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Why Memory? Dementia and Other Reasons To Remember
20 Plays1 year ago
Why are we talking about memory? An aging population means dementia cases will likely rise in the coming years, compounded by other chronic health conditions and lifestyle factors — including not enough sleep. Here's why memory care needs to matter, even at a young age.
This is part 2 of an intro series on sleep, memory, and dreams.
Connect with us at SuenoLabs.com. We're currently looking for contributors and podcast guests!
Disclaimer: This show is for informational purposes only. Sueño Labs does not provide medical advice.
Featured in this episode are clips from USA Today and Good Morning America.
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Transcript
The Unreliability of Memory
00:00:00
Speaker
Everybody forgets things sometimes, whether it's misplacing your keys or your phone or not remembering somebody's name or misstating a detail of something that happened. We all have these experiences where we recognize that our memory is unreliable. So what exactly is the difference between forgetting something and a diagnosable memory loss?
00:00:33
Speaker
Tonight, we're talking about why memory. There still is no cure for long-term memory loss. And an aging population means that issues related to dementia will only increase in the coming years.
Risk Factors and Support for Dementia
00:00:49
Speaker
What are the risk factors? What can we be doing right now to strengthen our memories? And how can we support loved ones who are living with dementia or related memory conditions?
00:01:04
Speaker
I'm Jimmy Leonard. This is SwenioLabs. Welcome back to SwenioLabs. This is part two of our introductory three-part miniseries on why sleep, memory, and dreams. Why these
Denial and Impact of Memory Decline
00:01:24
Speaker
topics? How are they connected? So tonight, of course, we are talking about memory.
00:01:30
Speaker
I think this is an interesting topic because of all the things in human health, memory seems to be one of those that we have the most denial about, right? You know, we will admit if we're feeling sick or if maybe we're injured and it's affecting our mobility, but few people will ever really admit that their memory is starting to go, right? Maybe we joke about it or we'll say something like,
00:01:58
Speaker
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot, or I meant to do that, but I got distracted, or oh, you know me, I'm just so scatterbrained. But these sorts of experiences where our memory is faulty, it's untrustworthy, there's something that we were told that is no longer in our brain or something we committed to do that we didn't follow through with.
00:02:21
Speaker
These lapses in memory affect our daily lives, our rhythms, our work, our relationships. It has an impact on our creative pursuits and our ability to do the things that are most important to us. Forgetting things can make us late for appointments. It can damage relationships. It can lead to breakdowns and trust. And eventually, as we all know, it can even contribute to the type of
00:02:50
Speaker
memory impairment and cognitive decline that eventually is diagnosed as memory loss.
Understanding Dementia and Alzheimer's
00:02:58
Speaker
Scientists haven't yet discovered any guaranteed effective way to fight severe memory loss or dementia.
00:03:09
Speaker
This is a little tricky to define because even the word dementia is a generalized, encompassing term for any sort of memory loss or difficulty with language or cognitive ability to the point that it's actually interfering with somebody's daily life. And there are a number of diseases and neurological conditions that can contribute to or cause dementia.
00:03:36
Speaker
And if you're listening to this, you likely know someone in your family or your network of relationships who currently is suffering from dementia. In fact, the most common cause of dementia, which is Alzheimer's disease, is expected to increase in the coming years as the population around the world continues to age. From time to time, we'll hear these stories on the news.
00:04:03
Speaker
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, multiple sclerosis. These are all examples of neurodegenerative disorders. These diseases affect millions worldwide.
Societal Support and Lifestyle Choices
00:04:13
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Good morning to you guys and we are seeing those Alzheimer's numbers go up and now the Alzheimer's Association releasing its new report shedding light on a real issue to take care of those people and those future patients, a shortage of caretakers.
00:04:26
Speaker
So where exactly does this leave us? There's of course the immediate concern of thinking about how can we best love and support the people we know who are suffering from dementia? How as a society can we make sure that we are allocating resources and staffing medical professionals to provide the care that people need? But even zooming out from that, what are we doing as a society to understand the risk factors and potentially even some of the contributing causes
00:04:55
Speaker
to these memory loss diseases. Now, I say this very tenderly and with a lot of compassion. I'm speaking as someone who has people in my own family who are living with degenerative memory loss and I see the impact that has on their lives and in no way
00:05:15
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Am I saying that this is a direct result of a choice that somebody made? But as evidence mounts around some of the leading contributors to memory loss, it is worth understanding how some of the lifestyle choices that we are making in our 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s
00:05:40
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may be contributing to memory loss in our 70s, 80s, and 90s because by the time these things happen, it's really too late to reverse course.
00:05:56
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Scientists don't have a crystal clear understanding of what exactly causes Alzheimer's disease, and most of the studies on this say that the most important risk factor is simply age. The National Institute on Aging estimates that about a third of people in their late 80s or 90s have some form of Alzheimer's disease.
00:06:21
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And so, it may just be these age-related changes in the brain that cause harm to neural connections that contribute to memory loss.
Environmental and Lifestyle Influences
00:06:31
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Scientists have also looked at genetic factors that raise a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease later in life
00:06:38
Speaker
But there's also been a growing body of research around environmental and lifestyle factors that may contribute to memory loss. So someone who has a history of heart disease or high blood pressure or obesity or other compounding health conditions is often at a greater risk of developing cognitive decline in their later years. We also see some correlation between a lack of nutrition or other unhealthy habits like smoking
00:07:06
Speaker
But one of the biggest ones that I think is not talked about very often is the correlation between not getting enough sleep and developing memory loss at a later age. This matters because unlike genetic risk factors, sleep is something that theoretically, practically, we can control. So of course, sleep is a big topic
00:07:34
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at Swenio Labs and a lot of what we're aiming to do on this podcast and through the website is to promote more awareness and healthier attitudes around protecting a good night's sleep.
Technology and Memory Retention
00:07:48
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But when it comes to memory, I think this is only part of the battle.
00:07:54
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There's a lot of conversation around how technology is impacting our attitudes and even the value we place on memory. Earlier, models of education, especially 100 years ago or even a few decades ago, leaned a lot more heavily into memorization.
00:08:14
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It was common for school to involve memorizing speeches and poems and all sorts of various mnemonic devices for everything from the order of operations in math to the planets to even the colors in the rainbow. But as everything goes digital and online, do we still work these memory muscles?
00:08:36
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Lots of people will do physical workouts at home. I think it's far less common that people will do mental workouts at home.
00:08:46
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Even if we were going to, what exactly does that include? Is it just doing the Daily Wordle? Is it doing a Sudoku puzzle? How do we strengthen our memory? Of course, this plays into the idea of different learning modalities. Not everyone learns the same way. Some people are visual learners, while some people prefer to learn with their hands or by doing something. So in that case, just downloading an app on your phone
00:09:13
Speaker
might not be the most effective way to strengthen your memory if that's not how your brain is wired to learn. Even that sentence, what does that mean? How are our brains wired to learn? Why is it different from one person to the next?
Memory Formation and Learning Differences
00:09:29
Speaker
There's so much to unpack around this idea of how memories are formed, how we learn best, and even some of the choices that we can be making in our daily lives. And then of course, our nightly lives, if you will, which is going to bed on time and getting sufficient rest that includes that deep wave sleep that's so important for long-term memory in the future.
00:09:53
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So we're asking a lot of questions here, I realize not giving a lot of answers, but that's the hope of the exploration in this series is that we can somehow bridge this divide between the cutting edge research that's happening around how the brain works, how memories are formed, what are some of the things that are contributing to these long-term memory loss conditions,
00:10:19
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and then responding to the way that societally we often disregard some of these lifestyle factors or everyday exercises that could have a tremendous impact on strengthening our memories and lowering our risk for developing dementia later on. So I hope that sets the stage. I hope that gives some sort of rationale as to why memory
00:10:47
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really as an extension of sleep and the explorations
Dreams and Memory Formation
00:10:51
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there. And then the third topic in this introductory series is dreams. What role do dreams have in memory formation? Why is it important that our deep sleep includes dreaming, but also an active awareness and attention to dreaming? That's part three of the intro series. So keep listening. This is Swen your labs. Thanks for joining.