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
So they could remember when they were eight years old, what was on TV at 7 p.m., 7.30, 8 p.m., and this incredible memory. It gets in the way, but there's on one end that form of memory, and then all the way to there's actually particularly poor memory in that same vein.
I'm not sure if two years ago, memories don't stick as long as the person can, you know, live their lives and they have, you know, regular memory for the things they need to live their lives for. But there, yeah, there's a wide variety of memory levels that can exist in the world.
How old are they?
They're young. Yeah. So many people have this fear of dementia. I have dementia in my family. It's our memories also. Here's a tip for everybody. They get worse as we age because we know and we've experienced more in our life. It's called interference. So I didn't know anything when I was in high school. My memory was better because I had nothing to interfere. Now I have so much to keep track of.
I give myself some slack when I don't remember certain things. That's why I have an assistant to tell me what I really need to remember. But I'm not worried because there is a lot of interference in my life, and I take that into account.
Yeah. So strengthening your memory is all about being present to what you really want to remember using those four techniques. Now, you can't make something emotionally resonant. Unless you try and make it funny. So that's actually one technique that I've used. If I really want to try and remember somebody's name or something, I try and create a funny image about it.
But sorry, repetition, repetition, repetition will help your memory. No problem. Association can help. So if you can associate this person or this name or this concept with something that it reminds you of to help those kind of recall moments, lines that you can have to this memory that can help as well. You can't make something novel if it's not completely novel.
But it's not, unfortunately, a magic bullet.
Your brain defines who you are. Take care of it.
Put your head down and work as hard as you can until you reach your goal. I'm the one that told me that, that bad advice.
I would love to discover how to enhance joyous memories more easily.
Oh, well, we used to think back in the early 1960s that the adult brain had no capacity to change or grow. And my whole neuroscience career has been showing how that could happen. How do you make it happen more? And what are those activities that you can bring into your life to do that beautifully? Why did we believe that?
It came from the... At the point in time we were in neuroscience, there was just no evidence that there were overt changes. We didn't have deep enough microscopes to see the molecular changes, even the structural changes that we can now see very easily with our more powerful tools. Understandably, they said, oh, I see no evidence for change. Once you reach adulthood, I see no change.
And so, of course, that was the dogma until somebody said, hey, I think let's look at this in a different way. And, of course, that wasn't believed at first. But then with effort, that was the concept of brain plasticity. And now we know that so much can change in the brain.
You know, yes, for certain things, language, there's a language change. I think it is, don't quote me on this, around 10 years old. It's good to learn the languages before that. That could be a little bit on the low side. Also, vision. It's really important to get bilateral good vision. And so if you have amblyopia, it changes your vision. So those are things that change with age.
You must make at least five deep friendships in your life.
I would love to. Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you very much.
My father, very smart guy, he was an engineer. And one day he drove back from the 7-Eleven, that's only about eight blocks from our house. He would go there to get his afternoon cup of coffee. And he told my mom that he... He had a hard time finding his way back home. That's the spatial memory that's so dependent on the hippocampus.
And as a hippocampal expert, when my mother told me that, I knew immediately there was a problem with his hippocampus. That is the structure that is first affected in dementia, including Alzheimer's dementia. And that is what he ended up being diagnosed with. I wish I could say so. Therefore, I had him immediately on an exercise plan. He was in his early 80s, maybe late 70s when that happened.
I can't remember exactly his age. He was a little bit wobbly on his feet. He did like going for a walk, so he would go do that. But there was a little bit of danger. As we all know with older people, there's a little risk taking. Again, going back to social interaction, the more time that I could spend with him,
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