MEDITATE DAILY

“in medieval times, communities threw young children in the river when they wanted them to remember important events. They believe that throwing a child in the water after witnessing historic proceedings would leave a lifelong memory for the events in the child. And believe it or not, this is true. This is a practice that somehow people arrived at. I don't know if they were aware of what adrenaline was, probably not, but somehow in medieval times, it was understood that spiking adrenaline or creating a robust emotional experience after an experience that one hoped a child would learn would encourage the child's nervous system”

“The title is brief daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non experienced meditators. One group did a thirteen minute long meditation, and this meditation was a fairly conventional meditation, they would sit or lie down, they would do somewhat of a body scan evaluating for instance how tense or relaxed they felt throughout their body and they would focus on their breathing. that daily meditation of thirteen minutes can enhance your ability to pay attention and to learn. It can truly enhance memory. However, you need to do that for at least eight weeks in order to start to see the effects to occur”

“if people are allowed to choose what they take photos of, that taking photos Again, this is with a camera, not mental snapshotting, that taking those photos would actually enhance their memory for those objects, those places, those people, and in fact details of those object, places, and people. And indeed, that's what they found. What does this mean? It means if you really wanna remember something or somebody, take a photo of that thing or person, pay attention while you take the photo, but it doesn't really matter if you look at the photo again. That framing up of the photograph stamps down a visual image in your mind that is more robust at serving a memory than had you just looked at that thing with your own eyes.”

“McGaugh and Cahill did experiments where they gave people a boring paragraph to read and only a boring paragraph to read. But one group of subjects was asked to read the paragraph and then to place their arm into very, very cold water. In fact, it was ice water. We know that placing one's arm into ice water, especially if it's up to the shoulder or near to it, evokes the release of adrenaline in the body. And what they found is that if one evokes the release of adrenaline through this arm into ice water approach, the information that they read previously, just a few minutes before, was remembered. It was retained as well as emotionally intense information.”

“It is the presence of high adrenaline, high amounts of norepinephrine and epinephrine that allows a memory to be stamped down quickly and far and away different than the idea that we remember things because they're important to us or because they evoke emotion. That's true. But the real reason, the neurochemical reason, the mechanism behind all that is neurochemicals have the ability to strengthen neuro connections by making them active just once. There's something truly magic about that neurochemical cocktail that removes the need for repetition.”

“chronic stress, the chronic elevation of epinephrine and cortisol is actually detrimental to learning. And there's an entire category of literature mainly from the work of the great and sadly the late, Bruce McEwen from the Rockefeller University and some of his scientific offspring like the great Robert Sapolsky, showing that chronic stress, chronic elevation of epinephrine actually inhibits learning and memory and also can inhibit immune system function, whereas acute sharp increases in adrenaline and cortisol actually can enhance learning and indeed can enhance the immune system.”

“exercise can impact learning and memory through other non neurogenesis, non new neuron type mechanisms. And one of the more exciting ones that has been studied over the years is this notion of hormones from bone traveling in the bloodstream to the brain and enhancing the function of the hippocampus. Yes, indeed, your bones make hormones. We call these endocrine effects, so they're effectively acting as hormones. And one such chemical is something called osteocalcin.”

“No discussion of memory would be complete without a discussion of the ever intriguing phenomena known as deja vu. They evaluated the patterns of neural firing in the hippocampus as subjects learn new things. Neuron a fires, then neuron b fires, then neuron c fires in a particular sequence. found that whether or not those particular neurons were played in the precise sequence that happened when they encoded the memory, or whether or not those neurons were played in a different sequence, or even if those neurons were played activated that is all at once with no temporal sequence, all firing in concert all at once evoked the same behavior and in some sense, the same memory. So at a neural circuit level, this is deja vu.”