Producer: Alright, good morning and welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, Sucheta, good to be with you.

Sucheta Kamath: Great to be with you, Todd. So let me ask you this question, Todd, is leaving your child in the car seat when it's 81 degrees outside negligent parenting?

Producer: Well, I think that’s one of the most cruel acts of parenting. I can't imagine any one intentionally doling just that.

Sucheta: Yeah, but you know, each year on average, around 30 to 40 children die from heat-related deaths after being trapped inside their parents’ cars. The majority of these cases showed no evidence of prior abuse or neglect on their parents’ part, but then the question comes to our mind is, what does help or what's going on, what makes people leave their children in the car? And what really doesn’t help is the way the car seat is placed. I was reading about this and what I found out, that two decades ago, such instances were relatively uncommon. The main reason for that, people suspect was that the parents would travel with their kids in the front seat. In early 90s though, cars began to get equipped with airbags, and the care safety experts got concerned that the passenger side, a front airbag, if deployed, could kill children, so then the rules shift changed and as a safety measure, the car seat got moved to the back of the car and facing away from the driver, making it really hard to see the baby in the back seat, and that baby then became even less visible to the parent who’s in a rush. So you and I can ponder or even our listeners can ponder a little bit about this, that who are these people who forget their babies in the back of the car? I would love to claim that I will not be that parent but guess what? The Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten says that the wealthy do it, it turns out, the poor do it, the middle class people do it, parents of all ages and ethnicity do it, mothers are just as likely as the fathers, it happens to chronically absent-minded and to those who are frantically organized to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. He says, “In the past 10 years, it has happened to a dentist, a postal clerk, a social worker, a police officer, an accountant, a soldier, a paralegal, an electrician, a protestant clergyman, a [0:02:57] student, a nurse, a construction worker, an assistant principal. It has happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor, and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician and it has happened to a rocket scientist.

So the lesson here is, well-meaning intentions can be completely forgotten. Anyone and everyone is capable of committing a prospective memory blunder. Hope none of us are as unfortunate as those parents who forgot their children in the back of their cars, but let's find out what can be done so one can improve, remember to remember, and not to forget such important things, and today, our guest is going to help just do that.

I would like to welcome back Dr. Mark McDaniel, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at Wash U in St. Louis, Missouri. We had a wonderful conversation with him last episode. This episode, we're going to talk about treatment or interventions. He's also a founding co-director of the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education. Dr. McDaniel’s research emphasizes on prospective memory and his work has been greatly relevant to my clinical practice. Another important thing about his work is that he explores individual differences in the tendency for learners to focus on abstraction versus learning off examples when attempting to acquire complex concepts. Mark has written several books and several articles, and important research papers. One of my favorite things about his work is several books that he has written. I recommend people to explore and maybe purchase those books. One such favorite book is Prospective Memory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Applied Perspective, and one final tidbit is Mark’s collaboration where he has co-authored a book called Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.

So this is our guest today, Todd.

Producer: Yeah, I know it's going to be a great conversation just like last week. I'm thinking about these tragic occurrences where a parent leaves a child in a hot car. I mean, I've never thought about it as applied to executive function. I keep wondering to myself, how does this continue to happen? Didn't we learn out lessons from seeing all these news stories? Now, I'm beginning to understand how this tragic occurrence continues to happen. Wow, fascinating stuff.

Alright, well, let's get to Sucheta’s next conversation with Prof. Mark McDaniel.

Sucheta: I would like to welcome to the show today Dr. Mark McDaniel, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Colorado and the founding co-director of the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. McDaniel’s research emphasis on prospective memory which means remembering to perform an intended action at some future moment has been of great relevance to my clinical practice. Another important aspect of his work includes exploring individual differences in the tendency for learners to focus on abstraction versus learning off examples when attempting to acquire complex concepts. Dr. McDaniel’s research in memory and cognition has received over $2 million in grant support from NIH and NASA. Over the past 35 years, he has published over 217 articles, chapters, and books in the area of human learning and memory. I myself own several of his books and I highly recommend Prospective Memory, Cognitive Neuroscience Developmental and Applied Perspectives to all the listeners.

In 2014, he co-authored a book entitled Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, and it has become an important piece of work for many educators and trainers like me.

Welcome once again, Mark, I'm so delighted to have you. Thank you for agreeing to be here.

Dr. Mark McDaniel: Thank you, Sucheta.

Sucheta: This conversation is going to be very exciting and I encourage the listeners to listen to our part one, but today, we are going to talk about how to manage or how to support the development or how to tackle the challenges in failing to remember to do in the future. 

So I want to start with an example of a student of mine that I have worked recently, this is a high school student. Let's call him Jason and this is how his day looks like: when he comes to school, he needs to remember – the Science teacher assigns him a homework which is due on Monday. He needs to remember that there's a test in Physics in three weeks. He needs to remember to turn in the forms by Tuesday. His History teacher wants him to update the blog E-Weekly. There is a venue change for soccer practice because this is an upcoming Easter weekend. He also needs to remember to text his friends back about the weekend, and he needs to remember to charge his phone which he can't do until he goes back to the locker, and then finally, he needs to remember to send the completed bio lab which the teacher doesn’t have. So this is the kind of kid who is trying to manage these incomplete parts of his day and then if you look at his report card which comes in three weeks, he has five zeros for homework assignments, he has two incompletes, but he has great test score. He has taken a test in Biology, for example, and he's done really, really well. So what is the problem with this kid? What kind of memory problem does he have?

Mark: Well, that’s a good question. There could be any number of problems, I think. One could be motivational in as much as he just doesn’t really care about getting the homework done. Another could be time issues in as much as if he's busy with his sports and his friends, and other things, it may be that by the end of the day, he runs out of time and so he just doesn’t get his homework done. By the way, we find that’s the case with our college students here. We also have a great interest in how students study and the nature of their study strategies and how those bear on student success in college and what we find is that students have pretty good plans for trying to space their studying for different courses over the days of the week, but at the end of the week, when we ask them how it went, they say, “Oh, I just ran out of time,” so the plans are good but by the end of the day, the students tried to pack so much in that something has to give and sometimes, it's studying for a particular course. So it could be that, Sucheta, but it could be a memory problem. It could be that the student that you speak about intends to charge the phone when he gets back to the locker but he just simply forgets because he's completely absorbed in other things when he gets back to the locker, so it could be any of these things and the kind of intervention or the kind of actions that the students might take for helping eliminate those issues and the quizzes will depend on what the source of the problem is. If it's a memory problem, so I think that’s what we want to talk about because that’s what I know about, the idea would be, we're doing a little bit of work with children now and doing some prospective memory tasks in their environment and one of the things that children have to do sometimes is remember to take something home to their parents and so we're doing a little bit of work with that. oftentimes, what happens is that the child – and the student, maybe – doesn’t make use of – engineering the environment to provide cues to them, so for instance, the idea is the student may have completed the homework and stuffed it in his drawer at home or forgotten to bring it back to school, so the solution is pretty simple: once the homework is finished, put that homework out on someplace that the student’s going to pass when they go to school, so for example, when I've got important things to mail, I'll put them right out on my countertop just before the kitchen door so when I'm leaving for work, I'll have to pass by and see those papers, it reminds me that I've  got to take them to work. I did this yesterday. I would have forgotten some papers but they were sitting there on the counter and so I remembered them, or even tape the homework to the door, to the inside of the door, so when they come to the door, the homework’s right there taped to the door and at that point, you've got a great reminder that I got to get the homework to school. So if it's a memory problem, engineering the situation where you're providing these cues, putting the homework in a very visible place as you leave so that when you leave for school, you'll remember it. Trying to put your charger, I don't know, in the locker room, you might imagine a giant charger blocking your way into the locker room. This would be a cognitive cue, so when you enter the room, this image comes up of a giant charger blocking your way and that’s a reminder, I’ve got to plug in the charger and charge my phone. So if it's a memory problem, there are various memory techniques, prospective memory techniques, the student could use to try to remember to turn in the homework, charge the phone, and do those kinds of things.

Sucheta: Got it. So that brings me to this – maybe you can walk us through the nature of prospective memory and the strategies that go along with it – so just to refresh everybody’s understanding, can you define prospective memory for us one more time?

Mark: Prospective memory is the memory task, if you will – if you want to call that – a memory task whereby you have to remember to perform an intended action at some appropriate point in the future, and I say appropriate point because if I'm supposed to get bread on the way home from the grocery store but I remember it when I get home, I've remembered the intention but I've remembered it too late, so the key is to remember this intention at a time when it can be executed. I want to remember the intention when I'm driving home. I want to remember my homework when I'm leaving for school. So it's not just memory of the intention. It's memory at the appropriate moment so you can execute it.

Sucheta: So can you quickly comment on this perception of passage of time? Can that be warped for some people, for example, an hour has gone by and when we are really engrossed in a task or an enjoyable activity, you might feel it's been only 15 minutes versus a lot of kids that I work with go upstairs to study and they're down in 10 minutes, saying that, “I've been studying for so long,” because that remember to remember is very much tied to that ongoing task that we have to interrupt to do something that was previously thought about, so can you comment on this passage of time issue? How do we understand that?

Mark: It's not well-researched and there are some different ideas about this. Some suggest that we've got an internal clock that accrues time as it passes and others say, well, maybe those clocks are there for various short time intervals but for longer time intervals, we judge time depending on the events that we can remember, so the idea would be if you remember a lot of events, you might think that more time has passed between the start of that and the end of  the event, or what we're finding in the laboratory is that when we have students try to estimate passage of time and also perform a time-based prospective memory task at which they have to perform the task after a certain amount of time has passed, we find that we have conditions for playing songs, and we find that people estimate the passage of time according to the number of songs they remember hearing, and so they kind of use a heuristic that, well, a song lasts 2 ½ to 3 minutes. I heard four songs so I think 12 minutes have passed, and what we find is that the more songs people hear, the more time they think has passed. Only a few songs have played that take a shorter amount of time has passed and we can manipulate how long the songs are, so you can turn up a certain amount of time –

Sucheta: And I know you have fooled people – yeah. I know you have people with Madonna’s long song and [0:15:43] two long songs, they think the less time has passed. In fact, when each song was five minutes long, correct?

Mark: That’s right. That’s exactly right, so the events that transpire during this passage of time does has a bearing on our estimates of how much time has passed.

Sucheta: So in terms of – or what I'm understanding that if you want to talk about strategies, how do I, first of all, solidify the intention of doing something in the future that needs to be strategized? Second, what do I do about things that I do during the ongoing time, that means that I need to practice interrupting myself to remember about something that I need to do but is not what I'm doing right now, and then what do I do when it's time to do what I said I will do, correct? So can you walk us through the strategies of how do I improve my prospective memory?

Mark: Well, yeah, you have mentioned some various strategies and we do have some experiments where we train – it's older adults is the population we're focusing on prospective memory strategies and they involve the kinds of things you suggested, so one is that if you're in a task where you'd have to respond after a particular amount of time has elapsed, this is common when you say, I have to take cookies out of the oven in 10 minutes, and that’s something that particularly, yeah, burning the cookies, so I’d have to credit that but in those situations, one strategy is to monitor the time and it's very useful to monitor the time in a way in which at the beginning of the interval, you don’t look at the clock very often because you still got a long ways to go to the target time, but as you get close to the target time, then the idea is to increase your frequency of monitoring, so if I  got to take the cookies out of the oven in 10 minutes, for the first couple of minutes, I don’t monitor the time, but then a little later I should monitor, and then as I monitor, I see it's nine minutes, now, I should pick up my monitoring and make sure I'm monitoring every 10 or 15 seconds or so, so that’s a very good strategy and that turns out that older adults don’t do that spontaneously. Older adults tend to monitor equally all the way through the interval, so when we instruct older adults to monitor with the strategic increased frequency near the target time, they do get better at prospective memory.

Sucheta: I see.

Mark: So that’s one thing, is that as you say, use the executive system to set up schedule of monitoring. Another is to create a really strong environmental cue, so one thing that we suggest is to convert a time-based task into what I'll say an environmental or event-driven task. So the idea would be, if the doctor said you got to take your medication in the morning, rather than think about, okay, in the morning, I got to remember to take the medication, think about time depth and environmental events, so you're used to eating breakfast in the morning and if you have orange juice with breakfast, the more effective strategy would be to convert the task into the intention to take the medication when I drink my orange juice. So now, you drink orange juice every morning. When you pick up that glass of orange juice, that’s going to be a cue to take medication. So concrete environmental events are much better cues than time or the passage of time so that’s another good strategy. And then a third strategy is to use external reminders. It's not a bad thing to set – if you are forgetting to take your medication or you need to take cookies out of the oven, set a timer. These cellphones now allow you to set a little alarm every day, and I always set a timer when I kind of remember to take things out of the oven but that doesn’t mean your lazy or don’t have a good prospective memory. It's just an effective environmental cue to allow you to do something that our system doesn’t do very readily.

Sucheta: So then tell me the role of metacognition, your awareness of self because my experience in strategizing is very much to do with ‘my knowledge of me,’ and those that I deal with who have executive dysfunction who need these kinds of strategic behaviors are really bad at knowing that they are suffering from these problems. So they don’t come up with clever strategies, let alone they accept that they need strategies. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Mark: Well, I think it's kind of hard to generate strategies because I think most people have a misunderstanding of prospective memory, I think. Most people believe that when you form the intention, it's indelible, that’s it's never going to leave memory, and it is true that when you form the intention, you have it in awareness, and in that sense, it is very memorable but upon distraction, any kind of distraction, usually, the intentions, as many people know, intentions leave awareness, they're now stored in long-term memory but it takes cues to retrieve them from long-term memory and those cues aren’t always present and most people don’t understand that the memory is not going to be easily retrieved from its storage in long-term memory. So I think a lot of people don’t really understand prospective memory so they don’t have a good idea about how to create useful strategies, so I think for people with executive issues or challenges, sometimes, training them explicitly with useful strategies can be very effective. I don’t have any data yet but we do know that Parkinson’s patients tend to have some executive dysfunction and we're right now starting a project with colleagues in the Washington Medical School which we're trying to train strategies with Parkinson’s patients. So the idea is we're explicitly instructing them on some monitoring strategies, some encoding strategies, some strategies to create environmental cues when they do encode intentions, and we're hopeful that this is going to help these individuals. I mean, I don't know about the students who work with [0:21:59] but Parkinson’s patients will say often that they're more disturbed by their cognitive challenges than by the motor challenges that they have, so a lot of them tend to get more prospective memory problems, and so on and that concern, that’s more alarming to them and more dissatisfying than some of the motor challenges. So we think that it's useful to provide them with some explicit training on strategies and we're hopeful that that’s going to help.

Sucheta: In my work, I think what I have found that there are two approaches I take. One is that self-regulatory process based on self-analysis, so who am I as a learner and thinker? What are my needs? What are my goals? And then what are the – so kind of like we had talked earlier in a previous podcast that there are bigger goals which need to be carried out over six months or a year but then there are smaller goals that need to be achieved in three weeks or two weeks, or one week, but then every day actions need to be counted towards those goals which may be distant future or near future, and what can help for those students or adults that I work with is goal rehearsal and then an intentional plan, and then rehearsal in between the executionary plan, so for example, I train people with three types of rehearsals. One is a sub-vocal rehearsal, talking quietly to yourself regarding your future intentions, then visual rehearsals which is conceptualizing or imagining yourself doing the action. So we kind of create some, like you said, environmental cues, but kind of imagine your interaction with that so either using pictorial cues, and the last one is a mental rehearsal which is kind of doing a more global rehearsal of a passage of time for the whole day. What I find that if you get people to practice rehearsing in different ways, that adds a great self-directive cue, so to speak, or metacognitive cue.

Mark: Well, it sounds theoretically right to me so I think when you talk about global mental rehearsal, I think you're talking about thinking about how the day will unfold and thinking about how one task will lead to another, and one of the things that occur to me with regard to that is, you're now setting up explicit cues for enacting behaviors throughout the day so rather than letting the day kind of unfold, what you've done is you've set up these cues so that I do one thing and when I finish that, I go on to something else and I think those cues are useful  too because maybe someone has forgotten the plan in the middle of the day but if they're going from one task to another as they imagined, ending one task kind of cues the beginning of another. So almost like, it's kind of interesting, when you listen to a CD for a while, you anticipate the next song that comes on. you're not even aware that you can do it but you do encode these orders of events and so in much the same way, I think what you're saying, Sucheta, helps somebody rehearse the order of the anticipated event and those now become cues that stimulate thinking of the next set of actions that you have to perform. So I think it all fits together in terms of thinking that we need to set up cues for ourselves throughout the day to remind us of our intentions.

Sucheta: Thank you and that brings me to the last question. Why prospective memory has become so relevant for us in 21st century? Is there any culturally or in terms of globally, change the way we run our days? I find that we are living a much more complex, multi-faceted life where we are pursuing goals in multiple domains, which create a tapestry of goals that we are trying to keep track off. What is your thought about that? Is the human life different in prospective domain from 18th century to 19th, to 21st – and I'm skipping 20th but – is there any global change?

Mark: That’s a really question. I get that question asked a lot in terms of things like, do we have more to remember now so is our memory overwhelmed or are we offloading our memory on the web now so is our memory worse, or are we busier now and does that hurt prospective memory? And I mean, I don't know, those are good questions. I can't say, I do know that when historians look at things like political unrest or when they look at things like young people and their need to revolt against authority, you can take things written in the 1800s and they sound like exactly what's happening now. With disasters, with the society, and what's happening with the young generation and the political situation is miserable, or whatever it might be, it seems like these things are just part of the human experience, so I would find it hard to think that prospective memory wasn’t as important or didn’t pose some more challenges throughout the ages. I think prospective memory is an intimate of part of being human because we have these executive functions that allow us to plan and anticipate the future. It's very much in the benefit of our survival, to think about the fact that next winter, there's not going to be any food growing and somehow, we've had to harvest and save food, and that’s just one simple example, but we've always got a plan for and think about remember to perform intentions, and I think maybe the nature of the intentions could have changed for many of us. We're not worried about bringing in the crops like they were in the 1800s, but nonetheless, I think we've always had important intentions to allow us to cope with and sustain ourselves through whatever the future is going to bring. I think it's been an important, really one of our most important cognitive tools for adapting and being flexible, so I don’t really think that now it's more important than it ever was. I think it has always been important for humans.

Sucheta: Got it. I agree, there's only one small change I see and I don't know what your thoughts are but when, for example, before electricity, when, for example, sundown, when major – when there was darkness, people retreated back into their houses, there was not a lot to do or those days when we wrote letters, you wrote a letter and you mailed it, and you waited for a response, and then maybe it took three weeks before they came back so the intentions were much more staggered, I guess, to act on, and I see that kind of a pressure to create a newer intention or follow up on the intentions that were created that are much more jam-packed.

Mark: Yeah, I think you're right. It seems to me they are very jam-packed. I agree with you. With the internet and email, there's a lot more information transmission and with that, there are a lot more requests to do things and a lot more things we think we need to do, and people we need to respond to, so I agree, it does seem more jam-packed, I agree with that.

Sucheta: Well, it has been terrific talking with you. Before I end, I'm sure a lot of people would love to know more about your work, if they want to reach you, what's the best way for them to find you?

Mark: Well, there's a website, the URL is psychweb.wustl.edu/mcdaniel, and that’s my webpage on the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department at Wash U.

Sucheta: Fantastic and we will link that up in our podcast. Once again, deep, deep gratitude for being on the show and sharing your wisdom. It's been terrific. Thank you so much.

Mark: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Producer: Alright, that was our second conversation with Professor Mark McDaniel. What a great conversation, Sucheta, lots to think about here as usual with your conversations. So the conversation with Prof. McDaniel about treatment of prospective memory was really, really valuable. I learned an awful lot about it myself. He's a great conversation.

Sucheta: Yeah, again, I think it makes me so excited to share his wealth of knowledge with our listeners because prospective memory is not a common topic in the field of education or helping those who are suffering with their inconsistencies, and so just to kind of review that prospective memory definition, it's the process of forming intention to do something in the future, and remembering to do it at appropriate intended times. This kind of memory for the future has served us well in the process of evolution, Todd, it has helped us adjust and adapt for our survival by connecting to our future needs with a plan and preparation, we have used prospective memory as an important mental tool to thrive. 

So my first takeaway here is for everyone that’s interested in prospective memory, they must know that it's a universal truth that the moment when we form these future intentions, they feel indelible. This confidence certainly works against us though. We need to counter that and that’s why we need strategies. 

You know, this conversation with Mark also reminded me of an interview with Kevin Kelly, one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine. He did this interview many years ago and he was asked to define technology and he said, “Anything produced by the mind is technology.” For example, a time card, a calendar, a blueprint of the house, or even laws can be conceived as technology, and this is not restricted to the human mind a lone. A beaver dam, a bird’s nest also exemplifies technology. In short, to manage prospective memory, we need creative use of cognitive technology and that’s why this conversation is so important.

Producer: Well, I'll tell you, I came out of this conversation with Mark, very hopeful, very optimistic that prospective memory can improve by using some strategies. I mean, can you walk us through that please?

Sucheta: Oh, sure, absolutely. The takeaway here is that overall, there are three global strategies. Number one is encoding strategies. Second is environmental strategies and third is monitoring strategies. So I'm going to kind of summarize that in a simple way but the encoding strategies mean ways to strengthen the future intentions themselves by focusing on creating stronger memory traces for these intentions. We have to be serious about the prospective memory intentions. If a student wants to turn in his homework, he has to make that a serious business. If you want to meet up a friend in a month at a specific location at a specific time, we have to be serious about wanting to remember that time and location. We have to avoid being distracted. We have to free ourselves from distractions in the moment when we are creating these goals for ourselves and we need to set aside brain’s resources towards concretizing these plans by forming some sort of associations and linkage, otherwise we will be like those people with a ribbon tied around their index finger, but they have no recollection as to what the ribbon is for. Once these intentions are taken seriously, then we can create cues to retrieve it from long-term memory. This also means converting time-based tasks into event-based tasks, and just to kind of illustrate that with examples, instead of saying to yourself that I will exercise in the evening, you tell yourself that I'll go get on the treadmill right after I load the dishwasher after dinner. Another way you can do that is you can say to yourself that I will get on the treadmill right when the Law & Order begins or comes on. So this association can really help as well, so instead of saying evening which is a time-based task, you make it event-based which is Law & Order or dishwasher loading.

The second prospective memory technique is to engineer the environment and Mark was big on that. The environment can create a strong link between intentions and behavior cues. This requires a lot of thoughtful analysis of your needs and as well as surroundings, so that the surroundings can trigger your thoughts about what you need to remember to remember. For example, the two bowls for the dogs in the kitchen next to the garage door can be a great reminder to fill both of them with food and water right before you leave for office. If those bowls, for example, your wife moves them while she was mopping the floor and you don’t see them, you're likely to not remember to fill them up. Similarly, another example would be to put a – since you always take your car keys before you go to the office, put important papers under the car keys where it's visible, leaving the gym bag right next to your shoes can be really helpful, so creating solutions can take away having to think and be intentional doing the routine prospective memory demands.

The last and the third strategy refers to monitoring strategies, so we can recruit our executive system to give ourselves periodical reminders throughout the passage of time leading up to the future action. As I was mentioning, if you are meeting up with your friend in a month and in between you travel to Chicago or in Hawaii, and your mom had surgery, so if you have these events happening, remembering to remember a lunch date with your friend, it's going to be long forgotten so what you need is instead, somewhere, a calendar reminder that you frequently visit and review and say, oh, it'll be in two weeks that I see my friends or it'll be in one week that I'll see my friend, or in three days, I see my friends, so that kind of really helps as well. As Mark mentioned in the beginning, we don’t monitor as often as we – we don’t need to monitor very often when the intention is way in the future but as we get closer to it, we begin to monitor the time a lot more frequently, so for example, we are at the airport and our flight doesn’t board for another two hours, we can sit in the lounge to take a nap or do something on the computer, but as it gets closer to the boarding time, around half an hour window, we begin to check our watch every five to 10 minutes so that we are ready to dash to the gate just in time so we don’t miss our plane.

Producer: Ah, I have used the leave important things by the car keys track all of my life, so I certainly can identify with that one. Something else that you discussed with Mark was the idea, just awareness just seems to be so crucial to coming up with some of these self-help strategies, right?

Sucheta: Yes, certainly. Remembering to remember and remember you will forget kind of falls by the wayside when we are either rushing through our day or we are confident about our memory. So this kind of goes hand in hand with your self-awareness. Many developmental disorders, brain injuries, and neurological conditions including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disrupt prospective memory skills. For example, many clients that I work with in my practice have executive dysfunction and they find that they get in trouble for not remembering to remember to do things or follow up when essential. Repeated failure with prospective memory however makes these clients of mine appear irresponsible or undependable and life can be a disjointed and dissatisfactory experience for them. The prospective memory intervention cannot be successful however without self-knowledge. So I find and Mark kind of vouched for that, that there has to be some process in place that reminds people that they will forget and they need to become self-aware how many times they have forgotten to remember to remember, so to bring about the change in life’s condition, one needs to figure ways to break the goals into manageable chunks, and then remember to follow up on those smaller steps. General goals like lose weight, find a better job, start dating again are not effective; you can't have those blanket goals without any remember to remember steps put in place. What's more effective is to concretize behavioral plan. For example, “This weekend before going to a movie with my girlfriend, I will create a dating profile on match.com,” is a much more concretized way of remembering to remember. So as Saturday rolls around, before you go to your Pilates class followed by a grocery store, you leave your dress next to your laptop and the laptop, you can pull up Match.com’s site, so those kinds of cues bring you to the goal that you have for yourself which is much more spread out over long range of time. So one thing that I talked to Mark about was this global mental rehearsal. So the idea is that one task reminds you about the next, and the next task rolls into the next, then you create these explicit cues that are linked with each other and teaching clients and patients with that linkage process can really help them to remember to remember.

Producer: Great stuff. Thanks for sharing all those takeaways and I enjoyed both conversations with Prof. Mark McDaniel. Great, great stuff.

So that’s all the time we have for this episode. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thanks for checking in and listening to us today and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.