How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel

Dr. Alan Castel, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and one of the world’s foremost experts on human memory and cognitive aging. We discuss what science actually tells us about how to improve our learning ability and memory at any age. We also discu

Good learning happens through making mistakes. Just seeing something many times doesn’t mean you’ll remember it well. You’ve seen the Apple logo so many times, of course, you know all the features, but then when you quiz people and test them, and I do this in my class, people aren’t sure. Is the bite on the left or the right hand side? Is there a stem or a leaf?

The best way to remember something is to again failures. I’ll have you draw it without looking at it and you struggling. Wait, is it on the left or right? And is it stem or a leaf? And you’re starting to question all of these things.

Then when you look at the logo again, you’re going to engage in better learning than if you hadn’t done that errorful kind of trial beforehand. >> Welcome to the Hubberman Lab podcast where we discuss [music] science and science-based tools for everyday life. [music] I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Alan Castell.

Dr. Alan Castell is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on human memory and cognitive aging. Today we discuss what determines if we remember something like a name or an event or how to do something. And we discuss how to improve our ability to remember information of all kinds at any age.

We also discuss how anytime we plan or imagine something about our future, we are always building that on memories of our past and what that means for our ability to come up with new ideas and plans for our lives. And we discuss how our memory changes across the lifespan and why some people retain exceptional cognitive abilities well into their 80s and 90s and even beyond and what any of us can do to improve our chances of maintaining or even getting better at memory as we age. Indeed, while most people assume that memory decline is an inevitable consequence of getting older, Dr. Castell explains research that tells us the story is far more nuanced and more optimistic. In fact, we cover one of the more powerful and perhaps surprising influences on our rate of cognitive aging, which is your beliefs about aging itself.

And finally, we discuss so-called superagers, which is the name given to older adults whose memory performance rivals that of people decades younger. He explains which super aer protocols are accessible to anyone and how they can be incorporated into everyday life to benefit our mental and our physical health. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today’s episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Alan Castell. Dr. Alan Castell, welcome. >> Thank you.

Nice to be here. >> You’re going to tell us how to build up and keep our memory. But let’s start by asking what is memory? Or rather, how do you conceptualize memory from the standpoint of we move through life, we experience things, let’s call it passively, or we try to remember certain things. What determines what information we hold on to, how long, and so on?

It’s a great question and memory is really a mental representation of the past and by its very nature it’s reconstructive. It’s never always accurate and I think that’s why it’s so mysterious and fascinating that you and I can see the same event and then remember it differently a week or a day later. Um, and it starts kind of almost at the sensory level and sometimes our mind plays tricks on us. And that’s how I got interested in this field that how can I think I know something and yet not know it as well as I do. And this is something that’s called metacognition or awareness of our own cognition.

And as a personal anecdote when you know I was in fifth or sixth grade I had one line in the play The Wizard of Oz. It’s a line I practiced again and again. Listen everyone, there’s a cyclone on the way. Hurry and get into the cellar. And of course on opening night, listen everyone, there’s a seller on the way.

hurry and get into the cyclone. >> Nice. >> And I was thinking, how did I manage that? Having memorized this line, most of the audience probably didn’t even notice. But that to me was an early exposure to memory is not always kind of a function of what you do with the information.

And then, you know, in high school, I had another exposure to memory where I just memorized a lot of things. And that got me pretty far in algebra and chemistry. In fact, I almost memorized the entire periodic table. But this was using pneummonics, you know, little rhymes or songs. And I realized in my first year of college that I really didn’t have a strong understanding of chemistry, even though I could use all these terms.

And thankfully, I took an introductory psychology class and I realized people studied learning and memory and kind of false memories and why memory can and cannot be accurate. And I I was hooked. I found that so fascinating and I still do today. I’m both impressed and um intrigued to ask more about memorization of the periodic table. Uh first question is about pneumonics and ways that we um try and batch and learn information by pairing it to other things.

Trying to remember a room full of people’s names and you know you uh could pair the first letter of their name with a fruit or what you know people do these things. To me, that seems like a very inefficient way to learn because you’re adding more information that you need to store away. So, the first question is, is that the best way to learn large batches of information? >> I think it’s almost a workaround. And that’s the first kind of problem people say is I can’t remember names.

And by their nature, names used to be descriptive of person’s occupation. Someone’s a baker, we call them Mr. Baker. But that’s of course evolved with time. and names.

You know, I tell people if you can’t remember someone’s name, that’s probably a natural forgetting, but you remember if you had an interesting conversation or you remember if you can trust them, that’s probably more important. So then to engage our kind of knowledge base so that we can remember names, we need to make this arbitrary link. And so I tell people my last name is Pastel, Castell, you know, Castell rhymes with pastel and my grandfather used pastels, let’s say. And so people can then make this link. But like you say, that’s effortful.

It takes time. It takes time away from kind of the essence of something else we could talk about. And it also leads to these kind of predictable memory errors. So people say, “Oh, I remember his name was Pastel. ” When in fact, it’s Castell.

So I think we have to almost trick our memory into remembering things that might be somewhat arbitrary. And that becomes more pronounced as we get older. You know, there’s more Davids, there’s more Andrews, and it’s just more interference. And so to get around that, we have to, you know, use deliberate practice, retrieval practice, use the name several times. But I tell my students whose names I often forget, that I’ll still remember topics we’ve talked about or, you know, you know, how they felt about something.

And I think that’s more important than sometimes just remembering a name >> to remember chemistry or uh some other subject that involves nomenclature. I uh not everyday terms unless you’re a chemist but to really understand the deeper me