Now two insight into our memory from neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Genova.

It's part of Katie's next chapter initiative, focusing on the rewards and challenges of aging memories.

Fascinating.

It's essential to so much of who we are and what we do from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep.

And even then, that the mechanisms behind memory are fast at work.

So I think that it's fascinating that at any age we can learn anything and memorize anything and remember we're limitless in what we can remember.

So at any age you can learn to play guitar or a new language or all the words to the latest Taylor Swift song.

We can remember anything if we give it the right input.

Dr. Genova gave a presentation called How We Remember and Why We Forget at Western Kentucky University.

A guest of the Presidential Speaker series.

She has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University, and her TED talks have gotten millions of views.

Janov is the bestselling author of several books, including Still Alice, which became a movie and won Julianne Moore an Oscar for Best Actress.

Genova posed with the cast on several red carpets back in 2015.

She calls her novels, quote, informed fiction.

My grandmother had Alzheimer's, and as the neuroscientist in my family, I did everything I could to understand it.

And so I read everything that was out there at the time.

So I read the scientific research papers, the clinical disease management books, like the 36 hour day.

Everything was written by a scientist, a clinician, a caregiver, a social worker.

There were all these from the outside looking in.

And so while I learned a lot, what I didn't learn was, what does it feel like from the perspective of the person with it?

What does it feel like to be my grandmother?

And as her granddaughter, I felt a lot of sympathy for her.

I felt so bad for her and so heartbroken for her, so heartbroken for all of us.

But that sympathy that keeps your experiences emotionally detached and separate, it's kind of a form of other izing.

I didn't know how to feel with her.

I didn't know how to accept the reality of her Alzheimer's and just be comfortable with her as she was.

And I realized that, oh, interestingly, fiction is a place where you can walk in someone else's shoes and experience what it's like to be someone else.

And empathy is really what collapses that emotional distance and allows us to connect.

And in the absence of a cure, this is really what all of us want with our loved ones with Alzheimer's is to stay emotionally connected.

Mm hmm.

Terrific insight.

Jokanovic's next book.

More or less.

Mattie is about a young woman with bipolar disorder.

It comes out in January.