The Seven Sins Of Memory – by Dr. Daniel Schacter

10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

As we get older, we often become more forgetful—despite remembering many things clearly from decades past. Why?

Dr. Daniel Shacter takes us on a tour of the brain, and also through evolution, to show how memory is not just one thing, but many. And furthermore, it’s not just our vast memory that’s an evolutionary adaptation, but also, our capacity to forget.

He does also discusses disease that affect memory, including Alzheimer’s, and explores the biological aspects of memory too.

The “seven sins” of the title are seven ways our (undiseased, regular) memory “lets us down”, and why, and how that actually benefits us as individuals and as a species, and/but also how we can modify that if we so choose.

The book’s main strength is in how it separates—or bids us separate for ourselves—what is important to us and our lives and what is not. How and why memory and information processing are often at odds with each other (and what that means for us). And, on a practical note, how we can tip the scales for or against certain kinds of memory.

Bottom line: if you’d like to better understand human memory in all its glorious paradoxes, and put into place practical measures to make it work for you the way you want, this is a fine book for you.

Click here to check out The Seven Sins of Memory, and get managing yours!

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • Live Long, Die Short – by Dr. Roger Landry
  • Tourette’s Syndrome Treatment Options
    Q&A Day at 10almonds tackles Tourette’s syndrome – discussing DBS, medications, CBIT, and speech therapies. No question too complex or trivial!

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • The No-Nonsense Meditation Book – by Dr. Steven Laureys

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    We’ve reviewed books about meditation before, and when we review books, we try to pick ones that have something that make them stand out from the others. So, what stands out in this case?

    The author is a medical doctor and neurologist, with decades of experience focusing on neuronal plasticity and multimodel neural imaging. So, a little beyond “think happy thoughts”-style woo.

    The style of the book is pop-science in tone, but with a lot of hard clinical science underpinning it and referenced throughout, as one would expect of a scientist of Dr. Laurey’s stature (with hundreds of peer-reviewed papers in top-level journals).

    You may be wondering: is this a “how-to” book or a “why-to” book or a “what-happens” book? It’s all three.

    The “how-to” is also, as the title suggests, no-nonsense. We are talking maximum results for minimum mystery here.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to be able to take up a meditative practice and know exactly what it’s doing to your brain (quietening these parts, stimulating and physically growing those parts, etc) then this is the book for you.

    Click here to check out The No-Nonsense Meditation Book, and re-light the less glowy bits of your brain!

    Share This Post

  • Celery vs Cucumber – Which is Healthier?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing celery to cucumber, we picked the celery.

    Why?

    They are both great, of course! But celery came out on top:

    Their macros are very comparable; they’re both 95% water with just enough other things to hold them together, and those other things are in approximately the same proportions in both celery and cucumber.

    In the category of vitamins, however, celery has a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B9, E, and K, as well as slightly more vitamin C. Cucumber, meanwhile, only boasts slightly higher vitamin B1.

    An easy win for celery on the vitamin front!

    Minerals are closer, but celery still comes out on top with its notably higher calcium and potassium content. Cucumber has more iron and zinc, but the margin is smaller.

    As a point in cucumber’s favor, it has been noted for its anti-inflammatory effect in ways that celery hasn’t, but we don’t think this is enough to say it wins over celery sweeping the vitamins category and coming out top for minerals too.

    However! They are both great, so enjoy them both, of course.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Enjoy!

    Share This Post

  • How To Make Your Doctor’s Appointment Do More For You

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Doctor: “So, how are you today?”
    Patient: “Can’t complain; how about you?”

    Hopefully your medical appointments don’t start quite like that, but there can be an element of being “along for the ride” when it comes to consultations. They ask questions, we answer, they prescribe something, we thank them.

    In principle, the doctor should be able to handle that; ask the right questions, determine the problem, and not need too much from you. After all, they have been trained to deal with an unconscious patient, so the fact you can communicate at all is a bonus.

    However, leaving it all to them isn’t really playing the field.

    Before the appointment

    Research your issue, as best you understand it. Some doctors will be very averse to you telling them about having done this (taking it as an affront to their expertise), but here’s the thing:

    You don’t have to tell them.

    You just have to understand as much as possible, so that you will be as “up to speed” as possible in the conversation, and not be quickly out of your depth.

    Have an agenda, based on the above. Literally, have a little set of bullet-points to remind you what you came in to discuss, so that nothing escapes you in the moment. This should also include:

    • If you have additional reasons for a particular concern (e.g. family history of a certain problem), make them known
    • If you plan to request any specific tests or treatments, be able to clearly state your reasons for the specific tests or treatments
    • If you plan to write off any specific tests or treatments as something to which you will not consent, have your reasons ready—in a way that makes it clear it’s something more than “don’t want it”, for example, “I’ve already decided that this treatment would make a sufficient hit to my quality of life, as to make it not worthwhile for me personally” (or whatever the reason may be for you). It needs to be something they can write on their notes instead of simply “patient refused treatment”.

    Compile a record of your symptoms (as appropriate), and any previous tests/treatments (as appropriate), in chronological order. If you take all this with you, perhaps in a nice folder, you will enjoy the following advantages:

    • not forgetting anything
    • ability to answer questions accurately
    • give the (correct) impression you take your health seriously, which means they are more likely to do so also—especially because they will now know that if they fob you off and/or mess something up, you’ll be taking a record of that to your next appointment.

    Plan your outfit. No, you don’t have to dress for the red carpet, but you want to satisfy two main conditions:

    • Accessibility for examination (for example, if you are going in with a knee pain, maybe don’t wear the tight jeans today; if they’re going to take blood, be either sleeveless or have sleeves that are easily moved out of the way, etc)
    • General presentability (it’s a sad fact that doctors are not immune to biases, and will treat people better if they respect them more)

    During the appointment

    Be friendly; doctors (like most people) will respond much better to that than to grumpiness—even if you have good reason for grumpiness and even if the doctor has been trained to help grumpy patients.

    Be confident: when we say “be friendly”, that doesn’t mean to necessarily be so agreeable as to not advocate for yourself. In particular:

    • If they explain something and it isn’t clear to you, ask them to clarify
    • If you disagree with them about a value judgement, say so. By “a value judgement” here we mean things in the realm of subjectivity. If the doctor says you are prediabetic, then you won’t get much mileage out of arguing otherwise; the numbers have the final say on that one. But if the doctor says “the side effects of the treatment you’re requesting will make it not worthwhile for you” and you have understood the side effects and you still disagree, then your opinion counts for more than theirs—it is your decision to make.
    • If they dismiss a concern, ask them to put in writing that they dismissed your concern of X, despite you providing evidence that Y, and it being well-known that Z. Often, rather than doing that, they’ll just fold and actually address your concern instead.

    Writer’s example in that last category: I recently made a request for a bone density scan. I expect my bone density is great, because I do all the right things, however, as both of my parents suffered from osteoporosis and assorted resultant crushed bones and the terrible consequences thereof, I a) have reasonable grounds for extra concern, and b) I believe that even if my bone density is fine now, it’s good to establish a baseline so I can know, in 5, 10, 20 years etc, whether there has been any deterioration. Now, happily the doctor I saw agreed with my assessment at first presentation and so I got the referral, but had she not been, I would have said “Could you please put in writing that I asked for a bone density scan, and you refused, on the grounds that [details about what happened with my parents], and that osteoporosis is known to have a strong genetic component is not, in your opinion, any reason to worry?”

    Be honest, and/but err on the side of overstating your symptoms rather than understating. For example, if it is about a chronic condition and the doctor asks “are you able to do xyz”, take the question as meaning “are you able to do xyz on your worst days?”. You can clarify that if you like in your answer, but you need to include the information that xyz is something that your condition can and sometimes does impede you from doing.

    Leave your embarrassment at the door. To the doctor (unless they are a very unprofessional one), you really are just one more patient with symptoms they have (unless your condition is very rare) seen a thousand times before. If your symptom is embarrassing, it will not faze them and you definitely should not hold back from mentioning it, for example. This goes extra in the case of discussions around sexual health, by the way, in which field the details you’d perhaps rather not share with anybody, are the details they need to adequately treat you.

    After the appointment

    Follow up on anything that doesn’t happen as promised (e.g. referrals, things ordered, etc), to make sure nothing got lost in a bureacratic error.

    Get a second opinion if you’re not satisfied with the first one. Doctors are fallible, and as a matter of professional pride, it’s likely the second doctor will be glad to find something the first doctor missed.

    See also: Make Your Negativity Work For You

    Take care!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • Live Long, Die Short – by Dr. Roger Landry
  • Rewire Your OCD Brain – by Dr. Catherine Pittman & Dr. William Youngs

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    OCD is just as misrepresented in popular media as many other disorders, and in this case, it’s typically not “being a neat freak” or needing to alphabetize things, so much as having uncontrollable obsessive intrusive thoughts, and often in response to those, unwanted compulsions. This can come from unchecked spiralling anxiety, and/or PTSD, for example.

    What Drs. Pittman & Young offer is an applicable set of solutions, to literally rewire the brain (insofar as synapses can be considered neural wires). Leveraging neuroplasticity to work with us rather than against us, the authors talk us through picking apart the crossed wires, and putting them back in more helpful ways.

    This is not, by the way, a book of CBT, though it does touch on that too.

    Mostly, the book explains—clearly and simply and sometimes with illustrationswhat is going wrong for us neurologically, and how to neurologically change that.

    Bottom line: whether you have OCD or suffer from anxiety or just need help dealing with obsessive thoughts, this book can help a lot in, as the title suggests, rewiring that.

    Click here to check out Rewire Your OCD Brain, and banish obsessive thoughts!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Salmon vs Tuna – Which is Healthier?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing salmon to tuna, we picked the tuna.

    Why?

    It’s close, and there are merits and drawbacks to both!

    In terms of macros, tuna is higher in protein, while salmon is higher in fats. How healthy are the fats, you ask? Well, it’s a mix, because while there are plenty of “good” fats in salmon, salmon is also 10x higher in saturated fat and 150% higher in cholesterol.

    So when it comes to fats, if you want to eat fish and have the healthiest fats, one option is to skip the salmon, and instead serve tuna with some extra virgin olive oil.

    We’ll call this section a clear win for tuna.

    On the vitamin front, they are close to equal. Salmon has more of some vitamins, tuna has more of others; all in all we’d say the balance is in salmon’s favor, but by the time a portion of salmon is giving you 350% of your daily requirement, does it really matter that the same portion of tuna is “only” giving you 294% of the daily requirement? It goes like that for a lot of the vitamins they both contain.

    Still, we’ll call this section a nominal win for salmon.

    In the category of minerals, tuna is much higher in iron while salmon is higher in calcium. The rest of the minerals they both have, tuna is comfortably higher—and since the “% of RDA in a portion” figures are double-digit here rather than triple, those margins are relevant this time.

    We’ll call this section a moderate win for tuna.

    Both fish carry a risk of mercury poisoning, but this varies more by location than by fish, so it hasn’t been a consideration in this head-to-head.

    Totting up the sections, this a modest but clear win for tuna.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Farmed Fish vs Wild-Caught: Important Differences!

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Why We’re Called “10almonds”, And Other Questions

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

    As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

    So, no question/request too big or small

    ❝Avid coffee drinker so very interested in the results Also question Is there something that you could take or eat that would prevent the caffeine from stimulating the kidneys? I tried to drink decaf from morning to night not a good result! Thanks❞

    That is a good question! The simple answer is “no” (but keep reading, because all is not lost)

    There’s no way (that we yet know of) to proof the kidneys against the stimulating effect of caffeine. This is especially relevant because part of caffeine’s stimulating effect is noradrenergic, and that “ren” in the middle there? It’s about the kidneys. This is just because the adrenal gland is situated next to them (actually, it’s pretty much sitting on top of them), hence the name, but it does mean that the kidneys are about the hardest thing in the body to have not affected by caffeine.

    However! The effects of caffeine in general can be softened a little with l-theanine (found in tea, or it can be taken as a supplement). It doesn’t stop it from working, but it makes the curve of the effect a little gentler, and so it can reduce some unwanted side effects.

    You can read more about l-theanine here:

    L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?

    ❝How to jump start a inactive metabolism and keep it going? THANKYOU❞

    The good news is, if you’re alive, your metabolism is active (it never stops!). So, it may just need perking up a little.

    As for keeping it going, well, that’s what we’re here for! We’re all in favor of healthy longevity.

    We’ll do a main feature soon on what we can do to influence our metabolism in either direction, but to give some quick notes here:

    • A lot of our metabolism is influenced by genes and is unalterable (without modifying our genes, anyway)
    • Metabolism isn’t just one thing—it’s many. And sometimes, parts of our metabolism can be much quicker or slower than others.
    • When people talk about wanting a “faster metabolism”, they’re usually referring to fat-burning, and that’s just a small part of the picture, but we understand that it’s a focal point for many.

    There really is enough material for a whole main feature on metabolic tweaks, though, so watch this space!

    ❝Why the name “10 Almonds?” Is this recommended by the Doctor? A daily dosage? And, if so, why? Thanks! Please answer me…I truly want to know!❞

    Almonds are very nutritionally dense, and for example 20g of almonds (so, about 20 almonds) would give a 100% daily dose of zinc, amongst other nutrients.

    We also do like to think that we give our readers an easily digestible dose of condensed “nutrition” in the form of health information.

    However! That’s not actually the reason at all. It’s a reference to a viral Facebook hoax! There was a post going around that claimed:

    ❝HEADACHE REMEDY. Eat 10–12 almonds, the equivalent of two aspirins, next time you have a headache❞ ← not true!

    It made us think about how much health-related disinformation there was circulating online! So, calling ourselves 10almonds was a bit of a nod to that story, but also a reminder to ourselves:

    We must always publish information with good scientific evidence behind it!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: