of this quick hit list of what to do to improve your

memory day-to-day because people hike that. like that. but there's also again that it's this memory paradox. memory's a really big deal. it's essential for the functioning of almost everything we do, right? our ability to remember, you know, who identify been and -- who i've been and who i am. but it's also not such a big deal because we forget most everything eventually. [laughter] can't remember last week or last month very well. we only remember a handful of things from the past year really, really well. and that's okay. >> host: yeah. i mean, i think there's, like, there's a zen, there's a zen thing in there which is, if you can get there which i don't feel like i'm there, you know, all the time, but with i have experience for and that is this kind of sensation of i can't remember. that is really frustrating, i would love to remember, you know, the exact thing particularly as a, you know, professional writer, you want to

remember the details, you want to be able to report it accurately. but at the same time, you have this kind of sense but i know, like, the essence, the essence of what i'm saying, the kind of larger point is there. and the larger point is there not that i'm going to fudge the details, figure out a way to get the details if i don't have them in my brain right now, but if you had to choose between kind of having the larger truth, like the best, the most collaborative perspective, the most kind of overarching perspective on something that happened and having some sort of, like, you know, tunnel vision memory of the actual things that you saw and heard at that moment in time, you would definitely choose the larger picture. i mean, a hundred times out of a hundred, that's what's so great about being human, having that big field of vision.

>> guest: yes. so our brains are remembering the gist of what happened or the gist of, you know, body of knowledge. like, you read a research paper, and you get the gist of it. and what's kind of beautiful about living today is that, you know, life's an open book test. you can look up the details. >> host: right. >> guest: and so this isn't making us dumber in any way, our ability to google the name or google the statistic. we weren't holding all of that information in our heads before the internet. this is now a way to expand what we have access to and what we can know and use. and it's, our brains, yeah, we get the gist of what's going on. i should say there are, there are about a hundred or so people who have been diagnosed on this planet who have highly superior autobiographical memory. these folks remember in great detail every day of their lives from, like, the age of 10 or so. so they do remember last week's

morning shower and what they had for lunch and all the text messages. and for some folks, this is a superpower. so marily henner, the actress, has this. i chatted with her several times, and she's in the book, and i tried to stump her, and i couldn't. pick a date, like, you know, august 4, 1986, oh, that was a saturday, and i went, you know, to visit johnny travolta, and -- she has the whole day. >> host: oh, my god, wow. >> guest: she could tell you what was happening in the news, what the weather was, and i threw in a day that i actually met her in new york city, she was, like, that's when you came to new york to see me. she loves this. oh, my gosh. >> guest: there are folks who have this where it's not the superpower you imagine it would be, they can't stop reliving the worst days of their lives in

full technicolor detail, and it lends to paralyzing depression. and there's a famous man, a case study in neuroscience, he was studied by alexander lauria, and he remembered everything and could memorize massive quantities of text in a foreign language and mathematical formulas he didn't understand and could regurgitate these in perfect detail years later. but he was somewhat impaired because, again, there was no background and foreground, right? everything was remembered. so what was meaningful was just remembered as what was inconsequential. and and so he was really burdened by this. >> host: yeah, yeah. >> guest: i think it's really useful for our ability to function. >> host: right. let me press you on something you said because i want to see if you'll stick to it.

is it really true that not having to remember all the phone numbers that we used to have to remember like, you know, you used to have to remember dozens of phone numbers just to stay in touch with people, you know, we'd have little books, but still -- and now we don't. i can remember maybe one or two phone numbers -- [laughter] you know, that are old phone numbers like, you know, that i grew up with. is that really okay or are we kind of getting lazy about some types of memory, and is that a little bit worse, would it be better if we actually did exercise that part of our memory a little bit more? >> guest: i love this question. and you and i are old enough that i still remember all my childhood friends' phone numbers, and yet i literally don't know my two young kids' phone numbers. like, i don't know what they are, and that just seems like bad participating right there. [laughter] >> host: it does. i'm talking about myself but, yes, it does. >> guest: so is here's a

question i'd ask of you, because a lot of people immediately assume this, well, this is just bad, this is bad for me. i should be memorizing these things. i used to remember all kinds of things like phone numbers. better for what? >> host: right. >> guest: how -- are you going to improve your ability to remember other things if you memorize a dozen phone numbers? if -- no. are you going the improve your ability to remember details of the documentary film you watched or the book you read or are you going to be better able to find your phone when it goes missing? it doesn't translate. so, yeah, we can -- again, you can memorize 100,000 digits of pi if you decided you wanted to. is so i can sit down and through repetition and maybe some associations i can remember, you know, my children's phone numbers and, you know, a dozen others. it was no problem.

it doesn't improve my memory ability for memorizing other things whatsoever. and it doesn't really improve my life because i don't need to memorize if it, i have it. so our phones, our smartphones are sort of, you know, an externalization of our memory. it's an augmentation of our memory, and we can, we can job share the job is of memory with our phones and all kinds of really cool ways that don't have to be fearful for us,? so, like, i wear glasses because my eyes need help seeing. we don't think twice about that. i can use google or my contact list to remember things for me to help aid in remembering. and it doesn't impair my memory's ability to do other things. it's not like, oh, i haven't memorized phone numbers and now

i'm sitting on the couch staring at the wall drooling. i think as a world we're busier and using our brains more than ever, and we don't have enough down time probably, right? >> host: right, right. >> guest: when i was a kid and we drove in the car, we stared out the window. [laughter] we looked at the world. we just looked at the world. now it's like, well, i should listen to a podcast while i walk -- >> host: right, right. [laughter] >> guest: -- and remember some of that podcast so i can tell you about it. so we're using our memories about. memorizing phone numbers is not cross-training, it's not going to help you in other ways. >> host: and i will say, hearing you say it that a way, i not only agree with you, but i would take it a step further. it's just anecdotal and again just me looking at my myself, which is what i do -- looking at myself, which is what i do so well, being now in my mid 50s, we can say that, i can would say that i think that my life has

improved over -- and that my skills have improved over the last, say, 25 years or so in that i am wiser because partly i just don't pay as much attention to every little detail. and i think more about the big picture even in events where i probably should be parsing details. i actually have trained to pay attention to more of the kind of big picture and i think that's made me a more interesting person who maybe can contribute, like, on the idea level a little bit better. and i don't want to paint it as a zero sum game, but i think that that, i don't know, that's a little hunch i have about myself. >> host: yeah, there's the memory for the stuff we know, your semantic memory is the accumulation of knowledge, and that doesn't, you know, that doesn't diminish with age. you know, most people tend to

think of as we age your memory gets worse. processing speeds slow down, but you start to be like -- sometimes you feel like you can see the wheels turning. come oranges you -- come on, yon get there. so that happens, but we don't have an impairment in what we've learned. the stuff you know stays with you. so you have this accumulated body of wisdom as you get older which is better than ever, more now than you did when you were 25, and a lot of us as we get older, we do, like you're saying, you have a memory for the gist. we have the memory for concepts and patterns. we live enough to be able to have experience and notice, oh, there's a similar pattern between this and that or this concept feels like this concept or i can now make conclusions based on this body of knowledge that i wouldn't have, you know, understood or noticed when i was younger. so our memories for the stuff we

know accumulate over time, and we, as we age, are more i attuned to patterns and concepts than we were when we were younger. >> host: right. right, right. >> guest: you add them together, and this is what i say, you know, wisdom comes with age. in part because of that. >> host: right. at least that's what i keep telling myself, wisdom comes with age. so let's get a little dark now because i'm sure, you know, you're -- this book is going to sell, i don't know, let's say 2 million copies. so just statistically, is that a little low? should i set 10 million? we'll say 10 million copies. let's say 100 million copies. >> guest: hsu. >> host: sure. >> host: so just that atistically, that person will pass it to another person, talking about hundreds of millions of people will see the book, and those people know, let's say 2 billion people, so

basically the whole world will come into contact with this book, as they should, and i'm getting to my point, some of those people statistically will either personally be at the beginning of alzheimer's disease or know someone, be observing someone. so, and then same with this interview. it'll be seen by, you know, probably a billion people. so let's talk to those people. what is a disturbing thing no notice that isn't -- to notice that isn't a normal functioning, what are the things we look out for, you know, if that's happening, you should probably go with see a neurologist, you should probably get a couple of basic tests. >> guest: yeah. and one of the things i'm out there pounding the pavement about is sort of normalizing brain health and getting people comfortable with talking about brain health. so, you know, we're perfectly happy to go to our primary care

physician and check our heart health, right? we'll get our blood pressure taken, blood drawn for cholesterol, we'll be talking about getting a certain number of steps in a day. but we -- anything from the neck up we seem to think we have no influence over. so, yeah, i think one of the things i'd love to see people get more comfortable with is being in conversation with their doctor about here are the kinds of things i'm forgetting -- yeah. >> guest: -- and this is what my cognitive health feels like today. >> host: right. >> guest: okay. and then next appointment we can compare this year versus last year. what are the kinds of things that could be potentially concerning. so i talk about tip of the tongue in the book, there's a whole chapter on it because this police station all of it, right? oh -- plagues all of it. what's his name, what's the name of that movie my friend recommended on flicks. tip of the -- on netflix. tip of the tongue is really common for all of us whether you're 20 or 60.

it tends to be pronouns. pronouns are in little neurological cul-de-sacs. they're really hard to get to, ultimately, as opposed to just the common word which is kind of like tons of intersections in the middle of main street downtown, easy to come by. so if you're having hot of tip of the talks -- lots of tip of the tongues, movie titles, actors, a person's name, don't sweat it. but if you're starting to go, oh, what's the name of the thing i write with, you know, the thing. i write words on the paper with, a pen? yes. like, if you're -- it's words that are common that go missing a lot for you and this happens to our friend rick o'brien all day long, he can't remember the name of the stuff we use, the thing i drink water from, what's that called. a glass? yeah. so that's happening. you bring that to your doctor. that's concerning. if you lose your keys and your phone, like that's probably an

attention problem, a distraction problem, not a memory problem. but if you find your keys or your phone and you think what do i do with this? what is this for? whey do i need this? -- why do i need this? or if you suddenly are like i don't know how to work this, you have that glitch moment, that's different than just misplacing it due to attention most likely. people talk about like, oh, i can't remember where i parked my car. that's normal and, again, likely an attention issue. it's something more concerning, like, as our friend greg o'brien will not recognize his car. he'll be standing in front of it, and it won't compute to his brain that that belongs to him, or he won't remember how he got there. over and over again they walk out into a parking lot and think, i don't know how i got here. so that's, you know, the first thing to go on alzheimer's, the first thing under awe attack in

your brain is the hippocampus -- >> host: right. >> guest: --ing the part of your brain that's new, consciously-formed memories. if this part of your brain is under attack, you can imagine that information that's recently happened won't go into a lasting memory. so i can't remember having driven to the store because that happened a few minutes ago, and i'm really a little fuzzy on how did i get here. or if you start repeating yourself a lot because you don't remember that a you told someone something. >> host: right, right. >> guest: if you're repeating yourself a lot and you don't remember telling you this, again, this is a conversation to bring to your primary care physician. treat it like heart health, people. it doesn't mean, oh, if i admit i've got a memory problem, or i'm going to fall off the cliff and have alzheimer's tomorrow. we have ways that we can prevent, we have ways that we can prolong the distance and

push alzheimer's way off into the distance by doing the right thing for your brain health. so we know that heart hell mediterranean -- heart healthy mediterraneaning diet can reduce your risk of alzheimer's by half. that's a lot. if we had a pill that was going to reduce your risk by half, you would take it. we know sleeping 7-9 hours a night is hugely important, and i've got a whole chapter. i can tell you it's super important for you to get sleep every night. this is going to help you lock in the memories of stuff you created today. it's going to help you learn new stuff tomorrow, and it's going to prevent alzheimer's. like, okay. but i kind of can let that -- i don't know, i can kind of space out on that unless you tell me why. so in thing book i say this is what your brain's doing while you sleep -- >> host: right. >> guest: -- that helps. so you know every time you can

give yourself 7-9 hours of sleep, i just prevented alzheimer's a little bit. [laughter] don't worry about the years you haven't slept because that's already water under the bridge. if you don't have alzheimer's today the, that means you're still okay. like, what are you going to do now. so is, yeah. >> host: yeah. and i will say there was a period of my life a long time ago where i thought sleep was for suckers, and i just thought, you know, i like felt guilty about getting too much sleep which is so silly. >> guest: don't feel that way. i just read something recently on social media about the importance of sleep. it was world sleep day, and a lot of comments were people saying i get 9 hours of sleep a night, and i feel so guilty about that. our culture, like, are you lazy? you know, if you're sleeping, you're lazy. huh-uh. >> host: we only have, like, two or three minutes, but let's

spend one or two of them talking a little bit -- people need to understand sleep is not, like, wasted time. again, we are designed, we all -- every living thing, every animal needs sleep. why? well, a big part of the reason is that our brains are consolidating these memories, right? we need that time to keep our brain in functioning order from day-to-day. >> guest: yeah. i mean, so so this clicked for me. this is a last of -- it's why would all living things -- >> host: right. >> guest: -- have is evolved to devote so much time to sleeping, right? we've spent years of our lives a asleep at in this point in our age, right? >> host: right, right. >> guest: something like 16 years asleep. it's not a state of doing nothing. that's the thing. we're not conscious for it, but our bodies, super busy doing things that are essentially to the health and functioning of every organ system in our body including our brains. so we need it to consolidate

memories, we need to clear away all the debris that is stimulated during the business of being awake so we don't get alzheimer's. it's vital to your mental health, cardiovascular health, not getting cancer. i think it really helps for folks to understand that, oh, my brain and body are doing business while i sleep, necessary if business while i sleep. so it's not a state of unconscious nothingness. >> host: right, absolutely. get more sleep and don't feel guilty about it. feel decadent about it, feel like you've just done something great for yourself and just do that every day and, like you said, don't worry about the sleep you've missed in the past. that's -- we've all done stuff that is stupid, but we can be smarter and wiser as we go on. >> guest: yep. know more, we do better. >> host: lisa, this has been such a privilege to talk to you for an hour straight.

we made it almost an hour without mentioning rudy tanzi -- [laughter] i'm just throwing his name out there because i've never talked to you for anything like this and not talked about rudy. >> guest: hilarious. >> host: and i hope in this book sells those 100 million copies that it deserves to sell, and i can't wait to see what your next one is on, and we'll, hopefully we'll talk about that one too. >> guest: thank you so much. can't wait to see you in real life someday soon. >> host: yeah, for sure.

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