Kind: captions
Language: en
the act of remembering can change the
memory if you remember some event and
then I tell you something about the
event later on when you remember the
event you might remember some original
information from the event as well as
some information about what I told you
and sometimes if you're not able to tell
the difference that information that I
told you gets mixed into the story that
you had originally so now I give you
some more misinformation or you're
exposed to some more information some
else and eventually your memory becomes
totally detached from what
happened the following is a conversation
with Chon ranganath a psychologist and
neuroscientist at UC Davis specializing
in human memory he's the author of why
we remember unlocking memory's power to
hold on to what
matters this is the Lex Freedman podcast
to support it please check out our
sponsors in the description and now dear
friends here's Chon
rangano Danny Conan describes the
experiencing self and the remembering
self and that happiness and satisfaction
you gained from the outcomes of your
decisions did not come from what you've
experienced but rather from what you
remember of the experience so uh can you
speak to this interesting difference
that you write about in your book of the
experiencing self and the remembering
self Danny really impacted me cuz I was
an undergrad at Berkeley and I got to
take a class from him long before he won
the Nobel Prize or anything and it was
just a mind-blowing class but this idea
of the remembering self and the
experiencing self I got into it because
it's so much about memory even though he
doesn't study memory so we're right now
having this experience right and people
are can watch it presumably on YouTube
or listen to it on audio but if you're
talking to somebody else you could
probably describe this whole thing in 10
minutes but that's going to miss a lot
of what actually happened and so the
idea there is is that the way we
remember things is not the replay of the
experience it's something totally
different and it tends to be biased by
the beginning and the end and he talks
about the Peaks but there's also the you
know the best parts the worst Parts Etc
and those are the things that we
remember and so when we make decisions
we usually consult memory and we feel
like our memories are record of what
we've experienced but it's not it's this
kind of very biased sample but it's
biased in an interesting and I think
biologically relevant way so in the way
we construct a narrative about our
past you say that uh it gives us an
illusion of stability can you explain
that basically I think that a lot of
learning in the brain is driven towards
being able to make sense I mean really
memory is all about the the present and
the Future Past is done so biologically
speaking it's not important unless
there's something from the past that's
useful and so what our brains are really
optimized for is to learn about the
stuff from the past that's going to be
most useful in understanding the present
and predicting the future right and so
cause effect relationships for instance
that's a big one now my future is
completely unpredictable in the sense
that like you could you know in the next
10 minutes pulling KN on me and slipped
my throat right I was planning on it ex
but having seen some of your work and
just you know generally my expectations
about life I'm not expecting that I have
a certainty that everything's going to
be fine we're going to have a great time
talking today right but we're often
right it's like okay so I go to a a see
a band on stage you know I know they're
going to make me wait the show's going
to start late and then you know come
they come on there's a very good chance
there's going to be an encore I have a
memory so to speak for that event before
I've even walked into the show right
there's going to be people holding up
their camera phones to try to take
videos of it now because this is kind of
the world we live in so that's like
everyday fortune telling that we do
though it's not real it's imagine and
it's amazing that we have this
capability and that's what memory is
about uh but it can also give us this
illusion that we know everything that's
about to happen um and I think what's
valuable about that that illusion is
when it's broken it gives us the
information right so I mean I'm sure
being in AI you know about information
Theory and the idea is the information
is what you didn't already have and so
those prediction errors that we make
based on you know we make a prediction
based on memory and the errors are where
the action is the error is where the
Learning Happens exactly
exactly well just to linger on Danny
Conan and just this whole idea
of experiencing self versus remembering
self I was hoping you can give a simple
answer of how we should live life uh
based on the fact that our memories
could be a source of happiness or could
be the primary source of happiness that
an event when experienced Bears its
fruits the most when it's remembered
over and over and over and over and
maybe there is some wisdom in the fact
that we can control to some degree how
we remember it how we evolve our memory
of it such that it can
maximize the long-term happiness of that
repeated experience okay well first I'll
say I wish I could take you on the road
with me that was such a great
description can I be your opening act or
oh my God no I'm going to open for you
dude otherwise it's like you know
everybody leaves after you're done
believe me I did that in in Columbus
Ohio once it wasn't fun like the opening
acts like drank our bab we spent all
this money going all the way there there
was only the everybody left after the
opening acts were done and there was
just that Stoner dude with the
dreadlocks hanging out and then next you
know we we blew like our savings on
getting a hotel room so we should as a
small tangent you're a legit touring act
when I was in grad school I played in a
band and yeah we traveled we would play
shows it wasn't like we were in a
hardcore touring band but we did some
touring and and had some fun times and
yeah you did we did a movie soundtrack
nice Henry portrait of serial killer so
that's a good movie we were on the
soundtrack for the sequel Henry 2 mask
of Sanity which is a terrible movie yeah
how's the soundtrack it's pretty good
it's badass at least that one part where
the guy throws up the milkshake all
right song we're going to have to see
we're going to have to see it all right
we're getting back to life advice you
know yeah uh one thing that I try to
live by especially nowadays and since I
wrote the book I've been thinking more
and more about this is how do I want to
live a memorable life you know I think
if we go back to like the pandemic right
how many people have memories from that
period aside from the trauma of being
you know locked up and seeing people die
and all the stuff um I think it's like
one of these things where we were stuck
inside looking at screens all day doing
the same thing with the same people and
so I don't remember much from that in
terms of those good memories that you're
talking about right you know when I was
growing up my parents worked really hard
for us and you know we went on some
vacations but not very often and I
really try to do now vacations to
interesting places as much as possible
with my family because like those are
the things that you remember right so I
I really do think about what's going to
be like something that's memorable and
then just do it even if it's a pain in
the ass because the experiencing self
will suffer for that but the remembering
self will be like yes I'm so glad I did
that do things that are very unpleasant
in the moment because those can be
reframed and enjoyed for many years to
come that's
probably um good advice or at least when
you're going through it's a good
way to uh see the silver lining of it
yeah I mean I think it's one of these
things where if you have like people who
you've gone through I since you said it
I'll just say since you've gone through
with someone and it's like uh
that's a bonding experience often you
know I mean that can really bring you
together I like to say it's like there's
no point in suffering unless you get a
story out of it so uh in the book I talk
about the power of the way we
communicate with others and how that
shapes our memories and so I had this
near-death experience at least that's
how I remember it on this paddle board
where just everything that could have
gone wrong did go wrong almost um so
many mistakes were made and um um ended
up like at some point just like
basically away from my board pinned in a
current like in this corner like not a
super good swimmer and my friend who
came with me Randy who's a computational
neuroscientist and he had just been
pushed down uh past me so he couldn't
even see me and I'm just like if I die
here you know I mean no one's around
it's it's like you just die alone and so
I just said well failure is not an
option and eventually I got out of it
and uh froze and got cut up and I mean
the the things that we were going
through were just insane but short
version of this is uh you know my my
wife and my daughter and ry's wife they
gave us all sorts of Hell about this cuz
they were just like where they were
ready to send out a search party so they
were giving me hell about it and then I
started to tell people in my lab about
this and then friends and it just became
a better and better story every time and
we actually had some photos of just the
crazy things like this generator that
was hanging over the water and we're
like ducking under this Z these metal
grings and I'm like going flat on and I
was just nuts you know but it became a
great story and it was defin I mean
Randy and I were already tight but that
was a real bonding experience for us and
yeah I mean and I learned from that that
it's like I don't look back on that
enough actually because I think uh we
often H at least for me I don't
necessarily have the confidence to think
that things will work out that I'll be
able to get through certain thing but my
ability to to actually get something
done in that moment is better than I
give myself credit for I think and uh
that was the lesson of that story that I
really took away well actually just for
me you're making me realize now that
it's not just those kinds of stories but
even things like periods of depression
or really low points to me at least it
feels like um motivating thing that the
darker it gets the better the story will
be if you emerge on the other side that
to me feel feels like a motivating thing
so maybe if people listening to this and
they're going through some as we
said uh one one thing um that could be a
source of light is that it'll be a hell
of a good story when it's all over when
you merge in the other
side uh let me ask you about decisions
you've you already talked about it a
little bit but when we Face the world
and we're making different
decisions how much does our
memory come into play is it the the kind
of narratives that we've constructed
about the world that are used to make
predictions that's fundamentally part of
the decision- making absolutely yeah so
let's say after this you and I decided
we're going to go for a beer right how
do you choose where to go you're
probably going to be like oh yeah this
new bar opened up near me had a great
time there they had a great beer
selection or you might say oh we went to
this place and it was totally crowded
and they're playing this horrible EDM or
whatever and so right there valuable
source of information right and then you
have these things like where you do this
counterfactual stuff like well well I
did this previously but what if I had
gone somewhere else and said maybe I'll
go to this other place because I didn't
try it the previous time so there's all
that kind of reasoning that goes into it
too um I think even if you think about
the big decisions in life right it's
like you and I were talking before we
started recording about how I got into
memory research and you got into uh Ai
and it's like we all have these personal
reasons that guide us in these
particular directions and some of it's
the and environment and random factors
in life and some of it is memories of
things that we want to overcome or
things that we build on in a positive
way but either way they Define us and
probably the earlier in life the
memories happen the more defining the
more defining power they have in terms
of determining who we become I mean I do
feel like adolesence is much more
important than I think people give
credit for I think that there is this
kind of a sense like you know um the
first three years of life is the most
important part but uh the teenage years
are just so important for the brain you
know and so that's where a lot of mental
illness starts to emerge um you know now
we're thinking of things like
schizophrenia as a neurodevelopmental
disorder because it just emerges during
that period of adolescence and early
adulthood so and I think the other part
of it is is that you know as I guess I
was a little bit too firm in saying that
memory determines who we are it's really
the self is an evolving construct I
think we kind of underestimate that and
when you're a parent you feel like every
decision you make is consequential in
forming this child and plays a role but
so do the child's peers and so do you
know there's so much I mean that's why I
think the big part of Education I think
that's so important is not the content
you learn I mean think of how much dumb
stuff we learned in school right but uh
a lot of it is learning how to get along
with people and learning who you are and
how you function and you know that can
be terribly traumatizing even if you
have a perfect you know parents working
on you is there some insight into the
human brain that explains um why we
don't seem to remember anything from the
first few years of life yeah yeah in
fact actually I was just talking to my
uh really good friend and colleague
Simona gy who studies uh the
Neuroscience of Child Development and so
we were talking about this and so there
are a bunch of reasons I would say so
one reason is there's an area of the
brain in the called the hippocampus
which is very very important for
remembering events or episodic memory
and so the first two years of life
there's a period called infantile
Amnesia and then the next couple years
of life after that there's a period
called childhood Amnesia and the
difference is that basically in lab and
you know even during childhood and
afterwards children basically don't have
any episodic memories for those first
two years the next two years it's very
fragmentary and that's why they call it
childhood Amnesia so there's some but
it's not much so one reason is that the
hippocampus is taking some time to
develop but another is the neocortex so
the whole folded stuff of gray matter
all around the hippocampus is developing
so rapidly and changing
and a child's knowledge of the world is
just massively being built up right so I
mean I'm going to probably embarrass
myself but it's like if you showed like
you know you trained a neural network
and you give it like the first couple of
patterns or something like that and then
you bombard it with another like you
know years worth of data try to get back
those first couple of patterns right
it's like everything changes and so the
brain is so plastic the cortex is so
plastic during that time and we think
that that memories for events are very
distributed across the brain so imagine
you're trying to get back that pattern
of activity that happened during this
one moment but the roads that you would
take to get there have been completely
rerouted right so I think that's my best
explanation the third explanation is a
child's sense of self takes a while to
develop and so their experience of
learning might be more learning what
happened as opposed to having this first
person experience of I remember was
there well I think somebody uh once said
to me that uh kind of loosely
philosophically that the reason we don't
remember the first few years of life
infantile Amnesia is because how
traumatic it is MH basically the the
error rate that you mentioned when your
brain's prediction doesn't match reality
the error rate in the first few years of
life your first few months certainly is
probably crazy high it's just nonstop
freaking out the the collision between
your model of the world and how the
world works is just so high that you
want whatever the trauma of that is not
to linger around I always thought that
an interesting idea because like just
imagine the insanity of what's happening
in a human brain in the first couple
years just you you don't know anything
and there's just this stream of
knowledge and we're somehow
given how plastic everything is he just
kind of molds and figures it out but
it's it's like an
insane waterfall of information I
wouldn't necessarily describe it as a
trauma and we can get into this whole
stages of Life thing which I just love
basically those first few years there
are I mean you know I mean think about
it a kid's internal model of their body
is changing right it's like just
learning to move I mean like you know
you if you ever have a baby you'll know
that like the first three months they're
discovering their toes right it's just
nuts so everything is changing but
what's really fascinating is and I think
this is one of those this is not at all
me being a scientist but it's like one
of those things that people talk about
when they talk about the you know
positive aspects of children is that
they're exceptionally curious and they
have this kind of openness towards the
world and so that prediction error is
not a a negative traumatic thing I think
it's like a very positive thing because
it's what they use they're seeking
information one of the areas that I'm
very interested in is the prefrontal
cortex it's an area of the brain that I
mean I could talk all day about it but
it's it helps us use our knowledge to
say hey this is what I want to do now
this is my goal so this is how I'm going
to achieve it and focus everything
toward cycle right the prefrontal cortex
takes forever to develop in humans the
connections are still being tweaked and
reformed like into late adolescence
early adulthood which is when you tend
to see mental illness pop up right so
it's being massively reformed then you
have about 10 years maybe of prime
functioning of the prefrontal cortex and
then it starts going down again and you
end up being older and you start losing
all that frontal function so look at
this and you'd say okay from you sit
around episodic memory talks we always
say children are worse than adults at
episodic memory
older adults or worse than young adults
at episodic memory and I always say
would say God this so weird why would we
have this period of time that's so short
when we're perfect right or optimal and
I I like to use the word optimal now
because there's such a culture of
optimization right now and it's like I
realize I have to redefine what optimal
is because for most of the Human
Condition I think we had a series of
stages of life where you have
basically adults saying okay young
adults saying I've got a child and you
know I'm part of this Village and I have
to hunt and forage and get things done I
need a prefrontal cortex so I can stay
focused on the big picture and the Long
Haul goals now I'm a child I'm in this
Village I'm kind of wandering around and
I've got some safety and I need to learn
about this culture because I know so
little what's the best way to do that
let's explore I don't want to be
constrained by goals as much I want to
really be free play and explore and
learn so you don't want a super tight
prefrontal cortex you don't even know
what the goals should be yet right it's
like if you're trying to design a model
that's based on a bad goal it's G to
it's not going to work well right so
then you go late in life you say why
don't you have a great prefrontal cortex
then but I think I mean if you go back
and you think how many species actually
stick around naturally long after their
child bearing ears are over after the
reproductive years are over like
menopause from what I understand
menopause is not all that common in the
animal world right why would that happen
and so I saw Alison gnik said something
about this so I started to look into
this about this idea that you know
really when you're older in most
societies your job is no longer to form
new episodic memories it's to pass on
the memories that you already have this
knowledge about the world or what we
call semantic meor memory to pass on
that semantic memory to the younger
Generations pass on the culture you know
even now in indigenous cultures that's
the role of the elders they're respected
they're not seen as you know people who
are past it and losing it and I thought
that was a very poignant thing that
memory is doing what it's supposed to
throughout these stages of life so it is
always optimal in a sense it's just
optimal for that stage of Life yeah and
for the Ecology of the system so you've
got so I looked into this and it's like
another species that has menopause is
Orcas Orca pods are led by the
grandmothers right so not the young
adults not the parents or whatever the
grandmothers and so they're the ones
that pass on the Traditions to the I
guess the younger generation of orcas
and if you you know if you look from
what little I understand different Orca
pods have different Traditions they hunt
for different things they have different
play traditions and uh that's a culture
right and so in Social
animals Evolution I think is designing
brains that are really around you know
it's it's obviously optimized for the
individual but also for kin and I think
that the kin are part of this like when
they're part of this intense social
group The Brain development should
parallel that the nature of the ecology
well it's just fascinating to think of
the individual Orca or human throughout
his life in stages doing a kind of
optimal wisdom development so in the
early days you don't even know what the
goal is and you figure out the goal and
you kind of optimize for that goal and
you pursue that goal and then all the
wisdom you collect through that then you
share with the others in the system with
the other individuals and as a as a
collective then you kind of converge
towards greater wisdom throughout the
generation so in that sense it's optimal
us humans and orcas got something going
on it works yeah apex
predators uh I just got a meglan on
tooth speaking of a Apex parties it's uh
just imagine the size of that
thing anyway uh how does the brain
forget and how and why does it remember
so maybe some of the mechanisms you
mentioned the hippocampus what are the
different components involved here so we
can think about this on a number of
levels maybe I'll give you the simplest
version first which is we tend to think
of memories as these individual things
and we can just access them maybe a
little bit like you know photos on your
phone or something like that but in the
brain the way it works is you have this
distributed pool of neurons and the
memories are kind of shared across
different pools of neurons and so what
you have is competition where sometimes
memories that overlap can be fighting
against each other right so sometimes we
forget because that competition just
wipes things out sometimes we forget
because there aren't the biological
signals which we can get into that would
promote long-term retention and lots of
times we forget because we can't find
the queue that sends us back to the
right memory and we need the right cue
to be able to activate it right so um
you know for instance in an neural
network there is no you wouldn't go and
you'd say this is the memory right it's
like the whole Network I mean the whole
ecosystem of memories is in the weights
of the neural network and in fact you
could extract entirely new memories
depending on how you feed yeah you have
to have the right query the right prompt
to access that whatever the part you're
looking for that's exactly right that's
exactly right and in humans you have
this more complex set of ways memory
works there's as I said the knowledge or
what you call semantic memory and then
there's these memories for specific
events which we call episodic memory and
so there's different pieces of the
puzzle that require different kinds of
cues so that's a big part of it too is
just this kind of what we call retrieval
failure you mentioned episodic memory
you mentioned semantic memory what are
the different separations here what's uh
working memory short-term memory
long-term memory what are the
interesting categories of memory yeah
and so memory researchers we love to cut
things up and say you know is memory one
thing or is it two things there's two
things or is three things and so one of
the things that there's value in that
and especially experimental value in
terms of being able to dissect thing in
the real world it's all connected speak
to your question working memory is a
term that was coined by Alan battley
it's basically thought to be this
ability to keep information online in
your mind right in front of you at a
given time and to be able to control the
flow of that information to choose what
information is relevant to be able to
manipulate it and so forth and one of
the things that Allan did that was was
quite brilliant was he said there's this
ability to kind of passively store
information you know see things in your
mind's eye or hear your internal
monologue but um you know we have that
ability to keep information in mind but
then we also have the separate what you
called an a central executive which is
identified a lot with the prefrontal
cortex it's this ability to control the
flow of information that's being kept
active based on what it is you're doing
now a lot of my early work was basically
saying that this working memory which
some memory researchers would call
short-term memory is not at all
independent from long-term memory that
is that a lot of executive function
requires learning and you have to have
like synaptic change for that to happen
and um but there's also transient forms
of memory so one of the things I've been
getting into lately is the idea that we
form internal models of events the
obvious one that I always us as birthday
parties right so you go to a child's
birthday party once the cake comes out
and they start you just see a candle You
can predict the whole frame you know set
of events that happens later and up till
that point where the child blows out the
candle you have an internal model in
your head of what's going on and so if
you follow people's eyes it's not
actually on what's happening it's going
where the action's about to happen um
which is just fascinating right so you
have this internal model and that's a
kind of a working memory product it's
something that you're keeping online
that's allowing you to interpret this
world around you now to build that model
though you need to pull out stuff from
uh your general knowledge of the world
which is what we call semantic memory
and then you'd want to be able to pull
out memories for specific events that
happen in the past which we call
episodic memory so in a way they're all
connected even though it's different um
the things that we're focusing on and
the way we organize information in the
present which is working memory will
play a big role in determining how we
remember that information later which
people typically call long-term memory
so if you have something like a a
birthday party and you've been to many
before you're going to load that from
dis into working memory this model and
then you're mostly operating on the
model and if it's a
new task you're you don't have a model
so you're more in the data collection
yeah one of the fascinating things that
we've been studying and this is we're
not at all the first to do this Jeff ZX
was a big Pioneer in this um and I've
been working with many other people Ken
Norman um Lea daachi NY or Colombia has
done some interesting stuff with this is
this idea that we form these internal
models at particular points of high
prediction error or points of I believe
also points of uncertainty points of
surprise or motivationally significant
periods and those points are when it's
maximally op optimal to encode an
episodic memory so I used to think oh
well we're just encoding episodic
memories constantly boom boom boom boom
boom but think about how much redundancy
there is in all that right it's just a
lot of information that you don't need
but if you capture an episodic memory at
the point of Maximum uncertainty for the
singular experience right you're just
it's only going to happen once but if
you capture it at the point of Maximum
uncertainty or maximum surprise you have
the most useful point in your experience
that you've grabbed and what we see is
that the hippocampus and these other
networks uh that are involved in
generating these internal models of
events they show a heighten period of
connectivity or correlated activity
during those breaks between different
events which we call event boundaries
these are the points where you're like
surprised or you cross from one room to
another and so forth and that
communication is associated with a bump
of activity in the hippocampus and
better memory and so
if people have a very good internal
model throughout that event you don't
need to do much memory processing you're
in a predictive mode right and so then
at these event boundaries you encode and
then you retrieve and you're like okay
wait a minute what's going on here ranat
now talking about orcas what's going on
and maybe you have to go back and
remember reading my book to pull out the
episodic memory to make sense of
whatever it is I'm babbling about right
and so there's this beauti dynamics that
you can see in the brain of these
different networks that are coming
together and then deail a different
points in time that are allowing you to
go into these modes and so to speak to
your original question to some extent
when we're talking about semantic memory
and episodic memory and working memory
you can think about it as these
processes that are unfolding as these
networks kind of come together and Pull
Apart can memory be trained and improved
this beautiful connected system that
you've
described what aspect of it is a
mechanism that can be improved through
training I think Improvement it depends
on what your definition of optimal is so
what I say in the book is is that you
don't want to remember more you want to
remember better which means focusing on
the things that are important and that's
what our brains are designed to do so if
you go back to the earliest quantitative
studies in memory by ebing house what
you see is that he was trying so hard to
memorize this arbitrary nonsense and
within a day he lost about 60% of that
information and he was using he was
basically using a very very generous way
of measuring it right so as far as we
know nobody has managed to violate those
basics of having people forget you know
most of their experiences so if your
expectation is that you should remember
everything and that's what your optimal
is you're already off because that's
just not what human brains are designed
to do do on the other hand what we see
over and over again is that the brain
does basically one of the cool things
about the design of the brain is it's
always less is more less is more right
it's like I mean I've seen estimates
that the human brain uses something like
12 to 20 watts you know in a day I mean
that's just nuts the low power
consumption right so it's all about
reusing information and and making the
most of what we already have and so um
that's why basically again what you see
biologically is you know neuromodulators
for instance these chemicals in the
brain like neopine phrine dopamine uh
serotonin these are chemicals that are
released during moments that tend to be
biologically significant surprise fear
stress Etc and so these chemicals
promote lasting plasticity right
essentially some mechanisms by which the
brain can say prioritize the information
that you carry with you into the future
attention is a big factor as well our
ability to focus our attention on what's
important and so uh there's different
schools of thought on training attention
for instance um uh so one of my
colleagues amishi jaw she wrote a book
called Peak mind and talks about
mindfulness as a method for improving
attention uh and focus uh so she works a
lot with military like Navy Seals and
stuff to do do this kind of work um with
mindfulness meditation um Adam gazali
another one of my friends and colleagues
has work on kind of training through
video games actually as a way of
training attention and so uh it's not
clear to me you know one of the
challenges though in training is you
tend to overfit to the thing that you're
trying to optimize right so you tend to
if I'm looking at a video game I can
definitely get better at paying
attention in the context of the video
game but you transfer it to the outside
world that's very controversial
the implication there is that attention
is a fundamental component of
remembering something allocating
attention to it and then attention might
be something that you could train how
you allocate attention and how you hold
attention on a thing I can say that in
fact we do in certain ways right so if
you are an expert in something you are
training attention so we did this one
study of expertise in the brain and uh
you so people used to think say if
you're a bird expert or something right
people will go like if you get really
into this world of birds you start to
see the differences in your visual
cortex is tuned up and it's all about
plasticity the visual cortex and vision
researchers love to say everything's
visual you know but but it's like we did
the study of attention and working or E
working memory and expertise and one of
the things that surprised us were the
biggest effects as people became experts
in identifying these different kinds of
just crazy objects that we made up as
they develop this expertise of being
able to identify what made them
different from each other and what made
them unique we were actually seeing
massive increases in activity in the
prefrontal cortex and this fits with
some of the studies of Chess experts and
so forth that it's not so much that you
learn the patterns passively you learn
what to look for you learn what's
important what's not right and you can
see this in any kind of expert
professional athlete they're looking
three steps ahead of where they're
supposed to be so that's kind of a
training of attention and those are also
what you'd call Expert memory skills so
um if you take the memory athletes I
know that's something we're both
interested in and you know so these are
people who train in these competitions
and they'll memorize like a deck of
cards and like a really short amount of
time um there's a a great memory athlete
her name I think is pronounced yenya
winter soul but she uh so I think she's
got like a giant Instagram following and
so she had this YouTube video that went
um where she had memorized an entire
Ikea catalog right and so how do people
do this by all accounts from people who
become memory athletes they weren't born
with some extraordinary memory but they
practic strategies over and over and
over again the strategy that they use
for memorizing a particular thing it can
become automatic and you can just deploy
it in an instant right so again it's not
necessarily going to one strategy for
learning the order of a deck ofs cards
might not help you for something else
that you need like you know remembering
your way around Austin Texas but it's
going to be these whatever you're
interested in you can optimize for that
and that's just a natural byproduct of
expertise there's certain hacks there's
something called The Memory Palace that
I've played with I don't know if you're
familiar with that whole technique and
it works it's interesting so uh another
thing I recommend for people a lot is I
use anky a lot every day it's a app that
does space repetition so I think medical
students and like students use this a
lot to remember a lot of different
things oh yeah okay we can come back to
this but yeah sure it's the whole
concept of space repetition you just uh
when when the thing is fresh you kind of
have to remind yourself of it a lot and
then over time you can wait uh a week a
month a year before you have to recall
the thing again and that way you
essentially have something like note
cards the can have tens of thousands of
and can only spend 30 minutes a day and
actually be refreshing all of that
information all that knowledge it's
really great and then for uh Memory
Palace is a technique that allows you to
remember things like the Ikea catalog or
by placing them visually in a place that
you're really familiar with like I'm
really familiar with this place so I can
put uh uh numbers or facts or whatever
you want to remember you can walk along
that little pal reminds you it's cool
like there's stuff like that that I
think athletes memory athletes could use
but I think also regular people can use
one of the things I have to solve for
myself is how to remember names I'm
horrible at it yeah I think is because
when people introduce
themselves I have the the social anxiety
of the interaction where I'm like I know
I should be remembering that but I have
I'm freaking out internally about
social interaction in general and so
therefore I forget immediately so I'm
looking for good tricks for that so uh
I'm I feel like we've got a lot in
common because when people introduce
themselves to me it's almost like I have
this like just blank blackout for a
moment and then I'm just looking at them
like what happened I look away or
something what's wrong with me yeah so I
mean I'm totally with you on this the
reason why it's hard is that there's no
reason should be able to remember names
because when you say remembering a name
you're not really remembering a name
maybe in my case you are but most of the
time you're associating a name with a
with a face and an identity and that's a
completely arbitrary thing right I mean
maybe in the olden days somebody named
Miller it's like they're actually making
flower or something like that but you
know for the most part it's like uh
these names are just utterly arbitrary
so you have no thing to latch on to and
so it's not really a thing that our
brain does very well to learn
meaningless arbitrary stuff so what you
need to do is build connection somehow
visualize a connection and sometimes
it's it's obvious or sometimes it's not
I'm trying to think of a good one for
you now but the first thing I think of
is Lex Luthor but yeah so I Le doesn't
Lex Luthor wear a a suit I think I I
know he has a shaved head though he's
bald which you're not you got a great
head if I trade hair with you any day
but but like you know but something like
that but if I can come up with something
like I could say okay so Lex Luther is
this criminal mastermind and then I just
imagine you talked about stabbing or
whatever
earlier kind of connected and that's it
yeah yeah and I but I'm serious though
that these kinds of weird associations
now building a richer Network I mean one
of the things that I find is if I've
like you can have somebody's name that's
just totally generic like John Smith or
something not that no offense to people
that that name but you know I if I see a
generic name like that but I've read
John Smith's papers academically and
then I meet John Smith at a conference I
can immediately associate that name with
that face because I have this
pre-existing Network to lock everything
into right and so you can build that
Network and that's what the method of
loai or the Memory Palace technique is
all about is you have a pre-existing
structure in your head of like your
childhood home or this mental Palace
that you've created for yourself and so
now you can put arbitrary pieces of
information in different locations in
that mental structure of yours and then
you can walk through the different path
and find all the pieces of information
you're looking for so the method of Loi
is a great method for just learning
arbitrary things because it allows you
to link them together and get that cue
that you need to pop in and find
everything right we should maybe Linger
on this Memory Palace thing just to make
obvious cuz when people were describing
to me a while ago what this is it seems
insane I just you literally think of a
place like a childhood home or a home
that you're really
visually uh familiar with and you
literally place in that
three-dimensional space facts or people
or whatever you want to remember and you
just walk in your mind
along that place visually and you can
remember uh remind yourself of the
different things one of the limitations
is there is a sequence to it m so it's I
think your brain somehow you need you
can't just like go upstairs right away
or something you have to like walk along
the the room so it's really great for
remembering sequences but it's also not
great for remembering like individual
facts out of context so the full context
of the tour I think is
important uh but it's a it's fascinating
how the mind is able to do that when you
ground these pieces of knowledge into
something that you remember well already
especially visually fascinating you can
just do that for any kind of sequence
I'm sure she used something like this
for the for Ikea
catalog absolutely absolutely um and I
think the the principle here is again I
was telling you this idea that memories
can compete with each other right well I
like to use this example and maybe
someday I'll Reg at this but I've used
it a lot recently is like imagine if
this were my desk it could be cluttered
with a zillion different things right so
imagine it's just cluttered with a whole
bunch of yellow posted notes and on one
of them I put my bank password on it
right well it's going to take me forever
to find it I might you know it's just
going to be buried under all these other
posted on but if it's like hot pink it's
going to stand out and I find it really
easily right so that's one way in which
if things are distinctive if you've
processed information in a very
distinctive way then you can have a
memory that's going to last um and
that's very good for instance for name
face associations if I get something
distinctive about you you know that it's
like that you've got very short hair and
maybe I can make the association with
Lex Luthor that way or something like
that right you know but I I get
something very specific that's a great
cue but the other part of it is what if
I just organized my notes so that I have
my finances in one pile and I have my
like uh reminders my to-do list in one
pile for so I organized them well then I
know exactly if I'm going for my banking
you know P my bank password I could go
to the finance pile right so the method
of lowai works or memory palaces work
because they give you a way of
organizing um there's a school of
thought that says that episodic memory
evolved from this like kind of knowledge
of space and you know basically this
primitive abilities to figure out where
you are and so people explain the method
Loi that way and and you know whether or
not the evolutionary argument is true
the meth ofi is not at all special so if
you don't you're not a good visualizer
um uh stories are a good one so a lot of
memory athletes will use stories and
they'll go like if you're memorizing a
deck of cards they have a little code
for the different like uh um like the
king and the Jack and the 10 and so
forth and they'll make up a story about
things that they're doing and that'll
work songs are a great one right I mean
it's like I can still remember there's
this obscure episode of the TV show
Cheers they sing a song about Albania
that he uses to memorize all these facts
about Albania I could still sing that
song to
you it's just I saw it on a TV show you
know uh so what you mentioned space
repetition so what um do you like this
process maybe can you explain it oh yeah
if I'm trying to memorize something
let's say if I have an hour to memorize
as many Spanish words as I can if I just
try to do like half an hour tomorrow and
then I later in the day I do half an
hour I won't retain that information as
long as if I do half an hour today and
half an hour one week from now and so
doing that extra spacing should help me
retain the information better now
there's a interesting boundary condition
which is it depends on when you need
that information so many of us you know
for me like I I can't remember so much
from college and high school cuz I
crammed cuz I just did everything at the
last minute
and sometimes I would literally study
like you know in the hallway right
before the test that was great because
what would happen is is I just had that
information right there and so actually
not spacing can really help you if you
need it very quickly right but the
problem is is that you tend to forget it
later on but on the other hand if you
space things out you get a benefit for
later on retention and so there's many
different explanations we have a
computational model of this it's
currently under revision um but in our
computer model what we say is is that an
easy maybe a good way of thinking about
this is this conversation that you and I
are having It's associated with a
particular context a particular place in
time and so all these little cues that
are in the background these little
guitar sculptures that you have and that
big light umbrella thing right all these
things are part of my memory for what
we're talking about the content so
now later on you're sitting around and
you're at home drinking a beer and
you're thinking God what a strange
interview that was right so now you're
trying to remember it but the context is
different so your current situation
doesn't match up with the memory that
you pulled up there's error there's a
mismatch between what you pulled up and
your current context and so in our model
what you start to do is you start to
erase or alter the parts of the memory
that are associated with the specific
place and time and you heighten the
information about the content and so if
you remember this information in
different times and different places
it's more accessible at different times
and different places because it's not
overfitted in a in an AI kind of way of
thinking about things it's not
overfitted to one particular context but
that's also why the memories that we
call upon the most also feel kind of
like they're just things that we read
about almost you don't vividly reimagine
them right it's like they're just these
things that just come to us like facts
right yeah and it's a little bit
different than semantic memory but it's
like basically the these events that we
have recalled every you know over and
over and over again we keep updating
that memory so it's less and less tied
to the original experience but then we
have those other ones which it's like
you just get a reminder of that very
specific context you smell something you
hear a song you see a place that you
haven't been to in a while and boom it
just comes back back to you and that's
the exact opposite of what you get with
spacing right that's so fascinating so
with space repetition one of its powers
is that you lose attachment to a
particular
context but then it
loses the the intensity of the flavor of
the memory MH that's interesting that's
so interesting yeah but you know at the
same time it becomes stronger in the
sense that the content becomes stronger
yeah so it's used for uh for learning
languages for learning facts for
learning for you know for that generic
semantic information type of memories
yeah and and I think this this falls
into a category we've done other
modeling um one of these is a published
study in pla computational biology where
we showed that uh another way which is I
think related to the spacing effect is
What's called the testing effect so uh
the idea is is that if you're trying to
learn words uh let's say in Spanish or
something like that and this doesn't
have to be words it could be anything
you test yourself on the words and that
act of testing yourself helps you retain
it better over time than if you just
studied it right and
so from traditional learning theories
some learning theories anyway this seems
weird why would you do better giving
yourself this extra error from testing
yourself rather than just you know
giving yourself perfect input that's a
replica of what it is that you're trying
to learn and I think the reason is is
that you get better retention from that
error that mismatch that we talked about
right so what's happening in our model
it's actually conceptually kind of
similar to what happens with back propop
in uh AI so or neural networks and so
the idea is is that you expose here's
the bad connections and here's the good
connections and so we can keep the the
parts of the cell assembly that are good
for the memory and lose the ones that
are not so good but if you don't stress
test the memory you haven't exposed it
to the error fully and so that's why I
think this is kind of this is a thing
that I come back to over and over again
is that you will retain information
better if you're constantly pushing
yourself to your limit right if you are
feeling like you're coasting then you're
actually not learning so it's like
always you should always be stress
testing the memory system yeah and feel
good about it you know even though
everyone tells me oh my memory is
terrible in the moment they're over
confident about what they'll retain
later on so it it's fascinating and so
what happens is when you test yourself
you're like oh my God I thought I knew
that but I don't and so it can be
demoralizing until you get around that
and you realize hey this is the way that
I learn this is this is how I learn best
it's like if you're trying to you know
star in a movie or something like that
you don't just sit around reading the
script you actually act it out and
you're going to botch those lines from
time to time right you know there's an
interesting moment you probably
experienced this I remember uh good
friend of mine Joe Rogan I was on his
podcast
and we were randomly talking about
soccer football somebody I grew up
watching Diego armanda mardona one of
the greatest soccer players of all time
and we were talking about him and his
career and so on
and Joe asked me if he's still
now and I said
yeah I don't know why I thought yeah
because that was a perfect example of
memories he he passed away I tweeted
about it how heartbroken I was all this
kind of stuff like a year before I know
this but in my mind I went back to the
thing I've done many times in my head
visualizing some of the Epic ronti had
on goal and so on so for me he's alive
so I'm and part of the also the
conversation when you're talking to Joey
there's stress and like your the focus
is allocated the attention is allocated
in a particular way but I when I walked
away I was like in which world was Diego
mardona still alive like in which cuz I
was sure in my head that he was still
alive it was a it's a moment that sticks
with me there's I've had a few like that
in my life where it just kind
of just
it like obvious things just disappear
from mind and it's cool like it it shows
actually the power of the Mind in a
positive sense to erase memories you
want erased maybe um but I don't know I
don't know if there's a good explanation
for that one of the cool things that
that I found is is that some people
really just revolutionize a field by cre
by creating a problem that didn't exist
before it's kind of like why I love
science is like I I engineering is like
solving other people problems and
science is about creating problems I'm
just much more like I want to break
things and you know create problems uh
not necessarily move fast though but but
one of my former mentors Mara Johnson
who in my opinion is one of the greatest
memory researchers of all time she comes
up young woman in the field and this
mostly guy field and she gets into this
idea of how do we tell the difference
between things that we've imagined and
things that we actually remember how do
we tell I get some mental experience
where did that mental experience come
from right and it turns out this is a
huge problem because essentially our
mental experience of remembering
something that happened our mental
experience of thinking about something
how do you tell the difference they're
both largely constructions in our head
and so it is very important and the way
that you do it is I mean it's not
perfect but the way that we often do it
and succeed is by again using using our
prefrontal cortex and really focusing on
the sensory information or the place and
time and the things that put us back
into when this information happened and
if it's something you thought about
you're not going to have all of that
Vivid detail as you do for something
that actually happened but it doesn't
work all the time but that that's a big
thing that you have to do but it takes
time it's slow and it's again effortful
but that's what you need to remember
accurately but what's cool and I think
this is what you alluded to about how
that was an interesting experience is
imagination's exactly the opposite
imagination is basically saying I'm just
going to take all this information from
memory recombine it in different ways
and throw it out there and so for
instance um Dan Shaker um and Donna
Addis done cool work on this Demis hbus
did work on this with Elenor Maguire and
and UCL and this goes back actually to
this guy Frederick Bartlett who is this
revolutionary memory researcher Bartlett
he actually like rejected the whole idea
of quantifying memory he said there's no
statistics in my book he came from this
anthropology perspective and short
version of the story is he just asked
people to recall things he give people
stories and poems ask people to recall
them and what he found was people's
memories didn't reflect all of the
details of what they were exposed to and
they did reflect a lot more they were
filtered through this lens of prior
knowledge the the cultures that that
they came from the beliefs that they had
the things they knew and so what he
concluded was that he called remembering
an imaginative construction meaning that
we don't replay the past we imagine how
the past could have been by taking bits
and pieces that come up in our heads and
likewise he wrote this beautiful paper
on imagination saying when we imagine
something and create something we're
creating it from these specific
experiences that we've had and combining
it with our general knowledge but
instead of trying to focus it on being
accurate and getting out one thing
you're just ruthlessly recombining
things without any you know any
necessary kind of goal in mind um I mean
or at least that's one kind of creation
so imagination is
um
fundamentally coupled with memory in in
both directions I think so I mean it's
not clear that it is in everyone but one
of the things that's been studied is
some patients who have amnesia for
instance they have uh brain damage say
to the hippocampus and if you ask them
to imagine things that are not in front
of them like imagine what could happen
after I leave this room right they are
find it very difficult to give you a
scenario what could happen or if they do
it' be more stereotype like yes this
would happen this would but it's not
like they can come up with anything
that's very Vivid and creative in that
sense as partly because when you have
amnesia you're stuck in the present
because the get a very good model of the
future it really helps to have episodic
memories to draw upon right and so
that's that's the basic idea and in fact
one of the most impressive things when
people started to scan people's brains
and ask people to remember past events
what they found was there was this big
network of the brain called the default
mode Network it gets a lot of pressed
because it's like thought to be
important it's engaged during mind
wandering and if I ask you to pay
attention to something it only comes on
when you stop paying attention you know
so people oh it's just this kind of you
know daydreaming Network and I thought
this is just ridiculous research who
cares you know um but then what people
found was when people recall episodic
memories this network gets active and uh
so we started to look into it and this
network of areas is really closely
functionally interacting with the
hippocampus and so in fact some would
say the hippocampus is part of this
default Network and if you look at brain
images of people or brain maps of
Activation so to speak of people
imagining possible scenarios of things
that could happen in the future even
things that couldn't really be very
plausible they look very similar I mean
you know to the naked eye they look
almost the same as maps of brain
activation when people remember the past
according to our Theory and we've got
some data to support this we've broken
up this network into various sub pieces
is that basically it's kind of taking
apart all of our experiences and
creating these little Lego blocks out of
them and then you can put them back
together if you have the right
instructions to recreate these
experiences that you've had but you
could also reassemble them into New
pieces to create a model of an event
that hasn't happened yet and that's what
we think happens and when I'm our common
ground that we're establishing in
language requires using those building
blocks to put together a model of what's
going on well there's a good percentage
of time I personally live in in the
imagined world I think of I have I do
thought experiments a
lot I you know take the uh the
absurdity of human life as it stands and
uh play it forward in all kinds of
different
directions sometimes it's rigorous
thoughts thought experiments sometimes
it's fun one so as I imagine that that
has an effect on how I remember things
and I suppose I have to be a little bit
careful to make sure stuff
happened versus stuff that I just
imagined happened and this also I mean
some of my best friends are characters
inside books that never even existed and
I'm you know there's
some degree to which they actually exist
in my mind like these characters exist
authors exist Doki exist but also uh
Brothers Kazo I love that book it's one
of the few books I've read
one of the few literature books that
I've read I should say I read a lot in
school that I don't remember but
Brothers
caram they exist and I have almost kind
of like conversations with them it's
interesting it's uh it's interesting to
allow your brain to kind of play with
ideas of the past of the imagined and
see it all as one yeah there was
actually this famous ponist he's kind of
like back then the equivalent of a
memory athlete except he would go to
shows and do this uh um those described
by the this uh really famous neuros
psychologist from Russia named uh Lura
and so this guy was named Solomon shevi
and he had this condition called
synesthesia that basically created these
weird associations between different
senses that normally wouldn't go
together so that gave him this
incredibly vivid
imagination that he would use to
basically imagine all sorts of things
that he would need to memorize and he
would just imagine like just create
these incredibly detailed things in his
head that allowed him to memorize all
sorts of stuff but it also really
haunted him by some reports that
basically it was like he was at some
point you know and again who knows the
drinking was part of this but at some
point had trouble differentiating his
imagination from reality right and this
is this is interesting because it's like
I mean that's what psychosis is in some
ways is you you know first of all you're
just learning connections from
prediction errors that you probably
shouldn't learn and the other part of it
is is that your internal signals are
being confused with actual things in the
outside world right well that's why a
lot of this stuff is both feature and
bug it's a double-edged sword yeah I
mean it might be why there's such an
interesting relationship between genius
and
psychosis yeah maybe they're just uh two
sides of the same
coin humans are fascinating aren't they
I think so sometimes scary but mostly
fascinating can we just talk about
memory sport a little longer there's
something called the USA memory
Championship like what are these
athletes like what does it mean to be
like Elite level this have you
interacted with any of them or reading
about them what have you learned about
these folks there's a guy named uh Henry
rer who's studying these guys and
there's actually a book by Joshua for
called Moon walking with Einstein where
he talks about
he actually as part of this book just
decided to become a memory athlete they
often have these life events that make
them go hey why don't I do this so there
was a guy named Scott hagwood who I
write about who um uh thought that he
was uh he was getting chemo for cancer
and so he decided like because chemo
there's a a well-known thing called
chemo brain where people become like
they just lose a lot of their
sharpness um and so he wanted to fight
that by learning these memory skills so
he bought a book and this is the story
you hear in a lot of memory athletes is
they buy a book by other memory athletes
or other memory experts so to speak and
they just learn those skills and
practice them over and over again they
start by winning bets and so forth and
then they go into these competitions and
the competitions are typically things
like memorizing long strings of numbers
or memorizing you know orders of cards
and so forth so there tend to be pretty
arbitrary things not like things that
would be able you'd be able to bring a
lot of prior knowledge but they build
the skills that you need to memorize
arbitrary things yeah it's fascinating
I've uh gotten a chance to work with
something called uh endb tasks so
there's all these kinds of tasks memory
recall tasks that are used to kind of
load up the quote unquote working memory
yeah yeah and to
see the psychologist used it to test all
kinds of stuff like to see how well
you're good at multitasking use it in
particular for the task of driving like
if it if we fill up your brain
with intensive working memory tasks how
good are you at also not crashing that
kind of stuff so it's fascinating but
again those tasks are arbitrary and
they're usually about recalling a
sequence of numbers in some kind of semi
complex way are you uh do you have any
favorite tasks of this nature in your
own uh studies I've really been most
excited about going in the opposite
direction and using things that are more
and more
naturalistic and the reason is is that
we've really move we've moved in that
direction because what we found is that
memory works very very differently when
you study it when you study memory in
the way that people typically
remember and so it goes into a much more
predictive mode and you have these um
event boundaries for instance and you
have
uh but a lot of what happens is this
kind of fascinating mix that we've been
talking about a mix of interpretations
and Imagination with perception and so
um and the new direction we're going in
is understanding uh navigation in our
memory for places and the reason is is
that there's a lot of work that's done
in rats which is very good work they
have a rat and they put it in a box and
the rat goes chases cheese in a box and
you'll find cells in the hippocampus
that fire when a rat is in different
places in the box and so the
conventional wisdom is that the
hippocampus forms this map of the box
and I think that probably may happen
when you have like absolutely no
knowledge of the world right but I think
one of the cool things about human
memory is we can bring to bear our past
experiences to e economically learn new
ones and so for instance if you learn a
map of an Ikea let's say if I go to the
IKEA in Austin I'm sure there's one here
I probably could go to this Ikea and
find my way to the you know where the
wine glasses are without having to even
think about it because it's got a very
similar layout even though Ikea is a
nightmare to get around once I learned
my local Ikea I can use that map
everywhere white form a brand new one
for a new place and so that kind of
ability to reuse information really
comes into play when we look at things
that are you know more naturalistic
tasks um and uh another thing that we're
really interested in is this idea of
like what if instead of basically
mapping out every coordinate in a space
you form a pretty economical graph that
connects basically the major landmarks
together and being able to use that as
you know emphasizing the things that are
most important the places that you go
for food and the places that are
landmarks that help you get around and
then filling in the blanks for the rest
because I really believe that cognitive
Maps or mental maps of the world just
like our memories for events are not
photographic I think there this
combination of actual verifiable details
and then a lot of inference that you
make so what have you learned about this
kind of spatial mapping of places how do
people represent locations uh there's a
lot of variability I think that and
there's a lot of disagreement about how
people represent locations in a world of
GPS and physical maps people can learn
it from like basically what they call
like survey perspective of being able to
see everything and so that's one way in
which humans can do it that's a little
bit different um there's one way which
we can memorize Roots like I know how to
get from here to let's say if I knew
walk here from my hotel I could just
rigidly follow that route back right and
there's another more integrative way
which would be what's called a cognitive
map which would be kind of a a sense of
how everything relates to each
other and so there's lots of people who
believe that these maps that we have in
our head are isomorphic with the world
they're like these literal coordinates
um that follow ukian space and as you
know ukian mathematics is very
constrained right
and I think that we are actually much
more generative in our maps of space so
that we do have these bits and pieces
and and we we've got a small task it's
right now not yet like uh we need to do
some work on it for further analyses but
one of the things we're looking at is uh
these signals called ripples in the
hippocampus which are these bursts of
activity that you see that are
synchronized with areas in in the
neocortex in the default Network
actually and so what we find is is that
those ripples seem to increase at
navigationally important points when
you're making a decision or when you
reach a goal it speaks to the emotion
thing right because if you have limited
choices if I'm walking down a street I
could really just get a mental map of
the neighborhood with a more minimal
kind of thing by just saying here's the
intersections and here's the directions
I take to get in between them and what
we found in general in our MRI studies
is basic Ally the more people can reduce
the problem whether it's space or any
kind of decision-making problem the less
the hippocampus encodes it really is
very economical towards the points of
most highest information content and
value so can you describe the encoding
in the hippocampus and the ripples you
were talking about with the what's the
signal in which we see the ripples yeah
so this is really interesting there are
these oscillations right so there's
these waves that you basically see and
um these waves are points of very high
excitability and low
excitability and uh at least during they
happen actually during slow wave sleep
too so the deepest stages of sleep and
you're just zoned out right you see
these very slow waves where it's like
very excitable and then very unexcitable
it goes up and down and on top of them
you'll see these little sharp wve
Ripples and when there's a ripple in the
hip campus you tend to see a sequence of
cells that resemble a sequence of cells
that fire when you know an animal is
actually doing something in the world so
it almost is like a little people call
it replay I think it's a little bit I
don't like that term but it's basically
a little bit of a compressed play of the
sequence of activity in the brain that
was taking place earlier and during
those moments there's a little window of
communication between the hippocampus
and these areas in the Neo cortex and so
um that I think helps you form new
memories but it also helps you I think
stabilize them but also really connect
different things together in memory and
allows you to build Bridges between
different events that you've had and so
this is one of at least our theories of
sleep and its real role in helping you
see the connections between different
events that you've experienced oh the so
during sleep is when the connections are
formed the connections between different
events yeah right so it's like You See
Me Now you see me next week you see me a
month later you start to build a little
internal model of how I behave and and
you know what to expect of me and we
think sleep one of the things that
allows you to do is figure out those
connections and connect the dots and
find the signal and the noise so you
mentioned uh
fmri what is it and how is it used in
studying memory this is actually the
reason why I got into this whole field
of science is when I was in grad school
fmri was just really taking off as a
technique for studying brain activity
and uh what's beautiful about it is you
can study the whole human brain and uh
there's lots of limits to it but you can
basically do it in person without
sticking anything into their brains and
very non-invasive I mean for me being an
MRI scanner is like being in the womb I
just fall asleep if I'm not being asked
to do it anything I get very sleepy you
know um but you can have people watch
movies while they're being scanned or
you can have them do tests of memory
like giving them words and so forth to
memorize uh but what MRI is itself is
just this technique where you put people
in a very high magnetic field typical
ones we would use would be three Tesla
to give you an idea so a three Tesla
magnet you put somebody in and what
happens is you get this very weak but
you know measurable magnetization in the
brain and then you apply a radio
frequency pulse which is basically a
different electromagnetic field and so
you're basically using water the water
molecules in the brain as a tracer so to
speak um and uh part of it in fmri is
the fact that these magnetic fields that
you mess with by by
manipulating um these radio frequency
pulses and the static field and you have
things called GR R would change the
strength of the magnetic field in
different parts of the head so they're
all we tweak them in different ways but
the basic idea that we use in eim is
that blood is Flowing to the brain and
when you have blood that doesn't have
oxygen on it it's a little bit more
magnetizable than blood that does
because you have hemoglobin that carries
the oxygen the iron basically in the
blood that makes it red and so that
hemoglobin when it's deoxygenated
actually um has different magnetic field
properties than when it has oxygen and
it turns out when you have an increase
in local activity in some part of the
brain the blood flows there and as a
result you get a lower concentration of
hemoglobin that is not oxygenated and
then that gives you more signal so I
gave you I think I sent you a gif as you
like to say yeah we had off record in
intense argument uh about if it's
pronounced GIF or GIF but that's we we
shall set that aside as friends we could
have called it a Stern rebuke perhaps
but rebuke yeah I drew a hard line uh it
is true the creator of gift said it's
pronounced GIF but that's the only
person that pronounces gif anyway yes
you sent a GI uh a gif of uh this would
be basically a whole a movie of fmri
data and so when you look at it's not
very impressive it looks like these like
very pixelated maps of the brain but
it's mostly kind of like white but these
tiny changes in the intensity of those
signals that you probably wouldn't be
able to visually perceive like about 1%
can be statistically very very large
effects for us and that allows us to see
hey there's an increase in activity in
some part of the brain when I'm doing
some task like trying to remember
something and I can use those changes to
even predict is a person going to
remember this later or not and the
coolest thing that people have done is
to
decode um what people are remembering
from the patterns of activity from
because maybe when I'm remembering this
thing like I'm remembering the house
where I grew up I might have one pixel
that's bright in the hippoc campus and
one that's dark and if I'm remembering
uh you know something like more like uh
uh the car that I used to drive when I
was 16 I might see the opposite pattern
where a different pixels spray and so
all that little stuff that we used to
think of noise uh we can now think of
almost like a QR code for memory so to
speak where different memories have a
different little pattern of bright
pixels and dark pixels and so this
really revolutionized my research so
there's fancy research out there where
people really I mean not even that I
mean by your standards this would be
stone age but you know a flying machine
learning techniques to do decoding and
so forth and now there's a lot of
forward encoding models and you you can
go to town with this stuff right and I'm
much more old school of Designing
experiments where you basically say okay
here's a whole web of inter of memories
that overlap in some way shape or form
do memories that occurred in the same
place have a similar QR code and do
memories that occur in different places
have a different QR code and you can
just use things like correlation
coefficients or cosine distance to
measure that stuff right super simple
right and so what happens is you can
start to get a whole state space of how
a brain area is indexing all these
different memories it's super
fascinating because what we could see is
this little like separation between how
certain brain areas are processing
memory for who was there in other brain
areas of processing information about
where it occurred or the situation
that's kind of unfolding and some are
giving you information about what are my
goals that are involved and so forth and
so and H campus is just putting it all
together into these unique things that
just are about when and where it
happened so there is a separation
between spatial
information
Concepts like literally there's distinct
as you said QR codes for these so to
speak let me try a different analogy too
that might be more accessible for people
which should be like uh You' got a
folder on your computer right I open it
up there's a bunch of files there I can
sort those files by you know
alphabetical order and now things that
both start with letter A are lumped
together and things that start with Z
versus a are far apart right and so that
is one way of organizing the folder but
I could do it by date and if I do it by
date things that were created close
together in time are close and things
that are far apart in time are far so
every like you can think of how a brain
area or a network of areas contributes
to memory by looking at what the Sorting
scheme is and these QR codes that we're
talking about that you get from FM or
allow you to do that and you can do the
same thing if you're recording from
massive populations of neurons in uh an
animal um and you can do it for
recording local Potentials in the brain
you know so little um waves of activity
in let's say a human who has epilepsy
and they stick electrodes in their brain
try to find the seizures so that's some
of the work that we're doing now but all
these techniques basically allow you to
say hey what's the Sorting scheme and so
we've found that some networks of the
brain sort information in memory
according to who was there so I might
have like we've actually shown in one of
my favorite studies of all time that was
done by a former post Zach rehea and
Zach did the study where we had a bunch
of movies with different people in my
labs are two different people and he
filmed them at two different cafes and
two different supermarkets
and what you could show is in one
particular Network you could find the
same kind of pattern of activity more or
less a very very similar pattern of
activity every time I saw Alex in one of
these movies no matter where he was
right and I could see another one that
was like a common uh pattern that
happened every time I saw this
particular Supermarket nugget you know
and so and it didn't matter whether
you're watching a movie or whether
you're recalling the movie was the same
kind of pattern that comes up right
that's so fascinating it fascinating so
now you have those building blocks for
assembling a model of what's happening
in the present imagining what could
happen and remembering things very
economically from putting together all
these pieces so that all the hippocampus
has to do is get the right kind of
blueprint for how to put together all
these building blocks these are all like
beautiful hints at a super interesting
system it makes me wonder on the other
side of it how to build it but it's like
it's fascinating like the way it does
the encoding is really really
fascinating or I guess the symptoms the
results of that encoding are fascinating
to study from this just as a small
tangent you mentioned sort of the uh
measuring local potentials with
electrodes versus fmri oh yeah what are
some interesting like um limitations
possibilities of fmri maybe the way you
explain is like brilliant with with
blood and it's detecting the um the
activations or the excitation because
blood flows to that area what's like the
latency of that like what's the blood
Dynamics in the brain that yeah like how
quickly can it how quickly can the task
change and all that kind of stuff yeah I
mean it's very slow to the brain 50
milliseconds is like you know like it's
an eternity uh like maybe not 50
oh you know maybe like uh you know let's
say half a second 500 milliseconds just
so much back and forth stuff happens in
the brain in that time right so in fmri
you can measure these magnetic field
responses about six seconds after that
burst of activity would take place all
these things it's like is it a feature
or is it a bug right so one of the
interesting things that's been
discovered about fmri is it's not so
tightly related to this spiking of the
neurons so we tend to think of the
computation so to speak as being driven
by spikes meaning like there's just a
burst of it's either on or it's off and
the neurons like going up or down um but
sometimes what you can have is these
states where the neuron becomes a little
bit more excitable or less excitable and
so fmri is very sensitive to those
changes in excitability actually one of
the fascinating things about fmri is
where does that how is it we go from
neural activity to you know essentially
blood flow to oxygen you know all this
stuff it's such a long chain of you know
going from neural activity to magnetic
fields and one of the theories that's
out there is you most of the cells in
the brain are not neurons they're
actually these support cells called gal
cells and one big one is asites and they
play this big role in regulating you
know kind of being a middle man so to
speak with the neurons so if you for
instance like one neuron's talking to
another you release a neurotransmitter
like let's say glutamate and that gets
another neuron starts Talk starts
getting active after you release it in
the gap between the two neurons called
synapse so what's interesting is if you
leave that you know imagine you just
flooded with this like liquid in there
right if you leave it in there too long
you just excite the other neuron too
much and you can start to basically get
seizure activity you don't want this so
you got to suck up and so actually what
happens is these asites one of their
functions is to suck up the uh um
glutamate from the synapse and that is a
massively and then break it down and
then feed it back into the neurons so
that you can reuse it but that cycling
is actually very energy intensive and
what's interesting is at least according
to one Theory and they need to work so
quickly that they're working on
metabolizing the glucose that comes in
without using oxygen uh kind of like
what you know anerobic metabolism so
they're not using oxygen as fast as they
are using glucose so what we're really
seeing in some ways may be in fmri not
the neurons themselves being active but
rather the asites which are meeting the
metabolic demands of the process of
keeping the whole system going it does
seem to be that fmri is a good way to
study Activation so with these estros
sites
even though there's a
latency it's pretty reliably coupled to
the activations oh well this gets me to
the other part about so now let's say
for instance if I'm just kind of like
I'm talking to you but I'm kind of
paying attention to your cowboy hat
right so I'm looking off to the I'm
thinking about the right even if I'm not
looking at it what you'd see is is that
there would be this little elevation in
activity in areas in the visual cortex
you which process Vision around around
that point in space okay so if then
something happened like you know a
sudden a light flashed in that part of
of you know right in front of your
cowboy hat I would have a bigger
response to it but what you see in fmar
is even if I'm not even if I don't see
that flash of light there's a lot of
activity that I can measure because
you're kind of keeping it excitable and
that in and of itself even though I'm
not seeing anything there that's
particularly interesting there's still
this increase in activity and so it's
more sensitive with ephor so that is
that a feature or is it a bug you know
some people people who study spikes in
neurons would say well that's terrible
we don't want that you know uh likewise
it's slow and that's terrible for
measuring things that are very fast but
one of the things that we found in our
work was when we give people movies and
when we give people stories to listen to
a lot of the action is in the very very
slow stuff it's in because if you're
thinking about like a story let's say
you're you're listening to a podcast or
something you're listening to Lex
Freedman podcast right you're putting
this stuff together and building this
internal model over several seconds
which is basically we filter that out
when we look at electrical activity in
the brain because we're interested in
this millisecond scale it's almost
massive amounts of information right um
so the way I see it is every technique
gives you a little limited window into
what's going on FM is huge problems you
know people lie down in the scanner
there's parts of the brain where you
I'll show you in some of these images
where you'll see kind of gaping holes
because there's you can't keep the
magnetic field stable in those spots
you'll see Parts where it's like there's
a vein and so it just produces big
increases and decreases in Signal or
respiration that causes these changes
there's lots of artifacts and stuff like
that you know every technique has its
limits if if I'm lying down an MRI
scanner I'm lying down I'm not
interacting with you in the same way
that I would in the real world but at
the same time I'm getting data that I
might not be able to get otherwise and
so different techniques give you
different kinds of advantages what kind
of big scientific discoveries maybe the
flavor of discoveries have been
done throughout the history of the
science of memory the studying of memory
what kind of
things have been like understood oh
there's so many it's really so hard to
summarize it I mean I think it's funny
because it's like when you're in the
field you can get kind of Blas about
this stuff but then once I started write
the book I was like oh my God this is
really interesting how did we do all
this stuff
um um I would say that some of the I
mean you know from the first studies
just showing how much we forget is very
important showing how much schemas which
is are organized knowledge about the
world increase our ability to remember
information just massive ly increase it
studies of expertise showing how experts
like chess experts can memorize so much
in such a short amount of time because
of the schemas they have for chess um
but then also showing that those lead to
all sorts of distortions in memory the
discovery that the act of remembering
can change the memory it can strengthen
it but it can also distort it if you get
misinformation at the time and it can
also strengthen or weaken other memories
that you didn't even recall all so just
this whole idea of memory as an
ecosystem I think was a big Discovery um
uh I could go this idea of like breaking
up our continuous experience into these
discret events um I think was a major
Discovery to the discreetness of our
encoding of Events maybe yeah I mean you
know and again there's controversial
ideas about this right but it's like
yeah this idea that and this gets back
to just this common experience of you
walk into the kitchen and you're like
why am I here and you just end up
grabbing some food from the fridge and
then you go back and you're like oh wait
a minute I left my watch in the kitchen
that's what I was looking for and so
what happens is is that you have a
little internal model of where you are
what you're thinking about and when you
cross from one room to another those
models get updated and so now when
you're in the kitchen you have to go
back and mentally time travel back to
this earlier point to remember what what
it was that you went there for and so
these event boundaries turns out like in
our research again I don't want to make
it sound like we've figured out
everything but in our research one of
the things that um we found is is that
basically as people get older the
activity in the hip campus at these
event boundaries tends to go down um and
and but independent of age if I give you
outside of the scanner you're done with
the scan I just scan you while you're
watching a movie just watch it you come
out I give you a test of memory for
stories what happens is you find this
incredible correlation between the
activity and the hippocampus at these
singular points in time these event
boundaries and your ability to just
remember a story outside of the scanner
later on so it's marking this ability to
encode memories just these little
Snippets of neural activity so I think
that's a big one um there's all sorts of
work in animal models that I can get
into you know sleep I think there's so
much interesting stuff that's being
discovered in sleep right now
um being able to just record from large
populations of cells and then be able to
relate that one I think the coolest
thing gets back to this QR code thing
because like what we can do now is like
I can take fmri data while you're
watching a movie or let's do better than
that let me get fmri data while you use
a joystick to move around in virtual
reality right you're in the metaverse
whatever right but it's kind of a crappy
metaverse because there's always so much
metav versing you can do M so they doing
this crappy metsing so now I can take a
rat record from his hippocampus and
prefrontal cortex and all these areas
with these really new electrodes get
massive amounts of data and have it move
around on a track ball in virtual
reality in the same metaverse that I did
and record that rats activity I can get
a person with epilepsy who we have
electrodes in the brain anyway to try to
figure out where the seizures are coming
from if it's a healthy part of the brain
record from that person right and I can
get a computational model uh in one of
the one of the brand new members in my
lab Tyler bond is just doing some great
stuff he he relates computer vision
models and looks at the weaknesses of
computer vision models and relates it to
what the brain does well um and so you
can actually take a a ground truth you
know um uh code for the metaverse
basically and you can feed in the visual
information let's say the sensory
information or whatever that's coming in
to a computational model that's designed
to take real world inputs right and you
could basically tie them all together by
virtue of the state spaces that you're
measuring in neural activity in these
different formats these different
species and in the computational model
which is just I just find that
mindblowing you could do uh different
kinds of analyses on language and
basically come up with just like the
basically it's the guts of llms right
you have you could do um analyses on
language and you could do analysis on
you know sentiment analyses of emotions
and so forth put all this stuff together
I mean it's it's almost too much but if
you do it right and you do it in a
theory driven way as opposed to just
throwing all the data at the wall and
see what sticks I mean that to me is
just exceptionally powerful so you can
take fmri data in across species and
across different types of humans or
conditions of humans and what
find construct
models that help you find the
commonalities or like the the core thing
that makes somebody navigate through the
metaverse for example yeah yeah I mean
more or less I mean there's a lot of
details but yes I think and not just
fmri but you can relate it to like I
said recordings from large populations
of neurons that could be taken any human
or even in a non-human animal that is
you know where you think it's an
anatomical homologue so that's just
mind-blowing to me what's the uh
similarities in humans and
mice I what Smashing Pumpkins uh we all
just rats in a cage is that Smashing
Pumpkins despite all of your rage is
that Smashing Pumpkins I think despite
all of your rage at gifs you're still
just rat in a cage oh yeah all right
good call back any good call back see
these memory retrieval exercises I'm
doing are actually helping you build a
lasting memory of this conversation and
it's strengthening the P the visual
thing I have of you with James Brown on
stage it's just com stronger and
stronger by the second um hot up but
animal studies work here as well yeah
yeah so okay so let's go to the um so I
think re I've got you know great
colleagues who I talk to who study
memory in mice you know and there's some
uh um one of the valuable things in
those models is you can study neural
circuits in an enormously targeted way
because you could do these genetic
studies for instance where you can
manipulate like particular groups of
neurons and it's just getting more and
more targeted to the point where you can
actually turn on uh particular kind of
memory just by activating a particular
set of neurons that was active during an
experience right so
so there's a lot of conservation of some
of these neural circuits across you know
um evolution in mammals for instance um
and then some people would even say that
there's genetic mechanisms for learning
that are conserved even going back far
far before but let's go back to the mice
in humans question right um there's a
lot of differences so for one thing the
sensory information is very different uh
mice and rats explore the world largely
through
um smelling all faction uh but they also
have Vision that's kind of designed to
kind of catch Death from Above So it's
like a very big view of the world and we
move our eyes around in a way that
focuses on particular spots and space
where you get very high resolution from
a very limited set of spots in space so
that makes us very different in that way
we also have all these other structures
as social animals that allow us to um
respond differently there's language
there's like um you know so you name it
there's obviously gobs of differences
humans aren't just giant rats there's
much more complexity to us time scales
are very important so primate brains and
human brains are especially good at
integrating and um and holding on to
information across longer and longer
periods of time right and and also you
know finally it's like our history of
training data so to speak is very very
different than you know I mean human's
world is very different than a wild M
Mouse's world and a lab Mouse's world is
extraordinarily impoverished relative to
an adult human you know but still what
can you understand by studying mice I
mean just basic almost behavioral stuff
about memory well yes but that's very
important right so you can understand
for instance how do neurons talk to each
other that's a really big big question
neural computation in and of itself you
think it's the most simple question
right not at all I mean it's a big big
question and understanding how two parts
of the brain interact meaning that it's
not just one area speaking it's not like
you know it's not like Twitter where one
area of the brain is shouting and then
another area of the brain's just stuck
listening to this scrap it's like
they're actually interacting on a
millisecond scale right how does that
happen and how do you regulate those
interactions these Dynamic you know um
interactions we're still figuring that
out but that's going to be coming large
from model systems that are easier to
understand um you can do manipulations
like drug manipulations to manipulate
circuits and and you know use viruses
and so forth and lasers to turn on
circuits that you just can't do in
humans so I think there's a lot that can
be learned from mice there's a lot that
can be learned from non-human primates
and there's a lot that you need to learn
from humans and I think um unfortunately
some of the uh people in the National
Institutes of Health think you can learn
everything from the mouse it's a like
why study memory in humans what I could
study learning in a mouse and it's just
like oh my God I'm going to get my
funding from somewhere else so uh well
let me ask you some random fascinating
questions uh uh how does deja vu work so
Deja Vu is it's actually one of these
things I think that some of the surveys
suggest that like 75% of people report
having a Deja Vu experience one time or
another I don't know where that came
from but I've pulled people in my class
and most of them say they've experienced
Aja Vu um it's this kind of sense that
I've experienced this moment sometime
before I've been here before um and
actually there's all sorts of variants
of this the French have all sorts of
names for various versions of the Shamy
Vu Harley Vu I don't know whatever it's
like all these different V yeah but um
uh Deja Vu is the sense that it can be
like uh almost disturbing intense sense
of
familiarity um so there was a a
researcher named Wilder Penfield
actually this goes back even earlier to
some of the earliest like hings Jackson
was this neurologist who first charact
who did a lot of the early
characterizations of epilepsy and one of
the things you notice is in epilepsy
patients some group of them right before
they would get a seizure they would have
this intense sense of deja vu so it's
this artificial sense of familiarity
it's a sense of having a memory that's
not there right and so what was
happening was there was electrical
activity in certain parts of these
brains say so this guy Penfield later on
when he was trying to look for how do we
map out the brain to figure out which
parts we want to remove and which parts
don't we he would stimulate parts of the
temporal loes of the brain and find you
could elicit the sense of deu sometimes
you'd actually get a memory that a
person would re-experience just from
electrically stimulating some part
sometimes they just have this intense
feeling of being somewhere before and so
um one Theory which I really like is is
that in higher order areas of the brain
they're integrating from many many
different you know sources of input what
happens is is that they're tuning
themselves up every time you process a
similar input right and so that allows
you to just get this kind of a fluent
sense that I'm very familiar you're very
familiar with this place right and so
just being here you're not going to be
moving your eyes all over the place CU
you kind of have an idea of where
everything is and that fluency gives you
a sense of like I'm here now I wake up
in my hotel room and I have this very
unfamiliar sense of where I am right but
you know there's a great set of studies
done by Anne clear at Colorado State
where she created these virtual reality
environments and we'll go back to the
metaverse imagine you go through a
virtual Museum right
and then she would put people in virtual
reality and have them go through a
virtual arcade but the map of the two
places was exactly the same she just
puts different skins on them so one
looks different than the other but
they've got same landmarks and the same
places same objects same everything but
carpeting Colors theme everything's
different people will often not have any
conscious idea that the two were the
same but they could report this very
intense sense of deja vu so it's like a
partial match that's eliciting this kind
of a sense of
familiarity and uh and that's why you
know in patients who have epilepsy that
affects memory you get this artificial
sense of familiarity that happens and so
we think that and again this is just one
Theory amongst many but we think that's
we get a little bit of that feeling it's
not enough to necessarily give you Deja
Vu even for very mundane things right so
it's like if I tell you the word rudaba
your brain's going to work a little bit
harder to catch it than if I give you
word like apple right um and that's
because you hear Apple a lot so your
brain's very tuned up to process it
efficiently but Ruda takes a little bit
longer and more intense and you can
actually see a difference in brain
activity in areas in the temporal lobe
when you hear a word just based on how
frequent it is in the English language
so fasc we think it's tied to this basic
it's a basically a byproduct of our
mechanism of just learning doing this
error-driven learning as we go through
life to become better and better and
better to process things more and more
efficiently so I guess Deja Vu is just
like an extra
elevated stuff coming together firing
for this artificial memory as if it's
the real
memory this I mean why does it feel so
intense uh well it doesn't happen all
the time but I think what may be
happening is it's such a it's a partial
match to something that we have and it's
not enough to trigger that sense of you
know that ability to pull together all
the pieces but it's a close enough match
to give you that intense sense of
familiarity without the recollection of
exactly what happened when but it's also
like a spatial temporal familiarity so
like it's also in time like there's a
weird blending of time that happens um
and we'll we'll probably talk about time
because I think that's a really
interesting idea how time relates to
memory but um you also kind of
artificial memory brings to mind this
idea of false memories mhm that comes in
all kinds of context but how do false
memories form well I like to say there's
no such thing as true or false memories
right it's like a um Johnny Roden from
The Sex Pistols he had a saying that's
like I don't believe in false memories
anymore than I believe in false songs
right it's like um and so the basic idea
is is that we have these memories
reflect bits and pieces of what happened
as well as our inferences and theories
right so I'm a scientist and I collect
data but I use I use theories to make
sense of that data and so a memory is
kind of a mix of all these things so
where memories can go off the deep end
and become what we would call
conventionally as false memories are
sometimes little distortions where we
filled in the blanks the gaps in our
memory based on things that we know but
don't actually correspond to what
happened right um so um if I were to
tell you that I'm like you know a story
about this person who's like worried
that they have cancer or something like
that and then you know they see a doctor
and the doctor says well things are very
much like you would have expected or
like you know what you were afraid of or
something when people remember that
they'll often remember well the doctor
told the patient that he had cancer even
if that wasn't in the story because
they're infusing meaning into that story
right so that's a minor Distortion but
what happens is is that sometimes things
can really get out of hand where people
have trouble telling the differen in
things that they've imagined versus
things that happen but also as I told
you the act of remembering can change
the memory and so what happens then is
you can actually be exposed to some
misinformation and so Elizabeth Loftus
was a real Pioneer in the work and
there's lots of other work that's been
done since um but basically it's like if
you remember some event and then I tell
you something about the event later on
when you remember the event you might
remember some original information from
the event as well as some information
about what I told you and sometimes if
you're not able to tell the difference
that information that I told you gets
mixed into the story that you had
originally so now I give you some more
misinformation or you're exposed to some
more information somewhere else and
eventually your memory becomes totally
detached from what happened and so
sometimes you can have cases where
people um this is very rare but you can
do it in the lab too or like a
significant not everybody but you know a
chunk of people will fall for this where
you can give people misinformation about
an event that never took place and as
they keep trying to remember that event
more and more more what happens they
start to imagine they start to pull up
things from other experiences they've
had and eventually they can stitch
together a vivid memory of something
that never happened because they're not
remembering an event that happened
they're remembering the act of trying to
remember what happened and basically
putting it together into the wrong story
so it's fascinating because this could
probably happen at the a a collective
level like this is probably what
successful propaganda machines aim to do
this creating false memory across
thousands if not millions of Minds yeah
absolutely um I mean uh this is exactly
what they do and so all these kind of
foibles of human memory get magnified
when you start to have social
interactions there's a whole literature
on something called social contagion
which is basically when misinformation
spreads like a virus like you remember
the same thing that I did but I give you
a little bit of wrong information
then that becomes part of your story of
what happened because once you and I
share a memory like I tell you about
something I've experience and you tell
me about your experience of the same
event it's no longer your memory or my
memory it's our memory and so now the
misinformation spreads and the more you
trust someone or the more powerful that
person is the more of a voice they have
in shaping that narrative right um and
and there's all sorts of interesting
ways in which misinformation can
happened there's a great example of when
John McCain and George Bush Jr were um
in a primary and there were these polls
where they would do these like I guess
they were like not rooc calls but real
calls where they would PLL voters but
they actually inserted some
misinformation about McCain's beliefs on
taxation I think and maybe it was
something about illegitimate children or
I don't really remember but they
included misinformation in the quest
that they asked like you know how do you
feel about the fact that he wants to do
this or something and so people would
end up becoming convinced he had these
you know policy things or these personal
things that were not true just based on
the polls that were being used so it was
a case where interestingly
enough the people who were using
misinformation were actually ahead of
the curve relative to the scientists who
were trying to study these effects in
memory yeah yeah it's
um it's really interesting so it's not
just about truth and falsehoods like us
as intelligent reasoning machines but
it's the formation of memories where
they become like visceral you can
rewrite history if you just look
throughout the 20th
century uh some of the dictatorships
with Nazi Germany with uh with the
Soviet
Union effective propaganda machines can
re re write our conceptions of History
how we remember our own culture our
upbringing all this kind of stuff and
you could do quite a lot of damage in
this way and then there's probably some
kind of social contagion happening
there like certain
ideas that maybe initiated by the
propaganda machine can spread faster
than others you could see that in modern
day certain conspiracy theories there's
just something about them that they are
like really effective at spreading
there's something sexy about them to
people to to where uh something about
the human mind eats it up and then uses
that to construct memories as almost as
as if they almost were there to witness
whatever the content of the conspiracy
theory is it's fascinating cuz once you
feel like you remember a thing I feel
like there's a certainty there's a it
emboldens you to like say stuff like you
really like it's not just you believe an
idea is true or not you like it's at the
core of your being
that you you feel like you were there to
watch the thing
happen yeah I mean there's so much in
what you're saying I mean one of the
things is is that people's sense of
collective identity is very much tied to
Shared memories if we have a shared
Narrative of the past or even better if
we have a shared past we will feel more
socially connected with each other and I
will feel part of this group they're
part of my tribe if I remember the same
same things in the same way and you
brought up this weaponization of history
and you know it really speaks to I think
one of the parts of memory which is that
if you have a belief you will find and
you have a goal in mind you will find
stuff in memory that aligns with it and
you won't see the parts in memory that
don't so a lot of the stories we put
together are based on our
perspectives right and so let's let's
just zoom out for the M moment from like
misinformation should take something
even more fascinating but not as like
you know scary um I was reading uh ton
vietn but he wrote a book about the
collective memory of the Vietnam War
he's a Vietnamese um immigrant who was
flown out as um after the war was over
and so he went back to his family to get
their stories about the war and they
called it the American war not the
Vietnam War right and that just kind of
blew my mind having grown up in the US
and having always heard about it as a
Vietnam War but of course they call it
the American war because that's what
happened America came in right and
that's based on their perspective which
is a very valid
perspective um and so that just gives
you this idea of the way we put together
these narratives based on our
perspectives and I think the the the
opportunities that we can have in memory
is if we bring groups together from
different perspectives and we allow them
to talk to each other and we allow
ourselves to listen I mean right now
you'll hear a lot of just Jammer you
know people going blah blah blah about
Free Speech but they just want to listen
to themselves right I mean it's like
let's face it the old days before people
were supposedly woke they were trying to
ban two Live Crew or you know just think
about lety Bruce got canceled for
cursing Jesus Christ you know it's like
this is nothing new people like to hear
things that disagree with them but um if
you're in I mean you can see two
situations in groups with memory one
situation is you have like people who
are very dominant who just take over the
conversation and they basically what
happens is the group remembers less from
the experience and they remember more of
what the dominant narrator says right
now if you have a diverse group of
people and I don't mean diverse in
necessarily the human resources sense of
the word I mean diverse in any way you
want to take it right but diverse in
every way hopefully and you give
everyone a chance to speak and
everyone's being appreciated for their
unique contribution you get more
accurate memories and you get more
information from it right um even two
people who come from very similar
backgrounds if you can appreciate the
unique contributions that each one has
you can do a better job of generating
information from memory and that's a way
to inoculate ourselves I believe from
misinformation in the Modern World um
but like everything else it requires a
certain tolerance for discomfort and I
think when we don't have much time and I
think when we're stressed out and when
we are just tired it's very hard to
tolerate
discomfort and I mean social media has a
lot of opportunity for this because it
enables this distributed one-on-one
interaction that you're talking about
where everybody has a voice but still
our natural inclination you see this on
social media there's a natural
clustering of people and opinions and
you just kind of you form these kind of
bubbles I think that's a to me
personally I think that's a technology
problem that could be solved if there's
a little bit of interaction kind
respectful compassion interaction with
people that have a very different memory
that that respectful interaction will
start to intermix the memories and ways
of thinking to where you're slowly
moving towards truth but that's a
technology problem because uh naturally
left our own devices we want to Cluster
up in a tribe yeah and that's the human
problem you know I think a lot of the
problems that come up with technology
aren't the technology itself as much as
the fact that people adapt to the
technology in maladaptive ways I mean
one of my fears about AI is not what AI
will do but what people will do I mean
take text messaging right it's like it's
pain in the ass to text people at least
for me and so what happens is the
communication becomes very Spartan and
devoid of meaning right it's just very
telegraphic and that's people adapting
to the medium right I mean look at you
you've got this uh keyboard right that's
like got these like Dome shaped things
and you've adapted to that to
communicate right that's not the
technology adapting to you that's you
adapting to the technology and I think
with you know one of the things I
learned when Google started to introduce
autocomplete and emails I started to use
it and about a third of the time I was
like this isn't what I want to say a
third of the time I'd be like this is
exactly what I wanted to say and a third
of the time I was saying well this is
good enough I'll just go with it right
and so what happens is it's not that the
technology necessarily is doing anything
so bad as much as it's just going to
constrain my language because I'm just
doing what's being suggested to me and
so this is why I say you know kind of
like my manthra for some of what I've
learned about everything in memory is to
diversify your training data basically
because otherwise you're going to be so
like humans have this capability to be
so much more creative than anything
generative AI will put together at least
right now who knows where this goes but
it can also go the opposite direction
where people could become much much less
creative if they just become more and
more like resistant to discomfort you
know and resistant to exposing
themselves to novelty to cognitive
dissonance and so forth I think there is
a dance between natural human adaptation
of technology and the people that uh the
design the engineering of that
technology so I think there's a lot of
opportunity to create like this keyboard
things that on net are positive for uh
human behavior so we adapt and all this
kind of stuff but when you look at the
long Arc of History across years and
cases has Humanity been flourishing are
are humans creating more awesome stuff
are humans happier all that kind of
stuff and so there I think technology
onet is uh has been and I think maybe
hope will always will always be on that
a positive thing do you think people are
happier now than they were 50 years ago
or 100 years ago yes yes I don't know
about that I think humans in
general like to uh remin about the past
like the times are better true and
complain about the weather today or
complain about whatever today cuz we
there's this kind of complainy engine
that just there's so much pleasure in
saying you know life sucks for some
reason and that's why I love punk rock
exactly I mean there's something in
humans that loves
complaining even about trivial things
but uh complaining about change
complaining about everything But
ultimately I think on net on every
measure uh things are getting better
life is getting better oh life is
getting better but I don't know
necessarily that tracks people's
happiness right I mean I would argue
that maybe who knows I don't know this
but I wouldn't be surprised if people in
hunter gatherer
societies are happier I mean I wouldn't
be surprised if they're happier than
people who have access to modern
medicine and email and so phones well I
don't think there's a question whether
you take hunter gatherer folks and put
them into modern day and give them
enough time to adapt they would be much
happier the question is in terms of
every single problem they've had is now
solved there's not food there's
guarantee of survival and shelter and
all this kind of stuff so what you're
asking is a deeper sort of biological
question do we want to be a Warner
Herzog at the movie Happy People life in
the tiger do we want to be busy 100% of
our time
hunting Gathering surviving worried
about the next day maybe that constant
struggle ultimately creates a more
fulfilling life I don't know but I do
know this modern society allows us to uh
when we're sick to find medicine to find
cures when we're hungry to get food much
more than we did even 100 years ago and
uh there's many more activities ities
that you could perform or creative all
these kinds of stuff that enables the
flourishing of humans at the individual
level whether that leads to happiness I
mean that's a very deep philosophical
question maybe
struggle deep struggle is necessary for
happiness or maybe cultural connection
you know uh maybe it's about like
functioning in social groups that are
meaningful and like having time but I do
think this is there was an interesting
memory related thing which is that if
you look at like things like
reinforcement learning for instance
you're not learning
necessarily every time you get a reward
if it's the same reward you're not
learning that much you mainly learn if
it deviates from your expectation of
what you're supposed to get right so
it's like you get a paycheck every you
know month from MIT or whatever right
and it's like you're kind of you
probably don't even kind of get excited
about it when you get the paycheck but
if they cut your salary you're going to
be p and if they increase your salary oh
good I got a Bonus you know and that
adaptation and that ability that
basically you learn to expect these
things I think is a major source of I
guess it's a major way in which we're
kind of more in my opinion wired to
strive and not be happy to be in a state
of wanting and if you know so people
talk about dopamine for instance being
this pleasure chemical and it's like
there's like lot of compelling research
to suggest it's not about pleasure at
all it's about the discomfort that
energizes you to get things to seek a
reward right and so you could give an
animal that's been deprived of dopamine
a reward and oh yeah I enjoy it it's
pretty good but they're not going to do
anything to get it you know and uh just
one of the weird things in our
researches Is We I got into curiosity
from a postto in my lab matius Gruber
and one of the things that we found is
when we gave people a question like uh a
trivia question that they wanted the
answer to the question the more Curious
people were about the answer the more
activity in these dopamine related
circuits in the brain we would see um
and again that was not driven by the
answer per se but by the question so it
was not about getting the information it
was about the drive to seek the
information um but but it depends on how
you take that if you get this
uncomfortable gap between what you know
and what you want to know you could
either use that to motivate you and
energize you or you could use it to say
I don't want to hear about this this
disagrees with my beliefs I'm going to
go back to my echo chamber you
know
yeah I like what you said that maybe
we're designed to be in a kind of
constant state of wanting which by the
way is a pretty good either band name or
rock song name state state state of
wanting that's like a hardcore band name
yeah yeah pretty good but I also like
the hedonic treadmill hedonic treadmill
is pretty good yeah yeah we could use
that for like our uh techno project I
think you mean the one we're starting
yeah exactly okay
great uh we're going on tour
soon this is this is our announcement we
could build a false memory of a show in
fact if you want let's just put it all
together so we don't even have to do all
the work to play the show we can just
create a memory of it and might as well
happen cuz the remembering self is in
charge anyway so let me ask you about we
talked about false memories but you know
in the legal system false confessions I
remember reading uh 1984 where sorry for
the dark turn of our conversation but uh
Through Torture you
can make people say anything and
essentially remember anything I wonder
to which degree there's like truth to
that if you look at the torture that
happened in the Soviet Union to for
confessions all that kind of stuff how
much can you really get people to
really yeah to force false memories I
guess yeah I mean I think uh um there's
a lot of history of this actually in uh
the criminal justice system uh you might
have heard the term the third degree if
you actually look it up historically it
was a very intense set of eatings and
you know starvation and
physical uh demands that they would
place on people to get them to talk and
you know there's certainly a lot of work
in the that's been done by the CIA in
terms of enhanced ter interrogation
techniques and from what I understand
the the research actually shows that
they just produce what people want to
hear not necessarily the the information
that that is being looked for and the
reason is is that I mean there's
different reasons I mean one is people
just get tired of being tortured and
just say whatever but uh another part of
it is is that you create a very
interesting set of conditions where
there's an authority figure telling you
something that you did this we know you
did this we have witnesses saying you
did this so now you start to question
yourself then they put you under stress
maybe they're not feeding you maybe
they're kind of like making you be cold
or you know exposing you to like uh
music that you can't stand or something
whatever it is right it's like they're
they're creating this physical stress
and so stress starts to act on you know
starts to downregulate the prefrontal
cortex you're not necessarily as good at
monitoring the accuracy of stuff then
they start to get nice to you and they
say imagine you know okay I know you
don't remember this but maybe we can
walk you through how it could have
happened and they feed you the
information and so you're in this
weakened mental state and you're being
encouraged to imagine things by people
who give you a plausible scenario and at
some point certain people can be very
coaxed into creating a memory for
something that never happened and and
there's actually some pretty convincing
cases out there where you don't know
exactly the truth there's a Sheriff for
instance who came to believe that he had
a false memory I mean that he had a
memory of doing sexual abuse based on
you know essentially I think it was U um
you know I'm not going to tell the story
because I don't remember it well enough
to necessarily accurately give it to you
but people could look this stuff up
there are definitely stories out there
like this where people confess to crimes
that they just didn't do and objective
evidence came out later on um but
there's a basic recipe for it which is
you feed people the information that you
want them to remember you stress them
out you have an authority figure kind of
like pushing this information on them uh
or you motivate them to produce the
information you're looking for and that
pretty much over time gives you what you
want it's really
tragic
that centralized power can can use these
kinds of tools to destroy lives
sad since there's a theme about music
throughout this conversation one of the
best topics for song songs is heartbreak
love in general but heartbreak uh why
and how do we remember and forget
heartbreak asking for a friend oh God
that's so hard to asking for a friend I
love that uh um oh it's such a hard one
well so I mean part of this is we tend
to go back to particular times that are
the more emotionally intense periods um
and so that's a part of it and again
memory is designed to kind of capture
these things that are biologically
significant and attachment is a you know
big part of biological significance for
humans right human relationships are
super important and sometimes that
heartbreak comes with ch massive changes
in your beliefs about somebody say if
they cheated on you or something like
that um or regrets and you kind of
ruminate about things that you've done
wrong
there's really so many reasons though
but you know I mean I I've had this I um
uh my first pet I had as you know was we
got it for a wedding present as a cat
and got it after like uh but it died of
FIP when it was 4 years old and you know
I just would see her everywhere around
the house you know we got another cat
then we got a dog dog eventually died of
cancer and the cat just died recently
and uh you know so we got a new dog
because I kept seeing the dog around and
I was just so heartbroken about this and
but I still remember the pets that died
it just comes back to you I mean it's
part of this I think there's also
something about attachment that's just
so crucial that drives again these
things that we want to remember and that
gives us that longing sometimes
sometimes it's also not just about the
Heartbreak but about the positive
aspects of it right cu the loss comes
from not only the fact that the
relationship is over but you had all of
these good things before that you can
now see in a new light right and so part
of one of the things that I found from
my clinical background that really I
think gave me a different perspective on
memory is so much of the therapy process
was guided towards reframing and getting
people to look at the past in a
different way not by imposing changing
people's memories or Not by imposing an
interpretation but just offering a
different perspective and maybe one
that's kind of more optimized towards
learning and you know um an appreciation
maybe or gratitude whatever it is right
that gives you a way of taking I think
you said it in the beginning right where
you can have this kind of like dark
experiences and you can use it as
training data to you know grow in new
ways but it's hard this uh I often go
back to this moment this show Louie with
Lou CK MH where he's all heartbroken
about a breakup with a woman he
loves and uh an older gentleman tells
him that that that's actually the best
part that heartbreak because you get to
intensely experience how valuable this
love was he says the worst part is
forgetting it is actually when you get
over the Heartbreak that's the worst
part so I I sometimes think about that
because you know having the love and
losing
it like the losing it is when
you sometimes feel it the deepest which
is an interesting um way to celebrate
the past and relive it it's it sucks
that you don't have a thing but when you
don't have a thing it's a it's a a good
moment to viscerally experience the
memories of something that you know
appreciate even more so you don't
believe that an Owner of a Lonely Heart
is much better than an owner of a broken
heart you think an owner of a broken
heart is better than the Owner of a
Lonely Heart yes for sure I think so I
think so but I'm going have to day by
day I don't know I'm I'm gonna have to
listen to some more Bruce Springsteen to
figure that one out well you know it's
funny because it's like after I turned
50 I think of death all the time like I
just think that you know in like I
probably I have fewer probably a fewer
years ahead of me than I behind me right
so I think about I think about one thing
which is what are the memories that I
want to carry with me for the next
period of time and also about like just
the fact that everything around me could
be you know I know more people who are
you know dying for various reasons and
so um I not lots I'm not that old right
it's like but you know it's uh um it's
something I think about a lot and I'm
reminded of like how I talked to
somebody who's like uh you know who's a
Buddhist and I was like you know the
whole idea of Buddhism is renouncing
attachments some way the the idea of
Buddhism is like staying out of the
world of memory and staying in the
moment right and they talked about you
know it's like how do you how do you
renounce attachments to the people that
you love right and they're just saying
well I appreciate that I have this
moment with them and knowing that they
will die makes me appreciate this moment
that much more I mean you said something
similar right in your daily routine that
you think about things this way right
yeah I meditate on
mortality uh every
day but I don't know I at the same time
that really makes you appreciate the
moment and live in the moment and uh I
also appreciate the full deep roller
coaster of suffering involved in life
the the little and the big too so I
don't know I'm the Buddhist kind of
removing yourself from the world or or
the stoic removing yourself from the
world the world of emotion I'm torn
about that one I'm not sure well you
know this is where Hinduism in Buddhism
or at least some strains of Hinduism and
Buddhism differ in
Hinduism uh like if you read the bhat
Gita the philosophy is not one of
renouncing the world because the idea is
is that not doing something is no
different than doing something right so
um what they argue and again you could
interpret in different positive and
negative but the argument is is that you
don't want to renounce action but you
want to renounce the fruits of the
action you don't do it because of the
outcome you do it because of the process
because the process is part of the
balance of the world that you're trying
to preserve right and of course you
could take that different ways but I I
really think about that from time to
time in terms of like you know letting
go of this idea does this book sell or
trying to you know like impress you and
get you to laugh at my jokes or whatever
and just be more like I'm sharing this
information with you and you know
getting to know you or whatever it is
but it's it's hard right it's like
because we're so driven by the
reinforcer the outcome it's you're just
part of the process of telling the joke
and if I laugh or
not that's up to the universe to decide
yep it's my
Thera uh how does study memory affect
your understanding of the nature of time
so like we've been talking about us
living in the the present and making
decisions about the
future standing on the foundation of
these memories and narratives about the
memories that we've constructed so it
feels
like it does weird things to time yeah
and the reason is is that in some sense
I think especially the farther we go
back I mean there's all sorts of
interesting things that happen so your
sense of like if I ask you how different
does one hour ago feel from two hours
ago you'd probably say pretty different
but if I ask you okay go back one year
ago versus one year and 1 hour ago it's
the same difference in time it won't
feel very different right so there's
this kind of compression that happens as
you look back F farther in time so that
it's kind of like why when you're older
the difference between somebody who's
like 50 and you know 45 doesn't seem as
big as the difference between like 10
and five or something right when you're
10 years old everything seems like it's
a long period of time here's the point
is that you know so one of the
interesting things that I found when I
was working on the book actually was
during the pandemic I just decided to
ask people in my class when we were
doing the remote instruction so one of
the things I did was I would pull people
and so I just asked people do you feel
like the days are moving by slower or
faster or about the same almost everyone
in the class said that the days were
moving by slower um so then at the I
would say okay so do you feel like the
weeks are passing by slower faster or
the same and the majority of them said
that the weeks were passing by faster so
according to the laws of physics I don't
think that makes any sense right yeah
but according to memory it did because
what happened was people were doing the
same thing over and over in the same
context and without that change in
context their feeling was that they were
in one long monotonous event and so but
then at the end of the week you look
back at that week and you say well what
happened have no memories of what
happened so it must the week just went
by without even my noticing it but that
week went by during the same amount of
time as an eventful week where you might
have been going out hanging out with
friends on vacation or whatever right
it's just that nothing happened because
you're doing the same thing over and
over so I feel like memory really shapes
our sense of time but it does so in part
because context is so important for
memory well that compression you
mentioned it's an interesting process
because when I think about when I was
like 12 or
15 I just fundamentally feel like the
same person it's interesting what that
compression does it makes me feel like
it's all we're all connected not just
amongst humans and spatially but in
terms in back in time there's a kind
of uh Eternal nature like the
timelessness I guess mhm to life that
could be also a genetic thing just for
for me I don't know if everyone agrees
to this view of time but to me it all
feels the same like you don't feel the
passage of time or no I feel the passage
of time the same way the students did
from day to day mhm there's certain
markers uh that let you know that time
has passed you celebrate birdes and so
on but the core of who I am and who
others I know are or events it like that
compression of my understanding of the
world okay removes time cuz time is not
useful for the compression so like the
details of that time at least for me is
not useful to understanding the core of
the thing so maybe what it is is that
you really like to see connections
between things this is like really what
motivates me in science actually too but
it's like when you start recalling the
past to you know and seeing the
connections between the past and present
now you have this kind of web of
interconnected memories right and so I
can imagine in that sense there is this
kind of the present is with you right um
but what's interesting about what you
said too that struck me is that your
16-year-old self was probably very
complex you know and I'm by the way I'm
the same way but it's like it really is
the source of a lot of Darkness for me
so but uh but when like you can look
back at like let's say you hear a song
that you used to play like before you
would go do a sports thing or something
like that you might not think of
yourself as an athlete but once you you
get back to that mental you mentally
time travel to that particular thing you
open up this little compartment of
yourself that wasn't there before right
that didn't seem accessible for Dan
Shaker's lab did this really cool study
where they would ask people to either
remember doing something altruistic or
imagine doing something altruistic and
that act made them more likely to want
to do things for other people so that
act of mental time travel can change who
you are in the present we tend to think
of this goes back to that illusion of
stability and we tend to think of memory
this very deterministic way that I am
who I am because I have this past but we
have a very multifaceted past and can
access different parts of it and change
in the moment based on whatever part we
want to reach for right how does
nostalgia Connect into this like this
desire and pleasure associated
with going back yeah so um my friend
Felipe
deberard uh wrote this and it just like
blew my mind where the word nostalgia
was coined by a Swiss physician who was
actually studying traumatized soldiers
and so he described Nostalgia as a
disease and the idea was it was bringing
These People Extraordinary unhappiness
because they're remembering how things
used to be um and I think it's it's very
complex so as people get older for
instance Nostalgia can be an enormous
source of Happiness right um and being
nostalgic can improve people's moods in
the moment but it just depends on what
they do with it because what you can
sometimes see is Nostalgia has the
opposite effect of thinking those were
the good old days and those days are
over right it's like America used to be
so great and now it sucks or you know my
life used to be so great when I was a
kid and now it's not right and you're
selectively remembering the things
thatan we don't realize how selective
our remembering self is and so you know
I live through the 70s it sucked you
know it's like uh partly it sucked more
for me but I would say that even
otherwise it's like there's all sorts of
problems going on gas lines people were
like you know worried about like Russia
nuclear war blah blah blah so I mean
it's just this idea that people have
about the past can be very useful if it
brings you happiness in the present but
if it Narrows your worldview in the
present you're not aware of those biases
that you have you will end up you can
end up it can be toxic right either at a
personal level or at a collective level
uh let me ask you both a practical
question and an out there question so
let's start with a more practical one
what what are your thoughts about um
bcis brain computer interfaces and the
work that's going on with neur link We
Lo we talked about electrod and
different ways of measuring the brain
and here neuralink is working on
basically two-way communication with the
brain and the more out there question
would be like where does this go but
more practically in the near term what
do you think about NE link yeah I mean I
can't say specifics about the company
because I haven't studied it that much
but I mean I think there's two parts of
it so one is they're developing some
really interesting technology I think
with these like s surgical robots and
things like that um BCI though has like
a whole lot of innovation going on I I'm
not necessarily seeing any scientific
evidence from neuralink and maybe that's
just I'm not looking for it but I'm not
seeing the evidence that they're
anywhere near where the scientific
Community is and there's lots of
startups that are do incredibly
Innovative stuff one of my colleagues
Serge staisy is just like a genius in
this area and and they're working on it
I think speech Prosthetics like that are
incorporating you know decoding
techniques with AI and you know movement
perspects this just like the the rate of
progress is just enormous so part of the
technology is having good enough data
and understanding which data to use and
what to do with it right um and then the
other part of it then is the algorithms
for decoding it and so forth and and I
think part of that has really resulted
in some real breakthroughs in
Neuroscience as a result so um there's
lots of new technologies like
neuropixels for instance that allow you
to harvest activity from many many
neurons from a single electrode um I
know neuralink has some
technologies that are also along these
lines but I even again because they do
their own stuff the scientific Community
doesn't see it right um but I think BCI
is much much bigger than neuralink and
there's just so much Innovation
happening I think the interesting
question which we may be getting into is
I was talking to Sergey a while ago
about you know so a lot of language it's
not just what we hear and what we speak
but also our intentions in our internal
models and you know so are you really
going to be able to restore language
without dealing with that part of it and
he brought up a really interesting
question which is the ethics of reading
out people's intentions and
understanding of the world as opposed to
the more you know the the more concrete
parts of hearing and producing movements
right just so we're clear because you
said a few interesting things when you
say when we talk about language and bcis
what we mean is getting signal from the
brain and
generating the language say you're not
able to actually
speak uh it's as a kind of linguistic
prosthetic it it's able to speak for you
exactly what you wanted to say and then
the deeper question is well saying
something isn't just the letters the the
words you're saying it's also the
intention behind it the the feeling
behind all that kind of stuff and is it
ethical to reveal that full shebang the
full context of what's going on in our
in our brain that's really that's really
interesting that's really I mean our
thoughts is it ethical for anyone to
have access to our
thoughts because right now the the
resolution is so low that we're okay
with it even doing studies and all this
kind of stuff but if the if if
Neuroscience has a few breakthroughs to
where you can start to map out the QR
codes for different dos for different
kinds of
thoughts maybe uh political thoughts you
know McCarthyism what if I'm getting a
lot of them communist thoughts or
however we want to categorize or label
it that's interesting that's really
interesting I think ultimately this
always the more transparency there there
is about the human mind the the better
it is but be there could be always was
intermediate battles with how much
control does a centralized entity have
like a government and so on what what is
the regulation what are the rules what
are the what's legal and illegal you
know if you talk about the police whose
job is to uh uh track down criminals and
so on and you look at all the history
how the police could be uh abuse its
power to control of citizenry all that
kind of stuff so people are always
paranoid and rightfully so it's
fascinating it's really fascinating you
know we talk about freedom of
speech you know freedom of
thought which is also a very important
Liberty at at the core of this country
and probably Humanity starts to get
awfully tricky when you start to be able
to collect those thoughts but I I what I
wanted to actually ask you is do you
think for fun and for practical P
purposes you'll be able to we would be
able to modify
memories so how difficult is it to how
far away we are from understanding the
different parts of the brains everything
we've been talking about in order to
figure out how can we adjust this memory
at the crude level from unpleasant to
Pleasant you talked about we can
remember the mall and the people like
location the people can we keep the
people and change the place like this
kind of stuff how difficult is that well
I mean in some sense we know we can do
it just behaviorally right just like
tell you give you know under certain
conditions anyway it can give you the
misinformation and then you can change
the people and the places and so forth
right um on the crude level there's a
lot of work that's being done on a
phenomenon called
reconsolidation which is this uh idea
that essentially when I recall a memory
um what happens is is that the
connections between the neurons and that
cell assembly that give you the memory
um are going to be like more
modifiable and so some people have used
techniques to try to like for instance
with fear memories to reduce that
physical visceral component of the
memory when it's being activated right
now I think I've as an outsider looking
at the data I think it's like mixed
results um and part of it is and this
speaks to the more complex issue is that
you don't you need somebody to actually
fully recall that traumatic memory in
the first place and in order to actually
modify it then what is the memory that
is the key part of the problem so if we
go back to reading people's thoughts
what is the thought I mean people can
sometimes look at this like behaviorists
and go well the memory is like I've
given you a and you produce B but I
think that's a very bankrupt concept
about memory I think it's it's much more
complicated than that and you know one
of the things that when we started
studying naturalistic memory like memory
from movies that was so hard was we had
to change the way we did the studies
because if I show you movie and I show
and I watch the same movie and you
recall everything that happened and I
recall everything that happened we might
take a different amount of time to do it
we might use different words and yet to
an outside Observer we might have
recalled the same thing right so it's
not about the words necessarily and it's
not about how long we spent or whatever
there's something deeper that is there
that's this idea but it's like how do
you understand that thought I encounter
a lot of concrete thinking that it's
like if I
show a model like you know the visual
information that a person sees when they
drive I can basically reverse engineer
driving well that's not really how it
works I once saw a talk by somebody or I
saw somebody talking in this discussion
of between neuroscientists and AI people
and he was saying that the problem with
self-driving cars that they had in
cities as opposed to highways was that
the car was okay at you know doing the
things it's supposed to but when there
were pedestrians around it couldn't
predict the intentions of people and so
that unpredictability of people was the
problem that they were having in you
know the self-driving car design because
it didn't have a good enough internal
model of what the people were you know
what they were doing what they wanted
and what do you think about that well I
spent a huge amount of
time watching pedestrians thinking about
pedestrians thinking about what it takes
to solve the problem of
uh uh measuring detecting the intention
of a pedestrian really of a human being
in this particular context of uh having
to cross the street and it's fascinating
I think uh I think it's a window
into how complex social systems are that
involve humans because you know I would
just stand there and watch intersections
for hours and what you start to figure
out is every single intersection has its
own personality so like there's a
history to that intersection like jayw
walking
certain um intersections
allow jaywalking a lot more because what
happens
is uh we're leaders and followers so
there's a regular let's say and they
they get off the subway and they start
Crossing on a red light and they do this
every single day mhm and then there's
people that don't show up to that
intersection often and they're looking
for cues of how we're supposed to behave
here and if a few people start the
jaywalk and cross on red light uh they
will also they will follow and there's
just a dynamic to that intersection
there's a spirit to it and if you look
at Boston versus New York uh versus a
rural Town versus even Boston San
Francisco here in Austin it's there's
different personalities Citywide but
there's different personalities areawide
region wide and there's different
personalities different intersections
and it's it's just fascinating for for a
car to be able to determine that is
tricky now what machine learning systems
are able to do well is collect a huge
amount of data so for us It's tricky
because we get to like understand the
world with very limited information
that's right and make decisions grounded
in this big foundation model that we've
built of understanding how humans work
AI could literally in the context of
driving this is where I've often been
really torn in both directions if you
just collect a huge amount of
data all of that information and then
compress it into uh a representation of
how humans cross
streets it's probably all there in the
same way that you have a Nome chsky who
says no no no no AI can't talk can't
write L convincing language without
understanding language and you know more
and more you see large language models
without quote unquote understanding can
generate very convincing language but I
think what the process of compression
from a huge amount of data compressing
into a representation is doing is in
fact understanding deeply in order to be
able to generate one letter at a time
one word at a time you have
to
understand the cruelty of Nazi Germany
and the beauty of uh sending humans to
space and like you have to understand
all of that in order to generate like uh
I'm going to the kitchen to get an apple
and and do that grammatically correctly
you have to have a world model that
includes all of human behavior you're
thinking llm is building that world
model it has to in order to be uh good
at generating uh one word at a time a
convincing sentence and in the same way
I think AI that drives a car if it has
enough data will be able to form a world
model that will be able to predict
correctly what the pest does but when we
as humans are watching pedestrians we
slowly realize damn this is really
complicated in fact when you start to
self-reflect on driving you realize
driving is really complicated there's
like cues would take about like uh
just there's a million things I could
say but like one of them determining who
around you is an aggressive
driver potentially dangerous yes I was
just thinking about this yes or or like
you can read it a mile once you get
become a great driver you can see it a
mile away this guy's going to pull an
move in front of you exactly
he's like way back there but you know
it's going to happen and I don't know
what cuz we're ignoring all the other
cars but for some reason the ask like a
red like like a glowing uh obvious
symbol is just like right there even in
the periphery Vision cuz we're again we
usually when we're driving just looking
forward but we're like uh using the
periphery Vision to figure stuff out and
it's like a little puzzle that we're
usually only allocating a small amount
of our attention to at least like
cognitive attention to I mean it's
fascinating but I think AI just has a
fundamentally different Suite of sensors
in terms of the bandwidth of data that's
coming
in that allows you to form the
representation that perform inference on
the representation you using the
representation you form that for the
case of driving I think it could be
quite uh effective but one of the things
that's currently
missing even though opening I just
recently announced adding memory mhm and
I I did want to ask you like how
important it is how difficult is it to
add some of the memory mechanism that
you've seen in humans to AI
systems I would say superficially not
that hard but then in a deeper level
very very hard because we don't
understand episodic memory right so uh
one of the ideas I talk about in the
book is one of the oldest kind of uh
dilemas in computational Neuroscience is
what Steve grossberg called the
stability plasticity dilemma right when
do you say something is new and
overwrite your pre-existing knowledge
versus go going with what you had before
and making incremental changes and so
you know part of the problem with going
through like massive you know I mean
part of the problem of things like if
you're trying to design an llm or
something like that is especially for
English there's so many exceptions to
the rules right and so if you want to
rapidly learn the exceptions you're
going to lose the rules uh and if you
want to keep the rules you have a harder
time learning the exception and so David
Mar was one of the early Pioneers in uh
computational neuroscience and then uh
Jay mcland and my colleague Randy
O'Reilly some other people like uh Neil
Cohen all these people started to come
up with the idea that maybe that's part
of what we need in what the human brain
is doing is we have this kind of a
actually a fairly dumb system which just
says this happened once at this point in
time which we call episodic memory so to
speak and then we have this knowledge
that we've accumul ated from our
experiences as semantic memory so now
when we want to we encounter a situation
that's surprising and violates all our
previous expectations what happens is is
that now we can form an episodic memory
here and the next time we're in a
similar situation boom we can supplement
our knowledge with this information from
episodic memory and reason about what
the right thing to do is right so it
gives us this enormous amount of
flexibility to stop on a dime and change
without having to erase everything we've
already learned and that solution is
incredibly powerful because it it gives
you the ability to learn from so much
less information really right and and it
gives you that
flexibility so one of the things I think
that makes humans great is having both
episodic and semantic memory now can you
build something like that I mean you
know computational Neuroscience people
say well yeah you just record a moment
and you just get it and you're done
right but when do you record that moment
how much do you record what's the
information you prioritize and what's
the information you don't these are the
hard questions when do you use episodic
memory when do you just throw it away
and these are the hard questions we're
still trying to figure out in people um
and then you start to think about all
these mechanisms that we have in the
brain for figuring out some of these
things it's not just one but it's many
of them that are interacting with each
other and and then you just take not
only the episodic and the semantic but
then you start to take the motivational
survival things right it's just like the
fight ORF flight responses that we
associate with particular things or the
kind of like uh reward motivation that
we associate with certain things so
forth and those things are absent from
AI I frankly don't know if we want it I
don't necessarily want a selfmotivated
llm right it's like uh and and then
there's the the problem of how do you
even like build the motivations that
should guide a proper reinforcement
learning kind of thing for instance so
uh a friend of mine Sam gersman I might
be missing the quote exactly but he
basically said you know if I wanted to
train like a typical AI model to make me
as much money as possible first thing I
might do is sell my
house so it's not even just about having
one goal or one objective but just
having all these competing goals and
objectives
right and then things start to get
really complicated well it's all
interconnected I mean just even the
thing you've mentioned is the moment you
know if we record a moment like it's
difficult to express concretely what a
moment is like how deeply connected it
is to
the the entirety of it maybe to record a
moment you have to make a universe from
scratch you have to have you have to
include everything you have to include
all the emotions involved all the
context all the things that built around
all the social connections all the um
visual experiences all the sensory
experience all of that all the history
that came before that moment is built on
and we somehow take all that and we
compress it and keep the useful parts
and then integrated into the whole thing
into our whole narrative and then each
individual has their own little version
of that narrative and then we Collide in
the social way and we adjust it and we
evolve yeah yeah I mean well even if we
want to go super simple right like um
Tyler Bonin who's a postto who's
collaborating with me he actually
studied uh a lot of computer vision at
Stanford and so one of the things he was
interested in is some people who have
brain damage in areas of the brain that
were thought to be important for memory
and uh but they also seem to have some
perception problems with particular
kinds of object perception and this is
super controversial some people found
this effect some didn't and he went back
to computer vision and he said let's
take the best state-of-the-art computer
vision models and let's give them the
same kinds of perception tests that we
were giving to these people and then he
would find the images where the computer
vision models would just struggle and
you would find that they just didn't do
well even if you add more parameters you
add more layers on and on and on it
doesn't help right the architecture
didn't matter it was just there the
problem and then he found those were the
exact ones where these humans with
particular damage to this area called
the perinal cortex that was where they
were struggling so somehow this brain
area was being was important for being
able to do these things that were
adversarial to these computer vision
models so then he found that the that it
only happened if people had enough time
they could make those discriminations
but without enough time if they just get
a glance they're just like the computer
vision models so then what he started to
say was maybe let's look at people's
eyes right so computer vision model sees
every pixel all at once right it's not
you know and we don't we never see every
pixel all at once even if I'm looking at
a screen with pixels I'm not seeing
every pixel all at once I'm grabbing
little points on the screen by moving my
eyes around and getting a very high
resolution picture of what I'm focusing
on and kind of a lower resolution
information about everything else but
I'm ch not necessarily choosing but I'm
directing that
exploration and allowing people to move
their eyes and integrate that
information gave them something that the
computer vision models weren't able to
do so somehow integrating information
across time and getting less information
at each step gave you more out of the
process I
mean the process of allocating attention
across time seems to be a really
important process even the breakthroughs
that you get with uh with machine
learning mostly has to do attention is
all you need is about attention
transform is about attention so
attention is a really interesting one
well then like yeah but how you allocate
that attention again is like is at the
core
of like what it means to be intelligent
what it means to process the world
integrate all the important things
discard all the unimportant
things attention is at the core of it is
probably at the core of memory too
because there's so much sensory
information there's so much going on
there's so much going on to filter it
down to almost nothing and just keep
those parts and to to keep those parts
and then whenever there's an error to
adjust the model such that you can uh
allocate attention even better to new
things that would result maybe maximize
the chance of confirming the model or
disconfirming the model that you have
and adjusting it since
then yeah attention is a weird one I was
I was always fascinated I mean I got a
chance to
study peripheral vision for a bit and
indirectly study attention through that
it's just fascinating how humans how
good humans are looking around and
gathering
information yeah at the same time people
are terrible at detecting changes that
can happen in the environment if they're
not attending in the right way if their
predictive model is too strong you know
so you have these weird things where
like the machines can do better than the
people it's not that it's like you know
so this is the thing is people go oh the
machines can do this stuff that's just
like humans it's like well the machines
make different kinds of mistakes than
the people do and I will never be
convinced unless I that you know we've
replicated human I don't even like the
term intelligence because I think it's a
stupid concept but but it's like I don't
think we've replicated human
intelligence unless I know that uh the
simulator is making exactly the same
kinds of mistakes that people do because
people make characteristic mistakes they
have characteristic biases they have
characteristic like you know heris that
we use and those I'm have yet to see
evidence that chat GPT will do that
since we're talking about
attention is there an interesting
connection to you between ADHD and and
memory well it's interesting for me
because uh when I was a child I was
actually told my school I don't know if
it came from a school psychologist they
did do some testing on me I know for
like IQ and stuff like that uh they or
if it just came from teachers who hated
me but they told my parents that I had
ADHD and so this was of course in the'
70s so basically they said like you know
he has poor motor control and he's got
ADHD and so and you know there was
social issues so like I could have been
put a year ahead in school but then they
said oh but he doesn't have the social
in he doesn't have the social
capabilities right so I still ended up
being like you know an outcast even in
my own grade but um but then like uh I
so then my parents said okay well they
got me on a diet free of Art AR official
colors and flavors because that was the
thing that people talked about back then
so so I am interested in this topic
because I've come to appreciate now that
I have many of the characteristics if
not you know full-blown it's like I'm
definitely
Timeless uh rejection s you name it they
talk about it it's like impulsive
behavior I could tell you about all
sorts of fights I've gotten into in the
past just you name it um uh but yeah so
ADHD is fascinating though because right
now we're seeing like more and more
diagnosis of it and I don't know what to
say about that I don't know how much of
that is um based on kind of
inappropriate expectations especially
for children and how much of that is
based on true kind of like maladaptive
kinds of uh Tendencies but what we do
know is this is that ADHD is associated
with differences in prefrontal function
so that attention can be both more
you're more distractable you have harder
time focusing your attention on what's
relevant and so you shift too easily but
then once you get on something that
you're interested in you can get stuck
and so you know the attention is this
beautiful balance of being able to focus
when you need to focus and shift when
you need to shift and so it's that
flexibility plus stability again um and
that balance seems to be disrupted in
ADHD and so as a result memory tends to
be poor in ADHD but it's not necessarily
because there's a traditional memory
problem but it's more because of this
attentional issue right and so um and
people with ADHD often will have great
memory for the things that they're
interested in and just no memory for the
things that they're not interested in is
there advice from your own life on how
to learn and succeed from that from just
how the characteristics of your own
brain with ADHD and so on uh how do you
learn H how do you
uh remember information how do you
flourish in this sort of Education
context I'm still trying to figure out
the flourishing per se but education I
mean being in science is enormously
enabling of ADHD it's like you're
constantly looking for new things you're
constantly seeking that dopamine hit and
and uh and that's great you know and uh
you they tolerate your being late for
things nothing's really nobody's going
to die if you screw up it's nice it's
not like being a doctor or something
where you have to be like much more
responsible and focused you could just
freely follow your curiosity which is
just great um but what I'd say is is
that like I'm learning now about so many
things like about how to structure my
activities more and basically say okay
if I'm going to be email is like the big
one that kills me right now I'm just
constantly like shifting between email
and my activities and what happens is is
that I don't actually get the email I
just look at my email and I get stressed
because I'm like oh I have to think
about this let me get back to it and I
go back to something else and so I've
just got fragmentary memories of
everything right so what I'm trying to
do is set aside a time like this is my
email time this is my you know writing
time this is my goofing off time and so
blocking these things off you give
yourself the goofing off time sometimes
I do that I and I sometimes I have to be
flexible go like okay I'm definitely not
focusing I'm going to give myself the
downtime and it's an investment it's not
like wasting time it's an investment in
my attention later on and I'm very much
with kort on this he wrote deep work and
a lot of other amazing books he uh he
talks about task switching as a sort of
the thing that really destroys
productivity so like you know switching
well it doesn't even matter from what to
what but checking social media checking
email maybe switching to a phone call
and then doing work and then switching
even switching between if you're reading
a paper mhm uh switching from paper to
paper to paper yeah because Cur like
curiosity and uh whatever the dopamine
hit from the attention switch like
limiting that cuz otherwise your brain
is just not capable able to really like
load it in
really uh do that deep deliberation I
think that's
required to uh remember things and to
really think through things yeah I mean
you probably see this I imagine in AI
conferences but definitely in
Neuroscience conferences it's now the
norm that people have their laptops out
during talks and you know conceivably
they're writing you know they're writing
notes but in fact what often happens if
you look at people and you can speak
from a little bit of personal experience
is you're checking email and you're like
uh uh or I'm working on my own talk but
often it's like you're doing things that
are not paying and I have this illusion
well I'm paying attention and then I'm
going back and and then what happens is
I don't remember anything from that day
it just kind of vanished because what
happens is I'm creating all these
artificial event boundaries I'm losing
all this executive function every time I
switch I'm getting like a few seconds
slower and I'm catching up mentally to
what's happening and so instead of being
in a model where you're meaningfully
integrating everything and predicting
and generating this kind of like Rich
model I'm just catching up you know and
so yeah there's great research by Molina
uner and and Anthony Wagner on
multitasking that people can look up
that talks about just how bad it is for
memory and and you know it's it's
becoming worse and worse of a problem so
uh you're a musician take take me
through uh how'd you get into music like
what what made you first fall in love
with music with uh creating music I yeah
so I started playing music just when I
was like doing trumpet in school um for
a school band and I would just read
music and play and you know it was
pretty decent at it not great but it was
decent how'd you go from trumpet to uh
guitar to guitar especially the kind of
music you're into Yeah so basically in
high school yeah so I kind of was a late
bloomer to music but just kind of MTV
grew up with me I grew up with MTV and
so then you started seeing all this
stuff and then uh I got into metal was
kind of like my early genre and I always
reacted to just things that were loud
and had a beat like uh I me ADHD right
like uh uh like you know everything from
Sergeant Peppers by The Beatles to like
uh um Led Zeppelin 2 my dad had both my
parents had both those albums so listen
to them a lot and then like uh the
police ghost in the machine and but then
I got into metal de leopard and you know
ACDC Metallica um went way down the
rabbit hole of speed metal MH uh and
that time was kind of like oh I why
don't I play guitar I can do this and I
had friends who were doing that and I
just never got it like I was I took
lessons and stuff like that but it was
different because in when I was doing
trumpet I was reading sheet music and
this was like I was learning by looking
there's a thing called tablature you
know this where it's like you see like a
drawing of the fretboard with numbers
and that's where you're supposed to put
your it's kind of like paint by numbers
right and so um I learned it in a
completely different way but I was still
terrible at it and I didn't get it it
it's actually taken me a long time to
understand exactly what the issue was
but it wasn't until I really got into
Punk and I saw bands like I saw Sonic
youth I remember especially and it just
blew my mind because they violated the
rules of what I thought music was
supposed to be I was like this doesn't
sound right these are not power chords
and this isn't just have like a shouty
verse and then a chorus part it's not
going this is just like weird and then
it occurred to me you don't have to
write music the way it's people tell you
it's supposed to sound that just opened
up everything for me and I was playing
it a band and I was struggling with
writing music because I would try to
write like you know whatever was popular
at the time and or whatever sounded like
other bands that I was listening to and
somehow I kind of morphed into just like
just grabbing a guitar and just doing
stuff and I realized part of my problem
with doing music before was I didn't
enjoy trying to play stuff that other
people played I just enjoyed music just
dripping out of me and and just you know
spilling out just doing stuff and so
then I started to say what if I don't
play a chord what if I just play like
notes that shouldn't go together and
just mess around with stuff and I said
well what if I don't do four beats go n
n n n one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 what if
I go 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 five and started
messing around time signatures then I
was playing um in this band with the
great musician who was really Brent
ritell who was in this band with me and
he taught me about arranging songs and
it was like What if we take this part
and instead of make it go like back and
forth we make it like a circle or what
if we make it like a straight line you
know or zigzag you know just make it
like nonlinear in these interesting ways
and then next thing you know it's like
the whole world sort of opens up as like
the and then what I started to realize
especially so you could appreciate this
as a musician I think so time signatures
right so we are so brainwashed to think
in 44 right every rock song you can
think of almost is in 44 I know you're a
Floyd fan so think of Money by Pink
Floyd right
yeah yeah you feel like it's in 44
because it resolves itself but it
resolves on the the last note of the
basically it resolves on the first note
of the next measure so it's got seven
beats instead of eight where the Riff is
actually happening interesting but
you're thinking in four because that's
how we used we're used to thinking so
the music flows a little bit faster than
it's supposed to and you're getting a
little bit of prediction error every
time this is happening and once I got
used to that I was like I hate writing
in 44 because I was like everything just
feels better if I do it in seven4 if I
alternate between four and three and and
doing all this stuff and then it's like
you just and you jazz music is like that
you know they just do so much
interesting stuff with us and so playing
with those signatures allows you to like
really break it all open and just I
guess there's something about that where
it allows you to actually have fun yeah
yeah and it's like so I'm actually like
a
very the Gen the one of the genres we
used to play in was math rock is what
they called it which is like this is so
many weird time sign what is math oh
interesting yeah so that's that's the
math part of rock is what the the ma
mathematical disturbances of it or what
yeah I guess it would be like so instead
of you might go like and instead of
playing four beats in every measure no
no no no no no no no you go no no no no
no no no no you know just do these
things and then you might arrange it in
weird ways so that there might be three
measures of verse and then one you know
and then five measures of chorus and
then two measure so you could just mess
around with everything right what does
that feel like to listen to there's
there's something about symmetry or or
like patterns that feel
good and like relaxing for us or
whatever feels like home and disturbing
that can be quite disturbing yeah so is
that is that the feeling you would have
if you were keeping math Rock I mean
yeah yeah that's stressing me out just
listening well yeah yeah learning about
it so I mean it depends so a lot of my
style of songwriting is very much like
in terms of like repetitive themes but
messing around with structure cuz I'm
not a great guitarist technically and so
I don't play complicated stuff and
there's things you can hear stuff where
it's just like so complicated you know
um but often what I find is is like
having a melody or and then adding some
dissonance to it just enough and then
adding some complexity that gets gets
you going just enough but I have a high
tolerance for for that kind of
dissonance and prediction I think I have
a theory a pet theory that it's like
basically you can explain most of human
behavior as some people are lumpers and
some people are Splitters you know and
so it's like some people are very kind
of excited when they get this distance
and they want to like go with it so
people are just like no I want to lump
every you know I don't know maybe that's
even a different thing but it's like
basically it's like I think some people
get scared of that discomfort yeah and I
really
gra you know I love it what's uh I
what's the name of your band now the
cover band I play in is a band called
Pavlov's dogs
and so yeah so it's a it's a band of
unsurprisingly of mostly memory
researchers neuroscientist I love this I
love this so much yeah actually one of
your MIT colleagues Earl Miller plays
bass plays bass you play like you play
do you play or you could compete if you
want maybe we could audition you for
audition oh yeah I'm Coming For You
Earl ear spot Earl's going to kill me
he's like very precise that I'll play
triangle or something
or is it where the cowbell yeah I'll be
the cowbell guy and you got what kind of
songs do you guys do uh so it's mostly
uh uh s late 70s punk and 80s new wave
and and uh Post Punk Blondie uh Ramon
Clash uh I do I sing uh age of consent
by New Order and and level Terrace you
have a female singer now yeah yeah yeah
Carri Hoffman and also um Paula Croc and
and so they do
uh they do yeah so Carrie does Blondie
amazingly well and we do like Gigantic
by the Pixies Paula does that one which
song Do You Love to play the most what
kind of song is super fun for you kind
of s of someone else's yeah cover yeah
cover okay and it's one we do with
Pavlov's
dogs I really enjoy playing I Want To Be
Your Dog by Iggy and the stes a good
song which is perfect cuz we're Pavlov's
dogs and pav of course was like
basically created learning theory so you
know there's that but also it's like but
I mean Iggy in the Stooges that song so
I play and sing on it but it's just like
it devolves into total noise and I just
like uh fall on the floor and generate
feedback I've like I think in the last
version it might have been that or a
Velvet Underground cover in our last
show I actually I have a guitar made of
aluminum that I got made and I thought
this thing's indestructible and so I
kind of like was just you know moving
around had it upside down and all this
stuff to generate feedback and I think I
broke one of the I broke one of the
tuning pegs and oh yeah so I man I maned
to break it all metal guitar go
figure a bit of a big ridiculous
question but let me ask you we've been
talking about Neuroscience in general uh
what what do you you've been studying
the human mind for a long time what do
you love most about the human mind like
when you look at it uh we look at the
fmri just the scans and the behavioral
stuff the electros you know the
psychology aspect reading the literature
on the biology side neur biology all of
it when you look at it what
what what is most like beautiful to you
I think the most beautiful but
incredibly hard to put your finger on is
this idea of the internal model that
it's like there's everything you see and
there's everything you hear and touch
and take tast you know Every Breath You
Take
whatever but it's all connected by this
like dark energy that's holding that
whole universe of your mind together
right and without that it's just a bunch
of stuff and somehow we put that
together and it forms our so much of our
experience and being able to figure out
where that comes from and how things are
connected to me is is just amazing but
just this idea of like that the world in
front of us we're only sampling this
little bit and trying to take so much
meaning from it and we do a really good
job not perfect I mean you know but that
ability to me is just amazing yeah it's
an incredible mystery all of it it's
funny you said Dark Energy because the
same in in astrophysics you look out
there you look at dark matter and dark
energy which is this loose term assigned
to a thing we don't understand which
makes up which helps make the equations
work in terms of gravity and the
expansion of the universe in the same
way it seems like there's that kind of
thing in the human mind that we're like
striving to understand yeah yeah you
know it's funny that you mentioned that
so one of the reasons I wrote the book
amongst many is is that I really felt
like people needed to hear from
scientists and like Co was just a great
example of this because like people
weren't hearing from scientists one of
the things I think that people didn't
get was the uncertainty of science and
how much we don't know and I think every
scientist lives in this world of
uncertainty and when I was uh um writing
the book I just became aware of all of
these things we don't know and so I
think of physics a lot I think of this
idea of
like overwhelming majority of the stuff
that's in our universe cannot be
directly measured I used to think haha I
hate physics so this is physicists get
The Nobel prize for doing whatever
stupid thing it's like there's 10
physicists out there I'm just kidding
dis strong words yeah no no no I'm
kidding it's the physicists who do
Neuroscience can be rather opinionated
so sometimes I like to Dish on it's all
love it's all love that's right I it's
8hd talking so um uh but at some point I
had this aha moment where I was like to
be aware of that much that we don't know
and have a beat on it and be able to go
towards it that's one of the biggest
scientific successes that I could think
of you are aware that you don't know
about this gigantic section overwhelming
majority of the universe right and I
think the more what keeps me going to
some extent is realizing the changing
the scope of the problem and figuring
out oh my God there's all these things
we don't know and I thought I knew this
because science is all about assumptions
right so have you ever read the
structure of scientific revolutions by
Thomas yes that's like my only
philosophy really that I've read but
it's so brilliant in the way that they
frame this idea of like he frames this
idea of assumptions being core to the
scientific process and the Paradigm
Shift comes from changing those
assumptions and this idea of like
finding out this kind of whole zone of
what you don't know to me is the
exciting part you know
well you are a great scientist and you
wrote an incredible book so thank you
for doing that and thank you for talking
today you've uh decreased the amount of
uncertainty I have uh just a tiny little
bit today and reveal the beauty of
memory this fascinating conversation
thank you for talking today oh thank you
it's been
blast thanks for listening to this
conversation with Chon Rano to support
podcast please check out our sponsors in
the description and now let me leave you
with some words from Haruki morakami
most things are forgotten over time even
the war itself the life and death
struggle people went through is now like
something from the distant past we're so
caught up in our everyday lives that
events of the past are no longer in
orbit around our minds there are just
too many things we have to think about
every day too many new things we have to
learn but still no matter how much time
passes no matter what takes place in the
interim there are some things we can
never assign to Oblivion memories we can
never rub away they remain with us
forever like a
touchstone thank you for listening I
hope to see you next time