Dr. Wendy Suzuki: Boost Attention & Memory with Science-Based Tools

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is Dr. Wendy Suzuki. Dr. Suzuki is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University and one of the leading researchers in the area of learning and memory. Her laboratory has contributed fundamental textbook understanding of how brain areas such as the hippocampus, which you will learn about today, how the hippocampus and related brain circuits allow us to take certain experiences and commit them to memory so that we can use that information in the future. Dr. Suzuki is also an expert public educator in the realm of science. A few years back, she had a TED talk that essentially went viral. If you haven't seen it already, you should absolutely check it out, in which she describes her experience using exercise as a way to enhance learning and memory. And on the basis of that personal experience, she reshaped her laboratory to explore how things like meditation, exercise and other things that we can do with our physiology and our psychology can allow us to learn faster, to commit things to memory longer, and indeed to reshape our cognitive performance in a variety of settings. As such, I am delighted to announce that Dr. Suzuki is now not only running a laboratory at New York University, but she is the incoming dean of arts and science at New York University. And of course she was selected for that role for her many talents. But one of the important aspects of her program, she tells me, is going to be to incorporate the incredible power of exercise, meditation and other behavioral practices for enhancing learning, for improving stress management and other things to optimize student performance. Today you are going to get access to much of that information so that you can apply those tools in your daily life as well. Dr. Suzuki is also an author of several important books. The most recent one is entitled Good Anxiety, harnessing the power of the most misunderstood emotion, and a previous book entitled Healthy Brain, Happy Life, a personal program to activate your brain and do everything better. And while that is admittedly a very pop science type title, I will remind you that she is one of the preeminent memory researchers in the world and has been for quite a while. So the information that you'll glean from those books is both rich in depth and breadth and is highly applicable. By the end of today's discussion, you will have learned from Dr. Suzuki a large amount of knowledge about how memories are formed, how they are lost, and you will have a much larger kit of tools to apply for your efforts to learn better, to remember better, and to apply that information in the ways that best serve you. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. Our first sponsor is athletic greens. Athletic Greens is an all in one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens, and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With athletic greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin d three, k two there are a ton of data now showing that vitamin d three is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D three, and k two is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body, and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin d three, k two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are in element, and those are sodium, magnesium, and potassium. But it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium, and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized if the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off. Our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. That's lmmnt.com Huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to elementlmnt.com Huberman today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, Nidra sessions, and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditations since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app, turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states, and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try, and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga Nidra, and something similar to it called nonsleep deep Rest, or NSTR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Wendy Suzuki.