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Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- And sometimes my wife will tell me this as well that... She'll tell me she said something, but I won't remember that either, or I'll have a different memory of things that we both experienced. And I'll be telling the story that, "That's not what happened." I said, "Absolutely, that's what happened." But over time, my brain has condensed it some way in a way that makes sense. And I think we think about it as like a movie, like a photograph. It never changes, but it does evolve. And hers changes 'cause her experiences are changing, and we both lived the same experience, but we have totally different memories of it.
- Yes.
- That's real.
- That happens a lot.
- We're not crazy.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. The truth is-
- We're not crazy, right?
- You are not crazy.
- Okay. Thank you for confirming at least that part.
- Yes, I am a psychologist.
- That's right.
- That's very true. And usually, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of what you remember and what your wife remembers. Probably neither of 'em are exactly right. It's somewhere in the middle.
- Mine's right. Hey, Bobcats, Kelly Damphousse here, president of Texas State University. And welcome to "The Current," where we talk to faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of the university to find out what is happening here at Texas State. And today I'm really excited about having Carmen Westerberg here. Thank you, Carmen, for joining us. And I've gotta make sure I get the title right. Psychology professor and chair of the Alliance of Researchers in Aging at Texas State. So thank you for joining us.
- Yes. Thank you for having me.
- Now this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart as I am aging all the time. It beats the alternative, okay?
- Exactly.
- But I think about aging a lot, and aging and dementia is one of our big areas of research here at Texas State. And you're obviously right in the middle of all that, right?
- Yes. Yes.
- Yeah. Well, before we get to that, and I've got so many questions, let's find out a little bit about Carmen, where you grew up, where you went to school, how you got to Texas State, and then that will lead us right into your research.
- Yeah, I'm originally from a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.
- Oh, so I'm Canadian. You're Minnesotan. So we have similar accents.
- Exactly. Yeah, my students always tell me I talk funny, but I think they-
- You sound great. They talk funny.
- Exactly. So yeah, I grew up there, went to high school there, and then I went to college at a small liberal arts college called Gustavus Adolphus College
- Really?
- In St. Peter, Minnesota.
- Okay.
- So my dad went there. I had strong urging to go there as well, but I very much enjoyed my time there. But then I went to the University of Minnesota to get my Ph.D. I just lucked out. I got into the program I wanted and it happened to be where I was from.
- What was the program?
- Psychology, cognitive and biological psychology.
- So my wife's dad got his Ph.D. in Minnesota. So that's where Beth kind of... She was born Stillwater, Oklahoma, but she grew up... Her first five years I think were in St. Paul.
- Oh, great.
- Yeah, so you're there in Minnesota, you get your Ph.D. So you have an undergraduate degree and you go straight into a Ph.D. program.
- Yes.
- 'Cause in the olden days... You're not old, but in my olden days, master's and then Ph.D., but a lot of degree programs are now where you go right. into a Ph.D. program, so that's what you did.
- Yeah. Yeah, I don't have a master's degree.
- So was that intimidating 'cause you're... Do you remember the first day of graduate school? Were you a little nervous coming from a small school and going to Minnesota?
- I wasn't that nervous. It's funny because I actually took a year off.
- Oh, okay.
- One year between undergrad and grad school. And I thought-
- It makes you appreciate school, right? I'm ready to go back school.
- Yes.
- Yeah.
- But I thought I was gonna be so old, because I had taken this year off, and I was still like the youngest person.
- You were like all of 23 or something, right?
- Yes.
- What did you do during your gap year?
- Well, that's a great question as well. I had worked at a summer camp, a YMCA summer camp, over the summers in college. And during the school year, basically they're a conference event center. And so I served as a conference host. So it was great because I could spend a lot of time studying for the GRE and doing things like that. So I didn't do much of consequence related to my degree, but it was a nice break. After I got my degree, I did a postdoc at Northwestern University.
- So tell us about a postdoc. 'cause I never did one, but I know a lot of people do it, especially in more the biological and the sciences. And yours is less of a social science and more of a biological science. But what does a postdoc mean?
- Yeah, so a postdoc is just an opportunity to get more research experience before you go on to a faculty position. It's nice because you don't do any teaching and so you really are 100% focused on research. When you're a student, you have classes. And so it's a good time to learn a new skill or take your research in a different direction if you want. I, it was, it's really a great time.
- And your postdoc was where? I'm sorry.
- At Northwestern University.
- At Northwestern, okay. Very good. So you're there. How long is your postdoc?
- It actually ended up being eight years.
- Eight years? Holy cow. That's long.
- Really long.
- Yeah, that's a long one. Well, 'cause you're having such a great time.
- Exactly. Well, and it ties into my research. So I started off in grad school. I was studying memory, but right around that time when I finished and went into my postdoc, we started realizing that sleep was important for memory. And so, yeah, I stayed a little longer so I could get training in how to do sleep research.
- How did you get to Texas State?
- Well, I was ready to leave my postdoc.
- After your postdoc, yeah. Ready to make a real paycheck.
- Exactly. I didn't know much about Texas or San Marcos but I came for my interview, and I visited the town, and everyone was so nice. I really appreciated the Texas hospitality. And the weather was a nice draw, 'cause I had been in Minnesota and then Chicago, which isn't really any better. And I was like, "They don't have any snow."
- I've talked to people who moved here from the Northwest or from the North generally. And they find kind of hard to get used to how friendly people are, because they are honestly friendly. They're not faking it. If you want help moving, they're gonna show up with a pickup truck, right?
- Yeah. Yeah. That was a little surprising. It wasn't like that in the North, but I really liked it. And the university had a good reputation, and I was interested in you had a clinical sleep lab, and that was very appealing to me as well.
- Was that always at Round Rock or was it here first then it went to Round Rock?
- It was here in San Marcos first.
- Yeah.
- Okay. So I remember at some point, I won't tell you why, but my wife suggested that I should go do a sleep study, and I will tell you, because she couldn't sleep because I was snoring, and I had sleep apnea and so on. I didn't know all those problems. And I went to a hospital. I spent the night connected all these wires and so on. And I discovered all kinds of things about myself. I didn't know that topic, area of research or medical study existed until I did a sleep study. And I learned a lot about the value of sleep. And you mentioned memory and sleep being correlated. And I'm the worst sleeper because I stay up late, I get up early. As you get older, you sleep less. I think that's probably true. Biologically, you probably need less sleep, But I'm really bad about... I'm not proud of this at all, but it really does affect me. And sometimes I realize I'm not operating at peak capacity if I'm not sleeping. So share with us more about that, about the relationship between sleep, memory, capacity, and what you do in your research projects.
- Okay.
- That's a lot, right?
- I was like, "All right, where to start?"
- Yeah. Where to start?
- Well, I mean, sleep in general is important for so many things. I focus in on memory, but getting good sleep is associated with several different physical ailments and things like that.
- Even weight and health, physical health and-
- Yeah, yeah, and diabetes, heart disease. They've all been linked to sleep. So sleep is still kind of a mystery though. We don't know if there's one single purpose as to why we sleep, because it is affecting so many different things. But I am interested in how memories change over time. That was the angle that I was coming from. So, in grad school, I was very interested in false memories. Why do people remember things wrong? And it just kind of evolved from there. I was like, well, we know our memories are evolving over time. That's part of the reason we have false memories. Once you take something in, it doesn't just sit there lying dormant in your brain. It goes through this process that we call consolidation that strengthens the memory, but it also causes some changes to happen. So you have to integrate this new information with your existing knowledge base. And when that happens, it can change the nature of the memory a little bit.
- It's really interesting because sometimes, and this has happened in politics and public life, people will say, "I remember this thing happening." And said, "There's no way that could have happened because you weren't alive when that happened." But in their brain, they really remember that happening. And they're not making it up. They believe it.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And that there's a process by which that happens.
- Yes
- That's just fascinating.
- Yeah, that's been a big area of research, these flashbulb memories, they call 'em. Where were you when the Challenger exploded or when you heard about 9/11? And they've shown that, a lot of times, people are just dead wrong.
- Just dead wrong. And sometimes my wife will tell me this as well. She'll tell me she said something, but I won't remember that either, or I'll have a different memory of things that we both experienced. And I'll be telling stories that, "That's not what happened." I said, "Absolutely, that's what happened." But over time my brain has condensed it some way in a way that makes sense. And I think we think about it as like a movie, like a photograph. It never changes, but it does evolve. And hers changes 'cause her experiences are changing, and we both lived the same experience, but we have totally different memories of it.
- Yes.
- That's real.
- That happens a lot.
- We're not crazy.
- Yeah.
- We're not crazy, right?
- You are not crazy.
- Okay, good. Thank you for confirming at least that part.
- Yes, I am a psychologist.
- That's right.
- That's very true. And usually, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of what you remember and what your wife remembers. Probably neither of 'em are exactly right. It's somewhere in the middle.
- Mine's right.
- That's right. So how do you study this?
- It's not the easiest thing to study, but, well, the big thing is that we think during sleep is the time when our memories are changing. It can happen when you're awake too, but not as much as it does when you're asleep. And so a lot of studies they'll have you learn something, and then you go to sleep either overnight or even during a nap. We do a lot of nap studies.
- I need to learn about this one, yeah.
- Because they're easier actually. You don't have to stay up all night as the researcher then. And then you give someone a memory test, and you see if there's some aspect of sleep that predicts how well they're gonna remember whatever it is you taught them before they went to sleep. So that's kind of the standard protocol for a sleep study, but things have gotten much more complex as the years have gone on. There's this technique. I was on a study that was one of the first papers to show this. It's called targeted memory reactivation. And so you have people learn the locations of different pictures on a screen. So they might see a cat in the lower right-hand corner and an alarm clock in the upper left-hand corner. And as they're studying the picture in each location, you play a sound cue that's associated with each object. So like with the cat, you would hear a meow. And so then what happens is you have people go to sleep and you play the sound cues while they're sleeping. And then they actually remember the locations of those objects better when they wake up, because you've reacted the memory while they were asleep.
- There's the association between the sound and the memory, and somehow your brain is hearing it and it reinforces the memory.
- Yeah, we think it reactivates it and helps this consolidation process move forward.
- But you have to sleep though, right? You can't-
- Yes.
- You can't survive without sleep.
- That is very true.
- Why is that?
- Well-
- You don't know.
- Yeah, your body just shuts down. I mean, they've done these studies. I mean, it's a lot easier to do in animals, right?
- Yeah, the sleep deprivation studies.
- Yeah, and they'll just keep poking them and keeping them awake. And what happens is their immune system no longer functions properly and all their organs shut down, and that's it. And so we know that we have to have sleep. There's actually an unfortunate, very rare genetic condition called fatal familial insomnia. And when people are in their 40s usually, like midlife, if they have this specific gene, they won't be able to sleep anymore, and eventually they'll pass away from that.
- Wow. I remember reading about this, that if you're not getting good sleep, in addition to the health things, that it affects things behaviorally like being tired and getting in car accidents because maybe you're not as alert, or not performing as well at work or in the classroom or whatever. Because people think I'm gonna pull an all nighter to prepare for an exam.
- Yeah, that's-
- It's the worst thing you can do probably, right?
- Yeah, that is not a good idea. I guess I always tell my students as long as the information is in there, you should sleep and not stay up to keep studying. But if it's not in there at all, you gotta get it in there.
- Get it in there somehow. Is there a branch of research that talks about how best to retain things?
- Oh yes. I mean, memory research is a huge area, and so there's all sorts of things. we know you can do spaced learning, which I try and tell our students about, which doesn't happen all the time. But learning a little bit, studying a little bit one day, and then coming back to it the next day, instead of leaving it all for the night before the exam.
- And it's also true that you can't really multitask, like listening to music, like listen to like a Taylor Swift song and studying at the same time. Super hard to do, right?
- Yes, yes.
- Yeah, 'cause your brain can't do two things at one time.
- No.
- Although I listen to Mozart when I'm writing, the requiem mass, because I've conditioned myself. I think better while that's playing, but I can't listen to George Strait 'cause I'm singing with George Strait next thing I know, right? Not quite as good as he does. So there's a relationship between aging and memory and sleep and aging, and let's talk about that a little bit 'cause that's an area for you as well.
- As you mentioned earlier, you do sleep less as you get older.
- Is it because I need less sleep or I'm just too busy?
- Well, it's a been a debate. I would say it's probably not that you need less. It's just that you're unable to sleep as long as you did when you were younger.
- Because when I was young, I could sleep for 12 hours straight. My dad would be kicked me out of bed on Saturday morning. I'd sleep all day, and now it's like three hours, four hours.
- Yeah, well, I mean, a good rule of thumb is if you feel rested when you wake up, that's all that you need.
- That's probably all you need.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. There isn't... People like to say seven hours or eight hours, but as long as you feel rested when you get up. But we know as you get older, you're sleeping less and your memory does decline. That's natural. So people tend to get worried like, oh, am I getting Alzheimer's disease or something? But our memories just-
- I think that all the time like, oh, is it starting to happen?
- Yeah, but not necessarily. We know there's just a natural decline in memory. And so we think one of the reasons is because you're not consolidating your memories as thoroughly during sleep. We think really deep slow wave sleep is important for memory consolidation, and that is the part of sleep that declines the most as you age.
- So there's different levels of sleep. There's the napping sleep and the sleep that happens at the beginning and the sleep that happens in the middle and the sleep that happens when you're getting closer to waking up. And it's that middle, the deep sleep that matters, right?
- Yeah. Well, you actually get most of your deep sleep in the first half of the night. And then the REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, is a lighter stage. That's when we think a lot of dreaming happens.
- That's when the dreaming is happening.
- And that's at the end of the night.
- So you're studying these relationships, and so what do we do with that information that you're gathering?
- Well, so the hope is obviously to be able to use it to help people with memory problems, and especially dementia, Alzheimer's disease is a big one. So we've identified different aspects of sleep that seem to be most relevant for consolidating memories. So can we develop interventions that artificially give people more slow wave sleep and other things that we know about sleep that would help improve their memory. The problem is, in the case of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, is when your brain starts going. If you lose parts that are necessary, you can sleep all you want, but you just don't have those working neurons anymore. So there is... I think sleep will help reduce memory decline, but I don't think it's the answer to curing dementia or anything like that.
- So sleep is not... The lack of sleep is not causing dementia. There may be some other,
- Well, it is a bidirectional relationship.
- Okay.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But there are other factors as well causing dementia.
- Yeah. Well, especially Alzheimer's disease. We know there's a genetic component, but that doesn't necessarily mean you will get Alzheimer's disease, but you have an increased risk. You've probably heard all these news stories pretty much everything increases your risk nowadays, but, yeah, we know if you don't get enough sleep, if you get consistently short amounts of sleep, you have an increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.
- You're making me nervous because my kids are always after me because they know, 'cause I'm always the first one to text them in the morning and the last one to text them at night, and they know that I'm not good at this about sleeping. And they're worried about me because they know the importance of good sleep. So how do we help people figure out how to sleep better? Certainly drugs could play a role.
- Yeah. I don't think drugs is the answer, just because they do too many things. They can help you fall asleep, but then they're interfering with the kind of sleep you're getting. You develop a tolerance. So you fall asleep, but then you're sleepy all day because it hasn't worn off yet. So I don't think drugs is gonna be the answer, but we just have to educate people on what helps. Keeping a consistent schedule is a big one.
- Yeah, all right, guilty. Okay. Because you have to plan to go to sleep, right?
- Yeah. If you go to sleep at the same time, then your body knows, oh, now it's the sleep time and it's easier to fall asleep.
- I find sometimes, if I don't have an appointment on a Saturday morning, that I'll stay up late on Friday 'cause I wanna sleep in on Saturday and next thing I know it's like four in the morning, and then I'm waking up at seven anyways. I'm trying to trick my body into sleeping in, but I'm making it worse.
- Yes.
- So consistency about when you go to bed.
- Yeah, that's a big one.
- What other behavioral things can people do?
- Well, so exercise is a big one.
- Oh no, don't do that.
- I know.
- I knew you were gonna bring that up.
- I know.
- So exercise before? Not too soon. Not too close.
- You don't wanna do it right before bed, but the reason is because it increases your slow wave sleep, and that's the one that is important for memory consolidation. So if you're worried about memory decline, exercising during the day is gonna help improve your slow wave sleep at night.
- I was afraid that was gonna be part of it. Okay.
- I know, I know.
- So exercising. Being consistent about when you go to bed. Is there routines you can get into that help you?
- Related to that, I guess, keeping your bedroom for sleeping only. A lot of people have a TV.
- Don't watch TV in bed. Yeah.
- Yeah.
- That's terrible. I'm bad about that because we have a TV in the bedroom, and it's hard not to do that.
- Yes. Yeah. So just take it out of the bedroom, right? So when you go in there, all you're doing is sleeping. And then your body learns we're in the sleep room now, so we're gonna sleep now.
- Okay. I'll work on that part. I'll do the exercise thing too. But yeah, I guess that's... You get into a habit and you're turning on the TV, and then you're watching, you got bright light in your face, and your body doesn't know it's supposed to go to sleep.
- Yeah, exactly.
- What about doomscrolling?
- Yeah, that's not good either.
- That's not good either. Man, I got all these problems.
- Yeah.
- Well, first off, you got the light in your face, and then you're seeing all these terrible things, and you get anxious about stuff. All those things are not conducive to getting good night's sleep.
- Exactly, exactly. So you bring up the light thing, that's a big one. Our body releases melatonin, it's a hormone, and that's what makes you feel sleepy and wanna go to sleep. And the release of melatonin is controlled by light. And so if you're looking at bright lights, you're not gonna release melatonin and so you're not gonna feel sleepy. So you want to expose yourself to bright lights early in the morning, right after you get up. Then your body's gonna be like, "okay, we're awake, no melatonin." But then in the evening, you wanna dim everything down.
- The irony is I will feel tired at three or four, and I'll go home and tell 'em I'm so tired. And then by 10 o'clock, like, I can't sleep and I'm doing stuff. Is that a thing?
- Yeah, and that's normal.
- Yeah, we do have a... Everybody has a little dip in alertness, usually mid to late afternoon.
- Yeah, okay. Well, I'm sorry, I didn't bring you in to diagnose me, but I'm so curious about the impact of sleep because we're so curious about people's mental health capacity and the impact that we're seeing. People are living longer, which is great, but the quality of life changes if you've got dementia or you're not able to remember things, and that you need more care from your loved ones who have to take care of you now because you're not able to do things you used to be able to do before. What does the future hold for this? What do you think will be... Does technology play a role here in helping us or hurting us?
- Well, I hope it's gonna help us. Yeah. I mean just we need more research. I think a big focus now is the early detection. If you're starting to show signs, then you can do things like improve your sleep and exercise more to hopefully delay or even prevent the onset. Once somebody does develop dementia, there's not much we can do. But if you start earlier, then you can delay the onset and hopefully that that will be a big way to reduce the incidents of dementia in the future.
- So what are some signs?
- Well, if people start asking the same question over and over, you get lost in familiar places. Language, there's some language changes. You have trouble naming objects, common objects-
- Forgetting people's names that you should know.
- That is one that happens to everybody. I wouldn't necessarily call that the early signs of dementia.
- Yeah, that's funny. Well, thank you for sharing that. One of the things that I think I always want to do is share what our faculty are doing in the research realm, because I think people think of universities as places where students go to learn from experts, which happens, but we've got these experts that are also doing incredibly important research as well that we hope are changing people's lives and making lives better for people around us. And Texas has a huge emphasis on dementia and aging generally. There's gonna be some research dollars that are gonna be made available for that. And because we know that an aging population is happening, but we wanna make sure that, as that aging happens, that people's quality of life is maintained.
- Exactly.
- Yes.
- And that's a large part of what your research is. Can we delay the onset as long as possible? And then can we mediate the effect? When it does hit eventually, can we figure out ways to help people deal with it?
- Yeah, exactly.
- All right, Carmen, one of the things we love doing is we ask our listeners to send me a question. And I'm not seeing the question. And we'll let you be the podcast host that you can ask. And then, typically, I'll ask people to answer the question too. So be ready, to throw your answer in the room.
- Your question is, do you have a favorite family tradition?
- So I'm gonna talk about kind of my... We have two families, right? With the family we grew up in and the family we created. And I have a third family, and we call it the framily. So Beth and I had these two other couples we met when I was in grad school at A&M. They were undergrads and then they became grad students there. And they're still living in College Station. We've been friends for 38 years now. Their kids call us aunt and uncle, and we're the framily. So that's my framily. And one of the things I love doing with the framily is every July 1st and January 1st, we get together if we can. And typically, because we were the older people, we were the first ones to own a house and so on. So everyone came to our house, and we have since bought a lake house in Arkansas that's big enough to house everybody. So each couple has two kids. Each of the two kids are married and now we've got babies coming. And so it's a big group. And so as much as possible on July 1 and January 1, we all get together and have a framily reunion. And it's fun because we've been together for so long we can finish each other's stories and we can reminisce. And when people are having some health issues, we can come together and hug on each other and so on, be very supportive. But to me, they're almost more family than the family I grew up with because we're so close and we've been together for so long. So it's the gathering on January 1 and July 1 that we have. What about you? Do you have a family tradition that you like?
- I'm secretly a fan of shopping.
- Oh really?
- And Black Friday shopping is like-
- Do you do it online?
- No.
- You gotta go.
- No.
- You gotta get up early.
- Adrenaline rush, walking into the mall. I love that feeling.
- That's hilarious. What was your best Black Friday buy?
- Well, so as I was growing up, they had these bears that you could only get on Black Friday, and they would run out. So that was-
- I thought you said beers first.
- Oh, no bears.
- Bears, okay.
- Like teddy bears.
- Yeah, teddy bears.
- They were called Santa Bears. And so, I think, I mean, that was my favorite thing, growing up as a teenager, going to get the Santa Bear. So they've since discontinued them, so that was sad, but yeah, I still like-
- So you did that with your family.
- With my mom.
- With your mom.
- Yeah.
- Still or now is it just you?
- Still, my mom.
- You go find her.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You guys go on Friday.
- We'll get together for Thanksgiving,
- That's hilarious. That's a lot of fun. Yeah, that's very good. Well, thanks for sharing that. Well, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for joining us on "The Current" as well. It's always great to hear from our faculty and staff, students, alumni, friends of the university about what's happening here at Texas State. Until next time, States Up, everyone.