Stage Fright, Measured
What happens in the brain and body in the minute before you speak in public. Fiona talks with a performance psychologist about adrenaline, the vagus nerve, and why reframing nerves as readiness is not…
Why You Forget Names and Remember Smells
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Show notes
Names versus smells
You meet someone, they say their name, and three seconds later it is gone. Yet the smell of a particular soap can drop you straight into a kitchen from thirty years ago. This episode explains why those two memories take such different roads through the brain, and why the difference is useful once you know it.
- How the hippocampus decides what to keep overnight
- Why smell has a shortcut to emotional memory
- The real reason names are hard, and a trick that works
- Spaced repetition and the forgetting curve
- A famous memory study that did not replicate
If you try the name trick this week, tell us how it went on the Witspeak channel.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Grey Matter Hour. I am Fiona Castellan, and for ten years my job was to put people to sleep in a lab and watch what their brains did with the day. This is the show where we take one ordinary thing your brain does and find out why. Today, names and smells. Why can you forget a name before the handshake ends, and yet one whiff of a certain soap puts you back in your grandmother's kitchen? The answer runs through a seahorse-shaped structure behind your ears, a direct wire from the nose, and a small trick I will teach you that genuinely helps with names. Later I will also tell you about a famous memory study that fell apart when people tried to repeat it. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us begin.
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