Speaker 1: Is your notion of who you are built on a
Speaker 1: mountain of narrative that may or may not be totally accurate.
Speaker 1: If somebody told you a totally false story about yourself,
Speaker 1: could you come to believe it? And what does this
Speaker 1: have to do with six people who spent over a
Speaker 1: decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit
Speaker 1: but believed that they had. And what does any of
Speaker 1: this have to do with why you are physically a
Speaker 1: different person every seven years, but why you can't easily
Speaker 1: see the changes in yourself through time, or what the
Speaker 1: effective technology will be on our sense of self. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
Speaker 1: sailed deeply into our three pound universe to understand why, why,
Speaker 1: and how our lives look the way they do. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is part two in the story of our drifting memories.
Speaker 1: So last week we talked about memory and its inaccuracies.
Speaker 1: I talked about how medieval European painters struggled to accurately
Speaker 1: depict lions because they had never seen a real lion.
Speaker 1: They'd only seen versions painted by other people, and as
Speaker 1: these sequences of paintings moved forward through history, they became
Speaker 1: more and more distorted from the original lion that someone
Speaker 1: had seen at some point, and the lions served as
Speaker 1: a metaphor for us to discuss how memories, like messages
Speaker 1: in the game of Telephone, become distorted over time. If
Speaker 1: you heard the episode, you'll remember I talked about a
Speaker 1: strange Native American folk tale called the War of the Ghosts,
Speaker 1: and this was used by the psychologist Frederick Bartlett. He
Speaker 1: had people read the story and then reconstruct it from
Speaker 1: their memory at various time points later to understand how
Speaker 1: their memory changed. And what he found is that over time,
Speaker 1: your memory of a story becomes more coherent with your
Speaker 1: internal model of the world and also more aligned with
Speaker 1: whatever your cultural norms are. So we saw that memories
Speaker 1: are not static recordings, but instead they are stored in
Speaker 1: vast constellations of neurons that are interconnected and dynamic, and
Speaker 1: new experiences can alter these neural connections, leading to changes
Speaker 1: in how memories are recalled, for example, in the context
Speaker 1: of eyewitness testimony. This understanding of memory is massively important
Speaker 1: because things that people say to you after you've witnessed
Speaker 1: an event. Whether this is cowitnesses talking to you, or
Speaker 1: psychologists or investigators, these can all change your memory of
Speaker 1: what you believe you saw at the time of the event.
Speaker 1: It alters your memory, but generally it doesn't change your
Speaker 1: confidence in your memory. And finally, we also saw in
Speaker 1: the last episode that even flashbulb memories, which are these vivid,
Speaker 1: emotionally charged recollections of big significant events, even these sorts
Speaker 1: of recollections become less accurate over time, as we saw
Speaker 1: with a long term follow up study after the terrorist
Speaker 1: attacks of September eleventh, two thousand and one. So this
Speaker 1: week we're going to talk about not just your memory
Speaker 1: of something external like a story you read or an
Speaker 1: event you saw. Instead, we're going to zoom in on
Speaker 1: what happens when those memories are about you. How do
Speaker 1: memory distortions through time change your notion of your personal identity.
Speaker 1: So let's start with a basic reality. Our brains and
Speaker 1: our bodies change so much during our life that, like
Speaker 1: a clock's our hand, it's difficult to detect the changes.
Speaker 1: So every seven years, for example, every cell in your
Speaker 1: body has been replaced. Physically, you are not you anymore.
Speaker 1: But you're a new you. Fortunately, there's one constant that
Speaker 1: links all these different versions of you together, and that
Speaker 1: is memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that
Speaker 1: makes me who I am. It sits at the core
Speaker 1: of our identity. It provides a single, continuous sense of self.
Speaker 1: But given what we talked about in the last episode,
Speaker 1: there might be a problem here because could the continuity
Speaker 1: of memory be an illusion? So imagine that you walk
Speaker 1: into a room room, and you meet your self at
Speaker 1: different ages in your life. So there you are at
Speaker 1: age seven, and there's you as a teenager, and over
Speaker 1: here it's you in your late twenties and mid fifties
Speaker 1: and early seventies and all the way through your final years.
Speaker 1: Imagine that you all sit together and you share the
Speaker 1: stories about your life, and you tease out this single
Speaker 1: thread of your identity. Would you be able to find
Speaker 1: a core version of you? Well, it's tough to say,
Speaker 1: because you all possess the same name and the same history.
Speaker 1: But the fact is that you're all somewhat different people
Speaker 1: at all these different ages. You have different values and goals.
Speaker 1: And what we're going to talk about today is that
Speaker 1: your life's memories might have less in common than expected.
Speaker 1: Your memory when you look back and ask yourself who
Speaker 1: you were at fifteen is different to who you actually
Speaker 1: were at fifteen. And your sixty year old self and
Speaker 1: your forty year old self will look back on an
Speaker 1: important event that happened to your twenty year old self,
Speaker 1: but they may have different recollections of exactly what happened
Speaker 1: and in what order and who is there. And the
Speaker 1: question is, if you don't all agree on the same memories,
Speaker 1: are you really the same person? So first, let's start
Speaker 1: from the point of view of the brain to think
Speaker 1: about self identity. There's no single region in the brain
Speaker 1: that underpins the self. It's a vastly distributed property. But
Speaker 1: we can point to some large players in the game,
Speaker 1: like the prefrontal cortex located just behind your forehead, which
Speaker 1: generally navigates your planning, your decision making, your self reflection.
Speaker 1: It helps you evaluate your action and give some narrative
Speaker 1: to your intention, and all this contributes to a coherent
Speaker 1: self concept and more generally, the prefrontal cortex is part
Speaker 1: of a broader coalition of areas that we summarize as
Speaker 1: the default mode network. Now, this is a network of
Speaker 1: brain regions that are active when you're at rest and
Speaker 1: not focused on something in the outside world. And this
Speaker 1: network seems to be involved in self referential thinking and
Speaker 1: daydreaming and reflecting on your own life and experiences, so
Speaker 1: it seems to be involved in maintaining a stable sense
Speaker 1: of self. And you have other areas involved, like the amygdala,
Speaker 1: which is involved in processing emotions and that influences how
Speaker 1: you react to your environment and shapes your emotional identity.
Speaker 1: But while we can point to all these brain areas
Speaker 1: as being involved, there's something else massively important. Your identity
Speaker 1: is fundamentally rooted in your memories. This tells you your
Speaker 1: whole life narrative. There are many types of memory, like
Speaker 1: short term and long term, and please listen to episode
Speaker 1: forty three to learn more about these different types. But
Speaker 1: the subtype we care about today is autobiographical memory, which
Speaker 1: is your memory of personal experiences and events. This type
Speaker 1: of memory plays an absolutely crucial role in shaping your identity.
Speaker 1: By recalling these memories and reflecting on these memories, you
Speaker 1: create this continuously changing narrative that defines who you are now.
Speaker 1: The reason that your memory is and your overarching narrative
Speaker 1: can always change is because of neuroplasticity, which is the
Speaker 1: brain's ability to adapt. Your brain is flexible. All the
Speaker 1: tens of billions of neurons in your head are always
Speaker 1: wiring and rewiring and disconnecting and seeking new partners and reconnecting,
Speaker 1: and they're doing this every moment of your life. I
Speaker 1: call this live wiring, and this, of course underlies the
Speaker 1: fluid nature of our identity. If you did didn't have
Speaker 1: this kind of flexibility in your brain, you would be
Speaker 1: stuck in time. You would never reorganize in response to
Speaker 1: new experiences, you would never learn, you would never change
Speaker 1: in response to trauma or education, or the relationships you have,
Speaker 1: or more generally, you wouldn't change from the politics and
Speaker 1: culture and the wider world around you. Now, if this
Speaker 1: were just a matter of the world getting poured into
Speaker 1: your nervous system as you mature, that's one thing. But
Speaker 1: the deeper, amazing issue that we're talking about today is
Speaker 1: that your past is not a faithful record. Instead, it's
Speaker 1: a reconstruction, and sometimes it borders on mythology. When we
Speaker 1: review our life memories, we should do so with the
Speaker 1: awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some of
Speaker 1: the details come from stories that people told us about ourselves.
Speaker 1: Others were filled in with what we think must have happened.
Speaker 1: Others are based on rewrites that make the overarching story
Speaker 1: more consistent. So if your answer to who you are
Speaker 1: is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity
Speaker 1: something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative. So how do
Speaker 1: our personal memories influence who we think we are? Let's
Speaker 1: return to the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftis. Last week I
Speaker 1: told you that in one of her experiments, she showed
Speaker 1: that the way questions are phrased influences people's memories. For example,
Speaker 1: if you ask people how fast a couple of cars
Speaker 1: are going when they hit each other, the people will
Speaker 1: give different speed estimates than if you ask them how
Speaker 1: fast the cars were going when they mashed into each other.
Speaker 1: The word smashed illicits higher speed estimates because it distorts
Speaker 1: something about people's memories. So, because Lostess was intrigued by
Speaker 1: the way that leading questions could contaminate memory, she decided
Speaker 1: to go further. She asked this question, would it be
Speaker 1: possible to implant entirely false memories into a person? So
Speaker 1: to find out, she recruited a bunch of participants and
Speaker 1: had her team contact their families to get information about
Speaker 1: events in their past, and then, armed with this information,
Speaker 1: the researcher team put together four stories about each participant's childhood.
Speaker 1: Three of the stories were true, and the fourth story
Speaker 1: contained plausible information, but it was entirely made up. This
Speaker 1: fourth story was about getting lost at a shopping mall
Speaker 1: as a child, being found by a kind elderly person,
Speaker 1: and finally being reunited with a parent. In a series
Speaker 1: of interviews, participants were told these four stories about their childhood,
Speaker 1: and at least a quarter of them claimed that they
Speaker 1: could remember the incident of being lost in the mall,
Speaker 1: even though it hadn't actually happened and it didn't stop there. Because,
Speaker 1: as Loftus describes it, the participant may start to feel
Speaker 1: like they remember a little bit about it, and then
Speaker 1: when they come back a week later, they're starting to
Speaker 1: remember more. Maybe they tell some details about the older
Speaker 1: woman who rescued them, and over time, more and more
Speaker 1: details creep into this false memory, like someone will say
Speaker 1: that the older woman had a particular hat that they remember,
Speaker 1: or they'll say they remember that they had their favorite
Speaker 1: toy with them, or they'll say they remember their mother
Speaker 1: was so mad or so glad when they were reunited.
Speaker 1: Only was it possible to implant false new memories in
Speaker 1: the brain, but people embraced and embellished those memories. They
Speaker 1: were unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity.
Speaker 1: Now we're all susceptible to this kind of memory manipulation,
Speaker 1: And it turns out this is true of even Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Loftus herself. So, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother
Speaker 1: had drowned in a swimming pool. And years later she
Speaker 1: was having a conversation with a relative, and that conversation
Speaker 1: brought out this extraordinary fact that Elizabeth had been the
Speaker 1: one to find her mother's body in the pool. Now
Speaker 1: that news came as a total shock to her because
Speaker 1: she hadn't known that, and in fact, she didn't believe it.
Speaker 1: But she describes, quote, I went home from that birthday
Speaker 1: and I started to think, maybe I did. I started
Speaker 1: to think about others. There are things that I did remember,
Speaker 1: like when the fireman came, they gave me oxygen. Maybe
Speaker 1: I needed the oxygen because I was so upset that
Speaker 1: I found the body. Now soon she was able to
Speaker 1: visualize finding her mother's body in the swimming pool. But
Speaker 1: then her relative called her up to say he'd made
Speaker 1: a mistake. It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who
Speaker 1: had found the body. It had been Elizabeth's aunt. And
Speaker 1: that's how Loftus had the opportunity to experience what it
Speaker 1: was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed
Speaker 1: and deeply felt. So your memories are not a faithful record. Instead,
Speaker 1: they are a constant reconstruction. Now it might feel to
Speaker 1: you almost inconceivable that you could somehow misremember your own
Speaker 1: life narrative. But this is precisely what happened in the
Speaker 1: small town of Beatrice, Nebraska, to multiple people in a
Speaker 1: way that that affected a combined seventy five years of
Speaker 1: their lives. So here is what happened. There was an
Speaker 1: elderly woman, a grandmother, named Helen Wilson, who was raped
Speaker 1: and murdered in her apartment in nineteen eighty five, and
Speaker 1: for four years the police searched, but they couldn't come
Speaker 1: up with who had done this. By nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: they were looking for any suspects who seemed sexually unconventional
Speaker 1: because a profiler at the FBI suggested that's who they
Speaker 1: should be looking for. So they finally found two people,
Speaker 1: a man and a woman who fit that general description.
Speaker 1: He had been a pornographic filmmaker and she had met
Speaker 1: him in California where they filmed together, and the two
Speaker 1: of them had come back to Beatrice, Nebraska and started
Speaker 1: filming pornography again. So the police picked them up and
Speaker 1: interviewed them. Now, he denied that he had anything to
Speaker 1: do with this murder that he was being accused of.
Speaker 1: He was baffled, and he said, why am I a
Speaker 1: suspect in this case of murder? He said he didn't
Speaker 1: even know the victim they were talking about, or anything
Speaker 1: about this crime. But according to the transcripts, the detective
Speaker 1: said to him, you're having a hard time remembering. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's because you don't want to remember. Could that be it? Joe?
Speaker 1: He kept denying it, and the detectives kept telling him
Speaker 1: they would be able to prove his guilt. But that's
Speaker 1: not the mind blowing part of the story, which was
Speaker 1: taking place in the neighboring room where they were interviewing
Speaker 1: the woman. The detectives told her that she was at
Speaker 1: the apartment of this elderly woman that's grandmother, and they
Speaker 1: quote worked on bringing back little bits of memory to her.
Speaker 1: She didn't remember anything about this grandmother, or the apartment,
Speaker 1: or what the woman was wearing, or even why she
Speaker 1: would have been there or gone inside, but the police
Speaker 1: kept telling her, according to the transcript, quote, let me
Speaker 1: try and help you refresh your memory. They told her
Speaker 1: her memories were repressed because the whole event was so awful.
Speaker 1: With time, she ended up wholeheartedly believing that she had
Speaker 1: done the crime, and she confessed that she suffocated the
Speaker 1: woman with a pillow while the man had performed the rape. Now,
Speaker 1: this was a very manipulative interrogation and subsequent confession, and
Speaker 1: maybe it would have ended there. But the problem was
Speaker 1: that at the scene of the crime they had found
Speaker 1: type B blood, and neither of these two had type
Speaker 1: B blood. So the police felt that maybe the solution
Speaker 1: was that there were other people involved, and they kept
Speaker 1: pushing the woman to generate recollections. She ended up telling
Speaker 1: the police that she thought maybe there was another man
Speaker 1: with her during the crime, so they showed her a
Speaker 1: lineup of photographs and she ended up picking a high
Speaker 1: school friend of hers, who then got arrested too, and
Speaker 1: maybe it would have ended there, but he didn't have
Speaker 1: typebe blood either. Then a fourth suspect was arrested, another
Speaker 1: woman who tended to hang out with the group. She
Speaker 1: had a number of interviews with the police psychologist, and
Speaker 1: she was also brought around to the idea that she
Speaker 1: had committed this horrible crime and had repressed her memory,
Speaker 1: so she ended up giving a confession of guilt. Then
Speaker 1: she had a dream about this whole thing, and in
Speaker 1: her dream she saw a fifth man there. So he
Speaker 1: got arrested and also had interviews with the psychologist, and
Speaker 1: he eventually also came to the conclusion that his psyche
Speaker 1: had simply forgotten or repressed this whole terrible event. Then
Speaker 1: he and the second woman to be arrested each had
Speaker 1: a dream that there was another woman at the scene,
Speaker 1: and that woman was arrested. Now she was certain that
Speaker 1: she was doing laundry on the night of February fifth,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five, but a police psychologist told her that
Speaker 1: she had witnessed this murder but simply couldn't remember it.
Speaker 1: He said to her, have you ever had memory problems before?
Speaker 1: So she thought about it and insisted that she did
Speaker 1: not have any memory problems. He asked, how about something
Speaker 1: really terribly frightening, like something that really had an impact emotionally.
Speaker 1: So she kept denying this and felt quite certain that
Speaker 1: she couldn't possibly forget a rape and murder scene. She said, quote,
Speaker 1: I just don't understand. I mean, this isn't something I
Speaker 1: would not say anything about. I'm not saying I'm perfect here,
Speaker 1: and I've done my share of little sins, but we're
Speaker 1: talking about killing an old person. End quote. As it
Speaker 1: turned out she had type BE blood and so she
Speaker 1: got charged anyway. Now, there were six people charged for
Speaker 1: this crime, and they became known as the Beatrice Six.
Speaker 1: The first man pled innocence, two more pled no contest,
Speaker 1: but three of the six people pled guilty. They all
Speaker 1: went to jail for well over a decade of their lives,
Speaker 1: and the man who kept insisting on his innocence kept
Speaker 1: trying to get a DNA test done. But it was
Speaker 1: only in two thousand and seven that he was able
Speaker 1: to finally get the Nebraska Supreme Court to make it happen.
Speaker 1: And the incredible result is that he and his five
Speaker 1: co defendants were finally exonerated. They were all found to
Speaker 1: be innocent. Another DNA test revealed the actual perpetrator, a
Speaker 1: Beatrice resident who had died in nineteen ninety two, and
Speaker 1: it appears that he had acted alone in the rape
Speaker 1: and murder. So what this case represents is something so
Speaker 1: stunning about our memory and its stability and its manipulability.
Speaker 1: Although these six people all denied having ever been in
Speaker 1: that woman's apartment, much less committing this crime, several of
Speaker 1: them were able to be convinced that they had repressed
Speaker 1: the memory because it was so traumatic. The psychologist told
Speaker 1: them over and over that the memories of the murder
Speaker 1: would probably come back to them when they were thinking
Speaker 1: deeply about it or having a dream, but it might
Speaker 1: take a while. As it turns out, it didn't even
Speaker 1: take that long. Half the suspects ended up completely believing
Speaker 1: in their guilt, even though they were not there and
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with this. Now, as a side note,
Speaker 1: this whole notion about memory suppression was floating around in
Speaker 1: psychology circles at that time, and there were actually a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of convictions passed down based on this idea,
Speaker 1: Like maybe an adult who comes to believe, let's say,
Speaker 1: through hypnosis that twenty years earlier she was sexually abused
Speaker 1: by someone and that memory had been repressed and she
Speaker 1: had never remembered it until just this moment. And there
Speaker 1: was a window of time I am in the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties and nineties when a number of people were convicted
Speaker 1: based on this kind of memory testimony. And while it's
Speaker 1: theoretically possible that someone could repress the memory for decades
Speaker 1: and then it pops up, essentially all these repressed memory
Speaker 1: cases were eventually overturned as strong evidence like DNA evidence
Speaker 1: got introduced into the court system, and many of these
Speaker 1: accusations were found to be totally false. But this case
Speaker 1: of the Beatrice six was especially amazing because here people
Speaker 1: who were innocent ended up believing, truly believing that they
Speaker 1: themselves were guilty for three of the six. They absolutely
Speaker 1: believed in their own guilt, and they suffered deep regret
Speaker 1: and shame. These new beliefs they had became just a
Speaker 1: new sedimentary layer in the history of their identity. So
Speaker 1: this is just like Elizabeth loftis receiving misinformation about finding
Speaker 1: her mother's body in the pool, and she came to
Speaker 1: have a memory of it. This is also like Lofts's experiments,
Speaker 1: where she plants false information into the narrative of participants
Speaker 1: in the laboratory. I'm going to link a New Yorker
Speaker 1: article about the Beatrice six in the show notes on
Speaker 1: Eagleman dot com slash podcast, and also an HBO documentary
Speaker 1: about this, so check it out there for more. But
Speaker 1: the point I want to make for now is that
Speaker 1: all these cases demonstrate the malleability and the manipulability of
Speaker 1: our memory, not only about an external story or picture
Speaker 1: or terrorist attack, but even when the memories are about
Speaker 1: our own lives. The writer John Dufresny once wrote that
Speaker 1: memory is a myth making machine. What we do is
Speaker 1: keep revising our past to keep it consistent with who
Speaker 1: we think we are. So think about the narrative of
Speaker 1: your own life. Which parts have you conveniently forgotten because
Speaker 1: they didn't mesh well with the overarching story. What parts
Speaker 1: have you told so many times that they've taken on
Speaker 1: a reality of their own, perhaps a little unanchored from
Speaker 1: what actually went down. Last week I told the story
Speaker 1: of a group of my colleagues who studied what happened
Speaker 1: with memories of nine to eleven. The bottom line was
Speaker 1: that memories drifted. People were given these detailed surveys one
Speaker 1: week after the attack, and then they were tracked down
Speaker 1: a year later and regiven the survey, and it was
Speaker 1: found that accuracy of recall was lower than expected, and
Speaker 1: it got even lower at three years after the event
Speaker 1: and then ten years after the event. But here's the
Speaker 1: important thing to surface. What drifted were the memories about
Speaker 1: the self. The factual memories like who is president at
Speaker 1: the time and how many planes there were? Those were
Speaker 1: essentially stable over time. Why is there some difference in
Speaker 1: the brain and the way they're stored. No, it's because
Speaker 1: those event facts were discussed endlessly in the media and
Speaker 1: in daily conversations, and so any misremembering got automatically corrected
Speaker 1: by the wider environment. In fact, as I mentioned last week,
Speaker 1: the researchers could predict the accuracy of memories just based
Speaker 1: on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was
Speaker 1: around something. But if you have some flashball memory that
Speaker 1: is inconsistent, like exactly what you were thinking or feeling,
Speaker 1: or even where you were standing or what you saw,
Speaker 1: you're really likely to repeat that a lot over the
Speaker 1: next decade. Digging that story in but that's not likely
Speaker 1: to get corrected by anybody, So the canyon of that
Speaker 1: memory gets etched deep and deeper into the neural landscape,
Speaker 1: even if the river is not flowing in the right spot.
Speaker 1: So personal memories drift, but event memories get corrected back
Speaker 1: into place. And I was thinking about this the other
Speaker 1: day because now it's more than two decades after the
Speaker 1: nine to eleven attacks, and I'm fascinated by how our
Speaker 1: increasing technology might influence our personal memories. So when I
Speaker 1: think about my past, I have some handful of photographs
Speaker 1: that pin me down to reality, at least in particular
Speaker 1: moments when the shutter clicked. In other words, I can't
Speaker 1: misremember those moments in my life too much because there's
Speaker 1: some objective evidence of what I looked like, or what
Speaker 1: I wore, or what the house behind me looked like,
Speaker 1: or what my parents' car looked like. So these photos
Speaker 1: constrain my otherwise drifty memory. They tie my memory to
Speaker 1: some factual version that I can move too far from.
Speaker 1: What I've been wondering about lately is how memory will
Speaker 1: change and how it might become a little more accurate,
Speaker 1: not because our brains are getting any better, but instead
Speaker 1: because our technology is improving. So when I was growing up,
Speaker 1: we had photography, but to capture that moment you had
Speaker 1: to go down to the store and buy film and
Speaker 1: insert that correctly into the camera, And then after you
Speaker 1: had snapped some number of shots, then you needed to
Speaker 1: drive back to Walgreen's and get it developed and pick
Speaker 1: it up a few days later. So, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: photographs were few and far between. So when I think
Speaker 1: back on my childhood, I really have only a few
Speaker 1: spots that are really pinned it down. But my kids
Speaker 1: are the subjects of a gajillion photographs, And in fact,
Speaker 1: we have an Alexa in our kitchen that cycles through
Speaker 1: these on its screen, So they're constantly seeing documentation of
Speaker 1: their lives from when they were one year old, two
Speaker 1: years older, three or four. And what that means is
Speaker 1: that they are far more pinned to their real historical
Speaker 1: trajectory than I was. The technology binds them to reality.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's a side note, I have no
Speaker 1: idea if this is a good or bad thing. Presumably
Speaker 1: they have fewer delusions about their history, but that also
Speaker 1: means they are less free from it. It's difficult to
Speaker 1: predict the consequences of that. In any case, the technology
Speaker 1: they are surrounded by gives them a much tighter relationship
Speaker 1: with their history. And by the time they have kids,
Speaker 1: who knows what technology is going to exist. Maybe my
Speaker 1: grandkid's bedroom will be wallpapered with dynamic movies from their
Speaker 1: past year. Maybe the movies are going to be captured
Speaker 1: by twenty four to seven three hundred and sixty degrees
Speaker 1: surround view cameras that they wear on themselves all the time.
Speaker 1: And maybe it won't even be on the walls, but
Speaker 1: instead it'll be holograms, such that they're always surrounding by
Speaker 1: three dimensional scenes of their past. Their recent paths are
Speaker 1: distant past. Maybe they're always going to be living in
Speaker 1: a community with themselves in time and therefore pinned down
Speaker 1: to a more accurate story of who they recently were.
Speaker 1: Whatever the case is, and I presume we can't possibly
Speaker 1: imagine it correctly, they will have a different relationship with
Speaker 1: their history. It's going to be more tightly bound to
Speaker 1: reality and less like the telephone game. Nonetheless, so much
Speaker 1: of our lives are not tracked, and this will be
Speaker 1: true even for them. Our emotional reactions are small transgressions
Speaker 1: that go uncaught and unrecorded, the contents of the dreams
Speaker 1: we have at night, the thousands of thoughts we have
Speaker 1: that go unexpressed. And so even for the next generation,
Speaker 1: they still face the challenge of building a coherent narrative
Speaker 1: that sometimes conflicts with other people's narratives about them, and
Speaker 1: all those narratives their own and others are likely to
Speaker 1: drift quite a bit from what actually happened. All these
Speaker 1: considerations led me to write a short story years ago
Speaker 1: in my novel sum So, in closing today's episode, I
Speaker 1: want to redo this literary thought experiment about what would
Speaker 1: happen if we were actually challenged to put the narrative
Speaker 1: of our personal identity to the test. The story is
Speaker 1: called reversal. There is no afterlife, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: we don't get to live a second time. At some point,
Speaker 1: the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop and
Speaker 1: begin to contract, And at that moment the earrow of
Speaker 1: time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out
Speaker 1: will happen again, but backwards. In this way, our life
Speaker 1: neither eyes nor disintegrates, but rewins. In this reverse life,
Speaker 1: you are born of the ground at funeral ceremonies. We
Speaker 1: dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly
Speaker 1: to the mortuary where the birth makeup is removed. You
Speaker 1: are then taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors,
Speaker 1: you open your eyes for the first time in your
Speaker 1: daily life. Broken vases reassemble, melt water freezes into Snowmen
Speaker 1: broken hearts find love. Rivers flow uphill, marriages re ride
Speaker 1: rocky roads, and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures
Speaker 1: of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses
Speaker 1: instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth faced children who
Speaker 1: are sent to schools to gently strip away The original
Speaker 1: sins of knowledge, reading, writing, and mathematics are expunged. After
Speaker 1: this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth,
Speaker 1: achieving the purity of the highest state of the infant.
Speaker 1: On their last day, howling because it is the end
Speaker 1: of their lives, Babies climb back into the wombs of
Speaker 1: their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the
Speaker 1: wombs of their mothers, and so on, like concentric Russian dolls.
Speaker 1: In this reverse life, you have blissful expectations about what
Speaker 1: will come next. As you experience your story backward, at
Speaker 1: the moment of reversal, you are genuinely happy for while
Speaker 1: life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect
Speaker 1: it will really be understood only upon replay, but you
Speaker 1: have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your
Speaker 1: memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep
Speaker 1: your life flat story consistent with who you thought you were.
Speaker 1: You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details
Speaker 1: and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back,
Speaker 1: the cloth of that storyline unravels, reversing through the corridors
Speaker 1: of your life. You are battered and bruised in the
Speaker 1: collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter
Speaker 1: the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as
Speaker 1: you did your first time here. Go to Eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
Speaker 1: to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and
Speaker 1: we have been drifting together in the inner cosmos,