E62: The Intellectual Domain of Stuff

I want a lot of stuff in my brain. Oh, I have too much stuff spinning around in my brain. Oh, I have just the right amount of stuff in there. This is the Goldilocks problem of stuff in your brain. You know, the chair is too big. The chair is too small. This chair is just right. For all of those of you who were raised on Goldilocks, you know. Well, even if your cultural norms and fairy tales didn't include Goldilocks and the three brains, I'm going to talk a little about this in the "7 Domains of Stuff," the intellectual domain.

In the previous episodes of stuff, we've talked about the physical domain of acquiring physical things and the emotional and social domains of getting too much stuff. If you haven't listened to those previous parts of the "7 Domains of Stuff," check them out.

The Human Brain and Memory

But before we ever started accumulating physical stuff, back when we were hunter-gatherers and there was very little stuff to acquire, we accumulated stuff in our brain. Before our brains got so big and before we had language, we had powerful memories. These were critical to our survival. We had to remember where the food was, where it might be. We had to remember how to get it. We had to consider if we would share it with family, which we usually did. And we had to consider if we would share it with our social group, a uniquely human thing to do. We remembered places and seasons and plants and animals. We had the ability to instantly recognize other creatures. Is it dangerous and wants to eat me? Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it? And then we began to think about whether it was pretty.

And when we had language, which took up a big part of our brain, we had to talk about it, and we had to remember stories about all these things. It filled our brains. And then came books, and then came the internet, and then came smartphones, and boy, oh, boy, we can really fill our brains up with stuff.

Curiosity and Intellectual Hoarding

So curiosity, check out the "7 Domains of Curiosity." Just go back and find it at the "7 Domains of Women's Health." And I think that's a whole lot to learn about curiosity and the way we choose to fill our brains up with stuff.

I am a hoarder of intellectual stuff. I never met, a fact that I didn't like and want to keep. Now, of course, I have to be extra careful with all the electronic stuff coming at me, and I have to assess what stuff is real according to my standards and what stuff can hurt me emotionally or psychologically. The problem of doom scrolling that we talked about in the "7 Domains of Curiosity" is a real one. If we tend to seek out and remember bad stuff and store it with a particularly strong emotional tag that requires our brain to remember it.

In the early human days of saber-toothed cats and floods and fire, this was an adaptive behavior. It's still a good thing to remember that the stovetop is hot, unless, of course, you have an induction stovetop and check that out and stuff it into your brain for consideration when you next need a new stove.

But anyway, so I'm a biologist. I'm a biophile. I am in love with the biological world. I seek out stuff to stick in my brain about the natural world. Now, if you're a knitter, it might be stuff about wool or fabric or weaving techniques or weaving history or Navajo weaving stories. It's good to stuff your brain with facts and stories about the things and the people you love. Consider the smartphone and the jillions of photos of grandkids.

Have we met the limits of our brain? Probably not. But we have met the limits of how many things we can stuff into our brain at the same time. This business of multitasking, reading your email and text messages and TikToks while listening to music and studying neuroanatomy isn't really going to help you remember neuroanatomy. What can help you remember neuroanatomy is telling stories about neurological pathways or anatomical structures.

Storytelling as a Memory Technique

Our brains were designed to remember stories. This is actually an excellent, scientifically proven memory technique. If you're asked to remember a series of random things the way old people are when asked when they are given a cognitive test, or when young people are asked to remember seemingly random historical facts, it's a mnemonic device to put the fact into a story. A story that might help you remember the random words red, daisy, and banana might be I walked in my front door, which is red, and saw a daisy in a vase and went to the kitchen and ate a banana. That's the way you remember door, red, daisy, and banana.

Are there people with perfect memories, people who remember everything they saw and heard and ate and tasted and smelled? Probably not. The term "eidetic memory" is used to describe the ability of a person to have a perfect mental image or snapshot of something that they saw so they can pick out things that weren't central to their vision. Now children, it turns out, can do this more easily than adults. As many as 17% of children can have eidetic memories. Children can be painfully accurate mimics. They can see you do it, and they can mimic it because they can see it in their brain. Maybe they don't filter out stuff that they don't need because they don't know what they need yet and everything is mostly new. There are theories that children lose eidetic memory as they get older and use more words to filter out what they saw. Adults with perfect eidetic memory are extremely rare, and especially they cannot reliably report the same level of detail over time.

The term "photographic memory" refers to the ability to reproduce lists of numbers or pages. You know, those people who can do it in front of an audience and look really cool. But people with photographic memories remember the numbers and the words without necessarily the visualization of the page. There are rare people with extraordinary memories, and there are people who have learned techniques to remember numbers and pages, and they are pretty uncommon. True eidetic memory is extremely rare, despite the prevalence of people with these gifts in TV shows and movies and in books.

The Bad Stuff Stuck in Your Brain

Okay, back to the bad stuff, things we saw or heard or felt that we cannot get out of our heads. The image even expands in space that it takes up until it takes up your waking days and nights. This area is of interest in study in the field of PTSD and trauma experienced by people who have had exposures to difficult things on social media, things that may not be true about them but take up residence in their brain and assume cognitive and emotional real estate larger than it warrants. It's often not even true in the capital T, true sense of the word, though it may feel to be true to the observer. Of great concern is the stuff that gets in the brains of kids from social media and the havoc it wreaks, especially in the brains of adolescent girls and even grown-up women and boys and men, of course.

Social Media and the Youth Mental Health Crisis

The Surgeon General of the United States has even sent out a health warning about the damage that things seen and read on social media can do to adolescents and children.

• Social media use by young people is nearly universal, with up to 95% of young people ages 13 to 17 reporting that they use social media almost constantly.

The U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said, "Children are exposed to harmful content on social media, ranging from violent and sexual content to bullying and harassment. And for too many children, social media use is compromising their sleep and valuable in-person time with family and friends. We're in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis, one that we must urgently address."

How to Get Rid of Bad Stuff in Your Brain

Okay. I agree. But the question what can you do with that bad stuff once it got into your brain? What's that stuff, and can you get out of it? Can you actually do some clearing of this stuff in your brain's house? Well, you can't swap out your hard drive, and you cannot delete files in your software. Of course, aging can soften memories and prune out memories that haven't been tagged as important, like how hard that seat was in the lecture room in the medical school. Those aren't memories importantly wired for long-term storage. You cannot buy more storage the way you can with your computer or your smartphone. You can use your devices to remember phone numbers. And who remembers phone numbers anymore, even their own? And who remembers the way they went to a friend's house across town? They just plug in their GPS, and it tells them how to get there.

How about getting rid of facts, though, images, memories that hurt you or don't serve you? This is tricky and the source of a lot of scientific research and a lot of humbug. And sometimes it's difficult to know which is which. So how could you fade or change a memory? There are steps you can take to lessen a memory's emotional impact and make it less powerful, less painful. And it takes time and practice to do this, and you have to have some little time out to do it when you're not being freaked out by the memory. So that's kind of hard.

• If you mindfully replay your memory and remember it at a non-stressful time, when you're calm and can process it, what are the sights, or what are the sounds, or what are the feelings attached to that memory?
• Process your emotions, label what you feel.
• And begin to question, is this true? Does this serve you? This probably isn't even true. Try to relive them, but not relive them emotionally. Try to say, "Is this really true?" Some people just cannot do it because the memory is so intense and fearful, and they might need an experienced therapist to help them work on this.
• But thinking about how to reframe that memory, what triggers it? Maybe every time you see a type, you know, a car, or you think of chicken soup, or you think of something happening when someone made chicken soup, why don't you try reframing the memory? And rather than thinking of chicken soup, which triggers the memory, cognitively add your favorite noodles to the soup or dumplings or something you really like, so that you can reprocess this memory or change the channel from chicken soup to chili. So changing the channel and changing the context of the memory, actively doing this, saying, "I want to remember this this way, and this is a better side of this memory that I want to hold."
• You could try to substitute the memory, and this is the way you might do it. But if you're stuck in a loop with a bad memory or a hamster running wheel of running an emotional loop over and over, then hold your hand in front of your face and say to yourself, "Stop." Or even say it out loud, "This memory doesn't serve me now, and I'm going to change the channel." Pick a memory channel to change to. And if you can't do that, if you just can't get off the hamster wheel of memory, then practice structured breathing in for a count of four, hold for a count of seven, and blow out through pursed lips for a count of eight. Do this 10 times, carefully paying attention to your counting. If you're still obsessed with the memory, do 10 more.
• Trying to change the channel into a more emotionally stable space sometimes requires that you completely change the channel, and you can do that sometimes with structured breathing.
• Practice a healthy lifestyle. It turns out that lack of sleep and poor food, poor food quality, too much fat, too much sugar, too much alcohol, trying to treat your bad memories with pharmaceuticals, all of these are bad ideas, as they may temporarily suppress the memory, but they aren't really helping you restructure the memory in your brain.

Self-Acceptance and Healing from Past Mistakes

Try self-acceptance. I've made mistakes in my 45-year career as a physician. I hold those mistakes, and they were painful, in a visual little coin purse that lives virtually over my heart inside my bra. Luckily, it isn't a huge file folder. When the mistakes have gone into the purse, they were painful, as they should have been. But over the years, in my mind, I pull the purse out and I look in it. I will never forget the mistakes. But over the years, I have forgiven myself. I was young and inexperienced. I didn't have all the information that I had later to make a better decision. I learned how to never make that kind of mistake again. I stuffed more information back into my brain. These were cognitive efforts to become a better person and to become a better doctor, and try not to obsess about the hard parts, but to become a better person the next time around.

I have cringe attacks about shameful situations when I was younger. I try to think about what I learned and what was also wonderful about the experience. Now my cringe experiences are some of my most precious.

If you are interested in a new way of learning about how we tag memories to remember them and how bad memories can drive out good ones and how to come to terms with the bad stuff, I strongly recommend the animated movie "Inside Out" and the sequel, "Inside Out 2." These movies were informed by neuropsychologists who specialize in memory, and they are funny and powerful, and informative.

And may you always have joy and sadness to balance and color the stuff in your memory world. Thanks for joining us on the "Intellectual Domain of Stuff" at the "7 Domains of Women's Health." Check out our other domains of stuff, and check out the "7 Domains of Curiosity" and our other great topics. Hopefully, they will spark a conversation with family and friends.