Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
Speaker 1: from how Stuff works dot Com. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps,
Speaker 1: and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
Speaker 1: paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
Speaker 1: Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
Speaker 1: want you to know in this video podcast from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark with me as always as the lovely
Speaker 1: and esteem of Charles W. Chucker Bryant. Are you going,
Speaker 1: buddy right? Are you slightly under the weather? I see Ted? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Everyone send other well wishes things. You'll be well by
Speaker 1: the time it's can tell them, probably, but it'll still
Speaker 1: warm my heart to see well wish exactly. Chuck. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've got the email, but we've been
Speaker 1: asked to mention a couple of shows that are coming
Speaker 1: out companion shows. They're coming out on the Science Channel, um,
Speaker 1: The Road to punkin Chunking and punkin Chunking Itself Naturally. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that Josh is uh, Thanksgiving night if you're board
Speaker 1: after your turkey on the Science Channel eight Eastern time, right,
Speaker 1: So can we get back to it? Yeah, let's do it, great, Chuck, Josh,
Speaker 1: do you remember coming into that delivery room from the
Speaker 1: womb with your mom going and you all wet and
Speaker 1: nasty and cold all of a sudden and everything's bright
Speaker 1: and there's people spanking you and you're suddenly a little perturbed.
Speaker 1: I remember being perturbed. That sounds like last Friday night
Speaker 1: for me. I'm not talking about any goat being around show.
Speaker 1: I don't remember that, do why? I'm totally full of it?
Speaker 1: And apparently no one members this. Being born is impossible
Speaker 1: as far as we know. As far as we know.
Speaker 1: Um so, anytime you hear somebody describing how they remember
Speaker 1: being born, you can punch them in the stomach and
Speaker 1: call them a liar. Do people say that I've heard
Speaker 1: it before. Yeah, it's rare, but yeah, people do say
Speaker 1: that they have uncovered that memory. What through primal therapy?
Speaker 1: Or are we getting there? You've got a little foreshadowing binge.
Speaker 1: That's literally like the last thing we're probably gonna cover
Speaker 1: and every end. Well, let's talk about this, Chuck, Why
Speaker 1: can't you remember being born, especially because there they think
Speaker 1: that infants are able to form memories, So why wouldn't
Speaker 1: we be able to be formed? And what's going on here? Like,
Speaker 1: that's just weird that our brains wouldn't start forming memories
Speaker 1: until a certain age after we're born. What's up with that?
Speaker 1: Why don't we remember being in the womb or sitting
Speaker 1: on a cloud waiting to come down into your mom's tummy,
Speaker 1: or you know, being like uh lay ocean gunman or
Speaker 1: something before you got to the cloud that why don't
Speaker 1: we remember any of that? Well, we can get to
Speaker 1: that in one second, but we should go ahead and
Speaker 1: just say historically that for many, many, many years, like
Speaker 1: a hundred years, they thought that we just simply our
Speaker 1: little baby brains weren't formed enough to uh, to be
Speaker 1: able to make these memories happen. Which it's a legitimate theory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think they looked into it that much though,
Speaker 1: But I mean, we develop at a certain pace, like
Speaker 1: we don't even have knee caps for the first several months,
Speaker 1: two years. Maybe, yeah, you don't have knee caps, pal,
Speaker 1: I don't think I knew that. That's why baby legs
Speaker 1: are so weird looking. You just want to chew on them,
Speaker 1: right yea um, but yeah, so we developed like we don't.
Speaker 1: We don't come out of the womb fully grown, so
Speaker 1: you can. It's not the most bone head. It's not
Speaker 1: spontaneous regeneration theory. No, but they didn't. For about a
Speaker 1: hundred years, they didn't even look into it much, I
Speaker 1: don't think. And then for the past twenty years they've
Speaker 1: started to well, hold on, what is it called? Are
Speaker 1: you talking about childhood amnesia? I am previously known as
Speaker 1: infantile amnesia by your favorite Mr Sigmund Fruid. Oh and
Speaker 1: guess what, what a surprise? He said that I had
Speaker 1: to do with repressed sexual urges. Holy cow, I can't
Speaker 1: believe it. Freud equated something with sex everything sex sex, sex.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. Sure, he said that we What we did
Speaker 1: was we repressed our memories of traumatic often sexual urgings,
Speaker 1: and formed screen memories to uh, to block the unconscious.
Speaker 1: I'd right, And by screen memories, no memories is another
Speaker 1: way to put that, because most people apparently can't come
Speaker 1: up with a concrete memory from their childhood until they
Speaker 1: turned about age three, right, But when you that's as
Speaker 1: far back as most people can remember it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can remember back that far. My first memory was in
Speaker 1: my first house that we moved from when I was three,
Speaker 1: and I remember very specifically a couple of things. I
Speaker 1: remember my mom wrapping her wedding ring on the back
Speaker 1: window when it was time to come in and eat.
Speaker 1: And I remember right before we moved out, we were
Speaker 1: eating on the floor that was you know, the furniture
Speaker 1: was was gone, and the next door neighbor, Billy Bright,
Speaker 1: came up to our screen door and like stood in
Speaker 1: the doorway and just watched us eat. And I remember
Speaker 1: that and I was three. What about you my earliest memory, Um,
Speaker 1: I must have been pretty young because I was still
Speaker 1: wearing diapers. Definitely less than I was younger than seven. Um.
Speaker 1: And I was banging goodbye on a storm window a
Speaker 1: storm door. Uh. And my older sister Karen was babysitting
Speaker 1: me and my mom was leaving this how I used
Speaker 1: to say goodbye so I couldn't talk. So it's definitely
Speaker 1: younger than six. Um. And I was banging on the
Speaker 1: storm window and just put my arm right through it.
Speaker 1: And I remember that scene. Um, but that's that's my
Speaker 1: no one. Do you remember that where you cut and wounded.
Speaker 1: I was. I don't remember paying or anything like that,
Speaker 1: but I was definitely bleeding everywhere. I remember my sister
Speaker 1: Karen just screaming, bloody murder. She was so freaked out.
Speaker 1: I love that you were mannish enough at that age
Speaker 1: to put your arm through a storm. I was like,
Speaker 1: it's nothing, don't worry about it, Karen, it's not a
Speaker 1: Josh door. Yeah, and then I went and started a fire.
Speaker 1: Good for you. So, um, that's my earliest memory. Um.
Speaker 1: But again, it's like it's sporadic. I can't really I
Speaker 1: can't tell you what agent it took place at well,
Speaker 1: either aside from knowing that I lived in that house
Speaker 1: and I moved it three. One of the things that um,
Speaker 1: I I recognize that as a very concrete memory, though,
Speaker 1: is that there's no photos of it. Apparently, if you
Speaker 1: look through family photos, it's very easy to generate false memories, okay,
Speaker 1: um or you know, obviously you can support the memories
Speaker 1: that you do have, as vague as they are, by
Speaker 1: looking at family photos, but these serve as cues. There
Speaker 1: were no photos of this one, and I was wearing diapers,
Speaker 1: So to me, this constitute is my release We'll get
Speaker 1: to the cues as well in a minute. But what
Speaker 1: they did figure out in the past twenty years from
Speaker 1: doing a lot of studying is that they've determined that
Speaker 1: children as young as three months old can't actually form memories.
Speaker 1: It's just the fact that these memories don't stick around
Speaker 1: as long term, right. And even more than that, they've
Speaker 1: also determined that we're born with UM, the ability to
Speaker 1: form unconscious memories. Talk about that. That's pretty cool. Okay,
Speaker 1: So basically we have two kinds of memory. We have UM, uh,
Speaker 1: explicit memory. Right. Do you remember when we talked about
Speaker 1: dogs perceiving time? We touched on this then too, we
Speaker 1: talked about explicit memory or UM semantic No, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: we talked about explicit memory, right, or episodic memory is
Speaker 1: the name of it. UM. And then there's the other kind,
Speaker 1: the unconscious memories UM, which are referred to as semantic.
Speaker 1: So you remember when I asked you and how do
Speaker 1: dogs perceived time? Um? You know what you had for
Speaker 1: breakfast and you were describing it in detail, which lent
Speaker 1: itself to have It was evidential that that was an
Speaker 1: episodic memory, like you clearly had memories and with a
Speaker 1: semantic memory. That's where you learn how to play a piano. Uh,
Speaker 1: And you might not remember learning to play the piano,
Speaker 1: but you can remember how to play the piano because
Speaker 1: you've learned it. You're accessing a different kind of memory, right.
Speaker 1: And oddly enough, if you like lose your memory and
Speaker 1: an accident or something and anesia, you may be able
Speaker 1: to still remember how to play the piano. I find
Speaker 1: this stuff absolutely fascinating. Okay, So for unconscious memory, um,
Speaker 1: we're born with that, but it take it does take
Speaker 1: uh several months, if not years to start to develop
Speaker 1: episodic memory. Right, So how does episodic memory work? Well?
Speaker 1: Is that what are you talking about? Encoding? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: Well the brain obviously, to create a memory, you need
Speaker 1: to create a synapse, which is just a connection firing
Speaker 1: within your brain between two neurons. And uh, what happens
Speaker 1: is when you, when you have a memory, encode that
Speaker 1: memory that sensory information into your memory bank, and then
Speaker 1: from there your brain categorizes it kind of files it
Speaker 1: away like you would on your computer, and then weird
Speaker 1: to think think about this, chuck, There are a series
Speaker 1: of brain cells in your brain right now, just a
Speaker 1: few that that are connected via synapsis that are responsible
Speaker 1: for maintaining your memory of the scent of a guardinia.
Speaker 1: How mind boggling is that my brain is melting? Okay,
Speaker 1: So when you think of the scent of a gardenia,
Speaker 1: you can come up with it, right, You can kind
Speaker 1: of remember what it's like right now that I'm right there. Apparently,
Speaker 1: when you smell a guardinia over and over, um, you
Speaker 1: can pick up more elements of that smell, right exactly,
Speaker 1: and you can add to that memory more and more
Speaker 1: and more. That makes right. But also the more that
Speaker 1: you think about the scent of a guardinia, the more
Speaker 1: that you recall it, the stronger that memory gets. Right.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I would think so yeah, kind of like
Speaker 1: a chef with their palette. So yeah, right. But I
Speaker 1: mean it's like if you train yourself to think of
Speaker 1: something or you think is something a lot, naturally your
Speaker 1: memories of it become stronger because that neural connection through
Speaker 1: the synapsies becomes stronger, biochemically stronger. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Like when I think of milk steak, I can recall
Speaker 1: that scent because I think about it on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is. But that's like the
Speaker 1: second time this week I've heard that what is milk steak? Well,
Speaker 1: it was from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia last week. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what was that? The milk steak is a real thing.
Speaker 1: I think it's a steak that's literally boiled in milk.
Speaker 1: And I get the impression there's some old school like
Speaker 1: from the two. But it was very funny obviously on
Speaker 1: that show for Charlie to say it's his favorite food. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Uh so where were we? Memory? Once your brain has
Speaker 1: filed those things away, if you want to recall that
Speaker 1: memory after it's consolidated, you need to retrieve these files
Speaker 1: like you would on your computer again, same way and um,
Speaker 1: well not the same way, but the same same theory
Speaker 1: and uh. In order to do this, your brain literally
Speaker 1: retraces those original synapsis that led to the memory in
Speaker 1: the first place. So it pulls up all that information
Speaker 1: for you. I've read another article on memory formation and
Speaker 1: that process was compared to, um, wearing a path through
Speaker 1: the woods. Right you go through the first time, you
Speaker 1: might it might consist of like some broken ferns or
Speaker 1: branches or something like this. You can kind of find
Speaker 1: your way. But over the course of months or years,
Speaker 1: the more you use it, the more visible it is,
Speaker 1: the more easily accessible it is. That make like forging
Speaker 1: a trail. Oh cool, Yeah, alright, So what we're talking
Speaker 1: about encoding Because of the original held belief that babies
Speaker 1: could not encode, they thought, all right, well, maybe they
Speaker 1: have this memory, but they can't encode it. Uh not true.
Speaker 1: So it says a study with the mobile, the little
Speaker 1: babies in the mobile in the ribbon, they're little needless baby.
Speaker 1: They took these little chubby baby legs and they were
Speaker 1: talking two and three month olds, and they tied ribbon
Speaker 1: to Uh. I guess jute rope would have been cruel
Speaker 1: to pull tender baby legs just so it with like
Speaker 1: a rusty needle in twine. Yeah. So they take ribbon
Speaker 1: and they tied to the baby's legs and then tied
Speaker 1: to a mobile above their head. And they found that
Speaker 1: a baby learned that by kicking their legs they would
Speaker 1: make the mobile move, which made the babies coup and
Speaker 1: perr I would imagine, But I thought babies always kicked
Speaker 1: their legs, So I kind of wondered about this that
Speaker 1: one I found that same. I had that same idea myself,
Speaker 1: because later on when they placed the same babies under
Speaker 1: a mobile, uh, they would start kicking their legs like
Speaker 1: they wanted to make it move with the with the ribbon,
Speaker 1: although the ribbon was no longer attached, and they took
Speaker 1: from that they remembered that if you're under a mobile,
Speaker 1: kick your legs. Maybe they were saying, I don't have
Speaker 1: knee gaps, maybe kicking their legs around. Yeah, but that
Speaker 1: that actually raises a really excellent point, like, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure any evidence that you can come up with, it's
Speaker 1: like trying to determine whether or not animals are happy.
Speaker 1: We uh, we express our world views, our emotions, everything
Speaker 1: verbally or or through written language. But it's through language.
Speaker 1: So before while we're pre verbal, um, everything is up
Speaker 1: in the air. We it's it's almost impossible to come
Speaker 1: up with definitive evidence of anything that surrounds That's actually
Speaker 1: that's a good setup for later two with the verbal
Speaker 1: But that's just a tease. Uh. Just to close on
Speaker 1: that study, though, they found that six month old babies
Speaker 1: actually picked up that relationship between kicking legs and the
Speaker 1: mobile moving faster. So this is what led them to
Speaker 1: think that babies actually gradually accelerate that instead of oh,
Speaker 1: we have no memory, and all of a sudden, it's
Speaker 1: my third birthday and now I do have memory. So
Speaker 1: it's a gradual thing instead of a sudden rapid growth.
Speaker 1: And there's another type of memory called implicit memory, right, yes,
Speaker 1: is that this is um. This is we're born with this,
Speaker 1: but it's also different from uh our ability to form
Speaker 1: unconscious memories. It's controlled by the um cerebellum um. And
Speaker 1: basically this is like our ability to remember that, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are hungry and we need to eat um, or
Speaker 1: you know, we need to seek out the our mother's
Speaker 1: warmth or something like that. Sure, like I hear her
Speaker 1: voice and I know that means that the milk is
Speaker 1: coming soon. So that that but that also sticks with
Speaker 1: us throughout our entire lives, so we don't necessarily forget that,
Speaker 1: right right, So I mean you don't ever forget like,
Speaker 1: oh I'm hungry, I need to eat, or you know,
Speaker 1: I would like to be warm right now? Right? That
Speaker 1: usually helps me survive. UM, But we're not. That's not
Speaker 1: centered around necessarily is a specific event in time. We've
Speaker 1: yet to figure out how to put things in the
Speaker 1: context of a timeline, which apparently is where real explicit
Speaker 1: memory begins, right, and that's when you need the cues.
Speaker 1: And that's what we've kind of figured out, not we,
Speaker 1: of course, but that's what they have figured out. Is
Speaker 1: the death between the babies and the adults is they
Speaker 1: cannot pick up on the cues from their past. And
Speaker 1: one of them that you were talking about was speech verbalization. Right,
Speaker 1: so we we apparently not only do we use uh
Speaker 1: language to express ourselves our thoughts or views or opinions
Speaker 1: or emotions even um, we also apparently four memories using language,
Speaker 1: autobiographical memories. Right. There was this really interesting study that
Speaker 1: um is in this article, which by the way, is
Speaker 1: called kind of Person Remember Being Born? It's on the site.
Speaker 1: It was written by the esteemed and um now famous
Speaker 1: Christen Congery of Steph Mom Never Told You and Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a very dense article. I gotta say, there was
Speaker 1: not much fluff in here, right, no chuck chuck usually
Speaker 1: highlights like the most important ones. I'm looking at this
Speaker 1: article right now. The entire article is yellow yellow. It's
Speaker 1: a article. Um So this study it was a two
Speaker 1: thousand four study um, and it found that um. It
Speaker 1: was a study of twenty seven and thirty nine month
Speaker 1: old boys and girls, and it found that if children
Speaker 1: didn't know the words to describe an event when it happened, uh,
Speaker 1: they couldn't describe it later after learning the appropriate words.
Speaker 1: That is awesome? Isn't it very cool? So apparently our
Speaker 1: language development and memory formation are very closely tied. And
Speaker 1: as you'll notice, that was a two thousand four study.
Speaker 1: We're just starting to crack um the the mystery of
Speaker 1: childhood amnesia, right right, you know, I got another one
Speaker 1: for you to, let's hear it. In relation to memory,
Speaker 1: context has a lot to do with it. And what
Speaker 1: they found in another study was that preschool aged kids
Speaker 1: can explain sequential order. But sequential order is not the
Speaker 1: same thing as a timeline of your life. Right, So
Speaker 1: if you if you're taken to a circus, you might remember,
Speaker 1: first the clown came out, and then the bear attacked
Speaker 1: the trainer and that kind of thing, but it's not
Speaker 1: like this happened two days before I started reading the
Speaker 1: Ramona Quimby series something like that, and that like you like,
Speaker 1: like I was saying that timeline is what forms our
Speaker 1: life or else we just have a cluster of like
Speaker 1: weird memories of like bears attacking trainers and you know,
Speaker 1: one chapter of a Ramona Quimby book or setting something
Speaker 1: on fire, And how can you if our lives are
Speaker 1: nothing but a string of memories and hopes for the future,
Speaker 1: what kind of life is that if we don't have
Speaker 1: a timeline to fit it? On good point, that's how
Speaker 1: we develop our sense of self absolutely and what was
Speaker 1: there was another cool stating here about how it ties
Speaker 1: to self recognition and your ability to recognize yourself as yourself.
Speaker 1: And they say that they don't think babies have this
Speaker 1: skill and they cannot basically don't have a personal identity
Speaker 1: until they're about two years old. Not only that, they
Speaker 1: have no um sense of um concreteness of the world
Speaker 1: around them. So I can't remember what age it's it's
Speaker 1: a very young age that they start to develop this.
Speaker 1: But say within the first two months, when you're sitting
Speaker 1: there cooing over a baby and you leave their field
Speaker 1: of vision, you're gone. You don't exist any longer, and
Speaker 1: you never did. Well, that's sad, isn't it. So Luckily
Speaker 1: that goes away very quickly because I mean, again, what
Speaker 1: kind of way is that to live? Don't tell the
Speaker 1: mom's that isn't that odd? Like you don't exist when
Speaker 1: you're not in their field of vision? Yeah? Are this
Speaker 1: kind of comforting? Almost in a way too. I guess
Speaker 1: when you thump them and run away, they're just like
Speaker 1: I wish I could be forgotten instantly by many people
Speaker 1: I meet. It's nice, um. And what about the cultural
Speaker 1: aspect of this? I found this interesting as well, step boy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they found that, uh, and this isn't surprising for some reason,
Speaker 1: but they found in relation to memory that Westerners personal
Speaker 1: memories focus more on themselves, whereas Easterners remember themselves as
Speaker 1: part of a group scenario. Isn't that yes, because we're selfish,
Speaker 1: selfish Westerners. And the other cool thing too about the parents.
Speaker 1: They said that parents can and this is really good
Speaker 1: for parents to know. Actually, the more that you describe
Speaker 1: things to your children as they're growing up, the better
Speaker 1: they're going to not only be able to recall that,
Speaker 1: but be able to describe their own experiences later in life.
Speaker 1: The more detailed you get with your recounting, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: remember we went to the zoo yesterday and you saw
Speaker 1: the bear that had the the bow tie on, and
Speaker 1: then the guy through the peanut atom and where should
Speaker 1: I go from here? So the more detailed you are
Speaker 1: with with going over these things with your kid every day,
Speaker 1: than the more they're gonna be better off later on
Speaker 1: in life and stuck you're gonna like this little outside research. Um,
Speaker 1: I read a study, or I read an article, honest
Speaker 1: study I should admit um of fifteen months old that
Speaker 1: shows that sporadic napping actually helps us form the memories
Speaker 1: needed to learn languages. Yeah, so they used made up
Speaker 1: language that they taught to these kids, esperanto, not quite um.
Speaker 1: It was like just babble, but it did have UM
Speaker 1: patterns in it, recognizable patterns UM. And they found that
Speaker 1: kids who nap more often were able to pick up
Speaker 1: this language or retain memories of how to speak this
Speaker 1: language better than kids who didn't nap. His offen. You know,
Speaker 1: I think that ties into something we said a long
Speaker 1: time ago about the brain during sleep using that time
Speaker 1: to file file everything away. That maybe, and that's what
Speaker 1: dreams are too, That they're misfiles. Dude. Yeah, we're just
Speaker 1: covering everything that's covered in the past. So the whole circle, buddy,
Speaker 1: And yeah, we're good like that, aren't we. We should
Speaker 1: we talk about how toothpaste and orange juice don't mix.
Speaker 1: That's a classic. UM I guess that's it, right, I'm done.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about