Guy Reams (00:02.168)
This is day 96, the hippocampus. You know, people oftentimes ask the question, if you had to go back and do it all over again, what would you do? Kind of a pointless question. Honestly, you probably have multiple times in your life when you could actually do that. You don't need to go back in time. You can just start right now. For example,
I've probably had...
at least three, maybe even more significant career changes in my life, and I'm only in my 50s. So I imagine that everybody, most everybody will have at least three or more significant career changes in their life. So it is quite possible to actually go back and start all over again. You think about it,
From age zero to age 16, maybe 17 or 18, the first 20 years of your life, unless you're just really good academically, those are a wash. I mean, you do learn a little bit, but you don't really learn something practical for a career. So really you start at 20. So most people have success in their career by the time they're 35. So really 15 to 20 years.
is what it takes to become really good now at something. So if you were to start at 50 and start a new career, you could probably get to be thriving in that career by the time you were 70.
Guy Reams (01:51.457)
I bring this up because if I were to go back and study something again, I would probably study the brain. I would probably try to become a specialist, a researcher that spends time on just exactly how the brain works. You know, we really haven't made a lot of advances in science regarding certain parts of the brain. For example, the big one is human memory.
Right now dementia or Alzheimer's is really an epidemic and throughout the world. It's probably one of the. I don't know what it is. I guess I'd have to look up the numbers. But I would bet you that it's one of the leading causes of death among older people. And when most people think of Alzheimer's, they don't think of death. They don't think it. They just think of somebody who's losing their memory. But.
At advanced stages, you can lose complete motor control and coordination ability, even forgetting how to breathe or how to eat. So yeah, the degradation of brain cells or whatever it is that is the symptoms of Alzheimer's. I mean, this is pretty bad. it's become, I think it's probably become one of the leading causes of death and one of the leading causes of disability.
So how the brain functions and why it functions is a pretty important part of science. Now, I've oftentimes thought about memory and how it works. If you think about it, it's pretty actually fantastic. Somehow in this gelatinous substance inside of our skulls, the human brain is somehow recording long-term memory.
sure there's short-term memory, but there's also long-term memory. And how does it recall all of that? It's just really incredible if you think about that. How does it actually store that? And how does it recall that? We've learned a lot in science, and I read a lot of research articles on this because I'm fascinated by it. We've learned a lot over the last 30 or 40 years, but we haven't made much more progress than we did like in the 60s.
Guy Reams (04:21.057)
So it's been a long time and we come up with little things here and there,
why and how the human brain remembers things is still a bit of a mystery. One of the greatest breakthroughs in science was around the mid-50s with the case of what is known as HM. HM stands for Henry Mollayesan. He was a patient who was born in 1926, I think, and he had really severe epilepsy as a child. In fact, so bad his seizures were
so bad that it was debilitating, I mean, completely debilitating. And so just trying to get his, figure out a way to cure him, when he was at 27 years old, he voluntarily went through a very radical surgical surgery procedure by a doctor named William Scoville. And basically he, they removed parts of his brain and the center part of his brain, the medial.
temporal lobes inside his brain. And that included most of what is called the hippocampi, or that's plural, or the hippocampus. And that also include parts of the amygdala. So this part of the brain, this middle part of the brain was removed in this patient. And this severely reduced his epileptic symptoms.
However, it had profound and incredible impacts on his ability to remember things. He had strange amnesia. So he was unable to, he could remember some things, but he was unable to form new memories. So they learned that the hippocampi is directly involved in the storage of memory. Maybe not the actual storage, but the ability to work.
Guy Reams (06:20.365)
call it once it's stored, I think is what they figured out. He could not remember events or acquire new knowledge beyond a few seconds. So his temporary memory was intact. Like you could give him instructions and then he could follow them. But then afterwards, he couldn't remember them again, or he couldn't remember how he knew. He had a working memory for short periods, but could not
acquire new motor skills or new and what was real is he couldn't start new habits at all because he could not remember how he learned them in the first place. One really sad incident is his mother died and they told him and he was crushed and cried. And they would have to tell him over and over again that his mother had passed away and every time he would cry. Now Hollywood has had a little bit of a love affair with this story.
There's been many stories that have branched away from this, the scenario of HM. But this was probably the greatest breakthrough that we had. Despite the ethical nature, HM was very, he did volunteer. By the way, he only died like in 2008, so he lived a long time. So the ability to stop his epilepsy actually helped him live a long time. And he was totally open to letting science study him.
And, and they have, they did for, for 50 years or so, they were studying what he could remember and what he could not remember as a way to try to figure out what role the hippocampi had in memory.
So explicit memory, which involves facts, events, like facts and events, they rely heavily on the hippocampus. Absolutely rely on it. Procedural memory, implicit things, such as skills, habits, they involve different brain regions, which was really fascinating, right? So using his brain, they were able to, through lots of practices and procedures, they were able to figure out
Guy Reams (08:33.633)
the involvement. they've discovered the hippocampus did not store things, was not actually storing the memory, but for some reason it was able to, it was involved in the recalling of things, which is really interesting. And they also learned that the brain memorizes things in different ways. So there's facts, figures, events, and then there's pictures, emotions, things.
So those different types of memories are memorized in different ways. In fact, they even started to learn that when you read, when you read language in a book,
that language is sometimes converted. You remember what the word is, or you remember what the meaning is, and then through the meaning, you're able to interpret the language. But they've also learned that there's other pathways that reading takes too. So reading has kind of multiple paths for converting characters on a page.
to something that we can make sense out of in our minds. So lots of cool things there. So I don't know why I bring this up, because I don't know if you've ever been, if you've ever lived with older people, somebody who's elderly that is suffering from dementia or suffering from Alzheimer's or some other memory issue. I think, and a lot of people told me it's related to hearing. And I think it is because every time I've been around somebody who has a trouble hearing,
I've noticed that their ability to remember certain things are prevalent. So it could be related. I don't know. I think I've read some things that it is, but I bring it up because we take for granted this ability to remember things, but it's really actually rather powerful that we can actually remember what we can. So I like to experiment with this and it's something I've done for quite some time now.
Guy Reams (10:44.085)
is I'm always trying to come up with ways to try to game the system so I can remember things and I can recall them faster. lately I've been, as part of one of my habits, I've been trying to teach myself, I've been rebuilding my memory palace that I built. For example, I was down in San Diego and there's this one restaurant I always go by because it's on the way where I, the path I take.
down to downtown. And the restaurant is nice, but they have these codes on the doors to go to the restroom. And every time I want to go to the restroom, I'm like, oh, man, I have to go back to the reception desk and ask them for the code and all that. So it's always the same code. They haven't changed the code in a decade. So I'm thinking, why can't I remember this? Maybe I should write it down my wallet or maybe I should put it in my phone.
But if I put it in my phone, I'll never remember where I put it in my phone, so it's pointless. So I just need to memorize it. Now, I could memorize the number.
But it would take a long time to get the hippocampus in my brain to record and be able to recall digits like that. It is possible. You can do it. But it takes a lot of repetition and a lot of commitment of time. But rather, I can now remember Joseph from the Bible wearing his coat of many colors is actually standing in
front of that restroom door and Joseph is has a hockey stick and he's about ready to smack a goose egg. So I imagine there's a goose egg on the ground and Joseph and his coat of many colors is about ready to smack that egg with a hockey stick. Now that may sound like insanity to you.
Guy Reams (12:45.197)
But it's not to me. See, Joseph is the number 92 in my brain. I have associated 92 with two things, with Joseph from the Bible and wrestling lions. So anytime I see an image with Joseph or the concept of wrestling lions, I remember the number 92. The number 11 I associate with Wayne Gretzky.
And Wayne Gretzky always scores a hat trick. So anytime I see Wayne Gretzky or somebody with a hockey stick, I think of the number 11. And then finally, the single digit zero, I always remember as a goose egg. And I remember it kind of in the, have you ever seen one of the early rhyme books where they have geese egg, like a big goose egg?
I think of it like this big decorative goose egg is the way I think of it in my brain. So in that case, it's Joseph, 92, with a hockey stick, that's 11, about ready to smack a goose egg, which is zero. So that bathroom code is 92, 11, zero. And I will never forget that. In fact, when I walk into that restaurant right now, I remember that Joseph is back there.
with this hockey stick about ready to hit that goose egg. And so I will always remember 9211 zero. That's the door code. So that it's kind of stupid that I do this stuff, but I think there's something really important going on in the synapses of the brain. When you remember things that are associated with pictures and images, and it keeps your brain active and very engaged. When you can remember things,
It also gives me something to meditate on. One thing I've had a hard time with over the years, I've done a lot of meditation in the morning or at night, and I've noticed that at first, I first started meditating, I thought it was stupid. I thought meditation was dumb. But then I tried it, and I tried it every day for a year. And I have to tell you that meditation significantly improved my life. So,
Guy Reams (15:09.527)
But one thing I have a hard time with, and people in the meditation world call it monkey mind, where you're sitting there trying to meditate, but your brain's bouncing all over the place, and then you can't get yourself to settle down, and then you just want to get up and get going, do what you're thinking about. It's better to let those thoughts come in than let them go, and I try to do that, but I need a mechanism. So instead of doing that, I walk through my memory palace,
or I walk through some of my favorite places where I've memorized things and I have these little stories. Like I have my birth date is a story. My social security number is a story. My driver's license is a story. My bank account number is a story. My routing number, my checking account is a story. All of my kids' social security numbers are a story. So I've got stories associated with all these strings of numbers.
So I just go through those in my mind while I'm meditating. And a funny thing happens. It calms me down. And I stop worrying about whatever I'm worried about. And I create a space in my brain for me to focus and think. So anyway, I don't know really what I'm trying to talk about today. I think I'm trying to talk about just how important it is to keep the brain active and very engaged. And if you haven't done so, you might want to consider
Building a memory palace or starting to learn how to memorize numbers. People will think you're crazy, but actually you won't be crazy because your brain will be active and you'll learn how to calm yourself when you need to calm yourself. And more importantly, you'll always remember the door code to the bathroom. There you go. All right, that's it.