Healthy Brain, Happy Life (12 page)

I didn’t have to be asked twice, and before I knew it, Leibovitz was standing in my lab. I ended up on a full two-page spread between Frances McDormand on one side and Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner on the other side. Pretty glamorous, right?

Someone once commented after seeing that picture that I must have men lining up outside my lab door.

My response: “Ha!” This was not a very polite response to a very nice compliment.

The fact was that, although I was a bona fide Annie Leibovitz model, there were
never
any men lining up at my lab door, let alone my apartment door. See? Men were just not interested in me.

Despite my obsessive work life and clear lack of a social life, I allowed myself one pleasure: good food. Partially primed by my time with François in Bordeaux and genetically primed by my parents, I loved food, and the restaurant scene in New York was phenomenally interesting. I read all the restaurant reviews (hence my paying attention to the article about Thomas Keller) and listened for any buzz I could pick up on the best and most interesting restaurants around.

When I first arrived as a new assistant professor at NYU I happily agreed to organize the departmental speaker series for the year with a colleague. We took suggestions for speakers from the faculty, made the invitations, and were responsible for hosting the guests during their visit. But the real reason I loved this job was because I got to choose the restaurants we took the speakers to after their talks. I took full advantage of this opportunity by researching and choosing what I thought would be the absolute perfect restaurant for a particular speaker—whether I knew the speaker or not. Those evenings out were becoming virtually my only social outlet, so, as was my way, I threw myself into restaurant research with all my might.

I ate by myself at the bars of the most interesting restaurants that I could find in New York. I liked to try new restaurants, but I became a regular at several neighborhood places too. I knew I had become a
real
regular when the bartenders started comping my meal because I ate there so often. All of this food-centered “research” could lead to only one outcome: chunkiness. My own.

Soon after I received tenure at NYU, I learned that I had been selected to receive the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences. This yearly prize honors the best under-forty researchers in the area of experimental psychology in the country. It was an amazing and thrilling honor to receive this award. It was particularly special because my parents flew out from California to attend the ceremony in April 2004 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. My former dissertation adviser Larry Squire from U.C. San Diego, who is himself a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was also there, and he, my parents, and I all went out for a wonderful dinner to celebrate the occasion.

The author holding the Troland Research Award with her parents at the
National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

(Courtesy of the author)

Yes, I am smiling in the picture, and I was indeed happy that night. But beneath the smile was a woman who, at thirty-nine years old, was becoming aware of something:
She hadn’t really given a moment’s thought to anything but her career and neuroscience experiments for years and years.
And when I tentatively popped my head outside my lab door to take a look at New York City, I found myself all alone. It was as if I were leading a double life. My science life was like one big party that you never wanted to leave, with lots of engaging colleagues to talk to and always something new and interesting in the works. By contrast, my social life was like one of those deserted ghost towns in a Clint Eastwood western with bunches of tumbleweed swirling around the dusty road. In my quest to push the limits of science in my field and gain the coveted position of tenure at NYU, I’d lost so much of myself.

You can see it in that picture from the Troland Research Award ceremony with my parents. I was getting wide. But my waistline was not the only thing changing. Something even bigger was starting to change for me. I had finally reached my goal. I had won tenure at NYU and had a big active research lab to show for it. Yes, I was pleased, but then again, I was a little lost. What was there to work for now that tenure had been achieved? I could make it to full professor status above my current rank of associate professor. But what else? I thought I would have
everything
once I got tenure. The truth is that I had a title and a great research program that I loved, but not much else.

Maybe I needed to pay more attention to Thomas Keller and start making some of the kind of memories that would really matter to me.

It was scary to consider these possibilities. Considering these possibilities meant that I had to admit how bad things were and I was not quite ready to do that. So many things were wrong at that point. How was I going to feel better about myself? How was I going to reconnect with the little girl who wanted to be a Broadway star? The romantic who fell in love with a French musician? Where had that woman gone?

I was going to find out, and I was going to use my brain to figure it out.

TAKE-AWAYS: WHAT MAKES THINGS MEMORABLE
?

While we are still waiting for that magic pill that will allow us to magically remember exactly what we want and need to remember, here are some practical tips for how to make things stick in your memory.

•  The more you bring a memory back to mind, the stronger it becomes. Boring but true. At the neural level, with each
repetition
you are strengthening the synaptic connections underlying the memory, allowing it to resist interference from other memories or general degradation. Repetition engages the neural networks related to our attention system; in other words, we tend to remember what we pay attention to.

•  If you want to remember something new, try to link or associate it to something you already know well, and this will help. The more
associations
a memory has, the stronger it is because it allows the memory to be retrieved in the widest variety of ways. If one clue doesn’t work, it will always have another to help retrieve it.

•  We know that memories with
emotional resonance
last longer and are stronger than other memories. This is because the amygdala, a structure critical for the processing of emotion, has the ability to form very long-lasting memories with help from the hippocampus. From an evolutionary point of view, the amygdala (one of the oldest parts of our brain) signaled us in an automatic way whether something in the environment was good or dangerous. As our brains evolved into more complex structures, the amygdala started sending reinforcement to the hippocampus whenever it picked up salient emotional experiences. It signals to the hippocampus: Remember this moment, it made me laugh, cry, scream with fear! It’s for this reason that our strong emotional memories seem imprinted on our brain and are so long lasting.

•  The brain is wired to focus attention on
novelty
so really novel events—the only time it ever snowed when you were in California or the one time you saw a meteor shower—tend to be memorable.

BRAIN HACKS: FROM A MEMORY CHAMPION

I recently spoke at a TEDx event in the Bay Area and one of the other speakers was the 2008 U.S. National Memory Champion, Chester Santos. He dazzled everyone by reciting the names of probably eighty to ninety people in the audience that he had met briefly just that day. Then he did something even more amazing. He recited the following list of thirteen words quite quickly:

Monkey

Iron

Rope

Kite

House

Paper

Shoe

Worm

Pencil

Envelope

River

Rock

Tree

Cheese

Quarter

He told us that he could get us to remember that list of words in just about three minutes. We were all waiting with bated breath. Then he went on to use some of the key factors that make things memorable, including novelty, emotional resonance, and associations. He told us that one way to remember a long list of unrelated items is to make up a story with those items; and the more fantastical or funny the story, the more memorable it would be. Then he recited such a story for us. He started by asking us to picture a monkey pumping iron (a novel and funny image). Then a big rope descends out of the sky. Imagine yourself feeling the texture of the big rope. You look up and see that the rope is connected to a kite. But no sooner do you notice the kite than a huge wind comes up and blows the kite right into the side of a house. That house is covered with pieces of paper. Imagine a house covered with hundreds of yellow sticky notes tiled all over it. Then a gigantic shoe appears and starts walking around the house covered with paper, making shoe marks all over it. But this shoe is really smelly, so picture a little worm boring its way out of the inside sole of the shoe. Suddenly, the worm turns into a pencil and starts writing on an envelope that appears on the roof of the house. Another big wind comes up and the pencil and envelope are both blown into a raging river. Then imagine the river so raging that waves begin to crash onto a big rock. The rock turns into a beautiful tree, but this tree is unusual: it is growing cheese on it. And then the most striking thing happens—suddenly quarters start shooting out of the cheese on the cheese tree.

Okay, we all agreed it was a fantastical story. But how memorable is it? Santos then started to recite the story again with the entire audience (including me sitting in the front row) yelling out all the key words as he told the other parts of the story, and it was clear that his fantastical story with its improbable events really worked to help us remember! After that he asked us to recite back the list and the whole group of three hundred people simultaneously recited the list perfectly from beginning to end. Amazing! He gave us that memorable story. Clearly it will take practice to come up with your own fantastical story that will help you remember a long list of things. But the cool thing is that Santos was using the same tools that we know improve memory—association, emotional resonance (humor), and novelty are at play big time in his story—to speed and enhance the learning process. I’m a convert! I’m going to have to start practicing with my own fantastical stories next time I need to remember a list of errands to run or a list of points to make in a presentation!