Essentials: Understand & Improve Memory Using Science-Based Tools

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are discussing memory, in particular, how to improve your memory. We are constantly being bombarded with physical stimuli, patterns of touch on our skin, light to our eyes, light to our skin for that matter, smells, tastes, and sound waves. Each one of and all of those sensory stimuli are converted into electricity and chemical signals by your so-called nervous system, your brain, your spinal cord, and all their connections with the organs of the body and all the connections of your organs of the body back to your brain and spinal cord. For instance, if you can hear me speaking right now, you are perceiving my voice, but you are also most likely neglecting the feeling of the contact of your skin with whichever surface you happen to be sitting or standing on. It is only by perceiving a subset, a small fraction of the sensory events in our environment that we can make sense of the world around us. Otherwise, we would just be overwhelmed with all the things that are happening in any one given moment.
Now, memory is simply a bias in which perceptions will be replayed again in the future. Now, this might seem immensely simple, but it raises this really interesting question, which we talked about before, which is why do we remember certain things and not others? Because according to what I've just said, as you go through life, you're experiencing things all the time. You're constantly being bombarded with sensory stimuli. Some of those sensory stimuli you perceive, and only some of those perceptions get stamped down as memories. Today, I'm going to teach you how certain things get stamped down as memories. And I'm going to teach you how to leverage that process in order to remember the information that you want far better. Each individual thing that we remember that we want to remember is linked to something by either a close, a medium or a very distant association. This turns out to be immensely important. I know many of you will read or will encounter programs that are designed to help you enhance your memory. You know, you have these phenoms that can remember 50 names in a room full of people, or they can remember a bunch of names of novel objects or maybe even in different languages. And oftentimes that's done by association. So people will come up with little mental tricks to, you know, either link the sound of a word or the meaning of a word in some way that's meaningful for them and will enhance their memory.
That can be done and is impressive when we see it. And for those of you who can do that, congratulations. Most of us can't do that, or at least it requires a lot of effort and training.
However, there are things that we can do that leverage the natural biology of our nervous system to enhance learning and memory of particular perceptions and particular information. So let's talk about tools for enhancing memory. Now there's one tool that is absolutely clear works, and that's repetition.
The more often that you perform something or that you recite something, the more likely you are to remember it in the future.
And while that might seem obvious, it's worth thinking about what's happening when you repeat something. But when I say what's happening, I mean at the neural level. What's happening is that you're encouraging the firing of particular chains of neurons that reside in a particular circuit, right? So a particular sequence of neurons playing neuron A, B, C, D, played in that particular sequence over and over and over again. And with more repetitions, you get more strengthening of those nerve connections. The problem for most people is that they either don't have the patience, they don't have the time. And sometimes they literally don't have the time because they've got a deadline on something that they're trying to remember and learn.
Or they simply would like to be able to remember things better in general, remember them more quickly. This process of accelerating repetition-based learning so that your learning curve doesn't go from having to perform something a thousand times and then gradually over time, it's 1,750 times a day, 500 times a day, 300 times a day and down to no repetitions, right? You can just perform that thing the first time and every time. Well, there is a way to shift that curve. So that you can essentially establish stronger connections between the neurons that are involved in generating that memory or behavior more quickly.