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**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. What about you? |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** What's my earliest memory? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** \[laughs\] I love it, mine is a very fun memory, too. I remember -- I think I was somewhere around the age of three, and I remember this dress that I was wearing, and part of the reason I'm not sure if it's in my mind or I just remember the sound... We had a family picture and I was wearin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you asked about sounds, and I'm wondering if maybe the reason why your memory got stuck -- because that's kind of what we think of, why did our memory stick? Because you didn't intentionally probably try to remember that your whole life, and yet it's so vivid... Was it maybe the sounds? |
In my case I didn't really have any sounds that I recall. It was more of a -- really more or less a visual scenario, a scene that is on a loop; when I think about a memory, it's on a loop. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. Well, memory is this interesting process, because first off you need some attention... And I don't think we know yet why for one person that early memory stands out, as opposed to another. I would think it would look like just sort of converging factors... But the process by which we... |
\[04:21\] So it's interesting working with people who complain about challenges with memory, because it can be for a myriad of reasons that people struggle with it. One could just be attention. This is why a lot of people who have ADHD struggle sometimes with remembering things... And it's really hard to encode anythin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's true. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** So there's nothing to retrieve, it's not there. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the age at which you generally begin to remember? We just recalled something in like the 2's and 3's... I understand that babies begin to form their long-term memories at around the age of 18 months... So when do we really start to remember, and what's generally the earliest that people remem... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** So generally, a lot of people tend to remember about age five... But like all things, there's variability in that. And as we talk through this, I think that'll make more sense for people why they remember one thing over another. But stress is definitely a moderating factor in the memory pr... |
Some people -- we're gonna talk about this today, but learning is involved in the process of memory. So in order for people to learn, i.e. then remember, you wanna think of it like an inverted U. Either too low a stress, too low of having really any sort of excitation, or too high of stress, is going to influence our a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I have a hypothesis - and I'm not a doctor, as you know... But I'm wondering if maybe how it works at an early age to remember is because there's less traffic, or just less congestion. We're older now, obviously, we're adults, and so our minds have so many things competing. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** At that young age all you have is awareness, so it's a little easier maybe to bank them, and maybe it's specific ones, and they get retained unintentionally. You don't consciously commit them into memory. It's something else that sort of happens, because there's just less traffic. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah, well - you know, one of the things is that there are less neural connections earlier in life. So your brain is really building these highways in your brain for data to be linked to other data. As we get older, this is why it's harder to change, so to speak, because those neural netwo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** So it's just harder to change them, because it's just like this is always the way that we go. And I think that's why it's valuable to have these conversations... Because if you aren't aware that there's actual routes you've developed, then you might not be apt to look at how you could buil... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Have you seen the movie Inside Out? |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yes, I have. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I almost actually pointed up an idea for a show called "Memory according to Inside Out", or something to that degree... Because that move was - I'm curious of your opinion on it, but my opinion is that it seems very accurate. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** It is really good. I love that move, so listeners, if you haven't seen it, go check it out... Because I think it's a really good file in people's brain to understand the role of emotions as it relates to memory... And that memories are constructed. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:00\] And the different emotions also - they're also part of sadness and joy, part of creating a memory... So joy alone doesn't make a memory, sadness as well, or disgust, and anger, and... What was the other one - disgust? |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Fear, you forgot fear. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Fear. Oh yes, fear. \[unintelligible 00:08:19.01\] |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** \[laughs\] Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the key ingredient. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** It is. And I just think the character depictions are so good around these emotions. So if you can imagine a T chart, and that with memory there's what we references as declarative memory, otherwise known as explicit memory, and then on the other side we have non-declarative, implicit memor... |
It's also declarative... So this declarative memory, I should say, also involves consciousness. I go to my own \[unintelligible 00:09:39.20\] system library and I retrieve it, and I pull it out. So experiences are part of this declarative memory. Episodes of our life. What we both just referenced are episodic memories.... |
But on the other side of that chart we have non-declarative memory, implicit, which is mostly unconscious. So we've talked about habit formation... If you can think of both associative learning and non-associative learning. |
Imagine how I pair things that don't necessarily go together. I associate "Oh, when I listen to this song, I go run, or I work on this type of project. I clean my house in this order of operations." It's very much procedures. And it can also be more of this reflexive response. |
Think of this like even trauma as well. I can have had a traumatic experience and my brain banks it, and I may or may not be aware of why my body is then reacting. |
Some people have a lot of negative thoughts or feelings around clowns, and interestingly enough, that was a memory earlier in one's life; however it can have more of this implicit reaction that says "Clowns are bad/scary/overwhelming, so I don't go see clowns." So implicit memory - these things can actually affect our ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So this memory - the connection, I suppose, of choices to memory is really interesting. You make choices sometimes even based on memories that you're not really sure that you -- not so much not sure that you have them, but they're sort of like in your subconscious and they come out in this way. With... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:07\] You have this fear, and maybe you don't know you have the fear. But something in your life, at some point you decided clowns are bad, and suddenly when you're around clowns now you're sweating and anxious. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. So you can see how these can both be going on at the same time. Maybe we think about it like the analogy of an iceberg, in that explicit memory is what I see above the water, the tip of the iceberg, but then beneath it is more of this implicit memory and the things I'm not necessaril... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. What do you say then for random memory pops into my head today? I'm just sitting here working, whatever whatever, boom - memory of my mom. I think about Bob Seger, for some reason, because that's something that she loved to listen to. You know, some weird, random memory just in my brain. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** You know, I would say that there was probably something else in terms of the information that was traveling through your brain that prompted that retrieval. Bear in mind, we're more apt to remember things that we rehearse. So the more often I run that play in my mind, the more often that p... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Fear... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...dictating your choices. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right. And this is why recognizing "Hey, I got stimulated", like "Oh, I'm afraid", and then going "Okay, so now what? What do I do if I feel that feeling? Is that reminding me of something that was in the past, that's triggering me, so to speak? Or is that actually a live event?" And that'... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that why they say "You need to process this"? |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's kind of what that is, right? You process, maybe even in time, this memory, this event, this trauma. It's not happening now. Sometimes when we recall memory, we have autobiographical memory, so I suppose there's some - and you could probably describe this better than I can - memory, and you th... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right. And this is why recognizing and differentiating the past from the present is helpful, and why it isn't helpful to use denial as a coping strategy, and saying "Well, it shouldn't bother me. That clown should not be disturbing to me." But you can actually, ironically, empathize with y... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's almost like remastering a memory. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** \[16:10\] Yeah. |
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