#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
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The following is a conversation with Cherry rog, enough a psychologist in newer scientists that you see. Davis, specializing in human memory, is the author of why we remember unlucky memories. Power to hold on to what matters.

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I got a store like treating our country store. IT has a few shirts on there. If you want to get a sure, you can get IT. IT was so easy to set up. I like the machinery of humans selling stuff and buying stuff, and through that capital's machine, figuring out together the things that bring happiness to our lives.

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Then Cameron describes the experiencing self and the remembering self, and that happiness and satisfaction you gain from the outcomes of your decisions did not come from what you've experienced, but rather from where you remember of the experience. So h, 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 because I was an undergrad berkeley, and I got to take a class room and along before I want the nobel prize or anything. And I was just a mind blood class, but this idea of the remembering self in the experiencing self, I got into IT because it's so much about memory, even though is a Sunny memory.

So we're right now having this experience, right? And people are can watch IT presumed ly in youtube or listen to IT on audio. But if you're talking to somebody else, you could probably describe this whole thing in ten minutes, but that's going to miss a lot of what actually happen.

And so the idea there is that the way we remember things is not the replay of the experience is something totally different. And IT tends to be biased by the beginning, in the end. And the he talks about the peaks.

There's also the, you know, the the best parts, the worst parts at at a, and those are the things that we remember. And so when we make decisions, we usually consult memory and we feel like our memories a record of what we've experienced. But it's not it's this kind of very biased sample, but it's biased and an interesting and I think biologically relevant way.

So in the way we construct a narrative about our past, you say that that 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 is all about the present in the future. The past has 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 and understanding the present and predicting the future, right? And so cause effect relationships, for instance, that a big one. Now my future is completely unpredictable in the sense that like you could help you in the next ten minutes, paul, I find me and sink my throat, right?

Just planning on IT, but having seeds of your work at 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 have a great time talking today, rain, but we're often right. It's like, okay, so I go to see a band on stage, you know I know they're going to make me weight, the shows gone to start lying and then you know cover they come on.

There's a very good chance there's going to be an on I have a memory, so to speak, for that event before you've even walked into the show, right? There's give me people holding up their camera phones, try to take videos of IT now because 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 I can also give us the solution that we know everything that's about to happen um and I think what's valuable about that that illusions went broken. IT gives us the information, right? So I mean, i'm sure being an 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 we make a prediction based on memory in the areas or where the action is.

the air is where the learning happens exactly.

exactly .

well, just a linger on danny. Condemn 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. 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 is 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 you can maximize the long term happiness of that repeated experience.

哦， well, first i'll say I wish I could take you on the road with me. I was such a great description.

Can be your opening? Xr.

oh, my god. No, i've got to hoped for you to otherwise it's like, you know, everybody leaves after you're done. Believe me, I did that in columbus, ohio once.

IT wasn't fun. Like the opening acts like Franker bar tab. We spent all his body going all the way there.

There was only that everybody left after the opening acts were done. And there was just that stone dude with the dreadlocks hanging out. And then next thing you know, we blew like our savings and getting a hotel room.

So we should, as a small tangent, you're legit touring act.

When I was in grad school, I played in a band. And yeah, we traveled with play shows. I won like we were in a hard core turing band, but we did some touring and and had some fun times.

And yeah, we did. We did a movie soundtrack nice and reports of serial killer. So that's a good movie. We were on the sound track for the sequel and two mask of sanity ity, which is a terrible movie.

How's the soundtrack is pretty good.

It's bad, at least that one part where the guy throws up a milk shake, we were gonna to see. We're going .

have to see IT.

We're going to back to life advice. And I see one thing that I tried to live by, especially nowaday insist I wrote the book. I've been thinking more, 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 in a locked up and seeing people die? And honest 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 work really hard for us, 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 really do think about what's going to be like something that's memorable and then just do IT even if its a pain in the ass because the experiencing self will suffer for that but the remembering itself will be like, guess 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 good advice or at least when you're going to shit, it's a good way to 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 since you said that all you got through shit with someone and it's like, uh, that's a bonding experience often you I mean that can really bring you together. I'd like to say it's like there's no point in suffering unless you get a story out event. So uh, in the book I talk about the power of the way we communicate with others and how that shapes are memories. And so this near death experience, at least that's how I remember IT on this paddle board where just every day they could have got wrong, did go wrong.

Almost 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 goat swimmer and my friend who came with me, Randy, whose 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 a it's like you just say alone and so I just said, well, failures is not an option. And eventually I got out of IT and froze and got cut up things that we were going through.

We're just insane. But short version of this is, uh, you know, my my wife and my daughter and Randy's wife, they gave us all sorts of hell about this because they were just like, where ready? Send out the 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.

We're like ducking out to disable these metal ratings and am like going on flat as not, you know. But IT became a great story, and I was stuff in a renan iori tied. 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, 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 actually get something done in that moment is Better than I give myself credit for, I think. And um that was the last son of the story that I really took away.

Well, actually, just for me, you make 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, he feels like a the motivating thing that the darker gets the bud of the story will be if you emerge on the other side, that to me feel feels like a motivating thing. So maybe people listen to this.

They're going through some shit. As we said, one thing that could be a source of light is that you will be a health of good story when it's all over. When you emerge on the other side, let me ask you about decisions you've really talked about a little bit. But when we face the world and we make a different decisions, how much does our memory coming to play? Is the the kind of narratives that we've constructed about the world that are used to make predictions that fundamentally part of the decision making?

absolutely. Yeah, so let's say after this, you and I decided we're gona 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 at a great time there that a great beer selection or you might say, oh, we went to the space and IT was totally crowded and they're playing this warrigal edm or whatever. So right there, valuable source of information, right? And then you have these things like where you do this counter factual stuff, like, well, I did this previously, but what if I had gone somewhere else and said, maybe I go to the other place because I didn't try the previous so there's all that kind of reasoning that goes into IT too. Um I think even if you think about the big decisions and life friday, you and I were talking before we started recording about how I got into memory research if you got into A A I and it's like we all have these personal reasons that guide us in these particular directions and some of its the 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 will become.

I mean, I do feel like adolescence is much more important than I think people give credit for. I think that there is this kind of a sense like 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 and that starts to emerge um now we're thinking of inks like schizophrenia is a neuro developmental disorder because IT just emerges during that period of adolescence, early adult hood.

So and I think the other part of IT is, is that you know as he will be too firm and saying that memory determines who we are, it's really the self is an evolved in construct. I think we kind of underestimate that. And when you're a parent, you feel like every decision you make is consequential, informing the child and place a role, but so do the child's peers.

And so do you know there's so much that's why I think the big part of education, I think that so important is not the content you learn. And me 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 perfect, you know, parents working on you.

Is there some insight into the human brain that explains why we don't need to remember anything from the first few years of life?

Yeah, yeah. In fact, actually, I was just talking to my, a really good friend, and college, Simona getty, who studies the neuroscience of child development. And so we are talking about this.

And so there are a bunch of reasons. So I say so one reason is there is an area of the brain and called the hip campus, which is very, very important for remembering events or episodic marine. And so the first two years of life, there's a period called infantile mission.

And then the next couple years of life, after that, there is a period called childhood initial. And the differences is that basically in lab and even during childhood and afterwards, children basically don't have any episodes, memories for those for two years. The next two years is very fragmentary, and that's why they called childhood initiative.

There's somebody of so much. So one reason is that the hip campus is taking some time to develop, but another is the neocortex that the whole folded stuff of grain matter all around the hip campus is developing so rapidly and changing, and the child's knowledge of the world is just massively being built up, right? So and i'm gonna probably embarrassed myself, but it's like if you showed like you know you trained a neural network, can you give IT like the first couple of patterns? There's something like that.

And then you bomb bar IT with another like, you know, year's worth of data, try to get back those first couple of pattern. And it's like everything changes. And so the brain is so plastic, the cortex is so plastic during that time.

And we think 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 been completely rerouted, right? So I think that's my best explanation.

The third explanation is a children's sense of self takes while to develop. And so their experience of learning might be more learning what happened, as opposed to having this first person experience of high. Remember, I was there.

Well, I think somebody wants. Sad to me that a 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 basically does the error rate that you mention when your brain's prediction doesn't match reality. The error rate in the first few years of life, your first few month, certainly it's probably crazy high, is just none.

Stop freaking out. The the collision between your model of the world and how the world works is just so high you want. Whatever the trauma of that is, not the linger around, I always thought that an interesting idea because like, just imagine the insanity, what's happening in a human brain in the first couple years, just you you don't know anything and there's just a string of knowledge where somehow, given how plastic everything is, he just kind of mold and figures that out. But it's, as I can not seen, waterfall of information I would necessarily describe .

as a problem. And we can get into the whole stages of life thing, which I just love. Basically those first few years there are mean, you let me think about the kids internal model of their body, body, it's change and right, it's like just learning the move. I mean, like if if you ever have a baby, you'll know that like the first three months and they're discovering their toes, this is not so everything is changing.

But what's really fascinating is, and he this is what of those this is not at all me being a scientist, but is that 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 er is not A A negative traumatic thing. I think it's like a very positive thing because that's what they use, that they're seeking information.

One of the areas that are very interested in is the prefrontal cortex area of the brain. That would mean, I could talk all day about IT, but 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 towards cycle, right? The profile cortex takes forever to develop in humans.

The connections are still being tweet and reform like into late adolescence, early adult hood, which is when you tend see mental pop up. So it's being massively reformed. Then you have about ten years maybe of prime functioning of the performer cortex.

And then IT starts going down again. And you and a big older and you started losing all that front of function. So a look at this and you'd say OK from you've sit around episode memory talks always say children and are worse than adults at epsom memory.

Older adults are worse. The Young adults at epsom memory, and I always say, would say, god, that's so weird. Why would we have this period of time that so short when we're perfect, trying 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 realized 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 adult saying, okay, Young adults saying, i've got a child and you know, I part of this village and I have to hunt and forage and get things done. I need to prefer on cortex so I can stay focused on the big picture and long hall goals. Now i'm a child, i'm in this village and 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 type preference, al critics here, you know what the goals should be yet, right? You're trying to design a model that's based on a bad goal. And so I going to work well, right? So then you go late in life.

You, so why don't you have a great profile cortex then? But I think, mean, if you go back and you think how many species actually stick around naturally long after their child bear years or over after reproductive years are over, like menopause, for I understand anos is not all that common in the animal world, right? Why would that happen? And so I saw elson government said something about this.

Should look into this, about this idea that, you know, really, when you're older, in most societies, your job is no longer form new episodes, memories. It's to pass on the memories that you already have. This knowledge about the world will be call semantic 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 pasted, losing IT. And I thought that was a very planets thing. The memory is doing what it's supposed to throughout these stages of life.

So IT is always optimal in a sense. Yeah, just opened al for that stage of life.

Yeah, and for the ecology of the system. So you've got so I looked in to this and it's like another species that has many opposes orcus orka pods are LED by the grandmothers, right? Is not the Young adults, not the parents or whatever the grandmothers.

And so they are the ones that pass on the traditions to the, I guess, the Younger generation workers. And if you you if you look for what little I understand, different workouts 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 optimize for the individual, but also for king. And I think that the king are part of this, like when they're part of this intense social group, the brain development should parallel that the nature .

of the ecole well is just fascinating to think of the individual worker or human throwout his life in stages, doing a kind of optimal wisdom development. So in the early days, you even know what the goal is, and you figure out the goal.

You kind of optimize that, go, pursue that go, and all the wisdom you collect for that, then you share with the others in the system, the other individuals, and as a, as a collective, that you kind of converge towards greater wisdom throughout the generation. So is, in that sense, is optimal. As humans and orkis get something going on.

they were, yeah, apex predators.

I got a magnon tooth. Speak with apex Prices. It's a just imagine the size of that thing anyway, how does the brain forget and how and why does IT remember? So maybe some of the mechanisms you mentioned, the happy campus put in the different components involved here so we could .

think about this on a number of levels may well give you the simplest version first, which is we intend 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 that works as 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 the competition just whipped things out. Sometimes we forget because there aren't the biological signals that you can get into. I would promote long term attention.

And lots of times we forget because we can't find the q that sends us back to the right memory and we need the right q to be able to activate IT, right? So um in Frances interneuron network, there is no you wouldn't go and you would 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.

You have to have the right quality, the right prompt to access that, whatever the part you looking for.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And in human of the more complex set of ways, memory works.

This, as they said, the knowledge of what you call semantic memory. And then there's these memories for specific events, which we call episode memory. And so there's different pieces of the puzzle that require different kinds of cues. So that's a big part of that too, is just this kind of what we call retrieval failure.

You mention episode memory, you mention a semantic memory, whether the different separations here, what's a working memory? Short term memory, long term memory? What the interesting category is .

a memory yeah and so memory researchers, we love to cut things up and say, you know, is memory one thing are the two things, just two things? There are three things. And so one of the things that there's value in that and especially experimental value in terms of being able to sex thing and the real world is all connected, speak your question. Working memory as a term that was coined by Allan badly. It's basically thought to be this ability to keep information online in your mind, right in front of you, to give in 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 Allen did that was quite brilliant was he said, there's this ability to kind of passively store information, you know, see things in your minds, eye or hear your internal monologue but um you we have that ability to keep information in mind but then we also have to separate what he called in a central executive, which is identified a lot with the preferable cortex as this ability to control the flow of information that's being kept active based on what IT is you doing. Now, a lot of my early work was basically saying that this working memory, which some memory researchers will 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 but there's also transient forms of memory. So one of the things we've been getting into late, late is the idea that we form internal models of events. The obvious one that I always use, birthday party, right? You go to 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 until 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 actions about happen. Um which is is fascinating, I see have this internal model and that's a kind of a working memory product, is 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 happened in the past, which we call episode memory.

So in a way, they're all connected even though it's different. Um the things that were focusing on in the way we organize information in the present, which is working memory, will play a big role in determining how you remember that information later. Which people .

typically all the time, like a birthday party of many before you're gonna load that from disk to work in memory. This model and is your most Operating on model. And if it's a new task, you you don't have a model, so you're more in the data collection.

yes. One of the fascinating things that we've been studying in this is we're not at all the first to this. Jeff ax was a big pioneer. This, and i've been working with many other people.

Can Norman a little divine why eric colombia 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 motivational ally, significant periods. And those points are when it's maximum optimal to encoder episode memory.

So I used to think, oh, well, we're just encoding epithetic memories constantly boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But think about how much for done and see if there is and all that, right? It's just a lot of information that you don't need. But if you capture an episode memory at the point of maximum uncertainty for the singular experience, right? You're just it's going going to happen once, but if you captured at the point of maximum S A maximum surprise, you have the most useful point in your experience that you grab.

And what we see is that the hyp campus and these other networks um that are involved in generating these internal models of events, they show a heightened period of connectivity or correlated activity during those breaks between different events, which we call event boundaries. These are the points where are expressed are you crossed from one room to another and so for and that communication is associated with a bump of activity in the hycy pus and Better memory. And so if people have a very good eternal model throughout that event, you don't need to do much memory processing.

You're a predictive mode, right? And so then at this event boundaries, you code and then you retrieve and you're like, okay, wait a minute, what's going on here, banging now, talking about orcus, what's going on? And maybe you have to go back and remember reading my book to pull out the epoxy memory to make sense of whatever does some about, right? And so there is this beautiful dynamics that you can see in the brain of these different networks that are coming together. And then the affiliating, 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 episode memory, working memory, you can think about IT as these processes that are run folding, as these networks going to 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 to 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. That's what our brains are designed to do.

So if you go back to the earliest quantitative studies and memory by eating house, what you see is that he was trying so hard to memorized this arbitron on sense. And within a day, he lost about sixty percent of that information. And he was using he's basically using a very, very generous way of measuring.

And right? So as far as we know, nobody has managed to violate those basics of having people forget you most of their experiences. So if your expectation is that you should remember everything, and that's what you're optimal is you're already off because this is not what human brains are designed to do.

On the other hand, what we see over and over again is that the brain is basically one of the cool things about the design of the brain. Is is always less is more. Less is more, right?

It's like, I mean, i've seen estimates that the human brain uses something like twelve to twenty watts, you know, in a demean that's just nuts, the low power consumption, right? So it's all about reusing information in making the most of what we already have. And so um that's why basically, again, what you see biologically is newer modulators for these these chemicals in the brain, like north an afan dope, mean h serotonin.

These are chemicals that are released during moments that tend to be biologically significant surprise here. Ss eta. And so these chemicals promote lasting plasticity, right?

Essentially some mechanisms vote, 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 and I mean SHE jaw SHE wrote a book called peak mind and talks about mindfulness sm method for improving attention and focus. So SHE works a lot with military like nv seals and stuff to do do this kind of work um with mindfulness meditation. Um adam gali in other of my friends and colleagues has work on kind of training through video games, actually is a way of training attention.

And so um it's not clear to me, you know one of the chAllenges though in training is you tend to over fit to the thing that you're trying to optimize is right. So you tend to if i'm looking at a video game, I can definitely get Better at paying attention in the context the video game, but you transferred 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 an 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 expert in something, you're training attention. So we did this one study of expertise in the brain.

And a because people used to think, let's save your bird expert. R S, something right? People ago, 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 vision researchers love to say everything special. We, but it's like we did the study of a tension working, 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. So we made up, as they developed the the expertise of being able to, I identify what made them different from each other and what made them unique. We are actually seeing massive increases in activity in the preferable cortex.

And this fits with some of the studies of chess experts. And so far at them, 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 athletes looking three steps ahead of where they're supposed to be. So that's a kind of a training of attention. And those are also what you call expert memory skills.

So um if you take the memory athletes, I know something were both interested and and you know so these are people train in these competitions and they will memorize like a deck of cards and like a really short amount of time um there's uh great memory athlete. Her name I think is pronounced yana winter soul but SHE uh so I think she's got like a giant instagram following. So he had this youtube video that went viral um where he had memorized in the entire I kia catalogue.

right? And so how do people do this by all accounts from people who become memory athletes? They were not born with some extraordinary memory, but they practice 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 incident, right? So again, it's not necessary going to one strategy for learning the order of the deck of cards might not help you for something else that you need like you remembering your way around Austin, texas. But it's gonna these whatever you're interested in, you can optimize for that. And that's just a natural by product of expertise.

There's certain hacks this time to called the memory palace that I played with a fear familiar with the whole technique and IT works. It's interesting. So another thing I recommend for people a lot, as I use anche a lot everyday is a APP that the space repetition. So I think medical students and make .

students uses a lot to remember.

a lot sure, the whole cept space, when when the thing is fresh, you can have to remind yourself of IT a lot. And then over time, you can wait a week, a month, a year before you have to recall the thing again. And that way, you essentially have something like no cards that you can have tens of thousands of and can only spend thirty minutes a day in, actually be refreshing.

All that information, all that knowledge, is through the great. And then for a memory, palace is a technique that allows you to remember things like I get cat logue by placing them visually in a place that you're really familiar with, like i'm really familiar with this place. I can put numbers are fact or whatever you remember.

You can walk along and low pile and 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 those things that I have to solve for myself is how to remember names. I'm horrible at IT.

yeah. I think it's because when people introduce themselves, I have the the social aniele of the interaction or like I know I should be remembered that, but I am freaking out internally about social social action in general. And so therefore, I forget immediately i'm looking for good tricks for that.

So I I I feel like we've got a lot and come because what people introduce themselves to be, it's almost like I have this like just blank black out for a moment. I just look at the like, what happened? I look away.

So what's wrong with me? So I mean, i'm totally with you on this. The reason why it's hard is that there is no reason we should be able to remember names because when you say to remember ing 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, right? I mean, maybe in the olden days, somebody need Miller.

It's like they're actually making flower, something that you know for the most part, it's like these names are just uteri arbitrary, so you have no thing to latch onto. It's it's not really a thing that our brain does very well to learn meaningless arbitron. So what you need to do is build connection somehow visualize the 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 his legs .

loose horb but that's great yes so living like .

luter where A A suit I think I I know he has a shaved head though or is bold with you're not you've got a great head if I trade here with you any day but something like if I can come up with something like I could say OK so lex luthor is .

this criminal masters and I just imagine you think about stb.

Whatever yeah and I am serious though, that these weird associations now i'm building a richer network. I mean, one of the things that I find is if I like you can have somebody's name is just totally generic like john Smith or something.

Not that no ency people that name but if 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 preexisting network to lock everything into IT, right? And so you can build that network. And that's what the method of low sie or the memory palace technique is all about, is you have a preexisting structure in your head of, like your childhood home or this mental palace that you have 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 could walk through the different path and find all the pieces of information are looking for. So method of those sites, a great method for just learning arbitrations. Because IT allows you to link them together and get that q that you need to pop in and find everything right.

We should maybe linger on this memory palest thing just to make obvious. Because when people are describing to me a while ago what this seems insane, I just you literally think of a place like a childhood home or a home that you're really visually familiar with, and you literally place in the 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, remind yourself of the different things. One of the limitations is there is a sequence to IT. So it's I think you're brain somehow you you can't just like globs stairs right away or something to like walk along the the room is really great for remembering sequences, but is also not great for remembering like individual facts out of context.

So the full context of the tour, I think, is important, but it's it's fascinating how the mind is able to do that when you ground these pieces of knowledge is something that you remember well already, especially visually fascinating. You need to do that for any kind of sequence. I'm sure you use something like this for the for I kia catalog .

so yeah absolutely absolutely um and I think the principle here is, again, I tell you this idea that memories can compete with each other right? Well, I like to use this example and maybe someday regret this, but have used to a lot recently, is like, imagine if this were my desk IT could be clutter red with a zillions different things. I, so imagine this just clutter with a whole bunch of yellow posted.

And one of them, I put my bank password on IT. right? Well, it's going to take me forever to find that, I might know, but this can be buried under all these other posters.

But if it's like hot pink is going to a stand out, and I find IT really easily, right? So that's one way in which of things are distinctive. If you ve process information a very distinctive way, then you can have a memory that's gonna um and that's very good differences for name face associations.

If I get something distinctive about you, you know that it's like that you can get very short hair and maybe I can make these so you should like luthor that way, something that right. But I get something very specific. That's a great queue.

But the other part of IT is, what if I just organized my notes so I have my finances in one pilot and I have my like reminders, my to do list in one pilots of her, so I organized them. Well, then I know exactly if i'm going for my banking, you know, my bank past where I could go to the finance pile, right? So the method of low side works or memory policies work because they give you a way of organizing.

Um there is a school of thought that says that epithetic 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 flow side that way and you know whether or not the evolutionary argument is true, the matter of low size is not at all special. So if you know you're not a good visualizer um uh stories are a good one.

So a lot of memory athletes will use stories and i'll go like a very memorizing a deck of cards. They have little code for the different like um like the king in the jack in the ten and and theyll make up a story about things that they're doing and that will work. Songs are a great one, right? I mean, it's like I can still remember there's a subscribe so the T V show, cheers they think is talk about albania that he uses to memorize all these facts about albania. I can still sing that song to you is like that on A T V show, you know. Uh, so you .

mention space repetitions. So what um do you like this problem? Maybe can you explain IT?

Oh yeah if I am trying to memorize something and see if I have an hour to memorized as many spanish words as I can if I just try to do like half an hour, and then I later in the day I do half an hour, I won't retain that information as long as a video half an hour today and half an our 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 that 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 in high school because I cramp ed, because I just did everything at last minute, and sometimes I would literally study like, you know, in the hallway right before the test. I 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 the later on retention.

And so there's many different explanations. We have a computational model of this is 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 and this conversation that you and I are having is 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, you have an a 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.

You think about what a strange interview that what's 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 on our model, what you start to do is he started to a race or alter the parts of the memory that are associated with a specific place in time, and you heighten the information about the content. And so if you remember this information in different times in different places, it's more accessible at different times in different places because it's not over fitted in in A A I kind of way of thinking about things not over fitted to one particular contact.

But that's also why the memories that we call upon the most also feel kind of like there are just things that we read about almost you don't vividly reimagine them, right? It's just these things that just come to us like facts, right? Yeah and it's a bit different than semantic memory, but it's I basically the these events we have recalled every you know over and over and over again, we keep updating that memory.

So it's less than less tied to the original experience. And then we have those other ones, which is like you just get a reminder that very specific contacts, 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 to you. And that's the exact opposite of what you get with spacing.

right? That's so facing. So IT was space repetition. One of its powers is that you lose attachment to particular context. But then he loses the the intensity of the flavor of the memory as interesting as so interesting yeah but you know.

at the same time, IT becomes stronger and the sense of the content becomes stronger.

Yes, was used for for learning languages, for learning fast, for learning for but you know for that generics semantic information that both .

of memories yeah and and I think this this falls into a category. We've done other modeling. One of these is publish study in laws, computational biology where we show that uh another way, which is I think related to the spacing effect, is what's called the testing effects.

Ah the idea is, is that if you're trying to learn words, uh let's say spanish or something like that, and this doesn't have to be words that could be anything you test yourself on the words and that act of testing yourself helps you retain IT Better over time. Then if you just studied IT, right? And so from traditional learning theories, uh, some learning theories, anyway, that seems weird.

Why would you you Better. Giving yourself this extra error from testing yourself rather than just, you know, giving yourself perfect input as a replica of what IT is that you're trying to learn. And I think the reason is, is that you get Better attention from that error that miss match that we talked about, right? So what's happening in our model is actually conceptual, kind of similar to what happens with backpack and um ai so the art neural networks and see, the idea is that you expose here's the bad connections and here's the good connections.

And so weekends keep the the parts of the sell 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 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 overconfident about what we'll retain later on. So it's fascinating. So what happens this is with you test yourself.

Oh my god, I thought I knew that, but I don't. And so I could be demoralizing until you get around that. You realize, hey, this is the way that I learned. This is, this is how I learned best. It's like if you're trying to you start a movie or something like that, you know, just on reading script, you actually acted out and you're going to botch those lines from time to time.

Right now there's an interesting moment. You probably experiences this. I remember a good friend, mine joe rogan, on his part cast and.

We are renomme talking about socks football. Somebody grew up watching the ago and madona one of the greatest success of all time. Every we're talking about him in his career and so on. And joe ask me if he's still around, no. 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 tweet about IT, how heart broken I was, that all this kind stuff that I get 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 runty and go and so on. So for me, he's alive. So i'm in part of the also the conversation we talking to join the stress and like you're the focus is allocated, the attention is allocated particular way.

But when I walked the wales, like in which world was the ea madona still alive? Like which cause I was sure yeah my head that he was still alive. Now at the moment that sticks with me this I had a few like that in my life or just kind of like obvious thing just disappear for mind and it's cool like IT shows actually the power of the mind in a positive sense to erase memories. You want a rest maybe um but I don't know I don't know there's a good explanation for that.

One of the cool things that that I found this is that some people really just revolutionize a field by by creating a problem that didn't exist before. Like why I love sciences like engineering is like solving other people's problems and sciences about creating problems, and just much more like I would break things and problems. Yeah, that is really move fast.

But one of my form ament tories, martia Johnson, who happen, is one of the greatest memory researchers of all time. SHE comes up Young woman in the field and mostly guy field, and he gets into this idea, how do we tell the difference between things that we've imagine 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 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 and using our profound al cortex and really focusing on the sensory information or the place in time and the things that put us back into when this information happen. And if something you thought about, you're not gonna have all that vivid detail as you do for something that actually happened. But IT doesn't work all the time, but that's a big thing that gift you.

But IT takes time. It's slow and it's again effort to ful, but that's what you need to remember accurate. But what's cool? And I think this is what you alluded to about how that was an interesting experiences.

Imaginations, exactly the opposite. Imagination is basically saying, i'm just gonna take all this information from memory recombine IT in different ways and throat out there in some instance um dc cor um and don an attest cool work on this. Demis haus did work on this with owner quire in ucl.

And this goes back actually to this guy, Frederick bartlet, who is this revolutionary memory researcher and bartlet he actually, like rejected the whole idea of quantifying memory, said, there is no statistics in my book. He came from this anthropology perspective and short version of the stories. He just ask people to recall things.

You give people stories in poem, asked 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 the 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'd 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 in combining with a general knowledge. But instead of trying to focus IT on being accurate and getting up one thing, you're just ruthlessly recombining things without any, you know, any necessary kind of goal in mind, one kind of creation.

So gines fabens 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, some patients who have in usia, for instance, they have uh, brain damage, say to the hip campus. And if you ask them to imagine things that are not in front of them, I imagine what could happen after I leave this, right? They are finding very difficult to give you a scenario of what could happen.

Or if they do would be more stereotype like, guess this would happen this. 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 a nica, you're stuck in the present because to get a very good model of the future really helps to have epithetic memories to drop on, right? And so that's that's the basic idea.

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, this is big network, or the brain called the default mode network. IT gets a lot of press because it's like thought to be important. IT is 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, if people know it's is this kind of, you know, daydreaming network and I think this is just ridiculous research. Who cares you? Um but then what people found was when people recall episodes, memories, this network gets active.

And uh so we started to look into IT. And this network, various is really closely, functionally interacting with the hip campus. And so in fact, some would say the hip campus 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 scenario of things that could happen in future, even things that couldn't really be very, they look very similar, I mean, you know, to the naked eye, they look almost the same as maps of brain novation when people remember red the past, according to our theory. And we've got some data to support this. We've broken up this network and very sub pieces, is that basically it's kind of taking apart all of our experiences and creating these little legal 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 be assemble them in the new pieces to create a model of an event that hasn't happened yet. And that's what we think happens in when I are common ground that we're establishing. And language requires using those building blocks to put together a model of what's going on.

But there's a good person of time I personally live in in the imagined world I think of, I do thought experiments a lot. I take the the absurd of human life as IT stands and a played forward in all kinds of different directions. Sometimes it's rigorous thought, thought experiments. Sometimes it's fun one.

So I imagine that that has an affect how I remember things and I suppose I have to build be careful to make sure stuff happened versus stuff that I just imagine happen and is also I mean, some of my best friends are characters inside books that never even existed and um you know there's some degree to which they actually existed. My mind like these characters exist. Authors exist as C, F, K exist, but also a brothers kamas of, I love that book.

One of the few books i've read, one of the few literature books that i've read, I just say read a lot in school that I don't remember. But first.

and I most conversion in sting. This is something to allow your brain to kind of play with ideas of the past, of the imagined, and see IT. All is one.

Yeah, there is actually this famous new monist. He's kind of like back in the equivalent of a memory athlete to hope you would go to shows into this um um those described by this uh really famous nous psychologist from russia named uh luria and so the sky was named Solomon on Sherry hevesi. Any of this condition called 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. And he said that allowed to memorize all sorts of stuff.

But IT also really haunted him by some reports that basically he was like, he was at some point, you know, again, who does the drinking? Was, it's a place had trouble differentiating imagination from reality, right? And this is this is interesting because it's like, mean, that's what psychosis is in some ways is you first of all, you're just learning connections from prediction errors that you probably shouldn't learn. And the other part of IT is that your internal signals are being confused with actual things in the outside world. grand.

Well, that's why a lot of this stuff is both feature bug.

that double age sod. I mean, there might be why there's such an interesting relationship between genius and psychosis.

Yeah, then maybe there just the two sides of the same coin. Humans are fascinating.

aren't think so, sometimes scary, but mostly fascinating.

Can we just talk about memory support a little longer? There's something called the U. S.

A memory championship, like water, these athos. Like, what does that mean to be like a little level at this? Have you interact with them or reading about what have you learned about these folks?

There's a guy name h henery watter who's studying these guys. And there's actually a book by josh u called moon walking with einst 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 he wanted to do this so there was a game Scott haggard who are write about who um thought that he was he was getting keyed o for cancer and so he decided like because the chemo there's A A well no thing called chemo brain where people become like they just lose lot of their sharpness um and so he wanted to fight that by learning these memory skills ls so he bought a book and this is the story you hear in a lot of memory athletes as 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 for them, then they go into.

competitions. The competitions are typically things like memorizing long strings of numbers or memorizing you know or reserve cards. And so far, so there are tend to be pretty arbitrary things, not like things that would be able to be able to bring a lot of prior knowledge, but they build the skills that you need to memorize arbitrary things.

Yeah, it's first thing i've got just to work with something called the end back tasks. So this, all these kids of task, number of recall task. Can I loaded up the corner court working memory? Yeah, yeah.

And to see psychologists used to test all kinds of stuff, like to see how well you good at multitasking. We used in particular for the task of driving. Like if if you fill up your brain with intensive working memory tasks, hagar.

U S. Also not crashing that kind of stuff that is fascine. But again, those tasks are arbitrary in their usually about recalling the sequence of numbers and some kind of semi complex way. Are 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 more naturalistic. And the reason is, is that we've really 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 in a much more predict tive mode.

And you have these um event boundary, for instance, and you have uh but a lot of what happens is this kind of fast ating mix of we've been talking about a mixed of interpretations and imagination with perception and so um and the new direction are going in his understanding, uh, navigation in our memory first 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 him in a box, and the actors cheese, cheese in a box, and will find cells in the hip campus, the fire, when a rat is in different places in the box.

And so the conventional wisdom is, is that the hyper campus 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 memories, we can bring the bear past experiences economically, learn new ones and suffered.

Since if you learn a map of an ika, let's if I go to the idea and Austin, i'm sure there's one here. I probably could go to this, I kia, and find my way to the, you know, where the wine glasses are without having to even think about that because it's got a very similar layout even though I K is a nightmare to get around. Once I learned my local A I can use that map everywhere, wipe 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 more naturalistic tasks um and um another thing that we're really interested in this idea of, like what if instead of basically mapping out a record ate 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 in 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 are a mental maps of the world, just like our memories for events are not photographic. I think there is this combination of actual, verifiable details. And then a lot of inference that you make .

to what have you learned about this kind of spatial mapping of places? How do people represent locations?

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 the survey perspective of being able to see everything. And so that's one way in which humans can do is a little bit different.

Um there's one way which we can memorize routes like I know how to get from here to what if I knew walk here for my hotel and can just originally follow that route back round. And there's another more integrative way, which would be what's called a cogretional 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 in these maps that we have in our head or icon morphed with the world, they're like these literal coordinate um that follow ucla an space and as you know, ucla an mathematics is very constraints, 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 we we've got a small task as it's right now not yet like, uh, we need to do some work on IT for further analysis. But one of the things we're looking at is, uh, these signals called ripples in the hycy pus, which are these birth of activity that you see that are synchronised with areas in the neocortex in the default network, actually. And so what we find is, is that those ripples seem to increase at navigational ally important points when you're making a decision or when you reach a goal.

This speaks to the emotion thing, right? Because if you have limited joy, as if i'm walking down a street, I could really just get a mental map of the neighbourhood 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 R M R I study says basically, the more people can reduce the problem, whether it's space or any kind of decision making problem, the less the hip hampson codes. IT really is very economical towards the points of most highest information content and value.

So can you describe the encoding in the hip campus and the ripples you were talking about? The what's the signal in which we see the ripples?

yes. So this is really interesting. There are these osla tions, right? So there are these waves that you basically see. And um these waves are points of very high excitement 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 excited and then very unexcitable IT goes up and down and on top of them you'll see these little sharply ripples.

And when there is a river in the hyp campus, you tend to see a sequence of cells that resemble a sequence of cells that fire when you know an animals actually doing something in the world. So IT almost is like a little people call IT replay. This is a little bit I don't like that term, but it's basically a little bit of 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 hyper campus and these areas in the new cortecs. And so um that I think helps you form new memories, but IT also helps you I think stabilized them, but also really connect different things together and memory and allows you to build bridges between different events that you've had. And so this is one of early start theories of sleep in its real role in helping you see the connections between different events that you've experience .

in 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. You know what to expect of me, and we've asleep. One of the things that allows you to do is figure out those connections and connect the dots and find the signal in the noise.

So you mentioned the F M R I. What is IT and how is IT used in studying memory?

And this is actually the the reason why I got into the whole field of science is when I was in grad school, F, I 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 there's lots of limits to IT, but you can basically do IT in a person without sticking anything into their brains and very non invasive. And in for me, being in mr.

Scanners, like being in the woom, I just fall asleep if i'm not being asked to do anything. I get very sleepy, you know um but you can have people watch movies while they're being scandal. You can have them do tests of memory like giving them words and so far to memory um but what mi is itself is just this technique where you put people in a very high magnetic field, typical ones we would use with three tesla to give you an idea.

So three tesla mag that you put somebody in. And what happens is you get this very weak, but you measureable magnetization in the brain, and then you apply a radio frequency pulse, which is basically a different electromagnet field. And so you're basically using water, the water molecules in the brain as a tracer are so to speak um and uh part of IT in F M I is the fact that these magnetic fields that you mess with by by manipulating um these radio frequency pulses and static field and you have things called gradients would change the strength of magnetic field in different parts of the head.

There are all we tweet them in different ways. But the basic idea that we use in em is that blood is flowing to the brain. And when you have blood that doesn't have oxymoron IT, it's a little bit more magnetization then blood that does because you have hima global that Carries the oxygen iron basically in the blood that makes IT red.

And so that hema global, when it's deoxygenated actually um has different magnetic field properties than when IT has oxon and IT. Turns out when you have an increase in local activities from part of the brain, the blood flows there, and as a result, you get a lower concentration of hemoglobin that is not oxy. And then that gives you more signal. So I gave you A I think I sent you a gift because you like to say.

yeah, we had off record intense argument about with this pronouncer forgive, but that was who shall set that aside.

But we could have called IT a stern rebuke.

perhaps rebuke. Yeah, I drew a hard line. IT is true, the creator of gift, that is pronounced gift, but that's the only person that pronounce is gift anyway. Yes, you send to give uh a give of .

uh this would be basically uh whole a movie of affiliated. And so when you look at it's not very impressive IT looks like these look very pixilated ted. Maps of the brain, but is mostly cannot like quite. But these tiny changes in the intensity of those signals that you probably wouldn't be able visually perceived, like about one percent, 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 and predict, is a person going to remember this later or not?

And the cool 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 hycy person, one that's dark and if i'm remembering uh you know something like more like, uh uh the car that I used driving a sixteen, I might see the opposite pattern where a different pixel brain. And so all that little stuff that we used to think of noise, we can now think of almost like A Q R code for memory, so to speak, where different memories of a different little pattern of bright pixel and dark pixel. And so this really revolutionized my research.

So there's fancy research out. There are people really, and not even that mean by your centers, to be stone aged, but you know, a flying machine learning techniques to do, decode, get. So for than now there's a lot of forward and coating models. And you you go to town with the stuff frame, and I much more old school of designing experiments where you basically say, okay, here's a whole web of of memories that overlap in some way, shape, perform.

Do memories that occur in the same place have a put similar Q R code, and the memories that a good different place of different Q R code, 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 brain area is indexing all these different memories.

And super fascinating. Because what we can see is this little like separation between how certain brain ears are processing memory for who was there, and other trainers is processing information about where IT occurred or the situation that kind of unfolding. And some are giving you information about one of my goals, h, that are involved and so forth. And so and the hip campus is just putting IT all together into these unique things that just talk about when and where IT happened.

So there is a separation between special information concepts like literally there's distinct, as you said, Q R codes for these.

so to speak. Let me try a different analogy to that might be more accessible for people, which would be like, uh, you ve got a folder on your computer, right? And open IT up.

There's bunch of files there. I can sort those files by, you know, alphabetical order. And now things that both started letter air lump together and things that started with zie versus air far apartment, right? And so that is one way of organizing the photo.

But I could do IT by date. And if I do IT by date, things that were created close together in time or close, and that are far part time so far. So every like, you can think of how a brain area or a network of various contributes to memory by looking at what the sorting scheme is and these Q R codes that were talking, whether get from from, I 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 is a little a waves of activity in, let's say, a human who has ele up seen any stick electrodes in their brain. Try to find the seizures so that 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 sought information in memory according to who was there.

So I might have, like, we've actually shown one of my favorite studies of all time that was done by a former postal exact rap, and that I did the study where we had a bunch of movies with different people in my labs, or two different people. And he filmed the 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 activity, moral as a very, very similar pattern 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, the same kind of pattern that that comes up. Brand is faster. 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 species so that all they have became poses to do is get the right kind of blue print for how to put together all these building blocks.

These are all like beautiful hints at a super interesting system that makes me wonder on the other side of IT how to build IT. But it's like is fascinating, like the way does encoding is really, really, or I guess the symptoms, the results that encoding a facing to study from this, just as a small tangent, you mention through the measuring local potentials with electrodes s versus F M I. Oh yeah. What are some interesting like limitations, possibilities of F M R I? Maybe the way you explained is like brilliant with with blood ens detecting the um the activation are the exciting because blood flow to the area was like the latency of the like what's the blood dynamics in the brain that yeah yeah like how quickly can IT how quickly can task change and all that kind .

of stuff yeah I mean it's very slow to the brain fifty million seconds this like, you know like it's an eternity uh like you maybe fifty uh you know maybe like, uh you know let's a half a second five hundred more second just so much back. And for that stuff happens in the brain in that time, right? So in F, I, but 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 that a feature? Is that a bug? great. So one of the interesting tics has been discovered about I from aria.

It's not so tightly related to the spiking of the and so we tend to think of the computation, so to speak, is being driven by Spikes, meaning like there's just a first of its either honor it's off and the neurons like going up, down um but sometimes what you can have is these states where the neuron becomes a little bit more excitement or less excited. And so ephori is very sensitive to those changes in excitability. Actually one of the fascinating this about farias, where does that? How is that we go from neural activity to you? Essentially blood flowed.

Ox yen, you're all this stuff is such a long chain of, you know, going from neural activity to magnetic fields. And one of the theory that out there is most of the cell s in the brain are not neurons. They're actually the support cells go gal cells.

And one big one is extra sites. And they plays big role in regulating, you know, kind of being a middle man, so to speak, with the neurons of, if you, for instance, like one neons talking to another, you release a neurotransmitter like, let's say, blue to made. And that gets another neuron starts at, starts getting active after you release the in the gap between the two neurons called synapses.

So what's interesting is, if you leave that, you imagine you're just flooded with like liquid in there, right? If you leave IT in there too long, you just excite the other nurr on too much. You could started to basically good season activity.

You don't want this, so you have to suck IT up. And so actually, what happens is these exercise, one of their functions to suck up the um glutamate from the same apps, and that is a massively, and then break IT down and then feedback into the neurons. So you can use IT, but that cycling is actually very energy intensive.

And what's interesting is least according one theory, and they need to work so quickly that they're working on metabolite ing the blue coast that comes in without using oxygen, uh kind of like what you know aneroid c metabolises. They're not using oxygen as fast as they're using glue cos. So what we're really seeing in some ways, maybe in f ri, not the neurons themselves being active, but rather the exercise which are meeting the metal bolic demands of the process of keeping the whole system IT.

does seem to be that F I is a good way to study activation. So with these exercise, even though there's a latency is pretty reliably coupled to the the activations.

Well, this gets me to the other part. But so now let's say, for instance, if i'm just kind of like i'm talking to you and kind of paying attention to your cowboy head, i'm looking to the ARM thinking about the right, even if for not looking at him, what do you'd see is, is that there will be this little elevation in activity in areas in the visual cortex, works, process vision around that point in space. okay.

So if then something happened like, you know sudden light flashed in that part of of you know, rain from the cowboy had I would have a bigger response to him. But what you see in from eyes, even if i'm not even if I don't see that flash light, there's a lot of activity that I can measure because you're kind of keeping IT excitable in that international itself, even though i'm not seeing anything there is particularly interesting. There is still this increase in activity and so is more sensitive with ever.

So there is that a feature? Is that a bug? You know some people people who study Spikes in irons and say, well, that's terrible. We don't want that. You uh, likewise, it's slow and that's terrible for measuring things that are very fast.

But one of the things that we ve found in our work is when we give people movie is 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 you're listening to a pod casters and you're listening next freeman podcasts, right? You're putting this stuff together in building this internal model over several seconds, which is basically we filter that out when we look at electrical activity in the brain because they're interested in this little second 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. I from rise huge problems you know people lie down and scanner.

There's parts of the brain where you will show you these images where you'll see kinds gaping holes because there's you can keep the magnetic field stable in those spots. You'll see parts where it's like there's a vain and so just produces big increase and decrease in signal respiration cause these change. There's lots of artifacts and stuff like that.

You know every technique has its limits. If if i'm lying down and mice or 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 I have been like, understood.

Hope there's so many. It's really so hard to summarized IT. I mean, I think it's funny because it's like when you're in the field, you can get a blazy about the stuff.

But then once I start to write the book and oh my god, this is really interesting. How did we do all this stuff? um. Um I would say that some of the time you from the first studies just showing how much we forget is very important, showing how much schema which is are organized knowledge about the world, a increase our ability to remember information just massively days of expertise, showing how experts like chess experts can memory so much in such a short amount of time because of the scheme as they have chess um but then also showing that those leader all sorts of distortions in memory, the discovery that the act of remembering can change the memory strengthening IT, but I can also distorted IT if you get misinformation at the time and I can also strengthen or we can, other memories that you didn't even recall. So just this whole idea of memories and ecosystem I think is a big discovery. Um uh I could go this idea like breaking up our continuous experience into these direct events um I think was a major discovery to the .

discrete ness of our encoding of events .

maybe yeah I mean, you know again, there's controversial ideas about this right but it's like get this idea that when this gets back to just this common experience of you walk into the kitchen, you like, why am I here? You just send to grabbing some food from the fridge and they go back or wait him and I left my watch in the kitchen and 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, therefore.

And so these event boundaries turns out like in our research and I don't want to make a sound like we've figured out everything, but in our research, one of the things that um we found this 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 down with the 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 as you find this incredible correlation between the activity and the hip campus at these singular points in time, these event boundaries, and your ability to just remember a story outside of scandal later on? So is marking disability to encode memories just these little snippets of neural activity? So I think that's a big one.

Um all sorts of work and animal models that I can get into you know sleep. I think there is so much interesting stuff that's being discovered and sleep right now um being able to just record from large populations of cells and then be able to relate that you want. I think the cool that gets back to this Q R code thing because like what we can do now is like I can take F I did while you're watching a movie.

Let's do Better than that. Let me get IT from the right data while you use a joystick to move around in virtual reality. Is the metaverse whatever, right? But it's got of a crappy diverse because there's always so much metaverse you can do in a number ice IT is is crappy metaverse. So now I can take a rat record from his hip campus and preferable cortex, all these areas, these really new electrics to 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 rates activity.

I can get a person with apple sa, who we have electrode s in the brain, any way to try to figure out where the seashore are coming from? IT is a healthy part of rain record from that person, right? And I can get a computational model, uh, in one of the one of the brand new members of my lab, tyle bonis, doing from great stuff, he relates computer vision models and looks at the weaknesses computer vision models and relates to what the brain does well.

And so you can actually take A A ground truth, you know um um code for the metaverse basically and you can feed in the visual information, I say the sensory information, whatever that's coming in to a computational model is 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 company. The model, which is just I just find that mine blue and you could do uh, different kinds of analyses on language and basically come up with just like that.

Basically it's the guts of l EMS, right? You have you could do an analysis on language and you could do analysis on, you know sentiment, analysis of emotions, so where and put all the stuff together, I mean, it's it's almost too much. But if you do IT right, and you do 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 exceptionally powerful.

所以 you can take F， M, R, I data in across species and across different types of humans, of conditions of humans, in what find construct models that help you find the commonalty ties. Or like 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 IT not just from I but you can late IT to I guess, that recordings from large populations of neurons that could be taken any human or even in a non human animal, that is where you think it's an anatomical homo log. So that's this spine blowing to me.

What's the are similarities, ties in humans and mice. That's what is matching pumpkins. Well, just right in a cage. Pumpkins.

despite all of your rage.

that's much push. I think despite .

all of your rage of gifts, you're still as parade. C.

yeah, I could call back and good call back.

See these memory retrial exercises that doing are actually helping you build a lasting memory of this god resave.

And it's strengthening the the visual thing. I have a new James Brown on stage come stronger, stronger by the second 是 but animal studies work here as well yeah yeah so okay so let's go to .

the um so I think sk i've got great colleagues so I talk to who study memory in my you know and there are some um um one of the valuable things in those models as 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 is just getting more more targeted to the point where you can actually turn on a particular kind of memory just by activating a particular set of neurons was active during an experience, right? So there's a lot of conservation of some of these neural circuits across you know evolution in mammals for instant.

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 to go back to the ice in humans question, right? 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 of 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 eyes around in a way that focuses on particular spots and space.

We 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 of social animals that allow us to um respond differently. The language there's like um you know if you name if there's obviously gobs of differences. Humans aren't just giant rats as much much more complexity to as 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 then know in humans world is very different than a wild mouse's world and a lab mouses .

world is extraordinary ly improved stuff about memory wall.

yes, but that's very important, right? So you can understand, for instance, how to neurons talk to each other. That's a really big, big question.

Neural computation, internet its so 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 it's all like twitter where what are the raise shouteth than another area? The brains is stuck listings to the crap. It's like they're actually interacting on the milieu d 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 gonna coming largely from model systems that are easier to understand. Um you can do manipulations like drug manipulations to manipulate circuits and you use viruses and so far than lasers to turn on circuits you just can't do in humans.

So I think there's a lot that can we learn from my there's a lot that can we learn from non human prime mates, and there's a lot that you need to learn from humans. And I think unfortunately some of the uh people in the national institutes of health think you can learn everything from the mouse. It's like why study memory in humans but I could study learning in a mouse and I just like, h my god, i'm going to get my funding from somewhere else so um well .

let me ask you some random fast in question. Uh, how does this have work?

So dasya vu is, uh, it's actually one of these things. I think that some of the survey suggests that, like seventy five percent of people report having a dasha who experiences one time or another, are aware that I came from but i've pulled people in my class and most of them say they've experienced a jo.

Um it's this kind of sense that i've experiences this moments sometime before I ve been here before um and actually there's all sorts of variants of this the french travel sorts of names for various versions of the shami party with all these several woods ah but h dasia wu is the sense that IT can be like a almost disturbing, intense sense of familiarity. Um so there is uh researcher in wild or pen field. Actually this goes back even earlier to some of the earliest like killings.

Jackson was this neurologist to first care, who did a lot of the early characters, zing of epytus Y. And one of the things you noticed in epytus y patients, some group of them, right before they would get a seizure, they would have this intense sense of dja wu. 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's electrical activity in certain parts, these brains to the sky pen field 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 in which parts don't win, he would stimulate parts of the temporal lobes of the brain and find you could illicit the sense of jasa. Sometimes you'd actually get a memory that a person would really experience this from electrically stimulating some parts sometimes, so that they just had this intense feeling of being somewhere before.

So um one theory which I really like is, is that in higher areas of the brain, they're integrating for many, many different sources of input. What happens is, is that they're tuning themselves up every time you sess 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 is kind of have an idea where everything is in the fluency gives you sense of like i'm here now.

I wake up in my hotel room and I have this very unfamiliar sense where I am right, but knew there is a great set of studies done by an clearly a cholera o state where he created these virtual reality environments. And we will go back to the metaverse. Imagine you go through a virtual museum, right? And then you would put people in virtual reality and have them go through a virtual ark.

But the map of the two places was exactly the same. He just put different skins on them, so one looks different than the other. They're same landMarks in the same places, same objects on everything, but carpeting colors deemed everything's, is different.

People will often not have any conscious idea that the two are the same, but they could report this very intense sense of dasha vu. So it's like a partial match that's listing this kind of a sense of familiarity and um 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 this is just one theory of explained, but we think that we get a little bit of that feeling.

It's not enough to natural giving asia woo even for very male. thanks. right? So it's like if I tell you the word rude, bega, your brains gonna a little bit harder to catch IT.

Then if I give you a word like apple, right um that's because you hear apple lots, your brains very tuned up, process IT efficiently. But rude bag that takes a little bit longer and more intense. And you can actually see a difference of brain activity in area in the temporary low when you hear a word just based on health.

Frequent IT is in the language. So we think it's tied to this basic. It's basically a byproduct of our mechanism of just learning, doing the area of learning as we go through life to become Better and Better and Better, to process things more and .

more efficiently. So I think they are extra elevated, the stuff coming together, firing for this artificial memories, if is the real memory. And why is IT feel so intense? What doesn't .

happen all the time? But I think what maybe 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 know that ability to pull together all the pieces. But it's a close enough match to give you that intense SE of without the recollection of exactly what happened when.

But it's also like a spatial time perl familiarity. So like it's also in time because a weird blending of time that happens will probably talk about time because I I think that's a really interesting idea how time released the memory. But um you also kind of artificial memory brings to mind this idea of false memories that comes in all kindness of context. But how do false memories form?

Well i'd like to say there is no such thing as true or false memories, right? It's like a john y rotten from the sex pistol he had a saying that's like, I don't believe in false memories any more than I believe in false songs right it's like um and so the basic idea is is that we have these memories that reflect bits and pieces of what happened as well as our inferences and theories, right? 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 mix of all this thing, so where memories can go off the deep and and become what we call convention as false memories or 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 like you know uh a story about this person who's like worried that they have cancer or something like that and then you they see a doctor and the doctor says, well, things are very much like you would have expected or like you know what you're afraid of or something when people remember that, they'll often remember all 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 this is that sometimes things can really get out of hand where people have trouble telling the difference in things that they could ve imagined.

First of 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 I was with love. This was a real pioneer in this work and this lots of other work has been done sense.

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 in to the story that you 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 happen.

And so sometimes you can have cases where people um is very rare, but you can do IT in lab to or like A 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, what happens? They start to imagine and they start to pull up things from other experiences you've have.

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 happened. And basically putting them together into the wrong .

story is fascinating, because this could probably happen at the a collective level, like this is probably what successful propaganda machines aim to do. It's creating false memory across thousands of nine million of minds.

Yeah absolutely. Um I mean, this is exactly what they do. And so all these kind of void bles of human memory get magnified when you start to have social interactions.

There's a whole literature on something called social condition, 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 experienced, you tell me about your experience of the same event.

It's no longer your memory or my memory, its 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 narrow of right. Um and and there's all sorts of interesting ways in which misinformation can happen.

There's a great example of when john mccain and uh George bush junior were um in a primary and there are these polls where they would do this like I guess they were like not robot calls but real calls where they would pull voters but they actually inserted some misinformation about mccain's beliefs on tax, I think can maybe something Better legion children, as I don't really remember but they included misinformation in the question that they asked, like 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 new policy things are these personal things that were not true just based on the polls server being used. So IT was the case were, interestingly enough, the people who are using misinformation were actually ahead of the curve relative to scientists who are trying to study these effects in memory.

Yeah, it's too really .

interesting.

So not just about truth and false is like .

uses 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 twist century, uh, some of the dictatorships would not see germany with a the soviet union.

Effective propaganda machines can rewrite our conceptions of history. How we remember on culture are upbringing, all this kind of stuff. You could do quite a lot of damage this way. And then there's probe some kind of social contingent happening there, like certain ideas that may be initiated by the propaganda machine can spread faster than others. You can see that a modern day, certain conspiracy theories, is just something about them, that they are like really effective spreading.

There's something sexy about them, to people, to to wear 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 there as fascinating. Because once you feel like you've remember a thing, I feel like there's a certainty. There's a eb lens you to like say stuff like you really like. It's not just you believe in ideas, true or not, you like, it's at the core of you being that you you feel like you were there to watch the thing happen.

Yeah I mean, there's so much on what you're saying. I mean, one of the things this 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 try, if I remember the same things.

In the same way, and you brought up this web ization of history, and you know, really speaks to, I think, one of the park's 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 zoom out for the moment from like misinformation, take something even more fascinating but not as like you to scary.

Um I was reading on vietnam but he wrote a book about the collective memory of the vietnam war his vietnam's 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 a blue my mind haven't grown up in the U. S. And I ve always heard of that as via nomo but of course they call the american work as as 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 perspective. 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 gering, you know, people going blob, blob about free speech. But they just want to listen to themselves, right? It's like, let's face IT the old days before people were exposed to wo they were trying to ban to life crew or you know I just thinking about let Bruce guy cancelled for curse c jesus, Chris, you know, it's like this is nothing new.

People don't like to hear things that disagree with up. But um if you're in the 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, as the group remembers less from the experience and they remember more of what the dominant naratu says right now, if you have a diverse group of people, and I don't mean diverse and necessarily the human resources and the what I mean diverse in any way you want to take IT right, but diverse in every way, hope, flame 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 for memory and that's a way to inoculate ourselves, I believe, from this information in the modern world um but like everything else, that 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 this conference.

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, what everybody is a voice, but still our natural you see this on social media is is a natural clustering of people and opinions. And you just form these kind of bubbles.

I think that to me, persons, 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 are slowly moving towards truth. But that's a technology problem because, uh, naturally left our own devices. We want to close drop in a tribe yeah.

that's the human problem. Yes, 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 more adaptive ways. I mean, one of my fears about A I is not what A I will do, but what people will do mean, take text message, right? And like pain in the ass, text people is for me.

And so what happens is the communication becomes very spartan and devoid of meaning, and this is very telegraphic and that's people adapting to the medium, right? I mean, look at you've got this uh keyboard right that's like got these like done shape things and you've adapted to that to communicate, right? It's not the technology adapting to you as you adapting to the technology.

And I think with one of the things I learned when google started to introduce auto complete in emails, I started to use IT. And about a third of the time I was like, this isn't what I want to say. Third of the time, i'd be like this 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, is 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 like my mantra for some of what i've learned about everything in memory is to diversify our training data basically because otherwise you're going to so like humans have the capability to be so much more creative than anything generative A I will put together, at least right now. Who knows where this is. But IT can also go the opposite direction, where people could become much, much less creative if they just become more and more like resistance to discomfort, resistance to exposing themselves, to novelty, to cognitive distant. And so for no.

I think there is a dance between natural human adaptation 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 a positive or human behavior. So we adapt and all this kind of stuff.

But when you look at the long ark of history across years and decades, has humanity been flourishing? Are, are humans creating more awesome stuff? Are humans happier? All that kind of stuff. So there, I think technology on that is, husband, I think maybe hope will always be on that, a positive thing.

You think people are happier now than they were fifty years ago.

one hundred years ago? Yes, yes.

I don't know about that.

I think humans in general like to uh remainest about the past, like the time of Better and complain about the weather today or complain about whatever today because we there's a kind of complaining engine that just there's so much pleasure in saying, you know life socks for some reason.

So why .

I love .

punk rock?

exactly. I mean, there's something in humans that loves even about trivial things, but are complaining about change, complaining about everything. But ultimately, I think on net, on every measure of things are getting Better. Life is getting Better.

Life is getting Better, but I know the necessarily that track people's happiness, right? Mean, I would argue that maybe and who knows, I don't know this, but I wouldn't be surprised to people in hunter gather or societies are happier. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they're happier than people who have access to modern medicine and email, cell phones.

Well, I don't think there's a question whether you take on the gathering folks and put them in a modern day and government of time to adapt theyll be much happier. The question is, in terms of every single problem theyve had is not solved. There is no food, there is guarantee or survival shelter and all this kind of.

So where you're asking as a deep part of biological question, do we want to be one of her zog and movie, a happy people left in the tiger? Do we want to be busy one hundred percent 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 matter.

Society allows us to, when we're sick, define medicine to find cures, when we're hungry to get food much more then we did even one hundred years ago. And uh, this many more activities that you could perform or creative, all these kinds stuff that IT enables the flourishing of humans at the individual level, whether that least to happiness. I mean, that's a very deep for sopco question maybe struggle, deep struggles necessary for happiness .

or maybe cultural connection, you know um maybe it's about like functioning and social groups that are meaningful and like having time. But I do think this is there is 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 deviate from your expectation, what you're supposed to get, right. So it's like you get a paycheck every year month for my tea, whatever, right? And it's like you're kind of you probably don't even excited to about what you get the paycheck, but if they cut your cellar, you're going to be Better.

If they crease your cellar, you oh good, got a bonus. You and that a 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 were kind of more, in my opinion, wired to strive and not be happy to be in a state to want to you know, some people talk about dope mean, for instance, being this pleasure chemical.

And it's like there's A A 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 it's enterprise to dope, mean a reward and enjoy IT pretty good but they're not gonna do anything to get IT, you know. And um just one of the weird things in our research as as we I got into curiosity from a postdoc in my lab, metis scriber.

And one of things that we found is when we gave people a question, like a trivial question, that they wanted the answer to that 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 persae, but by the question. So IT was not about getting the information, is about the drive to seek the information um but that 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.

You could use IT to say, I don't want to hear about this. This disagrees with my belief. 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 is a pretty good either band name or rock song name stay stay to win.

That's like a hard, pretty good. yeah. We could use that for like our technical project.

I think you mean the one we're starting? Yeah exactly. We're going on tour soon. This is our announcement.

We can build a false memory of a show. In fact, if you want, let just put IT all together. So we don't have to do all the work to play the show. Just create a memory of IT and might as well happened because they remember itself is in charge anyway.

So let me ask you about, we talked about false memories, but you know, in the legal system, false confessions among nineteen eighty four were side for the dark turn of our conversation. But through torture, you can make people say anything and essentially remember anything I wanted. Torch, agree, there's like truth to that.

If you'll get the torture that happen, the soviet for confessionals, all I can stuff. How much can you really get people to? really? You have to force false memories, I guess.

Yeah I mean, I think um there's a lot of history of this actually in the criminal justice system. You might have heard the term the third degree. If you actually look at up historically, IT was a very intense set of beating you know starvation, physical uh, demands that they would place for people to get them to talk.

You know, there is certainly a lot of work in the that's been done by the CIA in terms of enhanced 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 in one is people just get tired of being torture and just say whatever.

But uh, another part of IT is, is that you create a very interesting set of conditions where there is an authority figure telling you something that you did this. We know you did this, we have witnesses saying you did this, so how we started to question yourself, then they put you under stress, maybe there not feeding you, maybe there kind of like making you be cold, you know, exposing you to like, uh, music that you can stand or some whatever is right. It's like there they're creating this physical stress.

And the stress starts to act on sorts to doing regulate the preform cortex or not necessarily as good at monitoring the accuracy stuff. Then they start to get nice and they say, imagine, you know, okay, I know you don't remember this. Maybe we can walk you through how I could have happened and they feed you you the information.

And so you're in this weaken mental state and you're being encouraged to imagine things by people who give you a applausive scenario. And at some point, certain people can be very coasts into creating a memory for something that ever happened in. And there's actually some pretty convincing cases out there where you don't know exactly the truth.

There's a sharif, 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 essentially I think that was um um you know i'm not going to tell the story because I don't remember well enough to necessarily accurately give IT you but people could look this stuff up. There are definitely stories out there like this where people confessed to crimes that they just didn't do in objective evidence came out later on um but there is 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.

Really tragic that centralized power can can use these kinds of tools to destroy, ze said. Since there's a theme about music throughout this conversation, one of the best topics for songs is hard break love in general. But heart break, why and how do we remember forget heart break asking for a friend god.

that's so hard to asking for a friend of that uh um 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, memories design to kind of capture these things that are biological significant and attachment is you know big part of biological significance for humans right human relationships are super important.

And sometimes that heart break comes with massive changes in your beliefs about somebody save cheated on you or something like that um or regrets you kind of dominate about things that you've done wrong. There's really so many reasons though but you I mean I i've had this I my first pet I had, as you know, was we've got her for a wedding present as a cat and got IT after like a but he died of VIP when was four years old and you know I just would see her everywhere around the house you know we got another cat that we got a dog. Dog eventually died of cancer and the cat just died recently and um you know so we got a new dog because I kept seeing the dog around and I was just so hard broken about this.

And but I still remember the pets. That diet IT just comes back to you. I mean, it's part of this. I think there's also something about attachment. This is so crucial that drives again, these things that we want to remember, and that gives us that longing sometime, sometimes.

It's also not just about the hard break, but about the positive aspects of that, right? Because 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 for my clinical background that really, I think, giving a different perspective on memory is so much of the therapy process was guided towards reframing in getting people to look at the past in a different way, not by imposing changing people's memories or not by imposing and interpretation, but just offering a different perspective and maybe one that's kind of more optimized towards learning and you know um and appreciation may be your gratitude, whatever IT is right that gives you a way of taking I think you set up 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 a new ways but .

it's hard this A I often go back to this moment the show li, with a luu C, K. Where he's all hard, broken about a break up with the one he loves and an older gentleman tells him that that that's actually the best part that heart break 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 hard break, that's the worst part.

So 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 way to celebrate the past and relive IT. It's success. You don't have a thing. But when you don't have a thing is is a good moment to visually 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 IT 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 have to day by day I don't know i'm i'm going to listen to some more Bruce brinks scene to figure out one out.

Well, you know, it's funny because it's like after I turned fifty, I think of death all the time like I just think that you know, man, like I probably I have fewer probably a few years ahead of me that I behind me, right? So if you think about, thank you 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 and I know more people who are you know dying for various reasons and so um i'm not lost.

I am not that all right but you know it's uh um it's something I think about a lot and i'm reminded of like how I talk to somebody who's like, uh you know is but this now is like, you know the whole idea budsome m is renouncing attachments some way. The idea with the them is really like staying out of the world of memory and staying in the moment, right? And they talked about, you know, like how do you how do you announce attachments to the people that you love, right? And they're just saying, well, I appreciate that I have this moment with them. Knowing that they will die makes me appreciate this moment that much more. I mean, you said something similar right near daily routine that you think about things this way, right?

Yeah, I meditate a mortality every day, but I don't know at the same time that really makes appreciate the moment and live in the moment. I also appreciate the full debroah coaster of suffering involved in life, the little, the big, too. So I don't know the boot is kind of removing yourself from the world or the stock.

Move your self in the world, the world of emotion. I'm torn about that. I'm not sure. Well, you know.

this is where hinduism and brother m at least some strength of indus m bother some differ in hinduism. Like if you read the bug with kita, 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 again, you could interpret in different ways 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, you know, letting go of this idea, does this book sell or trying to you like impress you and get you 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 whatever IT is. But it's it's hard, right? It's like because we're so driven by the reinforcer of 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 university decide.

Yep, puts my thuma.

How does studying 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 are narrative about the memories that we constructed. So IT feels like IT does weird things the time. yeah.

And the reason is, is that in some sense, I think especially the father, 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 IT always say pretty different. But if I ask you, okay, go back one year ago versus one year and one hour ago, it's the same difference in time.

IT won't feel very different rights. So there's this kind of compression that happens as you look back further in time. So that is going to like why when you're older, the difference between somebody who's like fifty and forty five doesn't seem as big as the difference.

Sy, like ten and five or something, right? With your ten years old, everything seems like a long period of time. Here's the point is that, you know, so one of the interesting things that I found, one is working on the book, actually was during the pandemic.

I just decided to ask people in my class when I were doing the remote instruction. So one of things I did was out pull people. And so I just ask people, do you feel like the days are moving by slower or faster or about the same? Almost everyone in the class that the days were moving by slower.

Um so then I think I would say, okay, so do you feel like the weeks are passing by slower, faster, 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? 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 monotask event. And so but then at the end of the week, you look back at that week and you say, well, what happened? No memories of what happened.

So IT must the week just went by without a even my noticing and but that week went by during the same amount of time as an eventful week. Er you might have been going hanging out with friends on vacation, whatever right is just that nothing happened because you're doing the same thing over and over. So they feel like memory really shapes our sense of time, but that does so in part because context is so important for memory.

Well, that compression you mention is an interesting process, is what I think about when I was like twelve, fifteen, I just fundamentally feel like the same person. It's interesting what that compression does that makes me feel like it's all were all connected, not just amongst humans and specially but in terms in back in time, there's a kind of uh, eternal nature like the timeless lessons, I guess, to life that could be also a genetic thing just for for me, I don't know. Everyone agrees es 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 time the same way students did from day to day. There are certain markers that let you know the time has passed. You celebrate birds and so on. But the court of who I am, who others I know, our fans, is like that compression of my understanding of the world remove time, because time is not useful for the compressions. So like the details of that time, at least for me, is not useful 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 and science actually to. But it's like when you start, we're calling the past to you 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 presenters with the rain. Um but what's interesting about what you said to that struck me is that your sixteen year old itself was probably very complex. You and i'm by the way, I in the same way but it's like a really the source of a lot of talk for me.

So but um but when like you can look back at like let's see you here a song that used to play like before you would gob do a sports thing or something like that, you might not think of yourself as nately but once you you get back to that ultimately ally time travelled, that particular thing. You open up the little compartment of yourself that wasn't there before, right? They didn't seem accessible for then shacked res lab ed to this really cool study where they would ask people to either remember doing something altruistic c or imagine doing something altruistic c and that act made them more likely to want to do things for other people, so that active mental time travel can change.

Who you are in the president. We tend to think of this, goes back to the illusion of stability. Intend to think of memory is very deterministic way that I am, who I am because I have this past. But we have a very multi facility past and can access different parts of IT and change in the moment based on whatever part we want to reach for rain.

How does nostalgic a connected into this, like this desire, pleasure associated with going back?

yeah. So my friend, sleepy deeper guard wrote this, and I just like blue, my mind, where the word of nostalgia was coined by a swiss physician who is actually studying traumatize soldiers. And so he described nostalgia a disease.

And the idea was he was bringing these people extraordinary unhappiness because they are remembering how things used to be. Um and I think it's it's very complex. So as people get older, difference astoria can be an enormous source of happiness. Rain um and being nostril 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's socks or in a wildlife used to be so great when I was a kid and now it's not right. And you're selectively remembering the things that you we don't realize how selective are remembering self is.

And so you know I live through the seventies. It's socked was like, uh, partly sucked more for me. But 真的， even otherwise, it's like there is all sorts of problems going on. Gas lines people were like, you are worried about, like russia nuclear war, global bloss mean, it's this.

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 world, you in the present you are 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 a collective level.

Ah let me ask you both a practical question and an out there question. So let's start with a more practical one. What would your thoughts about B.

C, ice brain computer interfaces? And the work is going on with neurolinguistic about electoral in different ways of measuring the brain. And here, new link is working on basically two week communication with the brain. And the more out there question will be, like, words go. But more practically, in the near term, I what do you think about new link?

yeah. I mean, I can't say specifics about the company because I studied at that much. But I mean, I think there's two parts of its one is they're developing some really interesting technology.

I think with these like surgical robots and things like that. Um B C I though has like a whole lot of innovation going on. I am not necessarily seeing any scientific evidence from neural length.

Maybe that's just not looking for, but i'm not seeing the evidence that there anywhere near where the scientific community is. There's lots of start up. They are doing incredibly innovative ves that one of my colleagues are gisquet just like a genius in this area.

They're working on IT. I think speech, pathetic s like that, are incorporating, you know, decoding techniques with a eye and in a movement prospects, just like the the rate of progress is just enormous. So part of the technology, E E, is having good enough data and understanding which data use on what to do with that, right? Um and then the other part of IT then is the algorithms for decoding IT.

And so for them and I think part of that has really resulted in some real breakthrough and neurosciences result. So um there's lots of new technologies like neurotic xs, for instance, that allow you to harvest activity from many, many unions from a single elector. Um I know neural link has some technologies that are also along these lines, but even again because they they do their own stuff, scientific community doesn't see at rain.

Um but I think B C I is much, much bigger than nor link and there's so much innovation happening. I think the interesting question which we may be getting into is I was starting the survey well, go but you know so a lot of language is not just what we hear and what we speak, but also our intentions in our internal models. And, you know, so are you really gonna able to restore a 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. Said a few interesting things, when you were sick, when you talk about language in B, C. Eyes, what we mean is getting signal from the brain and generating the language.

Say you are not able to actually speak, it's as a kind of linguistic prostatic IT is 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 is also the intention behind the the the feeling behind that kind of stuff.

And is IT ethical to reveal that full shaban the food context of in our brain? That's really that's really interesting. That's really examine our thoughts. Is IT that the code for anyone to have accessory thoughts? Because right now the the resolution is so low that we're OK with that even doing studies in all this kind stuff.

But if, if, if newer science is a few breakthrough where you can start to map out to Q, R coats for different dots, for different kinds of thoughts, maybe political thoughts, you know, the a catheter m, what if you getting a lot of them communist thoughts? Or however, we want to category our way, bullet. 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 there could be always immediate battles with how much controlled as a centralize entity, hal, like a government, along what? What is the regulation? What are the rules? What are the, what's legal, illegal?

You know, if you talk about the police, whose job is to, uh, a track down criminals and so on, and you look at all the history how the police could be a abuse, its power to the control citizen, real, I can stop. So people always paranoid and ride fully. So it's fascinating.

It's really fascinating. You know, we talk about freedom speech, no freedom of thought, which is also a very important liberty at at the core of this country. In probably humanity starts to get awlung icky when you start to be able to collect those thoughts.

But I I what I want to actually ask you is, do you think for fun and for practical purposes, you will be able to, we would be able to modified 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, 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 behavior, tell you, give, you know, under certain conditions. Anyway, I can give you the misinformation and then you can change the people places.

So for the right um on the crude level, there's a lot of work that's being done on a phenomenon called reconsolidation which is the uh idea that essentially when I recall a memory um what happens is is that the connections between the neurons and that sell assembly to give you the memory um are going to be like more modifiable. And so some people have used techniques to try to late differences with fear memories to reduce that physical visual 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 in the 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. And then what is the memory that is the key part of the problem. So we go back to reading people's thoughts.

What is the thought? I mean, people can sometimes look at this like behavior. Go with 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 as much more complicated than that. And you know, what are 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 called the same thing, right? So it's not about the words necessarily and its not about how long we spent to 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 is 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 won't saw a talk by somebody or saw somebody talking in the discussion of between neuroscientists and A I 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 OK and, you know, doing the things that supposed to. But when the pedestrians around IT couldn't predict the intentions of people. And so that unpredictably, of people was the problem that they were having in, you know, self driving artisan, because they didn't have a good enough internal model of what the people were, you know, what they were doing, what they wanted and what you think about that.

But I spent a huge amount of time watching pedestrians thinking about pedestrians, thinking about what IT takes to solve the problem of 呃。 A measuring detecting the intention of a pedestrian, really of a human being, this particular context of having to cross the street. And it's fascinating. I think I think it's a window into how complex social systems are devolve humans because, you know, I would just stand there, watch intersections for ours. Then when you start to figure out as every single intersection has its own personality.

So like there's a history to that intersection that j walking certain um intersections allow j walking a lot more because what happens is uh where leaders and followers, so there's a regular that say and they they get off the subway and they start crossing a red light and they do this every single day. And then there's people that don't show up the intersection often and they're looking for queues of how we're supposed to behave here. And if a few people start to jail, walk across on red light, they will also they will follow.

And there's just a dynamic to that intersection. There's a spirit to and if you look at boston versus new york versus a world town where even boston seven this go here, Austin, is this different personality city, why? But there's different personalities ario at region wide and there's different personalities, different recessions.

And it's it's just faster for for a car to be able to determine that is tRicky. Now what machine learning system is able to do well is collecting huge amount of data. So for us is tRicky because we get to like, understand the world with very limited information and make decisions grounded in a big foundation model that we've built of all humans work. I 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 model data, all of that information, and then compressed IT into A A representation of how humans cross streets, it's probably all there in the same way that you have a known to sky who says, no, no, no, I can't talk, can write convincing language without understanding language, and know more and more you see, the large language models understand 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 world, the time, you have to understand the cruelty of not .

see .

germany and the beauty of sending humans space, and like you have to understand all in order to generate, like i'm going to the kitchen to get an apple and do that creates ally correctly. You have to have a world model that includes all .

of human behavior. You think an L M.

Is building that world model. IT has to in order to be a good at generating, uh, one word time, a convincing sense. And in the same way, I think a eye that drives a car, if he has enough data, will be able to form a world model that will be able to predict correctly what the pedestrian does.

But when we as humans are watching pedestrians, we slow realized them. This is really complicated. In fact, when you start to suffer flight on driving, you realize driving is really complicated. There's like subtle cues we take a about, like just million things, like one of them determine who around you an ice hole. Aggressive .

drivers, you become a great driver. You can see IT a mile away. This guy is going to pull in aspel move. He is like way back there. But you know, it's gonna happen.

And I don't know what, because we're ignoring all the other cars, but for some reason they ask like a red, like like a glowing, a obvious symbols, just like right there, even in the periphery vision because were again, we're usually when were driving just looking forward, but we're like using the prefer vision to figure stuff out.

And it's like a little puzzle that were usually only allocating a small amount of our attention to, at least a cognitive attention to and is fascinating. But I think A I just has a fundamental different sweet of sensors in terms of the band wife of data is 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 you could be quite uh, effective. But one of the things that's currently missing.

even though opening.

I just recently announced adding memory and I I did want to ask you like how important is how difficult is IT to add some of the memory mechanisms that you've seen in humans to A I systems?

I would say superficially not that hard, but then in a deeper level, very, very hard because we don't understand episode memory, right? So uh, one of the ideas I talk about the book is one of the oldest kind of uh, dilemmas in computational neurosciences, what you gross per called the stability plastics. M right?

When do you say something is new and overnight your preexisting knowledge versus going with what you had before making incremental changes. And so you know, part of the problem with going through like massive part of the problem of things like if you're trying to design an alea, 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 gona lose the rules.

Uh and if you want to keep the rules, you have a harder time learning the exception. And so David mars is one of the early pioneers in uh computational neuroscience. And then uh jm colon and my uh colleague Randy, really other people like a newcomen, all these people started to come up with the idea that maybe that's part of what we need.

And 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 episode memory, so to speak. And then we have this knowledge that we've accumulate, or from our experiences of semantic memory. So now when we want to, we encounter a situation that surprising and violates our previous expectations.

What happens is, is that now we can form an episode memory here, and the next time are in a similar situation, we can supplement their knowledge with this information from epsom memory in reason about what the right thing to do is rain. 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 of the ability to learn from so much less information, really, right? And and he gives you that flexibility.

So one of the things, I think that makes humans great is having both episodes and semantic memory. Now can you build something like that? And you know competition size people as well? Yeah, you just record the 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 episode memory? When do you just thrown 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 these things since such as one many of them that are interacting with each other and and you just take not only the epithetic and semantic, but then you start to take the motivational survival things right is just like the fighter flight responses that we associate with particular things are the kind of like a reward motivation that we associate with certain things so far. And those things are absent from A I I Frankly don't know if we want to I don't necessarily want to self motivated, right?

It's like a and and then there's the the problem of how do you even like build the motivations that should guide to proper reinforcement learning kind of thing, for instance. So uh uh friend of mine and girsha, I might be missing the quote exactly, but he basically said, you know, if I wanted to train, like typically I model to make me as much money as possible first thing and I do sell my house. So it's not even just about having one goal, one objective, but just having all these competing goals and objective.

then things get really placated. Let me just even want to think you've mentioned is the moment you if we record a moment like IT, is difficult to express concretely what a moment is like, how deeply connected is to the the entirety of IT. Maybe to record a moment, you have to make a universal scratch. Forget to have, you have to include everything, have to include all the emotions involved, all the context, all the things that built around, and all the social connections of the visual experiences, all the sensory experienced, all of that, all the history that came before that moment is built on. And we somehow we take all that, we impress IT and keep the useful parts, then integrated into the whole thing inside our whole narrative, and that each individual has their own little version of that narrative, and that we collide in social way, and we adjust this and we evolve.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if even if we want to go super simple, right? Like Tyler bonin, whose a postdoc is collaborating with me, he actually studied uh, a lot of computer vision at stanford.

And so one of the things he was interested in, some people who have brain damage in ers of the brain that we're 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 that 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 test that we were given to these people. And then you would find the images where the computer vision models were 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. The architecture didn't matter. Is there the problem? And then he found those were the exact ones, were these humans with particular damage to this area called the pyro inal 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 any firm 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 says, maybe let's look at people's eyes, right? So computer vision model sees every pixel all at once. It's not you know, and we don't we never see every pixel all at once.

Even i'm looking at a screen with pixel are not seeing every pixel at one. 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 i'm 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 were unable to do. So somehow, integrating information across time and getting less information at each step gave you more out of the process.

The process of allocating attention across time seems to be a really important process, even the breakthrough that you get with the machine learning most C S to do attention is all you need is bad attention. Transformer is bad attention, so attention is a really interesting one. yeah.

But then like, yeah, 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 other important things. Attention is that the core is probably the core of memory, too. There's there's so much sensor information, there's so much going on is so much going on to fill their down almost nothing and just keep those parts and to keep those parts.

And then whenever there's an error to adjust the models such that you can allocate attention, you have Better to new things that would results may be maximize the chance of confirming the model or just confirming the model they have an adJusting in since then, the attention is a weird one. I was, I was always fascinated. I mean, I I got to yet to study poor for a vision for a bit in indirectly study attention through that is just facing how humans how good humans are looking around and gathering information .

yeah at the same time, people are terrible detecting changes, look and happens in the environment. 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 as people go, the machines can do this stuff is 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 there is a stupid concept. But it's like, I don't think we've reapplication you and intelligence less. I know that a the simulator is making exactly the same kinds of mistakes that people do.

People make characteristic mistakes. They have characteristic biases. They have characteristic like, you know, heuristics that we use. And those I have yet to see evidence that ChatGPT will do that .

since we're talking about attention. Is there an interesting connection to you between A D H D N and memory?

What's interesting for me because um when I was a child I was actually told me school I don't know that came from a school psychologist, they did do some testing on me, I offer like I feel and stuff like that uh the they or if I just came from teachers who hated me, but they told my parents that I had A D H D. And so this was of course, in the seventies. Basically they said, like he has poor motor control and he's got A D H D.

So and uh you know the 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 he doesn't have the social capabilities that right so I still needed to be like, you know that an outcast even in my old grade but um but then like uh I was said that my parents that okay, well, they got me on a diet free of artificial colors and flavors because that was the the people talked about that and so I am interested this topic because i've come to appreciate now that I have many of the characteristics if not, you know fool blown it's like i'm definitely timeline inss uh rejection since if you know that they talk about it's like impulsive behavior. I can tell you that all sorts of fights i've gotten into in the past just you name IT um uh but yes so A D H D is fascinating though because right now we're seeing like more and more diagnoses 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 tendency.

But what we do know is this is that A D, H, D is associated with differences in prefrontal function so that attention can be both more you're more distractable, you've harder time focusing your attention and what's relevant. And so you shift too easily. But then once you get on something that you are interested and you can get stuck.

And so you know the attention is beautiful baLance of being able to focus when you need to focus and shift when you need shift. And so it's that flexibility plus stability again um and that baLance seems to be disrupted in A D H D. And so as a result, memory tends to be poor and A D H D, but it's not necessarily because there a traditional memory problem, but it's more because of this attentional issue, right? And so um in people that actually often will have great memory for the things that they are interested in and just no marry for the things that .

they're not interested in, is their advice from your own life on how to learn and succeed from that, from just how the characteristics of your own brain with the H H G and so on. How do you learn how? How do you remember information huddy flourish in this set of education contacts?

I'm still trying to figure out the flu ship per day that education of being in science is enormously enabling A V hd. It's like you're constantly looking for a new thing, tags, costly seeking that dope being hit and and uh and that's great you know uh you they tolerate you're being late for things, not things is really he's going to die if you screw up.

But it's nice that like being a doctor is if they where you have to be like much more responsible and focused, you can just freely follow your curiosity which is disgrazia um but what i'd says is, is that like and learning now about so many things like about how to structure my activities more and basically say OK, if i'm going to be details like the big one that kills me right now, i'm just constantly like shifting between email and my activities. And what happens is that I don't actually get the email and I just look at my email and I get stressed because of my oil. I have to think about that.

Let me get back to IT, and I go back to everything else. And so i've just got fragmentary memories of everything, right? So when trying to set, to set every time, like this is my email mail time, this is my, you know, writing time, this is my goofing off time.

And so blocking these things off, you give yourself of the growing off time. Sometimes I do that. I and I sometimes that reflexes will go like, okay, i'm definitely not focusing.

I'm going to give myself the downtime. I an 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 colored port on this. He wrote deep work and a lot of other amazing books. He talks about task switching as a sort of the thing that really destroyed productivity. So like you know, switching but IT doesn't even matter from what to what. But checking social media, checking email may be watching to a phone call and doing work and switching even switching between if you're reading a paper, a switching from paper to paper to paper ah because like curiosity in whatever the dopamine hit from the attention, which like limiting that because otherwise your brain is just not capable to really like loaded in and really uh do that deep deliberation I think that's required to remember things into really think through things yeah I .

mean you probably see this, I imagine in A I conferences, but definitely in north sides conferences, it's now the norm that people have their laptops out during talks and you know severability they're writing you know the writing notes.

But in fact, what often happens if you look at people and we can speak from a little but personal experience is your checking email and you're like, 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 the solution while i'm paying attention and i'm going back and and then what happens is I don't remember anything from that day. I just kind of vanish 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 meaningful ly integrating everything in predicting and generating this kind of like rich model, i'm just catching up, you know and so yeah, there's great research by millan uncovering and Anthony I wagon multi asking and people can look up with talks about just how bad IT is for memory and and you know it's is becoming worse and worse of a problem.

So your musician take me through how do you get into music? Like quite what made you first fall love with music without creating music?

I, yes. So I started playing music just when I was like doing trumpet in school um for school band and I would just read music and play and you know is pretty decent .

added not great but as decent how you go from trumpet to a guitar to guitar so .

see the kind of music into yes so basically high school yes so I can a was a late bloomer in music but just kind of M T V grew up with me. I grew up with M T V.

And so then you started seeing all the stuff and I got in metal was kind of like my early genre and I I always reacted to just things that we're loud and had to beat like A I mean a hd right like um uh like you know everything from sergei peppers by the beetles to like um let apple to my dad head both my parents at both those albums listen to them and then like the police goes in the machine and but then I got in the metal that leppard and you know A C D C metallic went way down the rabbit hole speed metal. Uh and that time was kind of like, uh, like when I play guitar, I can do this. And my friends were doing that and I just never got IT like I was.

I took lessons and stuff like that, but I 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 think a tablet ure you know this, where is A U C like a drawing of the front board with numbers and that's where you just put you. It's going to like paint by numbers, right? And so um i'd learned IT in a completely different way, but I was still terrible at IT and I didn't get IT.

IT is actually take me a long time 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 just blew my mind because they violated the rules of what I thought music was supposed to be as like.

This doesn't sound right. These are not power cords and this isn't just have like a shouty verse corus parts not going 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 the sound. I just open up everything from me. I was playing in 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 are listening to. And somehow I kind of moved into just like just grabbing a guitar and just doing stuff. And I realized a part of my problem with doing music before I was, I didn't enjoy trying to play stuff that other people play, just enjoyed music just dripping out of me and and just, you know, spilling out and just doing stuff.

And so I started to say, what if I don't play a cord? What if I just play like notes that shouldn't go together and just mess around and and I said, what if I don't do four b go na na a, one, two, three, or one, two, three, four, one two three what if I go one two, three, four five one two three, four five and certain matter time suggestions then I was playing um in the band with a great musician who was really brunt ritson who was in the span with me and he told me about a ranging song's and I 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, zizi, you know, just make IT like non linear in these interesting ways.

And then x know is like the whole word, sort of opens up as like the and then what I started realized especially so you could appreciate this as musician, I think. So time signature, right? So we are so brainwash to think in for four, right? Every rocks song you can think of almost for for I know you're fluid fan.

So think of money by pink floyd, right? Yeah, bang and bang. yeah. You feel like it's in for four because IT resolves itself, but IT resolves on the the last note of basically resolves on the first note of the next measure.

So it's got seven beats instead of eight, where the rif is actually happening. But you're thinking in form because that's how we use reuse thinking. So the music flows a little bit faster then 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 four four, because I was like, everything just feels Better. I do IT in seven, four of our alternate, or between four and three and and doing all the stuff and then it's like, you just jazz music is like that, you know, they just do so much interesting stuff with us.

And so playing with those time staying here is allow you to like really break IT all open. 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 one of the genres we explain as math rock they call them just like this is everywhere .

times what is math? Oh interesting yes. So that's that's the math part of rock is what the the mathematic disturbances of IT or what yeah.

I guess that would be like. So you might go like instead of playing four beats in every measure. No, you go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You 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 course, and then two measure. You could just mess around with everything.

What does that feel like to listen? There's there's something about some meter or or like a patterns that feel good and like relaxing for us or whatever fees like home and disturbing that can be quite disturbing. Yes, that is that the feeling you would have. He math rock. I mean, yeah yeah stressing me, I just listened .

well yeah yeah learning about IT. So I mean IT depends. So a lot of my style of song writing is very much like in terms of like repetitive themes.

But messing around with structure because i'm not a great guitar is technically if so I don't play complicated stuff and there's things you can hear, stuff where this is like so complicated now um but often what I find is is like having a Melody or and then adding some distant 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 distant and prediction. I think I have a theory, a pet theory, that it's like basically you could explain most of human behaviors.

Some people are lump ers and some people are split city to. And so it's like some people are very kind of excited when they get this distance and they wanna go with IT. So people are just like, no, I wanted lump every maybe that see you a different thing, but it's like basically like I think some people get scared of that discomfort. Yeah.

and I really on IT, you know, I love IT. What's A I what's the name of your band?

Now the cover band I plan is the band called pavlov dogs. And so, yeah, so it's it's a band, unsurprisingly, of mostly memory researchers nor I love this. I love what, actually, what if your mt.

Colleagues role, Miller plays base.

But you could compete if you want. Maybe we could adjust for this.

Oh, comment for you.

Earls, get to kill me. He's like, very precise trying .

or something where the cow ball? Yes, I A cow bay you what kind of songs you .

guys do so it's mostly uh uh late seventies PK in eighty new wave and post punk blondy uh mormons clash. Uh I do I sing uh age of consent by yeah .

yeah yeah Carry .

on and also um uh polar cross and and so they do, uh they do yes so Carry does blondy amazingly well and we do like dragani by the pixies politics. That one which .

song do you love to play them us? What kind of song is superfund .

of someone else?

Is the a cover, a cover OK?

And it's what we do with pavlos dogs. I really enjoy playing. I want to to be your dog by agent, which is perfect because our travel loves. And hello, of course, was like basic created learning theory.

So you know there's this, but also it's a bit I mean, I I in the studies that song so I play and sing on IT, but it's just like a devolves into total noise and I just like a fall on the floor and generate feedback. I've like I think in the last version I might have been that or evolve the underground covered in our last show. I actually, I have in a guitar made of aluminum that I got made.

And I thought the things in structural as so I kind of like was just, you know, moving IT around, had an upside down and all staff to generate feedback. And I think I broke one of, I broke one of the tuning pegs. So yes, so I manage, i've added to break in all metal guitar who go figure a bit .

of a big ridiculous problem. But let me ask you, we've been talking about your science in general. What what do you? You've been studying the human mind for a long time. What do you love most about the human mind? When you look at IT, we look at the fmr, just the scans and the behavioral stuff, electoral year, the psychology aspect, reading literary on the biology side, near a biology. When you look at IT.

what what is most like .

beautiful to you?

I think the most beautiful, but incredibly hard 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, a touch and taste, 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 are so much of our experience, and being able to figure out where that comes from and how things are connected to me is just amazing. But just this idea like that, the world in front of us, we're only sampling this little bit and trying to take so much meaning from an and we use a really good job, not perfect, I mean, you know, but that ability to me is just amazing.

Yeah, it's an incredible mystery of its funny said dark energy is the same. And in astrophysics you look out there, look at dark matter and dark energy, which is this loose term, a scientist thing we do understand, which makes, which helps make the equations work in terms of gravity and expansion universe in the same way. IT seems like there's that kind of thing in the human mind. They were like striving to understand.

yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny that you mention. So one of the reasons I wrote the book, among many, is that I really felt like people needed to hear from scientists.

And like, covet 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, 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 this idea of, like overwhelming majority of the stuff that in our universe cannot be directly measured.

I used to think, haha, hate physics. So physicists get the nobel prize for doing whatever stupid thing. Like there's ten physicists out there.

I just this words yeah I don't know know the physical or sites could be rather opinion. So sometimes I like to dish it's all love. It's all love that's right. I the lad hd talking so um but at some point I had this a home or was like to be aware of that much that we don't know and have a beat on IT 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 the 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, oh, my god, is only things we don't know. and.

I thought I knew this because science is all about assumptions, right? If you, the structure of scientific revolutions by tomas, yes, that's like my only philosophy, really, that ever had. But it's so brilliant in the way that they framed this idea of, like he framed this idea of assumptions being core to the scientific process.

And the paradise shift comes from changing those assumptions. And this idea like finding out this kind of whole zone of what you don't know, to muse the exciting part. You know.

well, you are a great scientist, and you rode an incredible books. So thank you for doing that and thank you for talking the day you've decreased the amount of uncertainty I have, uh, just a tiny little bit today and reveal the beauty of memory is fascinating conversation.

Thank you. Talk about that. I thank you. Been last.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cherry rog enough to support this podcasts. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from haruka comi.

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, i'm no longer 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 interview, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion. Memories, we can never go away. They remain with us forever like a touchdown. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.