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tv   Lauren Aguirre The Memory Thief  CSPAN  November 23, 2021 5:53pm-6:53pm EST

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>> i'm very excited to introduce tonight's speaker. including documentaries podcast short form video series games for blogs and more. her articles on memory have been featured in the boston globe magazine atlantic in scientific america. this book in particular supported by a grant from that offered these loan foundation and the public understanding of science osi.
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tonight lauren aguirre is joined by deborah blum. the recipient of the pulitzer ever is the director of the night sky journalism at m.i.t.. tonight we are discussing lawrence debut book "the memory thief" hailed by "science magazine" as emblematic and acceptable. joining us tonight the memory is moved with the rollercoaster speed of a mob -- novel while some attempts at offering a deeply compassionate insight to look at her understanding of what makes and what raikes rate pleased to have them both here with us for this event tonight so without further ado the a vote -- the podium is yours deb rand lauren. i'm so honored to be here as in
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part i'm such a fan of the harvard look store fan of this book and i found myself deeply annoyed because a lot of times i can do is go through book england today things that i got pulled into your store that it interfered with some of my work at my journalism program so this is me saying i'm very happy to be talking to you about this book. and your book reminded me that sometimes there are scientists who will talk about the brain as a box and memory and even more mysterious part about what happens in the rain and your book reminded me of the mystery and that the tech of work that
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goes on to try to solve it. i'd like to begin with you reading a brief x. excerpt and then go on to the conversation. >> rate. spent this is a scene from early on in the book. on the first friday about sober he leaned forward in his chair and stared at the mri scan on his monitor. he's looking at the brain of a young man who went to the hospital last night in the image is so strange and beautiful he knew something had to be wrong. he said whoa how much is empty office, this is. in the background of the rest of the to shaped structures hooked on either side of the fluid filled cavity. together they make up the hippocampus pic holds the key to
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memorynd and a distress signal from many millions of cells. some mysterious marauding force has laid waste to just this tiny region keeping the rest of the brain of harm. he went to the still quiet waiting room at the medical center in massachusetts. it was just outside of austin. he looks back l at the monitor. last night phonecall from winchester high school suddenly made more sense. the distraught 22-year-old had recently overdosed. he was 2 dragging one leg and repeatedly asking his mother he was dying. winchester is a smaller hospital that handles routine emergencies like a broken wrist or appendicitis but when patients with complex conditions or unexplained symptoms come and the staff will send them to afa
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facility that has hundreds of specialists and equipment. he could see what the winchester staff could not explained why the patient was acting strangely. in 10 years of medical training he had reviewed thousands of scanned brain shrunken from alzheimer's disease. itg with tiny broken leg vessels reigns with tuners in different sizes shapes and locations. in every case no matter what the damage looked like it was pretty clear what was going on for but what hen sees on the screen if from a famous a strange alien belonging to no category you could imagine. with eczema took a page out of the medical school textbook and deliberately highlighted the brain's memory b center. he re-examines mri. at the base of the skull through the familiar soft gray structure to the hippocampus comes into
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view. it seems certain that this patient would fail the memory tests given tol him and the damage triggered his interest in strange cases of rare brain disease. he believes more in chance than destiny but still it's almost as ifif the years of study have guided them directly to this moment in this office looking at this startling image. i think that excerpt gives everyone watching here a discredit than -- description of your book as being emblematic. let's widen the lens a little. i'm wondering if before we go any farther you can talk a j little bit about who he is and
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if len a little bit of some of the ways he starts unfolding this mystery detective part of your book. >> first i should say he is a friend of mine and we share a fascination with rains because i have a somewhat brain as we all doou but i asked his opinion foa neurological problem that he was extremely helpful. these of problem solver and he'e also an epidemiologist so he really looks for patterns and tries to explain well when you see something new like this syndrome, when you see something new how do h you make sense of ? to him when he saw the first patient that i described it was well this is and this is what we
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know about what happened to him but there wasn't enough to go on it but to say what actually calleded that very unusual dama. it wasn't until he saww the second case when he noticed a link and he said okay there's a link with both of them with heroin use. people even using heroin for decades? what changed? what changed was in 2012 sentinel had worked its way into the drug supply in massachusetts so that was a new thing. he's setting out to find out if this hunch isnd right. the mackie build a network of people who are puzzled and fascinated by this particular syndrome mostly the children -- massachusetts.
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>> it's a very b interesting sty because it's made on the shoestring budget or really no budget because it's this syndrome but doesn't fall in anyone's particulare area. it's not part of her research process. across his two areas addiction to opioids and memory so part of this job was looking at other people who have the expertise and eight resources that he didn't have. that was years of late-night e-mails to anyone he could think of who might be out for help and cajoling and badgering until he was able to hold together the people who could help them solve the s mystery. >> one of the things i i like so much about it is you see all these different parts of the
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puzzle and trying to connect the dots essentially in making this work. back up a little bit because one of o the things and it struck me again in reading your book that understanding of memories and i don't know this is a good thing or bad thing and you can m contradict me but it comes out in your book that much of our understanding of memory comes from injury, injuries to the brain, injuries to the memory and we don't seek that inhuman so a lot of times this is why there is a fascination with these two cases and i know there are more dirt really it's just one case sid took -- so to go
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back a little bit and talk about the hippocampus itself and why it's so important in a single case one of the history see reference is the very sign -- famous case. that was such a breakthrough moment and if he would talk a little bit about that and also a little bit about how was the central teacher looking at damage to the hippocampus to recognize the role of the hippocampus in memory. >> the famous story is h. m. who was later to be real -- reveal henry mission. he hadll terrible at biloxi and they couldn't treat it with a medicine and finally in the last-ditch effort to save him sort of a swashbuckling surgeon
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decided to remove both of his hippocampi. they thought that might work because the hippocampus is a very vulnerable and excitable region. he knew what it did and you think about removing a whole brainmo structure task deduce something risky but they were hoping to save his life. it wasn't until he woke up in the hospital and kept asking where the bathroom was that they realized that they had really hurt his memory so he was studied extensively for the rest of his life by brenda milner and others were able to tease it out. we talked about t memory. the memory care about is what the hippocampus shapes and creates the memory for things
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you know whether facts or parts of your life better stories that you can remember. he lost the ability to create any new memories of that sort but he had somebl procedural memories and he learned how to do things that were like motor skills. he would never recognize another new person and he didn't know suzanne despite having worked with her for decades. so yes it was a boon to science. >> yes and i'm glad he talked about the hippocampus. there are a number of kinds of memories but if you look at the hippocampus is kind of central structure and it's not just because of hm but because of the
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work that followed in that sense but there's another character in your book 01 and i should say his name was not revealed. that was the more recent decision and a lot of times in these kinds of journal of sciences they will protect the identity with their initials. so my hippocampus is connected to hm. >> i almost feel sorry for him. he's part of a group where has damage to the brain and this is not the same thing but there was a famous case of man named phineas gage who lost the frontal cortex of his brain and
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inthat injury allowed for people to start to recognize that part of the brain in its impulse control. you actually follow patient and i love this and you write an essay at the end of your book. you draw some parallels to hm in the way that his condition help us understand memory and how injury affects memory and i wondered if he would just talk a little bit about him as a case study not only in these glowing amazing images of the hippocampus but what we see as injuries affecting people's lives. >> he's really remarkable person i was so great at what he was willing to share his story with me for the book.
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he overdosed after 18 months of this sobriety on fentanyl andos woke up in the hospital with an injury but because he had long cared about memory and had studied memory in college he understood immediately when the doctor said you injured your hippocampus and what it meant for him. and to this day he still can't remember where he parked his car and he can't remember that his best friend broke up with his girlfriend the day before but because he's an incredibly person with incredible executive function he has managed to rebuild his life and has a job and takes classes at a community college so he's a testament to resilience and the
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ability to carry on and was very generous in agreeing to participate in research at the university of california san francisco memory and aging centeran and so there they leard they did some barely tailored mri scanning or a strange confluence of events. he had an mri scan just before his overdose so they knew what his brain look like and there was imaging done at the time of the overdose that showed that glowing image of the hippocampus and then he came back to ucsf and they measured the volume of his hippocampus and it had shrunk to 10% which is much as a 60 over losing a decade and there was this very detailed ter cognitive unction and what is called your episodic and
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explicit memory for numbers or events. he scored on the same level as someone with alzheimer's disease. what his case shows was that fentanyl can focus on just this one structure of the brain and damage it and there was an anesthesiologist who did recognize that and had done research for 20 years and finally gave up because no one wanted to fund it anymore but it was really not at all well-known. now we. know that opioids can damage the hippocampus and we turned thatur insight around and use that knowledge to find ways to protect the hippocampus. >> i want to zero in on that
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point and the mechanism of injury and open it up to other issues of memory leaving us to maybe as you enter the comparison between memory effects that are comparable to alzheimer's. >> lots and lots of people have been prescribed legal versions and yet we don't see an epidemic of memory loss or exposure in a one-on-one kind of way. even in your book and there's probably more since you research the book that we will talk about not a pandemic that an epidemic.
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has research been done and this relates to all, what causes the damage and to people understand why it's okay specific and what is about fentanyl? >> there to questions in there. one is the damage in the second is why did it not happen to most people like the first one how does it cause the damage?es it gets a little bit wonky but basically there are two main classes of nerves in the brain excited neurons were they fire in the past along and does represent the majority of theeu neurons in the brain but they are also exhibit torri neurons and their job is to manage everything. they keep things under control -- they keep things out of under control so when they
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are out of commission you have chaos and that's what happens with fentanyl. it blocks off the opioid respecter senate shuts them down. theyre are the bee commission ad the excitatory neurons are yfiring wildly out of control in burning up more energy and this is compounded by the people who use opioid not in the hospital setting but it suppresses the -- those so they are somewhat hypoxic. that basically means they aren't getting enough oxygen to this vulnerable structure. that's the nexus but why does this happen to most people is definitely still a mystery so it could be a genetic predisposition that is rare. it could be prior use. it could be for example a length had used drugs sinced age 11 but
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had then sober for a year and a half so was this prolonged use followed by separating followed by a dramatic overdose that was a problem for him? iscu it that sterilization and w different people's hippocampus are fed in different ways by the blood supply? that they really don't know. there are probably many more people than we were allies and then i also want to speak to your point about fentanyl used in anesthesia every day in 80 to 90% of surgeries and it clearly doesn't happen torg those people that those people are supported with oxygen but they also are given another drug that contracts the excitatory affect of fentanyl so it's protected. >> that's reassuring.
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question that goes way beyond this to all of the different responses to what is the individual response what is the more general response. so so many mysteries involved here which leads me to branch ouout into other issues of memo. let's talk about memory and then sort of expand this to something people think of as an epidemic of memory which is the more we understand emory and how it works and what triggers an injury and how we best treat that injury, you can generalize
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way beyond well this person used sentinel to what about the unknowns about emory and our understanding of alzheimer's. i don't know myself to describe alzheimer's is an epidemic because it isn't that we are just able to do better diagnostics while we are aware of the specific condition but alzheimer's and other dementias that affect memory, why does it matter so much and it's not just about daily function and this gets back to the core memory issue it's only our memory. we are able to. >> it's how you navigate your
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day. are we their memory and why does this matter so much? >> we are our memory. i will go back to the neurological episode that i've referencedne in the beginning because part of the journey to the story is i had an episode where he lost my memory for a couple thing i had no idea where i was what century it was her where i was pretty she asked me my name at that moment i could tell g-sib there was no connection to the past the present or the future and that was deeply terrifying because yes you don't feel like anyone. i want to sort altamed little because even someone with severe memory problems still feels love and connection so it's not as
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black-and-white as i described that memory also we think about rememberinghe the past and we ae but it's also about a matching the future and this is one of the more interesting experiments that i talked about in the book which is with eleanor mcguire in one. severe amnesia does damage to the hippocampus is yes to all of them, tell me about a day at the beach. look around with you these are the people who didn't have the memory problems told the whole story. therehe boats going by and i her seagal's and lots of details and the people with the damage to the is, there is i nothing. they know conceptually that there is white sand and a blue sky but that's all they can say. when they say what you saying
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they say that's it i'm just floating so they can't imagine something. they can't create a new scene in their mind and that's part of it will what makes us human and who we are. and maddening things that don't exist yet and projecting yourself into the bullets much about having a future as having a pass. >> that is such an interesting point and i hadn't thought about that later memory. you sort of may memory related decision by opening up the alzheimer's box are. if we look at the conflict haitians and effects of alzheimer's do you yourself see parallels and how alzheimer's affects the brain and how this
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particular condition affects the brain or is it more or less here is another where memory is so central to our lives and we don't understand how to protect their memory. senate there are some parallels which i wasn't aware of in the opioid associated syndrome and alzheimer's which was made clear leon except for the fact that both targeted the hippocampus. in most forms of alzheimer's disease the hippocampus is where the damage first begins so that's why most cases memory loss is the first sign line of the damage from there but going back to thoseta excitatory needs to be a tory neurons exhibit torri neurons that's known to be
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a feature of aging estate before alzheimer's disease. it was there that this imbalance and there's a little too much activity and its varied difficult. it's bad for memory formation. the target for treatment are drugs that can camp down that hyperat dignity. >> is it in kind of an early test phase or is it gone through the unical trial process toward something that could actually be used? >> the one i described in my book is a modified version of an off lipsey drug not too surprisingly but a tiny dose of
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it and that is in a phased to b- 3 base protocol of the phase 3 file but totals are good via ca could approve this drug that would happen in late 2022 if it works. it's fairlyt' far along and of course it's easier when you start with the drug that is known and you don't have to go through all this testing to determine if it's safe or not. >> i want to come back at some point and i suspect there might be some interest in the issue of howhe the fda decides to approve treatment. let me ask you, i mean i don't think. >> going back to my black box
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analysis you can look at the structure of thew, hippocampus d say it plays a central role. i wouldn't say we written the look on how memory works. you can contradict me. you know more about this than i do and i want to say have written the book in understanding what causesat or triggers are plays a role in memory loss. >> i would say you are absolutely right. we have not written the book on either of those things and there is no hammer of truth and every finding comes with with asterisk is an cat the up and hopefully we are a little bit closer to understanding the whole picture but it's always in complete. >> that's one of the reasons i really loved the story because the scientists who recognize the importance of the 01's in the
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phenia' at all these different cases which remind us just one case tells us something but we have got both these individual responses to injury but we also have these universals about how the brain works so going back to alzheimer's for a minute when you speak about the way it affects memory what do you see as the primary loss and what's the best understanding of some of the mechanisms and we have a few questions already in the q&a and i do want to encourage people if they have questions about memory or alzheimer's or anything in the book this is a great moment to have them into the q&a.
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talk about alzheimer's a little bit and i'm curious how working on this bookok made you think about alzheimer's and different way or feel that you understood it understood its impact in the way you hadn't thought about before? >> i had thought about alzheimer's before and that's true for many of us because by the time someone has alzheimer's they don't go out so they are invisible. if you know someone who has it or you are taking care of someone with alzheimer'she but e know a lot about alzheimer's but we don't know what causes it so that makes it very hard. they are a lot of features of alzheimer's or what they call
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biomarkers that buildup in the brain and amyloid plaque in the hyperactivity and information and where the damage is. it's possibleda to see all those things but how that process got started is believed to have happened way earlier and it's not clear why it against and there may not yet cause. there may be multiple causes and there may be multiple on-ramps to this disease so it's very hard to figure out the cause because it does happen so early and it's a disease of aging so there a ton of different things going on the brain at the same time. many people with alzheimer's disease may have some other disease as well. they might have cardiovascular disease so it can be hard. >> you are right where i think about alzheimer's if there is a
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personal connection and we hope to go to our allies with no at all. i'm going to t briefly mention segueing into a personal story with a question i have gotten in the q&a here. richards is my favorite aunt who was also the smartest person in her family. she is super sharp and the one person, on my fathers side of the family who was diagnosed with alzheimer's so i was shocked. of all the people that i would have predict did do have him and up with l alzheimer's disorder d i will add you to covid-19 which
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also comes up in your book in ways that have been research disrupted in some ways and the things that are focused on with infectious disease. she ended up in a memory care unit that was locked down due to covid and that did not go well. i have a question here that is related to you raise in the look and that's also personal. lauren can you talk about your own experience with amnesia and what caused it cliques did your man marries simply returned and we are talking about personal experiences again. >> what happened is it turned out that it was a type of
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seizure that was caused by a brain lesion so i threw a lot of the testing for example the 01 rivers went through after his injury and i had surgery by the chief a of neurosurgery and a boston hospital. and like that idea so i got second opinions and i was told by neurologists to just hang tight and take some medicine and i and that has been the case. i've had tons of mris and that lesion is still there so fortunately for me it was a one-time event and i consider myself extremely lucky. ..
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>> that's what p eowe are missing is what happened to me why and i the only person ? >> .this is a question from pat, also related to the people related syndrome. it does sound as though fentanyl damages memory suddenly while alzheimer's disease isslowing development . erthe other chemicals that
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affect the hippocampus and memory suddenly or slowly i suppose especially after what wemight call lifestyle chemicals ? >> not lifestyle chemicals that i'm aware of. there is another toxin that can damage the hippocampus and it's called amnestic shellfish poisoning and it's a toxin that accumulates in shellfish during algae blooms. so similarly it just zeros in on the hippocampus and really damages it very severely so people who suffer from that will have exactly the same kind of presentation but in terms of the hippocampus, i'm not aware of any research that suggests there's a toxin that's targeting, it's really more windows toxic proteins that are humility and many years of the brain, when they
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get together in the hippocampus that's when the damage begins and it spreads out from there to other brain agents. >> i got enough questions i don't want to ask too much but you make the point in the book and we do know of other exposures that are implicated inneurological conditions such as parkinson's . such as memory but definitely neurological in the chemical sense. i have a series of questions related to arts and crafts and this telling of the book itself. they like to know how to he feel about having his research publicized. the relevant emails, it's tell us more about how that project works.
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>> the accident didn't turn over emails to me, it was the health through a freedom of information act request for me and one of the neurologists who he works with closely monroe butler did turnover their text messages. which were fascinating because they show the kind of back-and-forth and evolution of ideas over the years as they tried to sort outwhat does this mean , what can we learn from owen rivers, what are theimplications . could this form the new model for alzheimer's? so actually i was a little surprised that jed parrish let me do this because he really doesn't like the limelight . i think he was motivated by wanting to get the word out because there are undoubtedly more people out there whojust
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don't know what happened to them . so it's possible that now morepeople will be aware of this . >> that makes perfect senseug this is a related question from allison . you included text messages, personal notes and one of your main characters wrote primary source material. outage you choose what material to include and why did you want to include those personal snapshots ? >> i'll take the personal snapshots first .sh science it sounds soberly si silly but science is done by people and i think how science advances ends so much on personal people's personalities and much they think about problems and who they talk to and luck.
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so those text message emails a really reveal people's personalities and how they talk about things in a way that would have been boring to describe in and mission voice. it was more interesting to hear from those people and there were hundreds of boring emails i sifted through from the dbh so you have to choose the ones that tell the story and even the story of your day. you're not going to sit down and tell everyone what happens, you're going to choose the highlights so that's what i did . >> and related to that was there anything really fascinating you learned during your research that and it up on the cutting room floor? a story you didn't tell? >> i think it was more some interesting science that i learned which i could not
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work in because it the real story but again, researchers at uv san francisco who were just trying to see can we image opioid receptors when they're being activated by accident they found a ", on and off the soviets. the ones we take our exactness opioids like fentanyl and those behave differently and go inside neurons . they activate other receptors and go into parts of neurons that regular opioids don't so i thoughtthat was fascinating becausei always wondered we already have opioids . why are these so different ? maybe that's why. i just thought that was fascinating. >> that's reallyinteresting . so i'm going to go back to an interesting question from cindy here. which has to do with
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exceptionally good memory and recension. she is describing an eight-year-old friend who has an incredible memory given the question ofcounting backwards from 100 .which i'm not sure i could do. she totally nails that and another sort of memory test, she's all over it. i heard and i actually think about this myself that when you get to the middle age and thinking not so much about diseases here but just generally memory and longevity that we tend to lose some of our memory for nouns or names as we get older. and i certainly see some of that and myself sadly enough.
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right, i don't remember names as wish as i did thesedays . not only memory defects and memory diseases but do we understand any of the biology behind an exceptional memory? >> that's a great question and i don't know the answer. i don't know if that's been studied. it's not something that i looked into. i actually met on one of my research trips someone like that who remembered every day of her life. she could go back and tell me what was happening and conversations and it was wild. she seemed perfectly happy. some people you hear about who have those exceptional memories is not necessarily a great thing to remember everything but for her it just seemed fine. she enjoyed it.
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>> i'm totally saying that should be your next book . it's these amazing stories so i don't know if it would be as good as this one but it really is an interesting question related to that the very pinpoint way, is there any evidence that memory experts at games, crosswords, sudoku actually have any affect in memory or enhancing memory loss or enhancing memory? >> there's this concept called cognitive reserve which is p the ability to your brain to keep functioning well even inthe face of damage that's happening . so there is evidence that cognitive exercise is helpful. in staving off memory loss and dementia but it's not the kind of things like the
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crossword puzzle that you do every day or sudoku. it has to be something hard. just like exercise, if you want to build new muscle, you want the kind of cognitive workout that is thought to be helpful, learning a new language or challenging yourself in some way and it's also being socially engaged. just having experiences your brain needs input. it's also why having hearing loss is problematic because you're not interacting with the world as much. so anything you can do to basically the working your brain is a good idea. >> that's very helpful and sadly reminds me of the many times that people say to me you have to do the work. i have a couple of book -related questions and then i want which i hope we can get
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to and then questions about and i expect you've got these before the new drug related to alzheimer's but let's save the book one quickly. are there other books about memory, amnesia, alzheimer's that you recommend and related, partly because i think we discussed it, have you read the new book about the sackler family and do you have thoughts about that book ? >> i have not read that book about the sackler family. one of the books i turned to is an oldie but a goodie l called the seven sins of memory because the concepts he talks about in terms of memory and what it's for and how it fails us still hold true today. there's two recent books, the problems of alzheimer's by jason, which if you want to dig into alzheimer's and also
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how we should be caring for peoplewith alzheimer's that once very good . there's a new book about remembering remembering by lisa genova who wrote still alice that's more focused and on the science of memory so if that's your interest and one of the books i read about his addiction that might sound interesting is called the biology of desireby mark lewis . that takes the position that addiction is as much a disorder of learning and memory as it is a disease. >> i have to say i really likestill alice and some of the points it made about memoryand who we are . i should definitely look at those . the fda and this has been incredibly at least in my geeky science writer community incredibly controversial . we recently approved a drug
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that was targeting amyloid plaques as one of the issues on alzheimer's and the approval process actually caused three scientists on the fda advisory board to quit the board because they were so unhappy about how it turned out and yet there is a lot of people who thope this drug is going to be helpful so if we can finish up talking a little bit about that, that would be wonderful . >> as you said, the advisory panel recommended against approval. and that is not to say that they know it doesn't work. it's to say the evidence isn't there in their opinion to show that it does work. many people were very supplies was approved because there have been 25 previous clinical trials targeting amyloid beta that didn't work
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. so why did this one finally get approved? there are lots of ideas about why it was approved and of course everyone wants a drum to work. i think the concern that a lot of people have expressed is that this is going to make it harder to develop other drugs bebecause there's already a shortage of people for clinical trials and now that will be made worse because there will be so many people taking this drug that they then are available to try other things. so that is the concern but it's also possible that because the fda approved this drug, people will feel more confident in the best investing money and coming up with other strategies so i mean, for this decision was made i covered a lot of researchers who said this is a great time in the field. like, we're finally truly optimistic about finding a treatment . it's a renaissance and we can see it three years, five years, 10 years so i don't
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think people willabandon all those other strategies . and so you know, i think despite all the concerns about this new drug which i think are real there's still a sense of optimism in the field about if not what the answers are, they can see how to get to the answers so that we can developtreatments . >> that's a great answer and it feels me makes me feel a little lessbitter . as we close this evening out lauren, are there points that you think you would like to say about memory or of the particular investigations, the secrets behind how we remember our points you'd like to leave our audience with? >> one of the things i really
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like about this story is again, it goes back to personality and what drives science. i think the case study is often sortof scorned in science . it's the bottom tier of compared to work with mice. it's considered low-level one off. but for me and for many scientists, those one offs are the opportunity to say what didwe miss ? when something doesn't make sense it's either observation was incorrect or we didn't know something that's important sso you're seeing it for the first time. what does it mean? most people, everyone's busy so do you file it away in the back of your mind and move on or are you in a position to say i want to figure out what this means and sometimes it really unlocks a whole new way of understanding human health that is really
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valuable. for me it's about the twin, sometimes opposing ideas of paying attention to things that don't make sense. open-minded also be skeptical and check yourself before you jump toconclusions . we have to be both critical and open to new ideas at the same time i think to be a great scientist, that's what you have to do. >> that's such a wonderful way to close this discussion and i wish we could do it longer. you've been great and i really want to thank everyone who has stayed with us. people have just stayed through this whole discussion which is wonderful to see and the questions have been so smart so from my own perspective it feels very lucky to come in and talk about the greatbook like this . you to everyone.
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>> thank you, it was great to be here. great conversation. >> you both, thank you again tremendously to both of you for sharing this discussion with us tonight and it's so relevant with the recent fda decision as well and i'm glad you touched onthe . thank you to everyone out there all over the country or spending your evening with us . please learn more about the book and feel free to purchase memory the on harvard.com with the links i have spammed you with in the chat. so it's harvard bookstore, have a great night everyone. please keep reading and be well. take care. >> tv features latest authors discussing their nonfiction books. hillary clinton and mystery writer louise henne discussed
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their international thriller state of terror and at 6:30 university of illinois journalist professor nikki usher offers her thoughts on the challenges facing american journalism in her book news for the rich white and blue. outplacement power distort american journalism and at 7:30 p.m. about books congressman steve israel on opening a new bookstore plus bestseller list, new releases and other news from the publishing world and at 10 pm on "after words" in his latest book world incorporated inside corporate america is just a social justice scam he argues corporate america is signing onto woke cultureonly to increase profits . he's interviewed by greg matthew harvard university economicsprofessor and former chair of the president's council on economic advisers . watch tv every sunday on c-span2 or watch online anytime at booktv.org.
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if you're on middle or high school student you can enter the conversation by entering the student cams competition. create a documentary using video clips that answers the question how does the federal government impact your life. >> be passionate toexpress your view no matter how large or small you think the audience will receive it to be . i know that in the greatest country in history your view does matter. >> to all the filmmakers remember content is king . and member to be as impartial as possible in yourportrayal of both sides of an issue . >> c-span awards cash prizes and you have a shot at winning the grand prize of $5000. entries must be received before january 20, 2022. for competition rules, tutorialsor how to get started visit our website at studentcams.org .

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