The Science Behind Memory with Dr. Charan Ranganath | 1152 | Dave Asprey

Does having an active love life improve your memory?

We know that social isolation can be a risk factor for dementia. Having an active love life, it depends on how you want to think about that. Are we talking sex life or are we talking.

I'm talking about sex life and love together, but it could be just an active sex life.

I guess I would say for both, you're probably living a more memorable life.

If you didn't you just say you had a bad memory. I'm just.

I'm just kidding. Well, I didn't tell you about some of the things I do remember, but.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey today. I'm hoping you remember the episode because it's an episode about memory with one of the world's leading experts in memory. And this is really important because whether you're talking about things in your relationship or your career or just becoming a better, more functional human being, which is the whole point of this podcast, if you don't remember the things that are important to you, there's probably a reason. And it may be that you don't have a skill. It's certainly Jim Quick is a dear friend who's been on who teaches skills, but maybe it's something deeper in the way your memory works. I've been studying this for years because I couldn't remember most of what was happening during the day when I had chronic fatigue syndrome. And today people ask me all the time, how do you remember all this biohacking stuff? And I have some theories about that. But rather than just my theories, given that I am a professional but unlicensed biohacker, there is no biohacking license, which means you can't take it away from me saying what's true. So let's talk to a guy who really, really has studied memory at every possible level and a guy who was not offended by my comment there. Some doctors get pissed when I say that. Others, like, cheer because, like, I wanted to speak the truth, but I was afraid so. Dr. Taran Raganath, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

You're a professor at the center for Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis.

That's right, yes.

Does that mean you only study cows? Because this is in central California, and, I mean, you guys are known for ag. What do you. What do you study memory at an AG school for, brother?

Oh, well, that's actually a good question sometimes, but we're also Known for our vet school. We're also known for our vet school engineering. And actually, we have the best viticulture and enology program in the world. So you want good wine, this is the place to be. And actually, it turns out we're probably also one of the top, say, four places for memory research in the world.

It's a fantastic school. And I'm a little bit bitter because when I applied there for my undergrad, I chose UC Davis as my top choice because it was close enough to where I lived in Manteca, California, if you guys are wondering. Which is like, a little unknown town, except that it's where 99 and i5 cross.

Oh, no. It had those gray water slides.

Yeah, I used to work at the water slides, believe it or not.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah. So, man, going back to high school. So I was really choosing it because I knew I could come home and do laundry. And then they didn't let me into UC Davis, so I swore revenge, and I just got my revenge by making fun of the AG school. So there.

It is.

By the way, it is a fantastic memory school. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, is a good. Is it. It's a good reputation. But more importantly, you run the Dynamic Memory Lab, which is like, how do we all get better at this? And you look at brain imaging, computational modeling, and, like, all this stuff. That's hard science for something that also is like, I can or I can't remember. Memory seems like a mushy field. How do you know if someone has a good memory?

Well, that's part of what I wanted to write the book about, because I think people have this misconception that having a good memory means being able to remember everything. And it's a bit like sort of saying, okay, well, the ideal way to decorate your house is to throw as much junk in your house as possible. Right? And so, like, you, if you're, like, looking at Marie Kondo and you'd be, oh, why aren't you hoarding more? This is terrible. Why are you saying goodbye to all these possessions? And so I think when people say, I want to remember, like, I want to have a good memory, they're usually saying, I just want to memorize everything. And I don't think that's what our brains are designed to do. And I don't think that's good memory in the first place.

So our brain should be more like Marie Kondo, like, only remember the important stuff.

The important stuff. It should be organized it should be easily, it should be easy to find what you need when you need it, and you should be able to lose the stuff that's not important. I mean, think of all the temporary passwords you've had to do. I mean, maybe you're better at not forgetting your passwords that I have in the first place, but. But think of all the temporary passwords, hotel room numbers that you've had. Just so many things that we encounter that we don't need to remember. Right. And so our brains aren't really well equipped to take in all that information. Computers are. And so I'm all for outsourcing boring memorization to my machines and I stick with the intelligent stuff. That's what I like to tell myself anyway.

Do you actively teach?

Yeah, yeah, I teach. I teach an undergraduate class in memory. I teach a class in brain imaging. And yeah, basically that's. That's what I do.

Do you allow your students to use Google and Chat GPT during exams?

I have. Yet I still haven't seen like the full ChatGPT thing going in terms of exam, but.

But do you just allow it explicitly because you said you want to outsource boring work? Just.

Well, it's a really good question, actually. I mean, yeah, so chatgpt, it's actually a very good question about what should we outsource and what shouldn't we outsource.

Yeah.

And I think ChatGPT, I think, is very good for outsourcing in terms of, like, a lot of people use it right now for grammar proofreading for people who speak English as a second language. I think it could be super helpful. As far as generative work, it's junk, right? I mean, it's like I've never gotten anything good out of Chat GPT that's actually intelligent. But that's a. That's a conversation about memory. You think?

Yeah, I love it when people send me spam emails written by Chat GPT that you can tell are written by Chat GPT. And it's like, dude, you couldn't even take the time to write the spam that you sent me. Like you're. You want my attention. You sent me a spam and you didn't even write it. It gets. It's like disrespectful to you. At least proofread your Chat GPT spams. So that would be my request. And if you're a student in a memory class and use ChatGPT, you better do such a good job with it that no one can tell. And at that point you probably did something that maybe was net positive. Now you wrote your book called why We Remember. Did you use chat GPT to write your book?

No. Nope, actually I didn't. I was. I mean, for one thing, I have yet to figure out how to write the right prompts to get chatgpt to give me something that's not garbage. But I think as a memory researcher I find this be a fascinating moment because I think a lot of what happens is our brains are constantly trying to tweak, to adapt to whatever task we have to do. And I think rather than ChatGPT getting better and becoming less crappy, I think people are just going to adapt their language to be as communicate as easily as possible with generative AI. And so I think it's an interesting moment to see whether people are going to change the way they communicate to be more chatgpt like, as opposed to getting chatgpt to be more intelligent and human. Like it's a, it's. We'll see where this goes.

I'm very curious and I'm hoping to get Mo Gaudat on who is the head of Google's R and D who wrote a really good book called Scary Smart about that. I, I saw him at a recent conference and there's, there's a lot going on there that, that will probably affect human memory. But let's get into human memory and how it works now before we like merge our consciousness without implants, hopefully with, with all the different AI projects that are out there. Take me through the basics of human memory. What's it for?

Well, in the book I argue that what memory is for is it's not about the past, it's about the present and the future. And what I mean by that is if you actually look at why you need this ability to remember, it's not about the past. Because as an animal you survive the past, right? So if anything's happening that's critical for survival, it's in the present and the future. And that is why if you look at like the neurobiology of memory, what you see over and over again is the factors that promote plasticity, the factors that promote a memory being able to last over time are factors that basically are involved in things that are biologically important. So the chemicals like noradrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, these are all chemicals I imagine many of your listeners know a lot about already. Those are released during biologically important moments, whether it's fear, anxiety, stress, reward, and those are all chemicals that promote plasticity and without these chemicals, it's a lot harder to get a memory that's going to stick around in life last. So what it's telling us is, is that our brains are not trying to carry everything with us. It's trying to carry what is most likely to be useful in the future.

Your book is called why we Remember. Can you tell me in two sentences why we remember?

Well, I guess I would go back and say memory. We remember so that we can understand the present and anticipate the future.

Is there an evolutionary reason for that?

I think so. I think we live in an uncertain world, right? And I think that what we want to be able to do is be able to maximize the amount of predictability, maximize the amount of information that we can get. So one of the things that you see with memory is that it tends to emphasize things that are, as I was saying, like, biologically significant. Like, I almost got eaten by a bear or I found somebody who was really attractive, or, hey, here's a good site for water, right? These are things that get emphasized in memory, and they're associated with motivational states and emotions and so forth. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that memory prioritizes these things that are emotionally or biologically significant, because that's the stuff that you need.

One of the most important things you can have in the world today is a natural and effective way to manage your stress. And that's why I love my sunlight and infrared sauna. It's not just another gadget. The sunlight and sauna gives you a quiet space where you can unwind, rejuvenate, and recover. Studies prove that infrared saunas can lower your cortisol levels and reduce stress and sunlight and infrared sauna goes even deeper. It gives your body a heat that penetrates and detoxes more than you'll find in a traditional sauna. A standout feature of Sunlighten is their reputation. Sunlighten delivers the highest quality of infrared on the market, and I've used it for almost 10 years. To get a sauna for your home Today, head to sunlighten.comdave and save up to $600 on your order. It feels like some people are abnormally good at remembering stuff. I had a chance a few years ago to have dinner with Ed o'. Neill. Al Bundy.

Yeah.

And it was really interesting because he sat down with a friend and started talking about football scores from college games in the 80s. I'm like, I. I thought Al Bundy did that. But it was actually, you could tell he remembered this amazing amount of detail, and I didn't even recognize the names of the teams because I'm not a sports guy, I'm a PubMed guy. But I was also thinking, how much memory does it take up if you have an enormous collection of kind of trivial details like that? It was trivial to me, but maybe not trivial to you. Does that mean you're forgetting something else?

No, I don't think so. There's not really much evidence suggests that we hit true capacity limitations in memory. I think what happens is that when you build up a lot of expertise, what can happen is it just becomes effortless to be able to attach new information because you already have so much information in the background that you really don't have a lot of new information to encode. So you can see this in studies of chess players, for instance. Chess players are just incredibly good at memorizing not only what's on a board at a given time, but entire sequences of moves throughout, like a match, let's say. And likewise, in the book, I talk about LeBron James and his photographic memory, so to speak, for basketball games. I think anytime people have expertise, it gives them enormous power and memory.

My son started studying the Rubik's Cube a few years ago and got to where he could solve it in under 10 seconds pretty reliably. And we were going to go to, you know, a Rubik's Cube championship thing. And then the pandemic happened. And after it ended, I said, do you still want to go? And he said, dad, it just takes too much time to remember all those moves, you know, because he had memorized hundreds and hundreds of algorithms in order to solve it really quickly. And he knows which algorithm to apply at which time. And it. It was an amazing feat of memory, I think, just driven through curiosity because, you know, I wasn't externally motivating him to do it. It was all internally generated motivation. And I was just so impressed when people develop an expertise and they remember a whole bunch of stuff and then you wait a couple years and all of a sudden it's like it's gone. Or you have to keep it up by working, remembering something, because it's complex things like chess. You stop playing chess for five years, you're not very good at chess. Why is that?

Well, so one of the things that we know is that our brains are constantly warping and adapting and remain plastic throughout our lifetime. So I think there's a little bit of a myth that says, like, oh, plasticity. If you don't use it you lose it. Your brain's always plastic. But the problem is, is that if you're not doing a particular skill that you've learned, then, yeah, that skill can become somewhat undone by the changes that are happening in the brain over time. Sometimes, though, also it's a matter of simply getting yourself back into the mindset that you used to be in when you used to do those activities too. That's something we call context. And so both of those are true. There is probably some element of losing a little bit of that skill over time as your brain is using resources to try to adapt to new things that you're doing. And some of it is getting back into that mindset that you used to be in while you were in the game originally.

When you forget something, do people make fun of you?

My wife does. I don't know if you have that in your life, but yeah, people make fun of me, but at the same time, they kind of expected of me. I've sort of cultivated a little bit of the absent minded professor Persona around me. The other thing is, is that I live in a community of memory researchers and most of us have terrible memories. At least that's what we tell ourselves.

I have a problem I want to ask you about. I think I'm several standard deviations worse than the average person. It feels like some people I know, every memory they have is time and date stamped. And you can say, what did you do last month? And they know, what did you do five years ago? My God, they know. And for me, two weeks ago and six weeks ago, I just did a bunch of crap in the before time. And I have no indexing of time on my memories whatsoever. It makes me really focus on the present and on creating the future. But I always imagine, like, if I had to like go to court and they're like, you know, what, what were you doing with the whatever with the, the plaintiff two weeks ago? I'd say, if I can't look at my phone, I have no idea what I was doing. Like, I. I'm. It's a blank. How do we remember time?

Well, so time, there's. There's a lot of different theories about this. I'll give you my take. So my take would be that when we remember time, we're usually reconstructing it, right? We're not. You don't have a stamp in your brain that tells you, hey, it's 11:30 right now. But for instance, right now it's very bright outside. I can have a sense that it's morning time. Just from looking outside. And so if I remember this event later on, I could go, yeah, we did this interview in the morning. I can also start to make some inferences based on my knowledge. Like, I usually do my podcast interviews in the morning. And so that allows me to get a little bit more precision and so forth. Some people are very kind of OCD ish about the time and the date, and they really do attend to it and think about it. But for a lot of time in the brain, what you see is there's just states that happen over time. I'm more awake in the morning, I'm more sleepy in the afternoon. And all of those things make this moment in time unique. Now, when people will often say, this happened on this date at this time, sometimes they're accurate, sometimes they're not, but they're. Sometimes people can be quite confident and just misremember a date and time. So I wouldn't necessarily say. If people say, I remember everything and I remember it perfectly, I wouldn't necessarily trust them.

Interesting. And some people are probably more memorable than others. Has your research on memory had any effect on people testifying in court? It feels like people's memories are pretty much random access, and they remember a bunch of stuff that didn't happen. When you present your research to the legal system, what would that do?

Well, there's other people, I think, who do more interactions with the legal system than I do. So, for instance, Elizabeth Loftus at UC Irvine's done a lot with this, and so I haven't had that much of an opportunity. I have talked to some people, and I describe one in the book. But one of the interesting things, I think, that comes up when you have to talk to law enforcement is about this idea that memory is neither true nor false. And I think this is something that a lot of people just have trouble wrapping their head around is uncertainty. Because really, I can remember some parts of an event very, very well and other parts of an event completely wrong. Sometimes I can remember all of the elements of the event and put it together in a story that's entirely false. And so there's a lot of care that needs to be taken in terms of, like, questioning people, for instance, if they're accused of a crime and making sure you don't suggest the details of the crime to the person that that is being questioned, because that can later become incorporated into their own memories. Because just the act of trying to remember something can create a new memory.

One thing I've learned through hundreds and hundreds of hours of Meditating with electrodes on my head with my neuro neurofeedback clinic called 40 Years of Zen is that my powers of self deception are legion. Like, like I will believe whatever the heck I feel or I remember whether or not it's fully accurate or not. And I'll be fully, fully convinced and then I'll see a video or something. Oh my gosh, I remembered it that way, but it wasn't. Why do we believe our made up memories so much?

Well, I think we have this idea that memory is supposed to be a replay of the past. And so if that's true, then if you remember something, it must be true. And what I like to tell people is as a scientist, I collect data, but then I generate theories to explain the data, and then I try to test the theories. And I think a lot of what happens in memory is that you get little bits and pieces of our past experience and then we generate theories to explain what happened based on that. But that theory is different from the data itself. It's an act of imagination. If you actually scan people's brains while they imagine things that have never happened, and you scan them while they're remembering things that did happen, those brain activity patterns look very, very similar to each other. It's hard for an expert to tell the difference.

Wow.

So what that tells you is that our ability to conceptualize an event is really critical to our ability to remember the event. But it's also something that's a piece together. It's a narrative that we create in our heads. And it can be an extraordinarily convincing illusion that can make us believe that everything is accurate even though it's not. Because we're often not aware of that storytelling element, we just confuse it with the data and memory.

You're an expert on memory. If you could get, say, neuralink, and it gave you fully accurate memory to everything you've experienced, what effect would that have on your memory?

Ooh, this is a good question. So I've actually, I was supposed to have a meeting with one of my colleagues who does brain computer interfaces last week, and it turned out I broke my arm, so I had to postpone it. So this is a good question for preparing for that meeting. I would say that we have to be careful because there's really, I think again, this issue is like, we want to remember more, more, more. And I think, no, you wanna remember better. And so the problem is not necessarily getting like, actually, I mean, this is. I'm sorry if I sound like I'm Rambling. But it's like I'm just thinking, this is such a rich question and I just wanna go to town with this.

Go for it.

But I have a postdoctoral researcher I'm working with and he's coming from the world of computer vision, actually. And one of the things that he's been studying is the limitations of computer vision models at certain kinds of challenges. For instance, if you give like an image and it can't tell which ones are the same and which ones are different, and it turns out the ones that the computer vision models struggle on and people do, well, it's because people, people never actually see an entire image. They just move their eyes and grab little bits and pieces, and then the brain stitches that together into a feeling of what's in front of you, a meaningfully integrated image. And it turns out that the, that the problems that these computer vision models have are on images that require people to make a lot of series of eye movements and then integrate that information. So what this tells us is people on the one hand are getting less information than a computer vision model. A computer vision model gets every pixel.

Of an image all at once, right?

A human is just grabbing little bits and pieces, but then the brain is meaningfully integrate that sequence, integrating the information that comes in from that sequence of eye movements into a meaningful representation of what's in front of you. And that's the magic of vision, that's the magic of memory. It's the magic of language, is that ability to make the most out of a small amount of information. And so to me, I think the challenge with something like, you know, if you were to come up with some kind of prosthetic, is you have to move away from this idea of recording as being the function of memory and something that's much more strategic, opportunistic, getting the information that's most new and useful and prioritizing that in building together a memory. And so I think there were neuralink is really brilliant in terms of the hardware, in terms of the AI. I don't think they're really that far ahead at all. But the hardware has been absolute genius. And I don't think they're anywhere near close enough to understanding anything to do with human memory.

Hey, biohacker. So you've heard of stem cells. You know, they're powerful. And maybe you wonder about stem cell therapy, but the process seems kind of intense because it is. Well, there's a new company called Stem Regen that I've been working with. The founder, Christian Dropo, is a Stem cell scientist, he's traveled the world in search of unknown plant extracts that can stimulate the release of your body's own stem cells right from your bone marrow. His discoveries led to an amazing breakthrough in stem cell therapy. Stem Regen is the world's first stem cell enhancer. Just two capsules will release 10 million of your own stem cells into circulation. Those stem cells migrate throughout your body and help your body naturally repair and renew itself. This is a new, powerful and very cost effective way to get the benefits of stem cells without having to hop on an airplane. And how about 20% off? Now go to stemregen co. Dave. That's stemregen co. Dave. It seems like human vision. We have that stochastic movement of our eyes. So it seems like we're getting little tiny images in a series over time. They're not even coming in all at once. So we never get all the images we think we do. We fill in the blanks between them automatically. So if you were going to do computer vision, right, you would teach an AI model on little bits of the image. Except I will bet you something good like a cup of coffee, that our bodies, probably our mitochondria, are selecting how the stochastic movement works and how it prioritizes images. And we just don't know how it does that. So even if you randomly picked images from the image and gave it to an AM model, it wouldn't work because there is inherent cell level intelligence. That's why we have extra mitochondria in our retinal cells, for instance. And there's, there's a lot of just beautiful nuance to hidden systems. I call it the MEAT operating system. And because we perceive the very highest level, like what comes out of the computer monitor, we think that's what it is, but it really isn't. How soon do you think it's going to be, given the advances in knowledge and imaging and AI, before we have a really accurate view of how it's working in the brain? Is it a five year problem or a 50 year problem?

Well, I would say that in terms of just what guides are eye movements, I think that's a, that's a lot of that is figured out already in the sense of. So I have a colleague named John Henderson who studies eye movements and one of the things he finds is, is that people's eyes gravitate towards. It used to be thought, oh, this is bright and shiny, your eyes should be gravitating towards that. And now what we realize is that people gravitate towards the most meaningful parts of an image. So if I took a scene in front of you and I just deleted parts of it, the places where you move your eyes are the ones where if you deleted it, you'd actually have trouble understanding what you're looking at at. Right. And so there's a very active sampling going on. And so I would argue it's not, it seems stochastic if you're looking at it from the outside, but actually there's a method to it. And that method is based on a lot, based on memory actually and knowledge. And so I think we're, we're farther along on that problem. But then figuring out how to teach a computer vision system do that, that's a whole nother thing. Because they're not designed like the brain, they're really designed for too much information.

So interesting. Some people think it's, it's evil that we want to solve this problem. I, I'm pretty neutral about it. You can do evil with a tractor or you can grow food with a tractor. It depends on how you use it. So I'm hopeful that we build AI to do good things for humanity. And one of them would be understanding ourselves better. And I think from a longevity standpoint, that's already happening and building a system for that many others are. And I, I'm very hopeful that in the world of neuroscience, I'm also doing a little bit of work there just around more trauma resolution and increasing cognitive performance that we're also about to make some major breakthroughs. But one of the things that's most basic for improving your memory is exercise. In your book you talk about why exercise is so important for memory. Why?

Well, it has so many, so many great effects. One is, and I think you probably have talked to your listeners about this. I imagine probably one of the biggest ones is it improves the vasculature. It improves like the ability of the body to deliver blood flow to the brain. And so that allows you to more rapidly convert energy and be able to use it to power the brain to do various things. It has an anti inflammatory effect, it can improve resilience to stress, it can improve sleep, it can stimulate neurogenesis, which is the creation of new cells in the hippocampus, which is an area of the brain that's important for memory. And that's just scratching the surface. I mean the number of benefits that you get is just amazing. So I definitely do recommend exercise.

I use microdose Cialis to get a similar effect in my brain. And there's studies now showing that people who use the larger doses for ED actually have a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's. But it looks like about 6 milligrams is a longevity dose because it improves blood flow in the brain. One of my goals is to not die of Alzheimer's or with Alzheimer's disease. And I feel like exercise and microdosing Cialis is a good combination for that. Good idea, bad idea.

Ooh. I do not know nearly enough about the topic. I think it's very important, as a scientist, when I say I have no idea, I would say I have no idea about something like that. And I doubt there's clinical trials, really, that would give you any kind of insight.

I think there are actually. There are some showing increases in blood flow in the brain using either FMRI or spect.

Oh, yeah. Well. And then translating that to Alzheimer's risk is just extraordinarily difficult. Right. I mean.

Oh, there are definitely epidemiological data points, like very strong. Something like a 70 or 80% reduction in people who regularly take ED medications.

Yeah, I don't know about that data and I don't want to come off like I'm an expert.

Yeah, no, you can't endorse the data. So you see the study.

Yeah, yeah. But what I can say is that there's so much. I mean, I think it's like the thing that I really want people to walk away with is this understanding that your brain is a part of your body and everything's connected. People sometimes say, oh, trauma is stored in your body, or, you know, blah, blah, but everything's connected. And so gut, microbiome, hugely important for brain function. Oral hygiene, hugely important for brain function. We're learning so much even now about things that are involved in bodily health. They can affect your resilience, your cognitive ability to maintain cognition as you get older and reducing your risk for Alzheimer's. And so I would really encourage people to just think about the lowest hanging fruit. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you getting exercise? Are you engaging in practices that can be allowing you to focus on the information that matters? I think. I'm sure your show probably emphasizes a whole lot of tangible ways where people can, at no cost, really improve the quality of their cognition over time.

Does having an active love life improve your memory?

We know that social isolation can be a risk factor for dementia. Having an active love life, I have to. It depends on how you want to think about that. Are we talking sex life or are we talking.

I'm talking about sex life and Love together, but it could be just an active sex life life.

But I guess I would say for both, you're probably living a more memorable life.

If you didn't you just say you had a bad memory.

I'm just, I'm just kidding. Well, I, I didn't tell you about some of the things I do remember, but you're getting me in serious trouble. But yeah, getting back to the issue, I think that their social connection is a huge part in maintaining our cognitive health over time. And one of the things that I noticed, and I know this is a bit tangential to your question, but it's very serious. And so that's why to convey it to your listeners, is that I used to do work in neuropsychology where we would test people for their risks for Alzheimer's. And what we found was that people who are older, who are clinically depressed, were very, very hard to distinguish from people who actually were in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Mental health is hugely important for cognitive health and actually can even increase your risk factor. If you have serious mental illness, it can increase your risk factors for all sorts of neurodegenerative disease. So I think things like having a good love life, having, having social relationships with people you care about is hugely important as we get older.

I've definitely seen even studies that show that having an, a connected love life to intimacy plus, you know, relationship, you know, does reduce your risk of all sorts of, of diseases and all sorts of mental illness. So I look at that as one of the nutrients that powers extended longevity. And, you know, being socially isolated and living forever is probably not going to happen. Right. And it's, there's a lot of individual variables there, but it feels like because emotions are connected, both intimacy and to memory, that having more intimacy would give you more emotions and you might remember more. But that's totally going out on a limb.

Well, you will have, probably, you'll have emotions. And I think the, the issue is what kinds of memories do you want to have first of all? And I think having intimate relationships gives you the kinds of memories that will be good for your mental health later on. And yeah, as you mentioned, I think when you don't have these intimate relationships, it can have toxic effects on your health and that can have very bad effects on cognition and memory. So it's, I can imagine you can have no good relationships and you can have lots of memories that are terrible memories of, you know, fights that you're starting with people and being scared and being anxious all the time or whatever, but those aren't necessarily the memories you want to have, and it's not going to be good for your cognitive health in the long run, for sure. And, and we could see this in people with chronic stress, that if you have chronic severe stress, it can absolutely be neurotoxic.