Essentials: Understand & Improve Memory Using Science-Based Tools

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.

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