Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says someone mutters
Speaker 1: and the street lamp gutters. Soon it will be morning.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, we're all
Speaker 1: back together again. Yeah. Oh it's been a little while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah, I forgot how
Speaker 1: small this table is when there are three people around it. Well,
Speaker 1: that we had three one time while you were gone,
Speaker 1: we had Holly was on. She was great. Oh I'm glad, Yes, Holly.
Speaker 1: Holly is always wonderful. So it's it's a great memory
Speaker 1: of mine to think back on Holly in that episode.
Speaker 1: You know now that you say the word memory, Yeah,
Speaker 1: almost as if it were a segue. I recall something.
Speaker 1: It's a memory I have about a thought I had
Speaker 1: about memories. I remember that. So let me take y'all
Speaker 1: back to a couple of months ago, I please do,
Speaker 1: Or it might have been a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: I don't know. My memory is not very good. When
Speaker 1: I was researching the brain to brain communication video that
Speaker 1: I wrote, there was a video episode we did a
Speaker 1: while back, and it was about the idea of people
Speaker 1: communicating without words from brain to brain. So in one
Speaker 1: of the experiments described in the video, they had two
Speaker 1: people sitting in rooms in different buildings, and they were
Speaker 1: using a combination of an e G cap on one
Speaker 1: end and then a transcranial magnetic stimulation device on the
Speaker 1: other end to have one person caused the other person's
Speaker 1: brain to press a button. Right, So that's kind of cool.
Speaker 1: The brain actually caused the person's finger to push the button.
Speaker 1: That's right. Well, the brain caused the other person's brain
Speaker 1: to cause the person's finger to press them exactly as
Speaker 1: opposed to the brain itself pushing the button. Just want
Speaker 1: to be like leaping out through the ear and going
Speaker 1: to deep right, which would have been brang prang ish.
Speaker 1: The yeah, the the the idea of being in that
Speaker 1: video you you were. We were taking that concept of
Speaker 1: a direct brain to brain communication and saying, what if
Speaker 1: this could be extended to the point where someone could
Speaker 1: transfer an entire brain state to someone else? Right, Sure,
Speaker 1: we don't know the ultimate end of what can be
Speaker 1: shared from brain to brain, because this example in this
Speaker 1: video that we talked about. It was very basic. It
Speaker 1: It's essentially just a one bit impulse. It's saying press now,
Speaker 1: you know, like action, do something. But what the most
Speaker 1: optimistic advocates of brain to brain communication we're saying is
Speaker 1: that one day, based on these same technologies, just taken
Speaker 1: to a much more complex level, you might actually be
Speaker 1: able to share really complex contents of the brain, such
Speaker 1: as skills like you could train somebody on a skill
Speaker 1: like I know kung fu, right, just with a brain transfer,
Speaker 1: you can put that knowledge brain state into their brain.
Speaker 1: Or you could share a memory of yours directly into
Speaker 1: somebody else's brain without words, going like oh I I
Speaker 1: had I saw this beautiful sunset once here you go, right,
Speaker 1: including the emotions I experienced when I saw this thing. Sure,
Speaker 1: And to be honest, we don't know if something like
Speaker 1: that is possible or not. It might be, it might
Speaker 1: not be. But I actually thought about this problem a lot,
Speaker 1: and while I certainly wouldn't say it's impossible to have
Speaker 1: somebody else's memories beamed into your brain, I do kind
Speaker 1: of wonder because let's imagine how this would work. Uh,
Speaker 1: Let's say you're trying to transfer a memory of when
Speaker 1: you were at a birthday party when you were seven
Speaker 1: years old, and you were handed a little paper plate
Speaker 1: with a piece of birthday cake on it, and there
Speaker 1: was a big scorpion sitting on that piece of birthday cake.
Speaker 1: This is where we learned how terrible Joe's childhood was.
Speaker 1: It rained every time there was a pool party. Now,
Speaker 1: if you have a videotape of this event, it would
Speaker 1: be easy to transfer a video file from one computer
Speaker 1: to another, right, assuming it's a common, easily read file
Speaker 1: type and you have the right libraries, codex whatever to
Speaker 1: translate the file. But the reason you need something like
Speaker 1: a codec is that there are potentially infinite number of
Speaker 1: ways visual information like video could be encoded as information
Speaker 1: for storage and transfer. Right, So, if you had a
Speaker 1: video of this event on your hard drive, there wouldn't
Speaker 1: be a little picture of a piece of birthday cake
Speaker 1: with sprinkles and big happy scorpions sitting on it somewhere
Speaker 1: inside your computer. It would just be a file like
Speaker 1: any other file, long string of data bits, ones and zeros.
Speaker 1: We know how that goes. That's some kind of program
Speaker 1: then compiles or or kind of filters down into a
Speaker 1: single image or a series of images rather exactly. So
Speaker 1: the reason we have common file types and codex and
Speaker 1: stuff is so all of our computers can agree on
Speaker 1: how to translate these bits of data into lard pixels
Speaker 1: on the screen or vice versa from recording them from
Speaker 1: a lens. But our brains don't have common file types yet,
Speaker 1: do they know? They don't? Well, you know, we can't
Speaker 1: even we can't even describe the file types that are there, right,
Speaker 1: we don't even fully understand how episodic memories are encoded
Speaker 1: in the brain. And by episodic memories, I mean something
Speaker 1: like that, like we're calling a particular event and what
Speaker 1: happened and how it made you feel. Yeah, yeah, all
Speaker 1: things like that, as opposed to what we might call
Speaker 1: semantic memories, which are more like remembering how to do something,
Speaker 1: or remembering what a fork is for, or or what
Speaker 1: a scorpion can do to you, or something your birthday
Speaker 1: party with your seven. So, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: describing your memory and words to another person is sort
Speaker 1: of one crude way of translating or converting a memory
Speaker 1: file type across possibly incompatible file types. Right, It's like
Speaker 1: a converter program in a way. But of course, some
Speaker 1: aspects of the experience can always be lost when you're
Speaker 1: transferring a memory this way. That's why we find ourselves
Speaker 1: saying things like, well, I guess you really had to
Speaker 1: be there, so something gets lost in this translation. So
Speaker 1: it's it's even, it goes beyond even the The analogy
Speaker 1: that we could draw is imagine that we're in the
Speaker 1: early days of computers, where every computer is its own
Speaker 1: individual type of thing, and the type of computer I
Speaker 1: own and the type of computer Laura owns, the type
Speaker 1: of computer Joe owns are all different types. We don't
Speaker 1: all have mac os or Windows. There's not intercompatible. There's
Speaker 1: no way for me to send the work that I
Speaker 1: do on mine onto yours and haven't mean anything. They're
Speaker 1: all based on different operating systems, and so I have
Speaker 1: I might have something on my machine and I want
Speaker 1: to share it with YouTube, but I'm kind of stuck
Speaker 1: because I don't have a way of doing that unless
Speaker 1: you say, hey, come over and look directly at my screen,
Speaker 1: which there's no analog for in human brain memory stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and oh wait, no, hold on, there's that consciousness binding
Speaker 1: machine we talked about. Well weight, I dreamed that I
Speaker 1: was about to say, like, I'd love to the other
Speaker 1: episode recording will I was a vacation. Uh No. I
Speaker 1: was going to also say, though, that even even this
Speaker 1: example with the analogy, it's it's not um, it's not
Speaker 1: completely accurate. Because with a computer we could actually point
Speaker 1: to the the the file name and say this represents
Speaker 1: that memory. We can't do that in the brain to
Speaker 1: the extent where we can identify a specific series of
Speaker 1: neurons and say this represents that memory. Yeah, that's totally true.
Speaker 1: We don't know if in theory we could one day
Speaker 1: do that. We certainly can't do that now, and we
Speaker 1: don't know if we could do it, if that would
Speaker 1: be at any way transferable. Very good point. Now, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, in favor of the idea of sort
Speaker 1: of technological compatibility for organic memories when we record, store,
Speaker 1: and recall memories, I think we all agree that something
Speaker 1: physical is happening in the brain. Like even if you're
Speaker 1: a duellist and you believe you know that there's something
Speaker 1: sort of like supernatural, a soul or something going beyond
Speaker 1: the brain, I think even most people who think this
Speaker 1: don't think that memory encoding and recall is a supernatural process. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think everyone agrees that it's a more than the
Speaker 1: sum of its parts kind of situation, but something that
Speaker 1: we hypothetically eventually will be able to suss out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It is a physical thing that happens in
Speaker 1: the brain. If it's a physical thing that happens in
Speaker 1: the brain, then it can, in theory at least be
Speaker 1: measured and recorded by scientific instruments. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: it can be without killing the brain, but at least
Speaker 1: it is in theory possible to see, Okay, here the
Speaker 1: physical states of every single cell in the brain and
Speaker 1: what they're doing in relationship to each other. So you
Speaker 1: should be able to record with the physical reality of
Speaker 1: a certain memory being recalled, is Yeah, once we get
Speaker 1: to the point where we have the data capacity, just
Speaker 1: the thorough put really to to watch all of those
Speaker 1: things carefully enough to designate them. Yeah. Sure. And so
Speaker 1: if we accept that the basis of all our memories
Speaker 1: is some kind of physical fact about the brain, and
Speaker 1: those physical facts can be measured, then shouldn't all of
Speaker 1: our memories be somehow recordable from the outside. Well maybe
Speaker 1: and maybe not. So I thought we should look at
Speaker 1: this question today and sort of examine the field of
Speaker 1: memory and technology and see what we can reasonably say
Speaker 1: about where technology and memory meet. Will we one day
Speaker 1: be able to record our memories onto computers, will we
Speaker 1: be able to share them between brains without words? And
Speaker 1: what the future of memory and technology is and these
Speaker 1: are all, you know, really cool questions to ask, and
Speaker 1: we've already mentioned it before in the episode, but there's
Speaker 1: so much that we don't know about the brain and
Speaker 1: how memory works that this is going to be largely speculative.
Speaker 1: We're going to try and lay the foundation of what
Speaker 1: we understand about memory, but honestly, we are on the
Speaker 1: very first steps of a very what could be a
Speaker 1: very long journey. We don't even know how long the
Speaker 1: journey will be, right, We we have no idea, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Plenty of researchers are working on this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about a few of them later on
Speaker 1: in the podcast. But first, first, let's talk about what
Speaker 1: we solidly do know about how memory is encoded in
Speaker 1: the brain. Okay, Well it's going to be short, alright,
Speaker 1: So yeah, that word solidly solidly. Uh. You you can
Speaker 1: you encounter things and you process them and later you
Speaker 1: can recall a simulation of the thing that happened. Oh,
Speaker 1: we we're pretty sure that we know a little bit
Speaker 1: more than that, a little bit more. There actually has
Speaker 1: been some very recent uh information coming out from a
Speaker 1: study that I think, Joe you you came across a
Speaker 1: blog on on the the idea about something that could
Speaker 1: really shake up the the idea of how memories are
Speaker 1: stored in the brain. But we'll get to that in
Speaker 1: a second. So, first of all, we generally talk about
Speaker 1: three uh phases of memory. We talked about the encoding
Speaker 1: of memory, the storage of memory, and the retrieval of memory. UH.
Speaker 1: And it's really a complex construction of the results from
Speaker 1: multiple regions of the brain all working together to encode
Speaker 1: a memory and store it. So memory remembering things and
Speaker 1: and forming new memories is very similar to thinking in general.
Speaker 1: It involves multiple regions of the brain working in concerts.
Speaker 1: So it's not like there's one part of your brain
Speaker 1: and that's the memory factory and that's all it does.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of stuff that works together to do this. Now,
Speaker 1: there are some facilitators that are really important in the
Speaker 1: encoding of memory. So first we have to perceive something
Speaker 1: in order to form a memory of some sort. See
Speaker 1: the scorpion, yes, yeah, not just the scorpion. You also
Speaker 1: see the cake, You feel the plate, you hear the
Speaker 1: children screaming you, the smell of cake, and scorpion enters
Speaker 1: your nostrils. All these things are collectively part of that experience,
Speaker 1: and you have an emotion of I wanted that cake,
Speaker 1: or maybe I wonder if scorpions are edible. I mean,
Speaker 1: who knows what's going through your mind. So those perceptions
Speaker 1: are integrated into a single experience, and the Hippo campus
Speaker 1: plays a big part in this. The Hippo campus is
Speaker 1: kind of working as a manager, pulling all this this
Speaker 1: the separate lines of data and integrating them into what
Speaker 1: will eventually be turned into the memory um. And that
Speaker 1: pretty much is the collection of all the perceptions that
Speaker 1: define that experience. Right now, here's where we start getting
Speaker 1: into things that we believe are going on, but we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure because we don't fully understand the
Speaker 1: workings of the brain. So xts think that the hippocampus
Speaker 1: and the frontal cortex tag team together to sort through
Speaker 1: these integrated experiences that the hippocampus has pulled together and
Speaker 1: determine which ones are keepers and which ones you can
Speaker 1: toss away. So, in other words, we've got stuff happening
Speaker 1: around us all the time, much of it we are
Speaker 1: not consciously aware of because we're not focusing on that
Speaker 1: at the moment, or if we are consciously aware of it,
Speaker 1: we're not going to remember it later. Yeah, we're not.
Speaker 1: There was nothing going on up in that corner of
Speaker 1: the room, so we can just blot it right out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's just a great spot in the memory. There's
Speaker 1: nothing like you know, it may turn out that, uh,
Speaker 1: there was actually something going on over there, there was
Speaker 1: a pinana on fire, but that was not important to
Speaker 1: the moment where the scorpion was sitting there on your cake,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't factor into your memory. It wasn't encoded, um,
Speaker 1: so if it's not encoded, it just kind of fades away,
Speaker 1: you know it. Just so, the frontal cortex and the
Speaker 1: hippocampus together are saying, all right, this is what's important
Speaker 1: for this memory. This is what we're going to store
Speaker 1: for later. All this other stuff we're gonna leave behind.
Speaker 1: It's important. So you don't get overloaded with all the
Speaker 1: data around you all the time. But then, of course,
Speaker 1: from our experience, you can think about how even that
Speaker 1: is not necessarily a totally clear distinction. I mean, think
Speaker 1: about all of the things you experience that you probably
Speaker 1: yourself wouldn't be able to recall clearly just out of
Speaker 1: the blue. But if somebody sort of like repeated it
Speaker 1: to you, you know, said like, hey, remember when Jonathan
Speaker 1: said X, Y and Z, you might be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he did say that. Yeah. The same sort
Speaker 1: of thing that when you encounter a smell that's similar
Speaker 1: to one that that played a really important part in
Speaker 1: a memory that of yours, it brings that back. So
Speaker 1: for me, for example, the one that I will always
Speaker 1: associate with a particular part of my life is the
Speaker 1: smell uh that you get when you go to like
Speaker 1: a giant indoor pool. The chemicals like that immediately takes
Speaker 1: me back to swim lessons when I was a little kid.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter how old I get, as so as I
Speaker 1: smell it, boom, I'm back there summer break. It smells
Speaker 1: like the Gainsville College pool uh and uh and and
Speaker 1: the terror that I experienced on a weekly basis going
Speaker 1: to swimming lessons. Uh. So you know, that's the sort
Speaker 1: of stuff that that like. It just it keys into
Speaker 1: those those little memories. We'll talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about what we think is happening when that goes on. Well, sure,
Speaker 1: because the memory doesn't exist, I mean the same way
Speaker 1: that a video file isn't a series of physical images
Speaker 1: inside your computer somewhere. That's not how it does, and
Speaker 1: that's not how the brain does either. It's it's a
Speaker 1: series of electrical impulses or electrochemical impulses. Rather. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's these electrochemical reactions in the brain. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: talking about neurons that are communicating with these various hormones
Speaker 1: and electrical chemical reactions. It's really complicated. We don't have
Speaker 1: a full understanding of it. But our brains are really plastic, right,
Speaker 1: so when we encounter new material, it starts shuffling stuff
Speaker 1: around to incorporate it. Sometimes it's a means of comparing
Speaker 1: a new experience to one that you have already had.
Speaker 1: This is important for memory. It's an important thing about
Speaker 1: our survival, right because let's say you've encountered something that
Speaker 1: nearly killed you and then later on in life you
Speaker 1: encounter it again. It's important that you remember that it
Speaker 1: nearly killed you the last time. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's sort of the way that a particular smell can,
Speaker 1: like the smell of a food that you got really
Speaker 1: sick off of, or tequilo or etcetera. Whatever it happens
Speaker 1: to me that it was um will will turn you
Speaker 1: off later in the future. Right, So, repeating as supposed
Speaker 1: to later in the past. Sorry, repeating an experience multiple
Speaker 1: times reinforces these electrochemical reactions in the order that they
Speaker 1: happen and in the patterns that they form. So there's
Speaker 1: one kind of a prevailing theory, at least for a
Speaker 1: very long time anyway, that memories are essentially these these
Speaker 1: um networks of neurons that represent the collective perceptions integrated
Speaker 1: into that experience. Or it's a it's a pathway of
Speaker 1: electrochemical signals across a series of those neurons, right right,
Speaker 1: it's it's a synaptic thing, right, You're looking at the
Speaker 1: actual electrochemical reactions across series of synapses. Uh. So that
Speaker 1: was like the that's like the large theory about the
Speaker 1: idea of you form a memory. You have this experience,
Speaker 1: a your brain encodes it and it is translated across
Speaker 1: the series of neurons through the synaptic communications, and that
Speaker 1: represents the memory. And every time you remember, you are
Speaker 1: essentially constructing that same pathway, that same series of of
Speaker 1: communications all over the little the little thought cards kind
Speaker 1: of dashes straight across that that same pathway. Right, it's
Speaker 1: the it's not the destination, it's the journey theory of right. Sure, sure,
Speaker 1: but there is a recent study that's kind of challenged that. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was the one that I was talking about that
Speaker 1: Joe had shared with us before the podcast, where the
Speaker 1: story is that it might not just be the synapses
Speaker 1: that are important, and maybe the neurons themselves have undergone
Speaker 1: some kind of change that mean that the neurons have
Speaker 1: something of the memory in them. And the reason why
Speaker 1: I'm being so vague with the language is because we
Speaker 1: don't have the full understanding of it. We merely have
Speaker 1: seen an experiment that tests this hypothesis with slug with
Speaker 1: slugs yea C slugs, because C slug brains and human
Speaker 1: brains are so similar. Depends on the humans. The experiment
Speaker 1: was that they did conditioning with C slugs with mild
Speaker 1: electric shocks. There's gonna be a lot of mode electric
Speaker 1: shocks in this episode, for better or worse, but at
Speaker 1: any rate, the sea slugs, yeah, well they were, they were.
Speaker 1: They learned to withdraw from the shocks. What other flavor
Speaker 1: of electrical shocks are are there, spicy, there's nuclear three
Speaker 1: mile island shocks. Um, So the slugs, the slugs learned
Speaker 1: to withdraw from these electric shocks. And then the researchers, uh,
Speaker 1: they they inhibited the synaptic connections. They disrupted the synaptic
Speaker 1: connections that were associated. They thought, with the formation of
Speaker 1: the memory, hey, this thing will hurt you, go away
Speaker 1: from it. But they they observed the slugs were still
Speaker 1: withdrawing even though the synaptic pathways had been disrupted. So
Speaker 1: that led them to the conclusion that perhaps the neurons
Speaker 1: themselves must have something to do with memory formation, and
Speaker 1: it's not just the synaptic passageways, and possibly we would
Speaker 1: might be able to use that information in the future
Speaker 1: to treat people who have certain types of memory problems
Speaker 1: where the neurons are healthy but the synapses are no
Speaker 1: longer communicating. They the thought is perhaps the memories are
Speaker 1: not lost, they just can't be accident. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. But again, this is early days, right, that's
Speaker 1: so crazy, the idea that you could have potential memories
Speaker 1: in your brain. Yeah, that just you just can't you
Speaker 1: can't recall them, but they're there. That's a possibility. Now,
Speaker 1: whether or not that's actually true, it's still too early
Speaker 1: to say, but it is an interesting hypothesis, and it
Speaker 1: may very well be that the actual reality is some
Speaker 1: combination of the things we already thought we knew and
Speaker 1: this new emerging information. It's probably a combination of the two.
Speaker 1: And because you know it's it can be pretty complex stuff.
Speaker 1: The idea being here that that it's it's very difficult,
Speaker 1: very challenging to talk about how technology is going to
Speaker 1: interact with our memory when we don't fully understand the
Speaker 1: actual process of creating those memories in the first place.
Speaker 1: What we do know is that memory memory is malleable,
Speaker 1: right Oh yeah, yeah, Well, the that that pathway that
Speaker 1: a memory sort of exists on changes every time, changes
Speaker 1: very slightly. Every time you call up that memory. It
Speaker 1: can potentially change a great deal, But most of the
Speaker 1: time it's little details, things that either get embellished, like
Speaker 1: when when you are remembering, you are reconstructing, You're not really. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not the same as going into a filing cabinet
Speaker 1: and pulling out the file marked whatever your memory is
Speaker 1: seven seven year seventh birthday. Yeah, yeah, it's it's not like.
Speaker 1: It's not like playing a tape. It's like a reconstructing
Speaker 1: frame by frame. Yeah. I I likened it to imagine
Speaker 1: that you are putting on a play, and the script
Speaker 1: it represents the original event, the play is the the
Speaker 1: you you recalling the event every time you see a play.
Speaker 1: If you go see a play more than once, you
Speaker 1: will notice that there are little differences in each performance,
Speaker 1: just because there are a lot of different parts that
Speaker 1: come along with any play. Uh, and because humans are
Speaker 1: bad at repeating precise actions precisely. Yeah. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: do it exactly every single time, right, Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: some people's brains are like going to see a play
Speaker 1: where you've got those actors who work by beats instead
Speaker 1: of you know, they're like the script and important but more.
Speaker 1: But but either way, you know you're you're going to
Speaker 1: see have a different experience each time. It might not
Speaker 1: be significantly different, you might say. You might say when
Speaker 1: you walk out, like, you know, I liked it better
Speaker 1: the second time than the first time, and I can't
Speaker 1: really you know, there were little changes that were different.
Speaker 1: The same sort of thing when you're remembering, and your
Speaker 1: brain tends to fill in gaps too, So when you
Speaker 1: are remembering something and perhaps the connections aren't going straight
Speaker 1: through the way they did when you first formed this memory,
Speaker 1: your brain's like, well, let's just what'll work. Let's just
Speaker 1: Fred Fred was there, putting Fred into this memory now
Speaker 1: and then suddenly friends at your seventh seventh birthday party
Speaker 1: even though you didn't meet Fred till you were nine.
Speaker 1: That might happen, um, and you might talk to Fred
Speaker 1: later and say, you remember when you're you're at my
Speaker 1: seventh birthday party? Is like, dude, I didn't didn't know
Speaker 1: you when you were seven, and they will You're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I could have sworn you were there. Yeah, So memory
Speaker 1: is not is not this permanent type of thing. It
Speaker 1: changes every single time where you remember, and knowing that
Speaker 1: it changes doesn't affect that that fact, right, Yeah, you can't.
Speaker 1: You can't concentrate into you can't remember really hard and
Speaker 1: get the truth of it. That doesn't work that way,
Speaker 1: which is both amazing and terrifying to me. Probably the
Speaker 1: stress of trying to force yourself to remember correctly would
Speaker 1: make you forget more. Yeah, add in more superfluous details
Speaker 1: that didn't actually happen. So good luck with that, guys. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: one of the things I thought was interesting about all
Speaker 1: this when I was looking into the encoding and the
Speaker 1: storage and the t evil bit, is that it really
Speaker 1: made me think that Sherlock Holmes, at least the the
Speaker 1: the Benedict Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes is pretty much
Speaker 1: a uh, you know, as fictional as you can get,
Speaker 1: in the sense that here's a here's a character who
Speaker 1: can walk into a situation and apparently instantaneously perceive everything
Speaker 1: that's going on. Everything appears to have equal importance in
Speaker 1: that perception, and uh, and also he has incredible retention. Now,
Speaker 1: when we talk about story memories, there are three different
Speaker 1: storage phases, right. There's the sensory stage, which only lasts
Speaker 1: a fraction of a second. That's the thing that allows
Speaker 1: an experience to linger after the experience itself has ended.
Speaker 1: So if there's a flash of light, that's what allows
Speaker 1: that flash of light to remain in your memory long
Speaker 1: enough for it to go to short term memory. Short
Speaker 1: term memory is something that lasts about thirty seconds. You
Speaker 1: can usually hold about seven things in your short term
Speaker 1: memory for about thirty seconds, and then it's about the
Speaker 1: max of it. Charlotte Holmes apparently can hold an infinite
Speaker 1: amount of information and retrieve it within those three seconds.
Speaker 1: No problem. Well, I mean his forehead is very tall,
Speaker 1: that is true. I was thinking he might be using
Speaker 1: one of those memory palace things, right, like the mamonic
Speaker 1: devices to have you constructed. Well, never mind, I don't
Speaker 1: want to get a sidetrack anyway. So the long term
Speaker 1: memory is as far as you can we know, it's
Speaker 1: it's limitless. You can store an infinite number of memories
Speaker 1: and long term memory at least, there's no way there's
Speaker 1: we've never been able to define a limit to it.
Speaker 1: So if you were able to, you know, see something
Speaker 1: and then remember a long term memory associated with that thing,
Speaker 1: that's different. That's why Charlotte Holmes can come in see
Speaker 1: a color of dust on a person's shoe and say, oh,
Speaker 1: that person was in such and such, because that's something
Speaker 1: that's in my long term memory, not my short term.
Speaker 1: But just being able to perceive everything at once and
Speaker 1: have it have meaning that I would question at any rate. Uh.
Speaker 1: That is the storage part retrieval, as we talked about already.
Speaker 1: That's where you're constructing the memory. Each time you remember,
Speaker 1: you're not you're not going to pull a file. You
Speaker 1: are building that file all over again. So if we
Speaker 1: go with that file example, instead of you pulling the
Speaker 1: file and reading a report, you sit down with a
Speaker 1: blank sheet of paper and you write the report out
Speaker 1: again from memory. That's essentially what whatever, what is happening
Speaker 1: in your brain. Yeah, so let's talk about how technology
Speaker 1: can interface with memories already, or or interfere with memories,
Speaker 1: as the case may be. So again, very much kind
Speaker 1: of cutting edge technology and science on this stuff. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and even when we don't fully understand the mechanics
Speaker 1: of memory, we can still do stuff to mess with it,
Speaker 1: which is kind of again awesome and terrifying at the
Speaker 1: first step of figuring out how something where, because it's
Speaker 1: going like, let's see what happens if we oh, oh, nope,
Speaker 1: that was bad. Oh yeah, I mean that seems much easier.
Speaker 1: Like for a while people couldn't figure out how the
Speaker 1: ancients built the pyramids, But it wouldn't be that hard
Speaker 1: to knock them over. I just think of uh, I
Speaker 1: just think of the buckerup bonds. I know, No, don't
Speaker 1: touch that. You don't know what that's connected to during neurosurgery,
Speaker 1: connected to that scorpion birthday party. Yeah, well yeah. One
Speaker 1: of the things I was looking into was really an
Speaker 1: interesting project. DARPA funds that. Uh that's a study that's
Speaker 1: done by the University of Pennsylvania that's looking into the
Speaker 1: possibility of using deep brain electrical stimulation to help encourage
Speaker 1: memory formation. So this would be for people who suffered
Speaker 1: traumatic brain injuries or TV eyes as they are referred to. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking about stuff that's happening in the brain.
Speaker 1: Sometimes when you suffer brain damage, part of the damage
Speaker 1: is the inability to form memories. Something can happen to
Speaker 1: some people. So the there's the study of the University
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania looking into using tiny electrical shocks in the
Speaker 1: brain towards the area of the hippocampus in order to
Speaker 1: help facilitate the formation of memories, so that people who
Speaker 1: have suffered these kinds of injuries will be able to
Speaker 1: continue having, uh, you know, a more independent life and
Speaker 1: be able to form memories. The way they would before
Speaker 1: the injury had happened. So that's pretty interesting. And again
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where because we know a
Speaker 1: little bit about how memories are formed, we're able to
Speaker 1: take these these kind of fairly primitive steps in the
Speaker 1: grand scheme of things. Um we've also talked about inhibiting
Speaker 1: the formation of memories on forward thinking, specifically in the
Speaker 1: video series in two thousand fourteen June of two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: so as we record this, it's almost a year since
Speaker 1: that video went live. Um I talked about some scientists
Speaker 1: who were looking into uh inhibiting or in uh doing
Speaker 1: what they would call an inception memory, installing a memory
Speaker 1: into mice. And now we come back to the mild shocks.
Speaker 1: Tell us all about it. Okay, So, yes, they took
Speaker 1: the mice, they put them into a container that had
Speaker 1: a floor that could give a mild electric shock, not
Speaker 1: the very day kind um to the little mice feet,
Speaker 1: which the mice did not like. The mice associated that
Speaker 1: particular box with being shocked. And so if you ever
Speaker 1: took the mouse out of its happy little safe container
Speaker 1: and put it into the shock o matic container, the
Speaker 1: mouse would get distressed, would hide in the corner and
Speaker 1: freeze and shiver. It was pathetic then, because scientists are
Speaker 1: supervillains in the James Bond style. Let's see what happens
Speaker 1: when we take away the puppy exactly. Yeah, good old
Speaker 1: egon getting into it. So what they did was they
Speaker 1: they used optogenetics. They actually altered the mice brains so
Speaker 1: that they could put fiber optic lines into them and
Speaker 1: shine light on specific neurons that they had implanted that
Speaker 1: had this sort of photoreceptive uh reaction, so that when
Speaker 1: light was shined on them, they would uh they would
Speaker 1: essentially spark the same pathway that the mice had formed
Speaker 1: when they were in the chockomatic box. Then they put
Speaker 1: the mice into a new environment that was not the
Speaker 1: chacomatic box, so the mice had no reason to associate
Speaker 1: it with being hurt. They shine the light on that
Speaker 1: particular region of the brain so that the mice were
Speaker 1: remembering getting shocked even though they hadn't been shocked in
Speaker 1: that room, and they behaved as if the room was
Speaker 1: going to be the chockomatic box again. So they were
Speaker 1: having this kind of um this this new environment, they're
Speaker 1: they're remembering something that happened, hadn't happened to this new environment.
Speaker 1: They associate with the new environment and behave the same way. Um,
Speaker 1: it's interesting and terrifying. Again, Like whenever we get in
Speaker 1: the memory, this is where I start thinking because there's
Speaker 1: so much of ourselves that's wrapped up in memory, and
Speaker 1: the thought of changing or inhibiting that is uh, kind
Speaker 1: of brings a lot of questions about how permanent is
Speaker 1: the self as well? Right well, I mean all of
Speaker 1: the movies and stuff that deal with this all have
Speaker 1: kind of dystopian plots. So we just imagined this would
Speaker 1: be used to implant false memories and and make us
Speaker 1: pawns of an evil scheming corporation for bad memories on
Speaker 1: other people all strange days for you still haven't seen that,
Speaker 1: have you know? Okay, there's also I mean they also
Speaker 1: looked into suppressing memories as well, to try and to
Speaker 1: remove the association of pain with the shock box. That's
Speaker 1: also part of the study. I like to think that
Speaker 1: they did that so that the mice could finally go
Speaker 1: back to two normal, stress free lives, but that probably
Speaker 1: wasn't the actual purpose. Probably not. Now, I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention this isn't entirely on topic, but it is related
Speaker 1: to technology and memory. There have also been a lot
Speaker 1: of people writing about the possibility that, uh, technology is
Speaker 1: taking the the need for us to remember away from
Speaker 1: a lot of in a lot of cases, because we've
Speaker 1: got a place where we can store the information that's
Speaker 1: not in our heads, so we can offload memory. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that we've basically uploaded our processing systems to whatever device
Speaker 1: we're using at the time, and therefore we don't need
Speaker 1: to remember phone numbers or our division tables or yeah,
Speaker 1: or or specific events people who are just looking at
Speaker 1: an event through their camera and taking photos. There's an
Speaker 1: argument to be made that uh. In fact, there have
Speaker 1: been these that have have shown this that people who
Speaker 1: are taking the photos have a harder time remembering details
Speaker 1: about the stuff they took the photos of because their
Speaker 1: brain said, oh, I don't need to remember that, we
Speaker 1: have a record of it. So these things that you're
Speaker 1: not taking pictures of, I'm totally going to concentrate and
Speaker 1: remember details. But this other thing that you took picture of, don't.
Speaker 1: We've got the picture, why do I need the remember?
Speaker 1: And I mean, I know it sounds weird that I'm
Speaker 1: putting it that way, but that's really what the studies found.
Speaker 1: So it was kind of interesting. They did this by
Speaker 1: taking people through a museum and they had them look
Speaker 1: at all these different exhibits, and at some exhibits they
Speaker 1: weren't told which ones ahead of time. They were told, oh,
Speaker 1: take a picture of this one, and then at the
Speaker 1: end of it they said, all right, we want you
Speaker 1: to describe each of these exhibits that you saw, and
Speaker 1: the ones that people took pictures of had the least
Speaker 1: amount of detail out of all the ones. That that's
Speaker 1: in fascinating psychology, especially since uh, in general, I think
Speaker 1: researchers have kind of pooh pooed the idea that that
Speaker 1: developing technologies are removing our capacity to to think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean because people have been arguing since
Speaker 1: like Aristotle, right, is Google making a stupid Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh if you teach people to read, how will they
Speaker 1: ever remember anything? You know? Right? Well, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: we've we've been using offloading memory technology from even before reading.
Speaker 1: You you had, like, you know, the one smart person
Speaker 1: probably in your in your local group who could remember everything.
Speaker 1: You remind me if this Sparry is poisonous or not. Hill.
Speaker 1: If you didn't have that one smart person, you didn't
Speaker 1: have a group for very long, right, well, or the
Speaker 1: other way of putting it is like I offload a
Speaker 1: lot of memories onto Rachel, and she, I'm sure, offloads
Speaker 1: some memories onto me, like we remember things for each other.
Speaker 1: This is the problem, is that I offload my memories
Speaker 1: to Tibolt, and he, being a puppy, is incapable of
Speaker 1: giving me any meaningful backup whatsoever. He's adorable. All right,
Speaker 1: let's talk about f m R eyes. You know, you
Speaker 1: can't have a good discussion about the brain without talking
Speaker 1: about f m R I or fumri as I like
Speaker 1: to call it. So please tell us all about fumri. Well.
Speaker 1: For some number of years, the Stanford neuroscience and psychology
Speaker 1: professor Anthony Wagner has been developing techniques that use brain
Speaker 1: scans to detect, wait for it, not the objectively defined
Speaker 1: contents of a person's memory, but whether someone is currently
Speaker 1: experiencing a memory. And that might sound kind of unimportant,
Speaker 1: but it's actually not. It might be more interesting than
Speaker 1: it sounds. And here's why. So imagine this. You put
Speaker 1: me in an fm R I scanner and that yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I know you always want to cram me into metal boxes.
Speaker 1: But uh, f m R I of course stands for
Speaker 1: functional magnetic resonance imaging, and that's uh. That's a device
Speaker 1: that measures brain activity in real time by detecting like
Speaker 1: increases or decreases of blood flow in regions of the brain.
Speaker 1: And so it can be useful for showing what parts
Speaker 1: of the brain people are using when they're given a
Speaker 1: certain stimulus or engaging in a certain activity or having
Speaker 1: a reaction. And so you put me in the f
Speaker 1: m R I. I am sure you're very pleased with this,
Speaker 1: But then you've got more in store for me. You
Speaker 1: show me pictures of faces of people who will be
Speaker 1: attending a party with me later this evening. Uh it
Speaker 1: might be a scorpion cake party or some other kind
Speaker 1: of party. That part doesn't really matter. What matters is
Speaker 1: the pictures. Some of the pictures are of strangers, and
Speaker 1: some of the pictures are of people that I have
Speaker 1: seen or met before. Now, although lots of complex things
Speaker 1: are going on in my brain at any given time,
Speaker 1: and even in the process of memory recall, Wagner's method
Speaker 1: could potentially analyze my f m R I scans and
Speaker 1: determine when I was looking at someone I had previously
Speaker 1: made memories of, thus as seeing in my brain memory
Speaker 1: or REvil activity, or someone I had never seen before.
Speaker 1: Un Thus it saw the brain activity associated with perceiving
Speaker 1: novel information. In the system they came up with for
Speaker 1: doing this actually got pretty darn good. Yeah, well, in
Speaker 1: cooperative subjects, right, and we'll get back to that, right.
Speaker 1: But but so by by gathering data on what it
Speaker 1: looks like when a whole lot of different subjects have
Speaker 1: experienced a memory versus learned new information, Wagner's team built
Speaker 1: an algorithm that can identify when a new subject is
Speaker 1: retrieving a memory with like accuracy. That's that's pretty good, yes,
Speaker 1: But why would it be interesting or useful to know
Speaker 1: if somebody was retrieving a memory at any given time. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the potential applications is in the use of
Speaker 1: lie detector screenings. So imagine a criminal a proceeding. You
Speaker 1: could have the old polygraph test for lie detection. But
Speaker 1: these days we all know that that is highly unreliable.
Speaker 1: A lot of experts refer to it pretty explicitly as pseudoscience.
Speaker 1: It is not generally accepted these days. Well, I think
Speaker 1: actually some jurisdictions still use them for some purposes, but
Speaker 1: among the experts they tend to say, like, no, you
Speaker 1: can't really rely on lie detector tests. And Jonathan, I
Speaker 1: think you did a video on that for brain stuff, right,
Speaker 1: And I've done a I did a podcast, a tech
Speaker 1: stuff podcast a long time ago about polygraphs and how
Speaker 1: you know their study there there they're keyed in too,
Speaker 1: look for changes in physiological response. But so like skin
Speaker 1: conductance or heart rate. Yeah, it's it's like Matt Murdoch basically, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's daredevil, but in electronic format. And uh, and
Speaker 1: you can uh, there's some people who just naturally don't
Speaker 1: care if they're lying, so there's no real physiology will
Speaker 1: change in their responses. There's some people who are uh
Speaker 1: so keyed up about being questioned that they're going to
Speaker 1: be giving off, you know, pitives, they're nervous or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and they're just a lot of different ways that
Speaker 1: a polygraph machine can come but really it's not even
Speaker 1: the machine that the person interpreting the results from the
Speaker 1: polygraph machine can come to a mistake and conclusion. So
Speaker 1: they are not as you say, they are not reliable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: far from scientifically sound. So since then, since we learned that,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people in law enforcement, in
Speaker 1: in the justice system have been yearning for a more
Speaker 1: scientifically sound way of evaluating the truth of somebody's testimony.
Speaker 1: So if a system like this fm R I scan
Speaker 1: or fool proof, it could actually make a great new
Speaker 1: type of lie detector test. For instance, the suspect accused
Speaker 1: of a crime claims never to have been present at
Speaker 1: the crime scene at all, never been there. Yet you
Speaker 1: hook him or her up to an fMRI machine and
Speaker 1: display a picture of the crime scene. Now, is that
Speaker 1: suspect showing internal brain scan signs of retrieving memories or
Speaker 1: of cataloging novel information? Sounds amazing, right, Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: would be great. And hey, we were just talking about
Speaker 1: a system that does that, right, except apparently it's not foolproof.
Speaker 1: And props to professor Wagner for pointing this out himself. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He and his team published in June of a study
Speaker 1: about how to beat their own system right. It was
Speaker 1: called goal directed Modulation of Neural Memory Patterns Implications for
Speaker 1: fMRI based Memory Detection in the Journal of neuroscience right,
Speaker 1: because they wanted to test their method in non cooperative subjects.
Speaker 1: Deceptive subjects you know, like people taking lie detector tests
Speaker 1: may sometimes be so. Wagner and his team set up
Speaker 1: a trial in which twenty four subjects devoted two days
Speaker 1: to looking at paces while hanging out in an fMRI
Speaker 1: I sounds like parties super Party. On the first day,
Speaker 1: they were shown two hundred paces two hundred hypothetically novel
Speaker 1: faces for two seconds each, then given eight seconds to
Speaker 1: invent a story to go along with the face. The
Speaker 1: researchers instructed them to do this with the idea that
Speaker 1: it would help the subjects form a memory about the face,
Speaker 1: you know, like kind of tricked their brain into thinking
Speaker 1: it was something worth saving. The researchers then shuffled the
Speaker 1: photos around and these subjects repeated the exercise, and during
Speaker 1: the second past, their algorithm was able to detect whether
Speaker 1: the subjects were experiencing memories about six of the time.
Speaker 1: Pretty good base, Yeah, yeah, wait way above sure. Uh.
Speaker 1: Day two, the researchers added two hundred new faces to
Speaker 1: the original batch and then shuffled the photos into two
Speaker 1: separate sets. During the first set, the subjects were supposed
Speaker 1: to react to each face as usual, you know, honestly
Speaker 1: either recognized the face or exp orians it for the
Speaker 1: first time. Then during the second set, the researchers asked
Speaker 1: them to try to fool the machine, meaning that for
Speaker 1: faces they remembered, the subjects were asked to focus on
Speaker 1: things about the photo that they hadn't noticed the first
Speaker 1: time around, kind of distract themselves from calling up their
Speaker 1: memory of it. That buttons are on their shirt or something, sure,
Speaker 1: the lighting, some something weird about I don't know, the
Speaker 1: background whatever. Uh. And for new faces, they were asked
Speaker 1: to recall something or someone that the photo reminded them
Speaker 1: of in as much detail as possible. It might be like,
Speaker 1: all right, this picture of a stranger looks an awful
Speaker 1: lot like an uncle I have. So I'm going to
Speaker 1: think about my uncle while I'm looking at this picture
Speaker 1: of a stranger, and that's going to be as if
Speaker 1: I were actually remembering this person and why my uncle
Speaker 1: suspiciously owns a scorpion farm. Uh. You know, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of repressed memories you guys have been prying
Speaker 1: back for the so so during during this uh, the
Speaker 1: second trial, the algorithms proficiency dropped to only with the
Speaker 1: deceptive subjects, so that that is no better than a
Speaker 1: coin flip um. It was, I should say, easier for
Speaker 1: them to fake memories than it was for them to
Speaker 1: conceal memories. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me,
Speaker 1: in the same way that it seems like it would
Speaker 1: be easier to make up lies and pretend you knew
Speaker 1: somebody with words than it would be to like hide
Speaker 1: the recognition in your face when you see somebody you
Speaker 1: know absolutely you know. Uh. This is why I'm a
Speaker 1: really bad actor, because when people say things to me,
Speaker 1: I can't be surprised if if I've heard it times
Speaker 1: in rehearsal, I'm just like, yeah, no, that's just yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's okay. I'm a bad actor too. I only know
Speaker 1: my que lines and my lines the rest of the show.
Speaker 1: It's not important. I'm not in it. I don't care.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what it's even about. Hamlet's about
Speaker 1: this guy who comes into the Danish uh royal court
Speaker 1: and sees that everybody's dead, and then he has to
Speaker 1: go back and report to the King of England. That's
Speaker 1: what Hamlets. That's a short story, but it sounds kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. There's a lot of preamble. Okay, I thought
Speaker 1: you were going to say, hamlets about a guy who
Speaker 1: meets a grave digger once. Actually it will be about
Speaker 1: a grave digger who meets this totally not so dat
Speaker 1: so So, based on all of these results, Wagner and
Speaker 1: his team are recommending and and themselves constructing more research
Speaker 1: into into deception and stress and and how memories are
Speaker 1: are made and recalled under those kind of circumstances, because
Speaker 1: they suspect that a suspect trying too hard to be
Speaker 1: honest might also throw the results. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Though,
Speaker 1: I would say the interesting thing to me about this
Speaker 1: is that we're not at I would say we're probably
Speaker 1: not at the peak of interpreting these results yet either.
Speaker 1: So I I would say that f m R I
Speaker 1: scanning for LIE detection probably can get better than it is,
Speaker 1: and who knows, we may end up with the system
Speaker 1: that's pretty hard to beat. At least we could end
Speaker 1: up with a system that could lead us to possible
Speaker 1: further investigation. Yeah yeah, Now, I hope nobody's ever just
Speaker 1: convicted on the basis of a test lay. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would imagine it would be more at least I think
Speaker 1: the ideal implementation of this would be you are in
Speaker 1: an investigation phase, and this is a means of finding
Speaker 1: out if the lead you're on, if you're on the
Speaker 1: right track, or if you need to switch gears very quickly.
Speaker 1: As opposed to this is the piece of evidence that
Speaker 1: the whole case hinges upon that I would definitely be
Speaker 1: a lot more concerned about. Um, So let's talk about
Speaker 1: let's go let's say that we've figured out the basics here.
Speaker 1: Let's say, let's go ahead, what I don't know, twenty
Speaker 1: to forty years now, we've now we figured it out. Uh,
Speaker 1: Let's say, do you think by that time we'll get
Speaker 1: to this point where we can share memories directly in
Speaker 1: some meat manner, whether it's brain to brain communication or
Speaker 1: brain to computer, or you know, some other variation that
Speaker 1: we haven't even thought of yet. I feel like it's
Speaker 1: really hard to say, because we haven't really seen anything
Speaker 1: like that yet. And to be honest, I've from what
Speaker 1: I've read a lot of the people who predict that
Speaker 1: we'll be able to download our memories into a computer,
Speaker 1: or more precisely, maybe it should be upload our memories
Speaker 1: to a computer. The basis they often seem to have
Speaker 1: for saying this is just sort of general stuff about
Speaker 1: how great technology is. You know, I've read several like
Speaker 1: opinion pieces saying, oh, by we'll be able to put
Speaker 1: our brains in computers because look at how amazing our
Speaker 1: gaming consoles are today. They're so much more powerful than
Speaker 1: the computers of the nineteen eighties. And that just seems
Speaker 1: to me to say, well, like, well, I understand our
Speaker 1: computers are much more powerful, but I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: this is dealing with the specifics of the problem. They're
Speaker 1: applying the concept of Moore's law universally across all disciplines,
Speaker 1: and that is not the way Moore's law works or
Speaker 1: the way the other disciplines work. Yeah, well, More's law
Speaker 1: might not even work that way. For yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: might end up with a computer that, by volume, is
Speaker 1: much much more powerful than a human brain. But so
Speaker 1: what I mean that doesn't necessarily mean you've conquered this
Speaker 1: translating problem, like where can you actually extract the semantic
Speaker 1: value of these structures in your brain and say, here's
Speaker 1: what this memory is about in a way that would
Speaker 1: make sense to a machine or to another person, And
Speaker 1: we even got to a point Joe and I were
Speaker 1: talking before the podcast started about how, uh, in this world,
Speaker 1: let's say that we have inner the world where we
Speaker 1: are able to share a memory directly to another person,
Speaker 1: in this brain to brain communication, we can't even be
Speaker 1: sure that the memory the other person receives is going
Speaker 1: to be similar to the memory we have. For In
Speaker 1: other words, Lauren, you have a concept in your head
Speaker 1: about what the color red is, and you have a
Speaker 1: concept in your head about what a bicycle looks like,
Speaker 1: and your version may be similar but different to the
Speaker 1: one that I have in my head. And I'm telling
Speaker 1: I'm sharing a memory with you about a red bicycle
Speaker 1: I saw now in that technology, would you be experiencing
Speaker 1: my memory kind of the way you would if you
Speaker 1: went to see a movie where the two of us
Speaker 1: philosophical subtleties aside are are witnessing the same thing. It's
Speaker 1: a visual field of information. Or would you in fact
Speaker 1: be experiencing my memory but based upon your concepts of
Speaker 1: red and bicycle? Are sure? So with with my picture
Speaker 1: of a red bicycle and my picture of my aunt?
Speaker 1: Who is writing it? Not your aunt? Right? So we
Speaker 1: we can't be sure if we get to a point
Speaker 1: where we can do this sort of memory sharing thing,
Speaker 1: that the individual elements of the memory will be true
Speaker 1: to the person who actually experienced it, or if it
Speaker 1: will be like like you know, I I tell you
Speaker 1: how to make something, so you end up using the
Speaker 1: stuff you have around you to make the same thing. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: let's say that we never do figure out a way
Speaker 1: to decode like the semantic contents of your memory. You
Speaker 1: know that we can look at your brain, we can
Speaker 1: analyze what's going on, and we just have no way
Speaker 1: to connect to that to actual information. We just see
Speaker 1: stuffs lighten up. We never find the codec to decode
Speaker 1: and red like like you're literally looking at a giant
Speaker 1: panel of light bulbs and you see that certain light
Speaker 1: bulbs are flashing on and off, but you have no
Speaker 1: context for what that. There's no red bicycle memory center
Speaker 1: of the brain that's universal across humanity, which seems pretty
Speaker 1: likely to me that that is not a effect a
Speaker 1: thing that can be discovered, but who knows. There's still
Speaker 1: one obvious way that we would be able to outsource
Speaker 1: memory recall, which is that we could outsource memory recording
Speaker 1: so in other words, we have some means of recording
Speaker 1: what's going on around us at any time when we
Speaker 1: would be focusing on it anyway, So we have an
Speaker 1: actual record of what's happening, not just a reconstruction of
Speaker 1: what is actual ones and zeros kind of record. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the idea here is again to bring up the
Speaker 1: horrific British sci fi series Black Mirror. There is one
Speaker 1: episode where characters have a technology that allows them to
Speaker 1: recall basically everything they've ever seen. They have an implant
Speaker 1: that just records it all. And now I don't think
Speaker 1: it's explicit in the episode exactly how that works, Like,
Speaker 1: is it trying to recall things from their brain, from
Speaker 1: their memories? I don't think so. I think it's actually
Speaker 1: a third party storage system. Yea that yeah, I think
Speaker 1: so that it's essentially it's it's using your sensory organs
Speaker 1: as the camera, camera and microphone, and as the screen
Speaker 1: to play back on. It's both. Yeah, So if you
Speaker 1: were to have some kind of third party technology camera
Speaker 1: implanted in your head, whether it's actually using your eyes
Speaker 1: as a lens or it's just a little camera on
Speaker 1: your head somewhere, and then it's attached to a solid
Speaker 1: state drive in your skull, and it's just keeping it
Speaker 1: as some you know whatever kind of arbitrary media format
Speaker 1: that can be interpreted later. This would ensure that encoding
Speaker 1: and decoding could be compatible, and you could have recording
Speaker 1: of everything you see. Yes, it's just not memory, it's
Speaker 1: not your memory. It would be third party from front
Speaker 1: to back. It would be essentially the same thing as
Speaker 1: if you had a cell phone with a with a
Speaker 1: camera on it, recording everything you know, facing out from you.
Speaker 1: And again you would you wouldn't say these are my memories.
Speaker 1: You would just say, here some video of stuff that
Speaker 1: happened where I was right right. And as you know,
Speaker 1: those of us who have watched Black Mirror saw that
Speaker 1: might not go very well socially speaking. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it pretty convincingly made the case that this is
Speaker 1: not really something you want in your life. Yeah, nobody
Speaker 1: really wants total recall of of everything that happened around them.
Speaker 1: I mean I I kind of am comfortable in in
Speaker 1: this cloudy mist of possibility that is my past. My
Speaker 1: past is getting cloudy here by the minute, So let's
Speaker 1: go ahead and wrap this up. Only thing I want
Speaker 1: total recall of is the Paul Verhoeven movie Total Recall.
Speaker 1: That's fair. Well, while I cannot guarantee that you will
Speaker 1: have that, I can at least get you a coup.
Speaker 1: Come on, John, than open your mam. Alright, So anyway,
Speaker 1: we're gonna wrap this up for real these now. This
Speaker 1: has been a really interesting topic to look into, and
Speaker 1: I am curious to see where this technology and our
Speaker 1: understanding of the brain goes and maybe maybe what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here right now it seems like it's really improbable,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe impossible to do, but who knows, Perhaps in
Speaker 1: forty years we'll find out that it's a commonplace and
Speaker 1: that the things we're thinking about our small potatoes compared
Speaker 1: to what's actually achievable. Yeah, I think it's a really
Speaker 1: interesting topic. I'm kind of disappointed that we couldn't say
Speaker 1: something more definite, but I think are we just don't
Speaker 1: have very much knowledge about what's possible in this realm today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it comes back to that that problem of us not
Speaker 1: having that much information about our own bodies. Despite all
Speaker 1: of the amazing science and technology that we have, we
Speaker 1: are ourselves is still kind of mysterious to me. That
Speaker 1: is the most exciting thing though, because it means there's
Speaker 1: so much more to learn, and uh, I can't wait
Speaker 1: to to read up on this stuff because it's really
Speaker 1: really cool. Now, I have a question for all of
Speaker 1: our listeners out there. If there is a subject about
Speaker 1: which you want to know more, whether it's something that
Speaker 1: we've covered in this episode, maybe a past episode, or
Speaker 1: something you just would like us to cover in the future,
Speaker 1: I would like you to let us know about it.
Speaker 1: We love getting your feedback. You guys are awesome. Keep
Speaker 1: it coming. The email addresses FW thinking at how Stuffworks
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