Dr. Wendy Suzuki
speaker
915 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 7 Jan
Dr. Wendy Suzuki’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, yeah.
It's real. Yeah. Absolutely. And so how do I prioritize it? I just make it a priority and I decide the actions that I'm going to do to get to that goal. So, for example, I am literally strategizing about how I can get in front of As many of those 9,000 students that I have, multiple times during their four years with us, I see them all. Every single first-year student, I see.
Every single one graduating, I see. There's a lot of time between that. What can I do to have a meaningful... Should I go on tour just like you do, but talk to the first years, the second years, the third years? I loved my college experience because I was imbued with the love of learning. And so I do that through the coursework that I provide for my students.
Actually, I'm trying to develop it right now. It is an online class, but with an in-person component so that I could kind of get up to scale. The first time I did it, it's called the Fluffy Brain course. So I want to give all the students in this course a fluffy brain, teaching them a lot about what we've just spent the last hour talking about.
But there's always going to be an in-person component. And the goal of this class is to inspire them to do personal, not inspire them. It's part of the class. That's a great thing about a class. I could assign things to you. So your assignment is to do a personal experiment about exercise. How are you going to up your your exercise for the next week.
But first, you're going to just notice your mood, your regular mood state, so that self-awareness. And the next week, you are going to propose something, do it, increase your exercise, and then self-reflect about that. And we will explore that and talk about it together.
They have to do it.
So I start with the official greeting of the College of Arts and Science, which is, Jay, you have a beautiful brain. And so I invite all the students when they see me on the street to come up and say, you have a beautiful brain. And of course, I will say it back to them. And I love starting from there because that is the truth, the neurobiological truth that every single one of us
The brains of my students is beautiful. Your brain is beautiful. My brain is beautiful. And no matter what your motivation for being in this space with me, it has a beautiful brain. And from there, we go from, which hopefully provides a sense of belonging, we go to, let's share.
Let's share what you have to give from your beautiful brain because your brain has something to give that is different than what my brain. And let's just provide a situation and an environment that's open to all of that sharing. Talk about the fact that, no, it's not about competition. It's not about getting the highest mark. It's learning the deepest for whatever class you are.
And I know these are hard priorities, but I'm building them over the last two and a half years. And it's really a joy to be able to do that.
Absolutely. I mean, there are studies showing that if you take a group of people and have them do positive affirmations, not just saying them a certain number of times every day versus people that don't do those positive affirmations, their affect is better. It's higher, you know, less negative affect and more positive affect. Yes, it does have an effect. Which makes sense.
Our brain takes in everything that's happening to us. So, you know, this is why we talked about looking at the people that you are, that's feeding you information. Are they cynical? Are they negative? Or are they giving you a growth mindset? Are they giving you interesting new possibilities to go to? Very important to ask yourself that.
Why does that exist? Yeah. So, sorry to say, but our memory does not work very well, generally. We think, oh, I'm young. I have a great memory. No, our memory is not great. And so the reason why... two people at the same event remember different things is that we are focused on these different things. And let me just go over the four things that makes memory stick.
This works at all ages based on the neurophysiology and biology of this hippocampus that we talked about, critical for forming and retaining new long-term memories. So what makes memory stick? Repetition. So you and I might be at the same event and you're focused on one thing and it's the same event, but event is big. I'm focused on something else.
So you're repeating something that I never saw and I'm seeing something that you never saw. Repetition. Association. We remember things better when they're associated with other things that are in our long-term memory. So We might be easier to remember a friend of a friend that we know really, really well. And they introduce us versus somebody that you don't know at all.
And you're trying to remember them from anybody. association. Novelty. If it's really novel, you've never experienced this in your life, it tends to be more memorable because our brains are focused on novelty. It's a danger kind of, you know, we have to pay attention to novelty.
And maybe there are things at the event that were really novel to you that like I've seen a million times and my brain just completely ignores them. And the fourth thing that makes memory stick is emotional resonance. So we remember the happiest and the saddest points in our life. That's what this structure, the amygdala helps with. It kind of helps those really emotional memories stick better.
And again, at this same event, you might be moved by something that either I didn't see or just I wasn't moved by because that wasn't in my life experience. So there's lots of different reasons why two different people will have sometimes very different memories of the same event.
You know, memory is also, there's a lot of variability, right? And I remember I met somebody with something called highly superior autobiographical memory. I don't know if you've heard of this. They did this great show on 60 Minutes about people. It was actually discovered by colleagues of mine, neuroscientists at UC Irvine. And these are people that have extraordinary memory for detail.
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