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Speaker 1: Is your notion of who you are built on a

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Speaker 1: mountain of narrative that may or may not be totally accurate.

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Speaker 1: If somebody told you a totally false story about yourself,

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Speaker 1: could you come to believe it? And what does this

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Speaker 1: have to do with six people who spent over a

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Speaker 1: decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit

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Speaker 1: but believed that they had. And what does any of

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Speaker 1: this have to do with why you are physically a

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Speaker 1: different person every seven years, but why you can't easily

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Speaker 1: see the changes in yourself through time, or what the

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Speaker 1: effective technology will be on our sense of self. Welcome

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Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist

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Speaker 1: and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we

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Speaker 1: sailed deeply into our three pound universe to understand why, why,

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Speaker 1: and how our lives look the way they do. Today's

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Speaker 1: episode is part two in the story of our drifting memories.

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Speaker 1: So last week we talked about memory and its inaccuracies.

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Speaker 1: I talked about how medieval European painters struggled to accurately

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Speaker 1: depict lions because they had never seen a real lion.

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Speaker 1: They'd only seen versions painted by other people, and as

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Speaker 1: these sequences of paintings moved forward through history, they became

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Speaker 1: more and more distorted from the original lion that someone

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Speaker 1: had seen at some point, and the lions served as

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Speaker 1: a metaphor for us to discuss how memories, like messages

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Speaker 1: in the game of Telephone, become distorted over time. If

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Speaker 1: you heard the episode, you'll remember I talked about a

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Speaker 1: strange Native American folk tale called the War of the Ghosts,

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Speaker 1: and this was used by the psychologist Frederick Bartlett. He

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Speaker 1: had people read the story and then reconstruct it from

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Speaker 1: their memory at various time points later to understand how

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Speaker 1: their memory changed. And what he found is that over time,

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Speaker 1: your memory of a story becomes more coherent with your

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Speaker 1: internal model of the world and also more aligned with

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Speaker 1: whatever your cultural norms are. So we saw that memories

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Speaker 1: are not static recordings, but instead they are stored in

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Speaker 1: vast constellations of neurons that are interconnected and dynamic, and

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Speaker 1: new experiences can alter these neural connections, leading to changes

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Speaker 1: in how memories are recalled, for example, in the context

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Speaker 1: of eyewitness testimony. This understanding of memory is massively important

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Speaker 1: because things that people say to you after you've witnessed

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Speaker 1: an event. Whether this is cowitnesses talking to you, or

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Speaker 1: psychologists or investigators, these can all change your memory of

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Speaker 1: what you believe you saw at the time of the event.

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Speaker 1: It alters your memory, but generally it doesn't change your

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Speaker 1: confidence in your memory. And finally, we also saw in

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Speaker 1: the last episode that even flashbulb memories, which are these vivid,

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Speaker 1: emotionally charged recollections of big significant events, even these sorts

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Speaker 1: of recollections become less accurate over time, as we saw

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Speaker 1: with a long term follow up study after the terrorist

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Speaker 1: attacks of September eleventh, two thousand and one. So this

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Speaker 1: week we're going to talk about not just your memory

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Speaker 1: of something external like a story you read or an

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Speaker 1: event you saw. Instead, we're going to zoom in on

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Speaker 1: what happens when those memories are about you. How do

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Speaker 1: memory distortions through time change your notion of your personal identity.

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Speaker 1: So let's start with a basic reality. Our brains and

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Speaker 1: our bodies change so much during our life that, like

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Speaker 1: a clock's our hand, it's difficult to detect the changes.

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Speaker 1: So every seven years, for example, every cell in your

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Speaker 1: body has been replaced. Physically, you are not you anymore.

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Speaker 1: But you're a new you. Fortunately, there's one constant that

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Speaker 1: links all these different versions of you together, and that

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Speaker 1: is memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that

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Speaker 1: makes me who I am. It sits at the core

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Speaker 1: of our identity. It provides a single, continuous sense of self.

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Speaker 1: But given what we talked about in the last episode,

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Speaker 1: there might be a problem here because could the continuity

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Speaker 1: of memory be an illusion? So imagine that you walk

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Speaker 1: into a room room, and you meet your self at

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Speaker 1: different ages in your life. So there you are at

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Speaker 1: age seven, and there's you as a teenager, and over

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Speaker 1: here it's you in your late twenties and mid fifties

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Speaker 1: and early seventies and all the way through your final years.

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Speaker 1: Imagine that you all sit together and you share the

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Speaker 1: stories about your life, and you tease out this single

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Speaker 1: thread of your identity. Would you be able to find

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Speaker 1: a core version of you? Well, it's tough to say,

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Speaker 1: because you all possess the same name and the same history.

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Speaker 1: But the fact is that you're all somewhat different people

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Speaker 1: at all these different ages. You have different values and goals.

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Speaker 1: And what we're going to talk about today is that

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Speaker 1: your life's memories might have less in common than expected.

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Speaker 1: Your memory when you look back and ask yourself who

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Speaker 1: you were at fifteen is different to who you actually

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Speaker 1: were at fifteen. And your sixty year old self and

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Speaker 1: your forty year old self will look back on an

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Speaker 1: important event that happened to your twenty year old self,

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Speaker 1: but they may have different recollections of exactly what happened

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Speaker 1: and in what order and who is there. And the

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Speaker 1: question is, if you don't all agree on the same memories,

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Speaker 1: are you really the same person? So first, let's start

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Speaker 1: from the point of view of the brain to think

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Speaker 1: about self identity. There's no single region in the brain

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Speaker 1: that underpins the self. It's a vastly distributed property. But

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Speaker 1: we can point to some large players in the game,

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Speaker 1: like the prefrontal cortex located just behind your forehead, which

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Speaker 1: generally navigates your planning, your decision making, your self reflection.

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Speaker 1: It helps you evaluate your action and give some narrative

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Speaker 1: to your intention, and all this contributes to a coherent

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Speaker 1: self concept and more generally, the prefrontal cortex is part

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Speaker 1: of a broader coalition of areas that we summarize as

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Speaker 1: the default mode network. Now, this is a network of

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Speaker 1: brain regions that are active when you're at rest and

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Speaker 1: not focused on something in the outside world. And this

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Speaker 1: network seems to be involved in self referential thinking and

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Speaker 1: daydreaming and reflecting on your own life and experiences, so

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Speaker 1: it seems to be involved in maintaining a stable sense

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Speaker 1: of self. And you have other areas involved, like the amygdala,

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Speaker 1: which is involved in processing emotions and that influences how

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Speaker 1: you react to your environment and shapes your emotional identity.

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Speaker 1: But while we can point to all these brain areas

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Speaker 1: as being involved, there's something else massively important. Your identity

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Speaker 1: is fundamentally rooted in your memories. This tells you your

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Speaker 1: whole life narrative. There are many types of memory, like

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Speaker 1: short term and long term, and please listen to episode

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Speaker 1: forty three to learn more about these different types. But

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Speaker 1: the subtype we care about today is autobiographical memory, which

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Speaker 1: is your memory of personal experiences and events. This type

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Speaker 1: of memory plays an absolutely crucial role in shaping your identity.

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Speaker 1: By recalling these memories and reflecting on these memories, you

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Speaker 1: create this continuously changing narrative that defines who you are now.

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Speaker 1: The reason that your memory is and your overarching narrative

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Speaker 1: can always change is because of neuroplasticity, which is the

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Speaker 1: brain's ability to adapt. Your brain is flexible. All the

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Speaker 1: tens of billions of neurons in your head are always

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Speaker 1: wiring and rewiring and disconnecting and seeking new partners and reconnecting,

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Speaker 1: and they're doing this every moment of your life. I

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Speaker 1: call this live wiring, and this, of course underlies the

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Speaker 1: fluid nature of our identity. If you did didn't have

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Speaker 1: this kind of flexibility in your brain, you would be

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Speaker 1: stuck in time. You would never reorganize in response to

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Speaker 1: new experiences, you would never learn, you would never change

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Speaker 1: in response to trauma or education, or the relationships you have,

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Speaker 1: or more generally, you wouldn't change from the politics and

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Speaker 1: culture and the wider world around you. Now, if this

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Speaker 1: were just a matter of the world getting poured into

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Speaker 1: your nervous system as you mature, that's one thing. But

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Speaker 1: the deeper, amazing issue that we're talking about today is

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Speaker 1: that your past is not a faithful record. Instead, it's

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Speaker 1: a reconstruction, and sometimes it borders on mythology. When we

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Speaker 1: review our life memories, we should do so with the

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Speaker 1: awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some of

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Speaker 1: the details come from stories that people told us about ourselves.

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Speaker 1: Others were filled in with what we think must have happened.

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Speaker 1: Others are based on rewrites that make the overarching story

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Speaker 1: more consistent. So if your answer to who you are

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Speaker 1: is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity

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Speaker 1: something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative. So how do

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Speaker 1: our personal memories influence who we think we are? Let's

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Speaker 1: return to the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftis. Last week I

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Speaker 1: told you that in one of her experiments, she showed

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Speaker 1: that the way questions are phrased influences people's memories. For example,

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Speaker 1: if you ask people how fast a couple of cars

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Speaker 1: are going when they hit each other, the people will

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Speaker 1: give different speed estimates than if you ask them how

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Speaker 1: fast the cars were going when they mashed into each other.

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Speaker 1: The word smashed illicits higher speed estimates because it distorts

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Speaker 1: something about people's memories. So, because Lostess was intrigued by

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Speaker 1: the way that leading questions could contaminate memory, she decided

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Speaker 1: to go further. She asked this question, would it be

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Speaker 1: possible to implant entirely false memories into a person? So

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Speaker 1: to find out, she recruited a bunch of participants and

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Speaker 1: had her team contact their families to get information about

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Speaker 1: events in their past, and then, armed with this information,

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Speaker 1: the researcher team put together four stories about each participant's childhood.

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Speaker 1: Three of the stories were true, and the fourth story

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Speaker 1: contained plausible information, but it was entirely made up. This

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Speaker 1: fourth story was about getting lost at a shopping mall

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Speaker 1: as a child, being found by a kind elderly person,

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Speaker 1: and finally being reunited with a parent. In a series

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Speaker 1: of interviews, participants were told these four stories about their childhood,

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Speaker 1: and at least a quarter of them claimed that they

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Speaker 1: could remember the incident of being lost in the mall,

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Speaker 1: even though it hadn't actually happened and it didn't stop there. Because,

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Speaker 1: as Loftus describes it, the participant may start to feel

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Speaker 1: like they remember a little bit about it, and then

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Speaker 1: when they come back a week later, they're starting to

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Speaker 1: remember more. Maybe they tell some details about the older

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Speaker 1: woman who rescued them, and over time, more and more

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Speaker 1: details creep into this false memory, like someone will say

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Speaker 1: that the older woman had a particular hat that they remember,

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Speaker 1: or they'll say they remember that they had their favorite

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Speaker 1: toy with them, or they'll say they remember their mother

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Speaker 1: was so mad or so glad when they were reunited.

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Speaker 1: Only was it possible to implant false new memories in

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Speaker 1: the brain, but people embraced and embellished those memories. They

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Speaker 1: were unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity.

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Speaker 1: Now we're all susceptible to this kind of memory manipulation,

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Speaker 1: And it turns out this is true of even Elizabeth

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Speaker 1: Loftus herself. So, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother

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Speaker 1: had drowned in a swimming pool. And years later she

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Speaker 1: was having a conversation with a relative, and that conversation

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Speaker 1: brought out this extraordinary fact that Elizabeth had been the

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Speaker 1: one to find her mother's body in the pool. Now

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Speaker 1: that news came as a total shock to her because

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Speaker 1: she hadn't known that, and in fact, she didn't believe it.

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Speaker 1: But she describes, quote, I went home from that birthday

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Speaker 1: and I started to think, maybe I did. I started

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Speaker 1: to think about others. There are things that I did remember,

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Speaker 1: like when the fireman came, they gave me oxygen. Maybe

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Speaker 1: I needed the oxygen because I was so upset that

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Speaker 1: I found the body. Now soon she was able to

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Speaker 1: visualize finding her mother's body in the swimming pool. But

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Speaker 1: then her relative called her up to say he'd made

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Speaker 1: a mistake. It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who

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Speaker 1: had found the body. It had been Elizabeth's aunt. And

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Speaker 1: that's how Loftus had the opportunity to experience what it

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Speaker 1: was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed

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Speaker 1: and deeply felt. So your memories are not a faithful record. Instead,

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Speaker 1: they are a constant reconstruction. Now it might feel to

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Speaker 1: you almost inconceivable that you could somehow misremember your own

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Speaker 1: life narrative. But this is precisely what happened in the

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Speaker 1: small town of Beatrice, Nebraska, to multiple people in a

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Speaker 1: way that that affected a combined seventy five years of

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Speaker 1: their lives. So here is what happened. There was an

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Speaker 1: elderly woman, a grandmother, named Helen Wilson, who was raped

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Speaker 1: and murdered in her apartment in nineteen eighty five, and

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Speaker 1: for four years the police searched, but they couldn't come

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Speaker 1: up with who had done this. By nineteen eighty nine,

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Speaker 1: they were looking for any suspects who seemed sexually unconventional

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Speaker 1: because a profiler at the FBI suggested that's who they

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Speaker 1: should be looking for. So they finally found two people,

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Speaker 1: a man and a woman who fit that general description.

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Speaker 1: He had been a pornographic filmmaker and she had met

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Speaker 1: him in California where they filmed together, and the two

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Speaker 1: of them had come back to Beatrice, Nebraska and started

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Speaker 1: filming pornography again. So the police picked them up and

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Speaker 1: interviewed them. Now, he denied that he had anything to

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Speaker 1: do with this murder that he was being accused of.

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Speaker 1: He was baffled, and he said, why am I a

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Speaker 1: suspect in this case of murder? He said he didn't

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Speaker 1: even know the victim they were talking about, or anything

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Speaker 1: about this crime. But according to the transcripts, the detective

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Speaker 1: said to him, you're having a hard time remembering. Maybe

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Speaker 1: it's because you don't want to remember. Could that be it? Joe?

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Speaker 1: He kept denying it, and the detectives kept telling him

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Speaker 1: they would be able to prove his guilt. But that's

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Speaker 1: not the mind blowing part of the story, which was

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Speaker 1: taking place in the neighboring room where they were interviewing

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Speaker 1: the woman. The detectives told her that she was at

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Speaker 1: the apartment of this elderly woman that's grandmother, and they

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Speaker 1: quote worked on bringing back little bits of memory to her.

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Speaker 1: She didn't remember anything about this grandmother, or the apartment,

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Speaker 1: or what the woman was wearing, or even why she

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Speaker 1: would have been there or gone inside, but the police

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Speaker 1: kept telling her, according to the transcript, quote, let me

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Speaker 1: try and help you refresh your memory. They told her

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Speaker 1: her memories were repressed because the whole event was so awful.

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Speaker 1: With time, she ended up wholeheartedly believing that she had

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Speaker 1: done the crime, and she confessed that she suffocated the

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Speaker 1: woman with a pillow while the man had performed the rape. Now,

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Speaker 1: this was a very manipulative interrogation and subsequent confession, and

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Speaker 1: maybe it would have ended there. But the problem was

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Speaker 1: that at the scene of the crime they had found

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Speaker 1: type B blood, and neither of these two had type

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Speaker 1: B blood. So the police felt that maybe the solution

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Speaker 1: was that there were other people involved, and they kept

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Speaker 1: pushing the woman to generate recollections. She ended up telling

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Speaker 1: the police that she thought maybe there was another man

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Speaker 1: with her during the crime, so they showed her a

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Speaker 1: lineup of photographs and she ended up picking a high

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Speaker 1: school friend of hers, who then got arrested too, and

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Speaker 1: maybe it would have ended there, but he didn't have

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Speaker 1: typebe blood either. Then a fourth suspect was arrested, another

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Speaker 1: woman who tended to hang out with the group. She

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Speaker 1: had a number of interviews with the police psychologist, and

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Speaker 1: she was also brought around to the idea that she

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Speaker 1: had committed this horrible crime and had repressed her memory,

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Speaker 1: so she ended up giving a confession of guilt. Then

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Speaker 1: she had a dream about this whole thing, and in

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Speaker 1: her dream she saw a fifth man there. So he

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Speaker 1: got arrested and also had interviews with the psychologist, and

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Speaker 1: he eventually also came to the conclusion that his psyche

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Speaker 1: had simply forgotten or repressed this whole terrible event. Then

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Speaker 1: he and the second woman to be arrested each had

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Speaker 1: a dream that there was another woman at the scene,

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Speaker 1: and that woman was arrested. Now she was certain that

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Speaker 1: she was doing laundry on the night of February fifth,

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five, but a police psychologist told her that

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Speaker 1: she had witnessed this murder but simply couldn't remember it.

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Speaker 1: He said to her, have you ever had memory problems before?

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Speaker 1: So she thought about it and insisted that she did

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Speaker 1: not have any memory problems. He asked, how about something

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Speaker 1: really terribly frightening, like something that really had an impact emotionally.

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Speaker 1: So she kept denying this and felt quite certain that

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Speaker 1: she couldn't possibly forget a rape and murder scene. She said, quote,

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Speaker 1: I just don't understand. I mean, this isn't something I

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Speaker 1: would not say anything about. I'm not saying I'm perfect here,

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Speaker 1: and I've done my share of little sins, but we're

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Speaker 1: talking about killing an old person. End quote. As it

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Speaker 1: turned out she had type BE blood and so she

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Speaker 1: got charged anyway. Now, there were six people charged for

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Speaker 1: this crime, and they became known as the Beatrice Six.

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Speaker 1: The first man pled innocence, two more pled no contest,

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Speaker 1: but three of the six people pled guilty. They all

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Speaker 1: went to jail for well over a decade of their lives,

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Speaker 1: and the man who kept insisting on his innocence kept

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Speaker 1: trying to get a DNA test done. But it was

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Speaker 1: only in two thousand and seven that he was able

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Speaker 1: to finally get the Nebraska Supreme Court to make it happen.

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Speaker 1: And the incredible result is that he and his five

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Speaker 1: co defendants were finally exonerated. They were all found to

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Speaker 1: be innocent. Another DNA test revealed the actual perpetrator, a

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Speaker 1: Beatrice resident who had died in nineteen ninety two, and

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Speaker 1: it appears that he had acted alone in the rape

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Speaker 1: and murder. So what this case represents is something so

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Speaker 1: stunning about our memory and its stability and its manipulability.

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Speaker 1: Although these six people all denied having ever been in

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Speaker 1: that woman's apartment, much less committing this crime, several of

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Speaker 1: them were able to be convinced that they had repressed

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Speaker 1: the memory because it was so traumatic. The psychologist told

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Speaker 1: them over and over that the memories of the murder

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Speaker 1: would probably come back to them when they were thinking

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Speaker 1: deeply about it or having a dream, but it might

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Speaker 1: take a while. As it turns out, it didn't even

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Speaker 1: take that long. Half the suspects ended up completely believing

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Speaker 1: in their guilt, even though they were not there and

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Speaker 1: had nothing to do with this. Now, as a side note,

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Speaker 1: this whole notion about memory suppression was floating around in

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Speaker 1: psychology circles at that time, and there were actually a

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Speaker 1: whole bunch of convictions passed down based on this idea,

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Speaker 1: Like maybe an adult who comes to believe, let's say,

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Speaker 1: through hypnosis that twenty years earlier she was sexually abused

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Speaker 1: by someone and that memory had been repressed and she

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Speaker 1: had never remembered it until just this moment. And there

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Speaker 1: was a window of time I am in the nineteen

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Speaker 1: eighties and nineties when a number of people were convicted

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Speaker 1: based on this kind of memory testimony. And while it's

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Speaker 1: theoretically possible that someone could repress the memory for decades

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Speaker 1: and then it pops up, essentially all these repressed memory

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Speaker 1: cases were eventually overturned as strong evidence like DNA evidence

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Speaker 1: got introduced into the court system, and many of these

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Speaker 1: accusations were found to be totally false. But this case

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Speaker 1: of the Beatrice six was especially amazing because here people

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Speaker 1: who were innocent ended up believing, truly believing that they

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Speaker 1: themselves were guilty for three of the six. They absolutely

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Speaker 1: believed in their own guilt, and they suffered deep regret

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Speaker 1: and shame. These new beliefs they had became just a

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Speaker 1: new sedimentary layer in the history of their identity. So

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Speaker 1: this is just like Elizabeth loftis receiving misinformation about finding

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Speaker 1: her mother's body in the pool, and she came to

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Speaker 1: have a memory of it. This is also like Lofts's experiments,

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Speaker 1: where she plants false information into the narrative of participants

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Speaker 1: in the laboratory. I'm going to link a New Yorker

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Speaker 1: article about the Beatrice six in the show notes on

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Speaker 1: Eagleman dot com slash podcast, and also an HBO documentary

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Speaker 1: about this, so check it out there for more. But

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Speaker 1: the point I want to make for now is that

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Speaker 1: all these cases demonstrate the malleability and the manipulability of

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Speaker 1: our memory, not only about an external story or picture

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Speaker 1: or terrorist attack, but even when the memories are about

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Speaker 1: our own lives. The writer John Dufresny once wrote that

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Speaker 1: memory is a myth making machine. What we do is

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Speaker 1: keep revising our past to keep it consistent with who

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Speaker 1: we think we are. So think about the narrative of

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Speaker 1: your own life. Which parts have you conveniently forgotten because

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Speaker 1: they didn't mesh well with the overarching story. What parts

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Speaker 1: have you told so many times that they've taken on

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Speaker 1: a reality of their own, perhaps a little unanchored from

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Speaker 1: what actually went down. Last week I told the story

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Speaker 1: of a group of my colleagues who studied what happened

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Speaker 1: with memories of nine to eleven. The bottom line was

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Speaker 1: that memories drifted. People were given these detailed surveys one

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Speaker 1: week after the attack, and then they were tracked down

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Speaker 1: a year later and regiven the survey, and it was

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Speaker 1: found that accuracy of recall was lower than expected, and

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Speaker 1: it got even lower at three years after the event

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Speaker 1: and then ten years after the event. But here's the

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Speaker 1: important thing to surface. What drifted were the memories about

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Speaker 1: the self. The factual memories like who is president at

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Speaker 1: the time and how many planes there were? Those were

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Speaker 1: essentially stable over time. Why is there some difference in

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Speaker 1: the brain and the way they're stored. No, it's because

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Speaker 1: those event facts were discussed endlessly in the media and

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Speaker 1: in daily conversations, and so any misremembering got automatically corrected

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Speaker 1: by the wider environment. In fact, as I mentioned last week,

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Speaker 1: the researchers could predict the accuracy of memories just based

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Speaker 1: on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was

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Speaker 1: around something. But if you have some flashball memory that

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Speaker 1: is inconsistent, like exactly what you were thinking or feeling,

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Speaker 1: or even where you were standing or what you saw,

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Speaker 1: you're really likely to repeat that a lot over the

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Speaker 1: next decade. Digging that story in but that's not likely

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Speaker 1: to get corrected by anybody, So the canyon of that

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Speaker 1: memory gets etched deep and deeper into the neural landscape,

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Speaker 1: even if the river is not flowing in the right spot.

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Speaker 1: So personal memories drift, but event memories get corrected back

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Speaker 1: into place. And I was thinking about this the other

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Speaker 1: day because now it's more than two decades after the

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Speaker 1: nine to eleven attacks, and I'm fascinated by how our

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Speaker 1: increasing technology might influence our personal memories. So when I

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Speaker 1: think about my past, I have some handful of photographs

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Speaker 1: that pin me down to reality, at least in particular

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Speaker 1: moments when the shutter clicked. In other words, I can't

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Speaker 1: misremember those moments in my life too much because there's

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Speaker 1: some objective evidence of what I looked like, or what

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Speaker 1: I wore, or what the house behind me looked like,

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Speaker 1: or what my parents' car looked like. So these photos

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Speaker 1: constrain my otherwise drifty memory. They tie my memory to

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Speaker 1: some factual version that I can move too far from.

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Speaker 1: What I've been wondering about lately is how memory will

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Speaker 1: change and how it might become a little more accurate,

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Speaker 1: not because our brains are getting any better, but instead

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Speaker 1: because our technology is improving. So when I was growing up,

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Speaker 1: we had photography, but to capture that moment you had

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Speaker 1: to go down to the store and buy film and

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Speaker 1: insert that correctly into the camera, And then after you

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Speaker 1: had snapped some number of shots, then you needed to

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Speaker 1: drive back to Walgreen's and get it developed and pick

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Speaker 1: it up a few days later. So, as you can imagine,

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Speaker 1: photographs were few and far between. So when I think

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Speaker 1: back on my childhood, I really have only a few

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Speaker 1: spots that are really pinned it down. But my kids

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Speaker 1: are the subjects of a gajillion photographs, And in fact,

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Speaker 1: we have an Alexa in our kitchen that cycles through

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Speaker 1: these on its screen, So they're constantly seeing documentation of

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Speaker 1: their lives from when they were one year old, two

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Speaker 1: years older, three or four. And what that means is

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Speaker 1: that they are far more pinned to their real historical

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Speaker 1: trajectory than I was. The technology binds them to reality.

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Speaker 1: By the way, it's a side note, I have no

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Speaker 1: idea if this is a good or bad thing. Presumably

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Speaker 1: they have fewer delusions about their history, but that also

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Speaker 1: means they are less free from it. It's difficult to

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Speaker 1: predict the consequences of that. In any case, the technology

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Speaker 1: they are surrounded by gives them a much tighter relationship

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Speaker 1: with their history. And by the time they have kids,

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Speaker 1: who knows what technology is going to exist. Maybe my

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Speaker 1: grandkid's bedroom will be wallpapered with dynamic movies from their

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Speaker 1: past year. Maybe the movies are going to be captured

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Speaker 1: by twenty four to seven three hundred and sixty degrees

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Speaker 1: surround view cameras that they wear on themselves all the time.

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Speaker 1: And maybe it won't even be on the walls, but

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Speaker 1: instead it'll be holograms, such that they're always surrounding by

435
00:29:00,560 --> 00:29:04,480
Speaker 1: three dimensional scenes of their past. Their recent paths are

436
00:29:04,520 --> 00:29:07,040
Speaker 1: distant past. Maybe they're always going to be living in

437
00:29:07,080 --> 00:29:12,280
Speaker 1: a community with themselves in time and therefore pinned down

438
00:29:12,560 --> 00:29:16,160
Speaker 1: to a more accurate story of who they recently were.

439
00:29:17,080 --> 00:29:20,080
Speaker 1: Whatever the case is, and I presume we can't possibly

440
00:29:20,120 --> 00:29:24,360
Speaker 1: imagine it correctly, they will have a different relationship with

441
00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:27,960
Speaker 1: their history. It's going to be more tightly bound to

442
00:29:28,080 --> 00:29:33,800
Speaker 1: reality and less like the telephone game. Nonetheless, so much

443
00:29:33,880 --> 00:29:36,560
Speaker 1: of our lives are not tracked, and this will be

444
00:29:36,640 --> 00:29:43,040
Speaker 1: true even for them. Our emotional reactions are small transgressions

445
00:29:43,080 --> 00:29:47,320
Speaker 1: that go uncaught and unrecorded, the contents of the dreams

446
00:29:47,360 --> 00:29:50,680
Speaker 1: we have at night, the thousands of thoughts we have

447
00:29:51,160 --> 00:29:55,360
Speaker 1: that go unexpressed. And so even for the next generation,

448
00:29:55,840 --> 00:30:00,160
Speaker 1: they still face the challenge of building a coherent narrative

449
00:30:00,400 --> 00:30:04,200
Speaker 1: that sometimes conflicts with other people's narratives about them, and

450
00:30:04,280 --> 00:30:07,440
Speaker 1: all those narratives their own and others are likely to

451
00:30:07,560 --> 00:30:11,360
Speaker 1: drift quite a bit from what actually happened. All these

452
00:30:11,400 --> 00:30:14,480
Speaker 1: considerations led me to write a short story years ago

453
00:30:14,600 --> 00:30:19,200
Speaker 1: in my novel sum So, in closing today's episode, I

454
00:30:19,280 --> 00:30:23,840
Speaker 1: want to redo this literary thought experiment about what would

455
00:30:23,920 --> 00:30:28,480
Speaker 1: happen if we were actually challenged to put the narrative

456
00:30:28,960 --> 00:30:33,640
Speaker 1: of our personal identity to the test. The story is

457
00:30:33,720 --> 00:30:38,600
Speaker 1: called reversal. There is no afterlife, but that doesn't mean

458
00:30:38,640 --> 00:30:42,120
Speaker 1: we don't get to live a second time. At some point,

459
00:30:42,200 --> 00:30:46,600
Speaker 1: the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop and

460
00:30:46,720 --> 00:30:50,320
Speaker 1: begin to contract, And at that moment the earrow of

461
00:30:50,400 --> 00:30:54,240
Speaker 1: time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out

462
00:30:54,720 --> 00:30:59,440
Speaker 1: will happen again, but backwards. In this way, our life

463
00:30:59,640 --> 00:31:05,000
Speaker 1: neither eyes nor disintegrates, but rewins. In this reverse life,

464
00:31:05,120 --> 00:31:09,360
Speaker 1: you are born of the ground at funeral ceremonies. We

465
00:31:09,440 --> 00:31:12,560
Speaker 1: dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly

466
00:31:12,680 --> 00:31:16,520
Speaker 1: to the mortuary where the birth makeup is removed. You

467
00:31:16,560 --> 00:31:20,040
Speaker 1: are then taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors,

468
00:31:20,400 --> 00:31:23,440
Speaker 1: you open your eyes for the first time in your

469
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:29,400
Speaker 1: daily life. Broken vases reassemble, melt water freezes into Snowmen

470
00:31:29,840 --> 00:31:36,320
Speaker 1: broken hearts find love. Rivers flow uphill, marriages re ride

471
00:31:36,440 --> 00:31:41,640
Speaker 1: rocky roads, and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures

472
00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:46,240
Speaker 1: of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses

473
00:31:46,320 --> 00:31:51,760
Speaker 1: instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth faced children who

474
00:31:51,800 --> 00:31:55,520
Speaker 1: are sent to schools to gently strip away The original

475
00:31:55,560 --> 00:32:00,800
Speaker 1: sins of knowledge, reading, writing, and mathematics are expunged. After

476
00:32:00,840 --> 00:32:06,400
Speaker 1: this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth,

477
00:32:06,880 --> 00:32:10,880
Speaker 1: achieving the purity of the highest state of the infant.

478
00:32:11,440 --> 00:32:14,200
Speaker 1: On their last day, howling because it is the end

479
00:32:14,200 --> 00:32:18,040
Speaker 1: of their lives, Babies climb back into the wombs of

480
00:32:18,080 --> 00:32:21,920
Speaker 1: their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the

481
00:32:21,960 --> 00:32:26,560
Speaker 1: wombs of their mothers, and so on, like concentric Russian dolls.

482
00:32:27,640 --> 00:32:31,800
Speaker 1: In this reverse life, you have blissful expectations about what

483
00:32:31,880 --> 00:32:36,440
Speaker 1: will come next. As you experience your story backward, at

484
00:32:36,480 --> 00:32:40,680
Speaker 1: the moment of reversal, you are genuinely happy for while

485
00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:44,720
Speaker 1: life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect

486
00:32:44,920 --> 00:32:48,760
Speaker 1: it will really be understood only upon replay, but you

487
00:32:48,960 --> 00:32:54,280
Speaker 1: have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your

488
00:32:54,320 --> 00:32:59,480
Speaker 1: memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep

489
00:32:59,480 --> 00:33:03,360
Speaker 1: your life flat story consistent with who you thought you were.

490
00:33:04,240 --> 00:33:09,320
Speaker 1: You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details

491
00:33:09,720 --> 00:33:14,200
Speaker 1: and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back,

492
00:33:14,600 --> 00:33:20,160
Speaker 1: the cloth of that storyline unravels, reversing through the corridors

493
00:33:20,200 --> 00:33:23,600
Speaker 1: of your life. You are battered and bruised in the

494
00:33:23,640 --> 00:33:28,920
Speaker 1: collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter

495
00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:33,880
Speaker 1: the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as

496
00:33:33,920 --> 00:33:40,840
Speaker 1: you did your first time here. Go to Eagleman dot

497
00:33:40,840 --> 00:33:44,719
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.

498
00:33:45,160 --> 00:33:48,800
Speaker 1: Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com

499
00:33:48,800 --> 00:33:52,080
Speaker 1: with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to

500
00:33:52,160 --> 00:33:56,000
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and

501
00:33:56,080 --> 00:34:00,280
Speaker 1: to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and

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00:34:00,320 --> 00:34:11,600
Speaker 1: we have been drifting together in the inner cosmos,