The guest
Dr. Wendy Suzuki: Professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU and incoming Dean of Arts and Science, one of the world's leading learning and memory researchers known for hippocampus work and a viral TED talk on exercise and the brain.
What this episode covers
Andrew Huberman interviews neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki about how memory is formed, stored, and lost. She explains the role of the hippocampus, the four drivers of memorability (novelty, repetition, association, emotional resonance), and shares her personal turn from workaholic to fitness-driven researcher after a tenure-stress weight gain and her father's Alzheimer's diagnosis. The bulk of the conversation covers her published and unpublished studies showing aerobic exercise boosts mood, prefrontal attention, and hippocampal memory via BDNF, plus the benefits of short daily meditation. They close on attention, the overuse of stimulants among students, and her top three tools: exercise, meditation, and sleep.
Recommended on this episode
ProductRecommended
Daily Burn
Daily Burn
“But I love the variety”
“what I use is a video workout that I started even before the pandemic, it's called "Daily Burn," and is just thousands of different workouts.”— Wendy Suzuki
The guest's own work
BookBy the guestISBN verified
Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion
Wendy Suzuki
“The most recent one is entitled "Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion,"”— Andrew Huberman
BookBy the guestISBN verified
Healthy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain and Do Everything Better
Wendy Suzuki
“a previous book entitled "Healthy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate your Brain and Do Everything Better."”— Andrew Huberman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
BookReferencedISBN verified
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
“I've used it for, for instance, Matt Walker's "Why We Sleep," an excellent book on why we sleep”— Andrew Huberman
BookReferencedISBN verified
The 4-Hour Body
Tim Ferriss
“as well as Tim Ferriss's "The 4-Hour Body," Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan," and so on”— Andrew Huberman
BookReferencedISBN verified
The Black Swan
Nassim Taleb
“Tim Ferriss's "The 4-Hour Body," Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan," and so on, and so on.”— Andrew Huberman
MediaReferenced
Memento
Christopher Nolan
“I think they first heard about the hippocampus from the movie "Memento."”— Andrew Huberman
BookReferencedISBN verified
Atomic Habits
James Clear
“And then James Clear wrote a book about habits and has a very popular newsletter about habits.”— Andrew Huberman
BookReferencedISBN verified
Chatter
Ethan Kross
“Ethan Kross wrote a book called "Chatter," which focuses on the fact that so much of our inner dialogue, it is indeed negative.”— Andrew Huberman
ProductReferenced
IntenSati
Patricia Moreno
“the form of exercise that I teach is called IntenSati. It's a form of exercise that was developed by this amazing instructor, Patricia Moreno.”— Wendy Suzuki
Big reveals from this episode
- Patient HM had both hippocampi removed in 1953 and immediately lost all ability to form new memories of facts and events.
- Suzuki reveals HM actually retained part of his posterior hippocampus, complicating the famous textbook interpretation.
- Suzuki admits she gained 25 pounds chasing tenure and was the weakest person on a solo Peru river-rafting trip, which sparked her exercise transformation.
- Her father, a Silicon Valley engineer, got lost driving home from a 7-Eleven seven blocks away, signaling the Alzheimer's that reshaped her research.
- New neurons are born in adult human hippocampi into the ninth decade of life, supported by newer studies beyond Rusty Gage's original work.
- A longitudinal Swedish study found women who were highly fit in their 40s gained nine more years of good cognition decades later.
- In her 10-minute meditation study, adherence to daily meditation beat the daily-podcast control, the highest retention she has ever recorded.
- Huberman cites a Stanford colleague's claim that two-thirds or more of college students use Adderall, Ritalin, or Modafinil without a prescription.
Worth remembering
- Four things make experiences memorable: novelty, repetition, association, and emotional resonance.
- The amygdala tags emotional or threatening events and makes the hippocampus encode them as long-term memories.
- Without a hippocampus you cannot imagine novel future events, not just remember past ones.
- Aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a growth factor that helps new brain cells grow in the hippocampus.
- Just 10 minutes of walking can shift your mood via a neurochemical bubble bath of dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline.
- Exercise boosts BDNF via two pathways: a muscle-released myokine and a liver-released ketone, beta-hydroxybutyrate.
- A single 30-45 minute aerobic session reliably boosts mood, prefrontal function, and reaction time, lasting at least two hours.
- Low-fit adults doing spin two to three times a week improved Stroop, recognition memory, and spatial memory in three months.
- For mid-fit people, every drop of sweat counted, with mood and hippocampal memory improving the more they worked out up to seven times a week.
- Suzuki's top three attention tools are exercise, meditation, and sleep, with sleep being the most physiologically essential.
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