Dr Wendy Suzuki Boost Attention Memory With Science Based Tools

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman talks with Dr. Wendy Suzuki, professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, incoming dean of its College of Arts and Science, and author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Suzuki spent much of her career studying how the hippocampus turns experiences into long-term memories, and then, after a personal transformation through exercise, redirected her lab toward the question of how everyday habits like cardiovascular exercise, meditation, sleep and spoken affirmations improve memory, attention and mood.

The tone is friendly, upbeat and practical, a conversation between two longtime neuroscience colleagues who clearly enjoy each other's company. It opens with the basic science of memory and the famous patient H.M., moves through Suzuki's personal story and the biology of how exercise helps the brain, and then turns to her published and unpublished studies, her own daily routine, and simple tools that anyone can use to improve focus and memory.

The Discussion Explores:

• The four things that make experiences memorable: novelty, repetition, association and emotional resonance
• What the hippocampus does, what patient H.M. taught us, and its role in imagination as well as memory
• Why fearful experiences can be stamped in after a single event
• Suzuki's morning routine of tea meditation, exercise, a cold shower finish and more sleep
• How she went from overworked and 25 pounds overweight to a neuroscientist of exercise, and how her father's dementia shaped that path
• The two pathways from muscle and liver to BDNF, and evidence for new neurons in the adult human hippocampus
• Study results on the acute and long-term effects of exercise, including "every drop of sweat counted"
• Affirmations, a 10- to 12-minute daily meditation, and the three top tools for attention: exercise, meditation and sleep

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

What Makes Something Memorable

Suzuki says four things make experiences memorable. First is novelty: our attention is drawn to new things, and paying attention is part of what makes memories stick. Second is repetition. Third is association, linking the new thing to things you already know, like meeting someone who shares many of your friends. Fourth is emotional resonance: we remember the happiest and saddest moments of our lives, along with funny and surprising ones. That last factor reflects an interaction between the amygdala, which processes emotional and especially threatening situations, and the hippocampus, the key structure for forming long-term memories.

Some memories form in a single experience, especially negative ones, because the brain evolved to protect us. Suzuki recalls coming home from work at the NIH in Washington, D.C. to find her apartment door pried open with a crowbar and her nicest things stolen; for years afterward, rounding that corner put her in a terrible state. Huberman links this to what neuroscientists call conditioned place aversion and preference: the brain readily links a place with a bodily state, good or bad.

The Hippocampus: Memory, Identity and Imagination

The hippocampus, whose name means seahorse, is a beautiful, curling structure deep in the brain. Its role is clearest in patient H.M., who had both hippocampi removed in 1954 to treat severe epilepsy and immediately lost the ability to form new memories for facts and events. Suzuki adds that later MRI scans showed part of his posterior hippocampus was actually left intact, which complicates how his case is interpreted. On Huberman's question about where memories are stored, she says long-term memories do end up in the cortex, but the hippocampus can hold them for a very long time, making it a kind of long-term intermediate storage area.

For Suzuki, the hippocampus is personal: "The hippocampus and what it does really defines our own personal histories". Newer research shows it also supports imagination: without it, people can't imagine situations they've never experienced. As she puts it: "Anytime you need to associate something together, either for your past, your present, or your future, you are using your hippocampus".

Suzuki's Morning Routine

Suzuki shares the routine she follows seven days a week. She starts with a 45-minute tea meditation, meditating over brewing and drinking tea, which she learned from a monk who runs an institute in Taiwan. Then she does a 30-minute cardio and weights workout, followed by a warm shower that ends with a blast of cold water. The cold was painful at first but is now something she misses; if she forgets it, she sometimes gets back in the shower. Huberman explains that cold reliably triggers adrenaline and noradrenaline release, and cites a 2000 paper showing circulating dopamine rising to about 2.5 times baseline and staying elevated for hours.

Sleep underlies everything. During the pandemic Suzuki ran sleep experiments on herself and found she was getting six and a half hours when she needed seven and a half to eight. Now that she gets that extra hour, mostly by going to bed earlier, she says she approaches difficult tasks more willingly, tries longer and harder, and her brain works better.

From Workaholic to Exercise Neuroscientist

While working toward tenure at NYU, Suzuki did nothing but work, ate lots of takeout, gained 25 pounds and was very stressed. On a solo river rafting trip in Peru, she was the weakest person in the group, and when she came home she started going to the gym, beginning with a hip-hop dance class she was terrible at but enjoyed. A year and a half later, having lost the 25 pounds, she was writing an NIH grant when a thought struck her for the first time: "grant writing went well today". She realized she could focus longer and remember details more easily, which led her to wonder what exercise does to the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.

What made it a mission was a call from her mother: her father had gotten lost driving home from a 7-Eleven seven blocks from their house. He was later diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia. Her father, an engineer who helped build Silicon Valley in the 1970s, had not been very active, while her mother played team tennis into her 80s. Seeing her own memory, focus and mood improve just as her father's declined convinced her this could help millions of people, especially an aging population.

How Exercise Changes the Brain

Every time you move your body, Suzuki says, you release neurochemicals such as dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline, and aerobic exercise also releases a growth factor called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which helps new brain cells grow in the hippocampus. She describes each workout as giving your brain "this wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals", and says regular exercise means "we all have the capacity to grow a bigger, fatter, fluffier hippocampus". She doesn't claim exercise would cure her father's disease, but hopes entering her 70s with a bigger hippocampus would delay how much such a disease could affect her memory.

She explains two studied pathways from body to brain. First, working muscles release a myokine that crosses the blood-brain barrier and stimulates BDNF, shown in running rats. Second, the liver releases the ketone beta-hydroxybutyrate during exercise, which also crosses into the brain and boosts BDNF. Huberman clarifies that this doesn't mean you need a ketogenic diet. On new neurons, Suzuki says that after Rusty Gage's early work at the Salk Institute, newer studies using better techniques suggest new neurons are born in the adult human hippocampus into the ninth decade of life, although it remains debated. Huberman notes the research has focused almost entirely on cardiovascular exercise, and studies of weight training and high-intensity intervals are still needed.

What the Studies Show About Exercise and Memory

The minimum dose for mood, Suzuki says, is about 10 minutes of walking, which studies show can shift mood; for bigger effects on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex you need cardio that raises your heart rate, and even a power walk counts. A single 30- to 45-minute aerobic session reliably improves mood, prefrontal attention (measured with the Stroop test) and reaction time. In one of her published studies, these effects were still present two hours after a workout, the longest she measured. In unpublished pandemic data with people in their 20s to 90s, 30 minutes of age-appropriate exercise lowered anxiety, depression and hostility scores and raised energy, and older participants improved even more on attention tests. Because of this, she says "the best time to do your exercise is right before you need to use your brain in the most important way", which for most people means mornings, though exercising whenever you can still helps.

Her study of low-fit adults aged 30 to mid-50s (exercising less than 30 minutes a week) compared three months of spin classes two to three times a week (45-minute classes) with competitive video Scrabble. The exercisers had better mood, body image and motivation to exercise, and improved on the Stroop test, a memory task requiring them to tell similar items apart, and a spatial memory task in a virtual city. A second, unpublished study let already moderately fit people increase their spin classes up to seven a week, and found that "every drop of sweat counted": the more they added, the better their mood and hippocampal memory. She also cites a 2018 Swedish study: women who were highly fit in their 40s "gained nine more years of good cognition later in life" compared with less-fit women, though she stresses it is correlational.

Suzuki uses a video workout program called Daily Burn, 30 minutes of varied routines including kickboxing, and has built up from four or five days a week to seven. Huberman emphasizes the power of a daily, "non-negotiable habit, since people start bargaining when told to hit a weekly total, and says doing it at the same time each day makes it easier. On aging, he says: you absolutely don't want to be the control experiment".

Affirmations and Mindset

Suzuki is a certified instructor of intenSati, a workout created by Patricia Moreno that combines kickboxing, dance, yoga and martial arts moves with spoken affirmations, such as saying "I am strong" with each punch. The first time she tried it, she felt idiotic and thought she was in the wrong class, but by the end she was yelling the affirmations and left feeling great. Research shows positive affirmations can change mood, and she says the practice revealed how many negative things she said to herself. Huberman connects this to Alia Crum's research showing that beliefs about a behavior shape its effects, and to Ethan Kross's book Chatter on countering negative inner dialogue.

Meditation and the Present Moment

In a study Suzuki published, people did a short daily guided body-scan meditation (about 12 minutes) for eight weeks. Surprisingly, people stuck with the meditation better than with the control group's daily podcast listening, which she calls the highest retention rate she's ever had in a study like this. The meditators handled a stress test better and showed improved mood and cognitive performance. Her lab is now testing short, doable practices, such as brief sound, visual and walking meditations, with NYU students, especially near the stressful end of the semester, with the hope of improving grades and graduation rates.

Asked how meditation works, Suzuki says the most important thing may be practicing attention to the present moment rather than worrying about the future or replaying the past, which is especially hard with phones connecting us to every problem in the world. Huberman ties this back to the hippocampus, which draws on past, present and future, and suggests meditation helps us deliberately choose where to direct it rather than shuffling between them.

Top Tools for Attention

Huberman notes widespread use of stimulants like Adderall and modafinil among students, often without a prescription, and asks what else can help attention. Suzuki names three tools: exercise, for its direct effect on the prefrontal cortex; meditation, backed by clinical studies showing better focus; and sleep, which she calls the most basic because nobody can survive without it, and essential for attention, creativity and all brain function. She adds that being linked to your phone 24 hours a day damages attention. Both note these tools are low- or no-cost: bodyweight exercise, free YouTube workouts, and breathing meditations like those in her book. She plans to bring these practices into undergraduate education as dean, which Huberman predicts could become a model for schools and workplaces.

Conclusion

Wendy Suzuki blends decades of memory research with her own story to show that the brain is not fixed: it responds to how we treat our bodies every day. Memories form through novelty, repetition, association and emotion, powered by the hippocampus, and that same structure can be strengthened by regular exercise that releases BDNF and supports new neurons. Her studies suggest even a single workout sharpens attention and mood for hours, low-fit adults gain memory benefits from two to three cardio sessions a week, and fitter people benefit further as they add more. Add a short daily meditation, enough sleep, maybe a cold finish to your shower and some kinder self-talk, and you have a simple, affordable routine for a sharper, happier brain now and a more resilient one later in life.

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