Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you wasn't the stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
Speaker 1: We live in a remarkable age, don't we. We certainly do.
Speaker 1: We certainly do. We have um airplanes, true submarines, we
Speaker 1: have satellites in orbit, and we have these amazing little
Speaker 1: devices that we wear on our person at all times
Speaker 1: that often feel like, uh, an extension of ourselves, and
Speaker 1: we turn to them when we need to connect with somebody,
Speaker 1: when we need to take a photograph of something happening
Speaker 1: in our daily life, if we need to fact check something,
Speaker 1: be it you know who starred in Beast Master? Or
Speaker 1: I wonder what the name of this friend of a
Speaker 1: friend is. What do you do you on Facebook and
Speaker 1: you look for it, or you just need like simple um,
Speaker 1: you know, conversions of figures or simple mathematics. What do
Speaker 1: you do? You go fleeing to your your smart device?
Speaker 1: Oh oh yes, yes, yes, well it is it is
Speaker 1: the rolodex as well. It's all those things rolled up
Speaker 1: into one and this little, uh, this little electronic organ
Speaker 1: that lives in our pocket. I know. And the funny
Speaker 1: thing about that is that this question I'm about to
Speaker 1: post would be ridiculous ten years ago, but now I
Speaker 1: think it matters. Have you ever tried to recall an
Speaker 1: actual phone number stored in your cell phone? I'm talking
Speaker 1: about a phone number of a close friend or a relative,
Speaker 1: and you've come up just with snake eyes. Yes, but
Speaker 1: and it was trying. There were times, not recently, but
Speaker 1: like in the first two or three years. Maybe. UM,
Speaker 1: I do remember having that problem where I need to
Speaker 1: list my wife's number on something or call her from
Speaker 1: from another phone. And I we weren't married at the time,
Speaker 1: but still if she was the person I was talking
Speaker 1: to the most on the phone, and I didn't have
Speaker 1: her number memorized yet, so I had to make a
Speaker 1: conscious decision, Okay, this is this is the one number,
Speaker 1: This is the the only one, but this is the
Speaker 1: one number I need to commit to memory besides my own. See,
Speaker 1: this is a fine example of us humans outsourcing memory
Speaker 1: to metal and plastic, and it's something that we've been
Speaker 1: doing for a long time. But now I think it's
Speaker 1: very obvious because, as you say this, these devices are
Speaker 1: things that we rely on all the time. Yea. And
Speaker 1: not just the devices, of course, but just the Internet itself.
Speaker 1: I mean, as as writers, we've certainly seen this trend
Speaker 1: over the years where it's I'm forgetting how to spell
Speaker 1: things because the spell check is so ubiquitous, it's everywhere,
Speaker 1: it's and you know, and and if it's not in
Speaker 1: the program that I'm using, then it's then it's it
Speaker 1: halts me, it brings me to a stop. I can't
Speaker 1: finish the sentence because I suddenly have all these doubts
Speaker 1: about the things that I've written. It's like, sometimes I
Speaker 1: find myself in a form intentionally misspelling a word in
Speaker 1: order to make sure that the word I just spelled
Speaker 1: was actually correct and not uh and not you know,
Speaker 1: it was in a situation where that the spell check
Speaker 1: was somehow turned off or malfunctioning. And that's such a
Speaker 1: good example of a microcosm of how you are taking
Speaker 1: memory and just shuttling off to someone else or something.
Speaker 1: And I think a good macrocosm of this would be
Speaker 1: something like the cloud, which we are now all beginning
Speaker 1: to back up to right right, your your photos, your
Speaker 1: your basic information on your phone, important documents. Uh. I
Speaker 1: still occasionally run across old floppy disks that I that
Speaker 1: with labels on them where I had like worked on
Speaker 1: a short story or part of a novel or something,
Speaker 1: you know, fifteen years ago. And at the time I
Speaker 1: was like, all right, this, this is important. I mean
Speaker 1: to put this on the ZIP file and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: store this in a different location it doesn't safe or something.
Speaker 1: And now it's becoming increasingbly, you know, it just seems
Speaker 1: silly because it's out there in the cloud. It's it's
Speaker 1: stored safely, and you know, unknown storage facilities, electronic storage
Speaker 1: facilities around the world. Well see, And I think this
Speaker 1: all points to this idea that we are now at
Speaker 1: the age of Watson. And when I'm talking about Watson,
Speaker 1: I am talking about Jeopardy, of course, because this used
Speaker 1: to be the game show in which humans would roll
Speaker 1: out their memory prowess and show everybody how awesome we
Speaker 1: were in that department. But along came, of course, an
Speaker 1: artificial machine and and trumped Ken Jennings. Of course, this
Speaker 1: is the the Jeopardy champ and map enthusiasts math yes,
Speaker 1: and showed us how fallible our memories really are and
Speaker 1: how we really do rely on outsourcing it and if
Speaker 1: you're like me, you sat there thinking about all this
Speaker 1: outsourcing of memory and you kind of shame yourself a
Speaker 1: little bit because you think, well, you know, maybe I
Speaker 1: should be making an effort to memorize these facts for
Speaker 1: those who retain this information. But then on the other hand,
Speaker 1: it makes a certain amount of economic sense, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: our minds are in this universe having to navigate this
Speaker 1: world of of physical objects, and in non physical idea
Speaker 1: is abstract numbers, and it makes sense that like a
Speaker 1: sly mold, we would figure out the shortest path through
Speaker 1: the maze. And I like this idea of couching it
Speaker 1: in slime mold because if you think about memory, it
Speaker 1: kind of does have its place an emergence, right, and
Speaker 1: this idea of all of us coming together as one
Speaker 1: organism and making life work for us, and in this
Speaker 1: case memory. So this is actually called transactive memory, and
Speaker 1: it has been around since the dawn of man and woman,
Speaker 1: right yeah, Because I mean if you are thinking about
Speaker 1: early man trying to start a fire or trying to
Speaker 1: create a stew, well, it's very possible that several people
Speaker 1: know the steps in order to create this fire or
Speaker 1: to create this this meal, and so everybody is relying
Speaker 1: on each other to try to figure out how to
Speaker 1: bring all of this to fruition. Right, So, you know,
Speaker 1: think about the most complex do in the world, and
Speaker 1: maybe it has fifty steps to it. Well, those fifty
Speaker 1: steps are distributed among many people who don't have a
Speaker 1: writing utensil or the internet at their disposal to try
Speaker 1: to figure out how to do something. And this is, uh,
Speaker 1: it's important to know. This is before the age of
Speaker 1: specialization really takes off in a larger sense in the civilization.
Speaker 1: You know, the idea that once you have a circles
Speaker 1: of food, you don't have to hunt all the time,
Speaker 1: and certain individuals can devote themselves to certain specialized tasks.
Speaker 1: But it's what but, as we're discussing here, even before that,
Speaker 1: there's a certain amount of specialization that ends up taking
Speaker 1: place because we are externalizing the necessary information. We're essentially
Speaker 1: outsourcing it to other members of our community. Now. Harvard
Speaker 1: psychologist Daniel Witner, Ralph Eber, and Paula Raymond began to
Speaker 1: study transactive memory in earnest in the eighties and they
Speaker 1: found this is interesting in terms of specialization, that spouses
Speaker 1: often divide up memory tasks. Yes, and this is really
Speaker 1: the most um, this is the the example of this
Speaker 1: is really I think the easiest for most of us
Speaker 1: to understand because they also applied to not only two spouses,
Speaker 1: but also to like close flint friends or or or
Speaker 1: people that you're working with an a regular basis. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, some of the stuff we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: I recognize in our work process. You know. Uh, because
Speaker 1: it comes down to to this, all right, you imagine
Speaker 1: you're you and your coworker, you and your spouse. There's
Speaker 1: certain information you need easy access to. Now at a
Speaker 1: at a very economic level, think about it. Does it
Speaker 1: make sense for you both to have that? You know,
Speaker 1: if you need one bottle of water on a hike,
Speaker 1: would you both carry a bottle of water? No, one
Speaker 1: person would carry the bottle of the water of water
Speaker 1: and the other person would say carry the cooler of sandwiches.
Speaker 1: And with information with memory, it often ends up the
Speaker 1: same way, and we end up at like, at a
Speaker 1: subconscious level, we're doing this. You're not you know, you're
Speaker 1: not actively thinking, well, my wife she's keeping track of
Speaker 1: you know of of you know when we have to
Speaker 1: go out of town. Uh, this weekend and what time
Speaker 1: we need to leave or whatever. So I'll just let
Speaker 1: her handle that, not because I would choose to forget that,
Speaker 1: I would rather fill my brain with other things. No,
Speaker 1: we we end up doing this at a sub conscious level,
Speaker 1: just again, like that slime mold reaching out through the
Speaker 1: maze to find the shortest way out. I know, I
Speaker 1: was thinking about it in my own relationship with my spouse,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, he is the person who keeps
Speaker 1: all the dates in his head as well as like
Speaker 1: details about my personal family history as well as his,
Speaker 1: because he's kind of he's the big memory there. But
Speaker 1: I'm the person who does all the technology stuff. I
Speaker 1: remember all the pasthwords, I remember all the steps to
Speaker 1: switch between streaming and DVD and UM DVR and all
Speaker 1: the different things that have to do with our internet
Speaker 1: media consumption. And we've never talked about it and said, hey,
Speaker 1: this is how we're gonna parse out our life together.
Speaker 1: But that's just sort of how it has fallen to us.
Speaker 1: So I think it's very interesting that we would shuttle
Speaker 1: off certain things with people and go to them and say, okay,
Speaker 1: how do you do this now? Of course, it's it's
Speaker 1: important to mention in all this that the human memory
Speaker 1: is is always flawed. I mean we've talked about this before.
Speaker 1: Our memory of things that happened to us is flawed.
Speaker 1: Every time we take that memory out of the drawer,
Speaker 1: we alter it in some way, shape or form. And
Speaker 1: when it comes to various factoids and specific details, uh,
Speaker 1: that is another area where we just have built in limitations.
Speaker 1: But this is where having a brainmate comes from play,
Speaker 1: be it a spouse or just you know, a long
Speaker 1: term uh, you know, co worker or friend. There was
Speaker 1: a study we're looking at here from Cilia B. Harris
Speaker 1: at All titled Collaborative Remembering When can remembering what others
Speaker 1: be beneficial? And in this particular study, the researchers looked
Speaker 1: at older couples who have been together for decades. Uh.
Speaker 1: They separated them questioned individually about events years and years ago,
Speaker 1: and uh, they stumbled on in details about past events
Speaker 1: when they but when they question question them together, they
Speaker 1: were able to retrieve even more information. And they they
Speaker 1: observed that the the individuals were engaging in something called
Speaker 1: cross queuing. So they're costing these clues back and forth
Speaker 1: until they trigger enough memories in each other to recall
Speaker 1: the total event. So it's like this collective memorization of
Speaker 1: a past event, but they have to be together to
Speaker 1: bring it out. It's like the wonder Twins powers activity.
Speaker 1: That's so funny. I'm sure everybody has had that experience
Speaker 1: before with someone. Now. Another example of creating a little
Speaker 1: hold for our memory is a very interesting one to me,
Speaker 1: and it has to do with photographs, because to me,
Speaker 1: this is a very subconscious thing. You take a photograph, right,
Speaker 1: and you think, I'm I'm on vacation, I've had this
Speaker 1: wonderful moment, and I am remembering all of this, I'm
Speaker 1: soaking it in. But that may not be the case.
Speaker 1: We're of course talking about the photo taking impairment effect.
Speaker 1: And uh, I think we've all encountered people at events,
Speaker 1: strangers generally, who are taking photographs, and we've we've we've
Speaker 1: met this with varying degrees of irritation or resentment. You know,
Speaker 1: you're you're saying you're the Grand Canyon, and you're like,
Speaker 1: I'm just I just want to take the sin, I
Speaker 1: just want to experience it. And then there's here's somebody
Speaker 1: that is, uh, you know, painstakingly setting up a camera
Speaker 1: to take a photograph of it, and at times you
Speaker 1: can be a little judge. You can think like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: look at me, I'm living in the moment of this experience.
Speaker 1: I'm experiencing it. A photograph can't even capture what I'm
Speaker 1: seeing now, and you're looking at it through a camera
Speaker 1: or growing up, I certainly remember seeing parents obsessed with
Speaker 1: video cameras where it seems like they're observing their entire
Speaker 1: the entire childhood of their offspring through the lens of
Speaker 1: the video camera. Um also, and of course concerts are
Speaker 1: even worse now. I was. I was a concert about
Speaker 1: a year ago, like a heavy metal concert for this
Speaker 1: band called Sugar, and the Sugar has been around for
Speaker 1: a while, so you saw this differ. I think I
Speaker 1: think there's some relation. It's to the aid issue, but
Speaker 1: the other from Scandinavia, but they've been Yeah, they've been
Speaker 1: around for a while and so they're they're fan base,
Speaker 1: you know, ranges from you know people. I'm probably around
Speaker 1: the middle of the the the the age of brackets
Speaker 1: for the fans. So me and a friend of mine
Speaker 1: were watching the show, but we couldn't help but notice
Speaker 1: some of the younger fans who were basically experiencing the
Speaker 1: live music through their their iPhones as they videotaped it,
Speaker 1: and and we, you know, we were just like, this
Speaker 1: is the most unmetal thing we've ever seen in their lives.
Speaker 1: You know, you should be experiencing hell. So it's it's
Speaker 1: easy to bring this this attitude into it. But then
Speaker 1: you talk to somebody for whom photography is their passion,
Speaker 1: is there is you know, even their you know their career,
Speaker 1: and you know you you you have to admit that
Speaker 1: this is the way that they take the beauty in
Speaker 1: their life and and remember it, you know, well in
Speaker 1: those cases. And we'll talk in a second about this study.
Speaker 1: That sort of I think vindicates your feelings about being
Speaker 1: at the Grand Canyon and someone looking at it through
Speaker 1: a lens as opposed to experiencing it um In some ways,
Speaker 1: I think the photographer might be able to have a
Speaker 1: the professional photographer might have a better sense of those
Speaker 1: events because they go through those images and they do
Speaker 1: a lot of editing afterward, as opposed to someone who's
Speaker 1: just happening happens to take a picture of that and
Speaker 1: they put on Instagram at that moment. What it's also
Speaker 1: something to be said, maybe I'm being judgy, but taking
Speaker 1: a bad picture something and taking a good picture. For instance,
Speaker 1: when I go to the aquarium and I see somebody
Speaker 1: take a flash a direct flash image of something in
Speaker 1: an aquarium tank, like they're not going to get a
Speaker 1: good picture, Like like, it's not like you're gonna go
Speaker 1: home and be and and you're gonna look at the
Speaker 1: image that you took and it's just gonna you know,
Speaker 1: time travel you back to when you were staring at
Speaker 1: that octopus. No, you took a really bad photo of
Speaker 1: something that was far more impressive in real life, whereas
Speaker 1: you know, there are if someone actually knows what they're
Speaker 1: doing in the camera there and with especially if the
Speaker 1: appropriate editing is applied, you can create a more beautiful
Speaker 1: vision of what you actually saw. I think that you
Speaker 1: should create a pamphlet to give out at these various
Speaker 1: places like the aquarium, just to do your duty here
Speaker 1: as a little p s A. I have thought before
Speaker 1: that I amost want to see a sign that's as
Speaker 1: professional of photographers only. Um, I mean really that's kind
Speaker 1: of when there's no photography allow That's basically what the
Speaker 1: arrangement is like. If you want to photograph these works
Speaker 1: of art, for instance, for fish, then you need to
Speaker 1: know what you're doing. You need to get special permission
Speaker 1: to do it. You want a giant thumb and the
Speaker 1: kind of a world class work. Oh well, you know
Speaker 1: that's the other thing. Like I when I go to
Speaker 1: an art museum and uh, And I've been accused of
Speaker 1: being a stump about about going to our museums before,
Speaker 1: about not wanting to hear a bunch of people talk
Speaker 1: at etcetera. And I and I want to clarify that
Speaker 1: I do think it's okay to talk in a museum.
Speaker 1: But when I'm trying to look at works of art
Speaker 1: and people are busy getting their photograph made in front
Speaker 1: of it, like that just drives me crazy, Like like
Speaker 1: that the art, the art is the art we are,
Speaker 1: you know, we should be here to appreciate the art,
Speaker 1: not to say this is great. I love this painting.
Speaker 1: It would be a little better for my memory that
Speaker 1: I had a picture of me with it making the
Speaker 1: victory sign with my fingers. All right, Remind me never
Speaker 1: to attend the aquarium or a museum with you, because
Speaker 1: I do like the photo bomb every once in a while.
Speaker 1: So just saying, all right, we're talking about here is
Speaker 1: Fairfield Universities psychologists Linda Hankel, who gave test participants a
Speaker 1: digital camera in an itinerary of objects to view at
Speaker 1: a museum on campus. There. Yeah, they said, go to
Speaker 1: the museum, look at these particular exhibits. And some of
Speaker 1: them were told, all right, take photographs of the whole thing,
Speaker 1: you know, this particular painting, whatever. Just get a good
Speaker 1: picture of this painting for me. Other people were told,
Speaker 1: get some details, get the details of this paint They
Speaker 1: were asked specifically to zoom in on the detail, okay,
Speaker 1: and that's really important. And other people were just sent
Speaker 1: to look at stuff exactly right, right, and not take
Speaker 1: any photographs whatsoever. So the next day she showed them
Speaker 1: pictures of the names of the objects they had seen,
Speaker 1: or excuse me that she shown them pictures or the
Speaker 1: names of the objects they had seen, and some they
Speaker 1: hadn't seen at all, and she asked details about the
Speaker 1: once they remembered. Now, test participants recognized fewer objects they'd
Speaker 1: photographed whole right than those that they observed on their
Speaker 1: museum tour, and they were much less accurate and recalling
Speaker 1: visual details of museum objects they've photographed hole compared with
Speaker 1: those that only observed unless they zoomed in with their camera.
Speaker 1: So just the act of taking the picture allowed them
Speaker 1: to use transactive memory, essentially saying I don't need to
Speaker 1: remember this, this is getting documented, so I don't have
Speaker 1: to crab my brain with us unless again they did
Speaker 1: the whole zoom function, which changed, uh, their their mindset. Really,
Speaker 1: it would change their cognitive function at that moment because
Speaker 1: they had to hone in and really observe at that moment.
Speaker 1: So you see how subconsciously we're doing this with photograph
Speaker 1: and you have to wonder, what about the Internet? What
Speaker 1: is that doing to the way that we uh shuttle
Speaker 1: off memory. Yeah, that's essentially the big point we're getting
Speaker 1: to here, especially concerning transactive memory. Again, that idea that
Speaker 1: we're we're saying, all right, well, Judy knows how to
Speaker 1: make this portion of the stew so I'm going to
Speaker 1: uh and it is all subconscious. I'm going to forget
Speaker 1: how to do that because I know that someone else
Speaker 1: in my group is already specializing in that. That is
Speaker 1: how we end up treating the Internet, That's how we
Speaker 1: treat the cloud, not as a reference book that we
Speaker 1: have at our disposal, but as a person, as as
Speaker 1: if this is a member of our community who just
Speaker 1: happens to say, remember all the fahrenheit celsius conversion tables?
Speaker 1: Who who happens to remember who was in every movie ever?
Speaker 1: Who happens to remember you know, even a little stuff
Speaker 1: like what days to certain holidays fallen this year? I mean,
Speaker 1: all the all of that information. They are this uber friend,
Speaker 1: this friend made out of out of the internet. And uh,
Speaker 1: and we treat that, we treat the cloud as if
Speaker 1: it is this person and at least in our mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so the question becomes, how does this transactive memory
Speaker 1: writ large affect our brain? And I'm sure everybody uh
Speaker 1: is familiar with that by now famous two thousand and
Speaker 1: eleven study about how Google has affected our memory and
Speaker 1: has changed it in a sense um. The paper two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven paper called Google Effects on Memory Cognitive consequences
Speaker 1: of having information at our fingertips details research carried out
Speaker 1: in four memory studies, and it was found in just
Speaker 1: a general overview. It was found that if participants thought
Speaker 1: that the information they were presented with was being backed up,
Speaker 1: they were less likely to remember it. In addition, they
Speaker 1: had this, uh, this one experiment involving difficult trivia questions,
Speaker 1: and participants were more likely to subsequently quickly react to
Speaker 1: words like Google and Yahoo. It was two thousand and eleven,
Speaker 1: then the non computer related Nike in your play. So
Speaker 1: the idea is that when we were asked about things
Speaker 1: we don't know, our first instinct now is to think
Speaker 1: about finding the information online. And I'm sure everybody's experienced
Speaker 1: that too. I know that, you know, at least ten
Speaker 1: times a day, I'll be thinking about something and I
Speaker 1: and it's very actually very um disturbing to my process
Speaker 1: if I'm trying to get something done in one large chunk,
Speaker 1: because my room will will sort of say, okay, go
Speaker 1: let's stop what you're doing right now and go look
Speaker 1: that up. And it will be silly stuff too, like
Speaker 1: I'll be researching something to do with, say, I don't
Speaker 1: know quantum physics, and then I'll suddenly need to know
Speaker 1: if a vagota is still alive or I want our
Speaker 1: or the other day it was this, I suddenly had
Speaker 1: to know what Mitch McConnell looked like when he was younger,
Speaker 1: and incidentally I could find no evidence of what he
Speaker 1: looked like when he was younger, Like the the earliest
Speaker 1: image I found a Minch McConnell. He was he already
Speaker 1: looked like he was in his fifties. So um, if
Speaker 1: anyone out there can can que me into what he
Speaker 1: looked like, it's stupid, it makes no sense. But for
Speaker 1: some reason, my mind has to know what he looked
Speaker 1: like when he was a younger man for no reason, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm not obsessed with mint McConnell in any way shape
Speaker 1: or form in a negative repositive. And it's funny. I
Speaker 1: was looking at a paper on mirror neurons, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden I had the urge or this thing
Speaker 1: bubble up in my brain of was Barbarella supposed to
Speaker 1: be a scientist? And I was like, no, don't stop
Speaker 1: what you're doing right now to look that up. Please don't.
Speaker 1: But then you have to you have to run off
Speaker 1: and uh and hopefully you'll find an answer. I'll get
Speaker 1: thirty minutes just going down the rabbit hole. Well, you
Speaker 1: know how it is that when we talk about memory
Speaker 1: loop and like closing it, you know that that that
Speaker 1: is going to continually pop up for me until I
Speaker 1: go on Google what Barbara Ella's profession was. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I've I've seen the movie several times and I
Speaker 1: can't remember off hands, so I think she was so listeners,
Speaker 1: let us know Barbara Ella. What was her occupation? Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 1: what do you do look like when he's a teenager?
Speaker 1: All right, we should probably take a quick break and
Speaker 1: when we get back, we are going to talk about
Speaker 1: outsourcing your identity. Alright, we're back. What is your favorite
Speaker 1: scene in Barbaralla? Well, there's so there's so much. I mean,
Speaker 1: the thirteen year old boy and me still likes the
Speaker 1: opening credits when she's floating around. But then there's the
Speaker 1: weird stuff with the dolls attacking and the ice. There's
Speaker 1: the queen with the horn coming out of her head,
Speaker 1: the leather peep bowl, the angel dude, the orgasm machine.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just NonStop. Yeah, I think it's the
Speaker 1: dolls with the razor sharp teeth that might be my favorite,
Speaker 1: but you're right, it's hard to pick. All right. Um.
Speaker 1: In the past, we have talked about something called the Panopticon,
Speaker 1: and we talked about how when it comes to data
Speaker 1: data tracking, UM, we have willingly handed ourselves over to
Speaker 1: the pan panopticon that that I in the corporate sky
Speaker 1: that tags every move we make on the Internet. That's right,
Speaker 1: I mean cookies signaling where we've been. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: you're logging into into Facebook to view various accounts, various
Speaker 1: news organizations, etcetera. So companies like Facebook ended up having
Speaker 1: this rather remarkable picture of who and what you are,
Speaker 1: just based on little individual bits about your interest. Because
Speaker 1: not only do they know, well, here she is interested
Speaker 1: in this, then they know well, if he or she
Speaker 1: is interested in this, and they likely line up with
Speaker 1: certain demographics surrounding that fan base. And it gets very analytical.
Speaker 1: But in a sense, Facebook ends up knowing you better
Speaker 1: than you know yourself. Yeah, and we'll get to some
Speaker 1: of those uh analytics and how robust they are and
Speaker 1: how they can predict what you're going to do and
Speaker 1: who you may be about. But first I wanted to
Speaker 1: share this tidbit from Slate magazine. It's an article by
Speaker 1: Ed Finn, and he says, these days, when a computer
Speaker 1: crunches the numbers and tells you this is who you are,
Speaker 1: it's hard to contradict because there's more data about you
Speaker 1: in the machine than there is in your head. Algorithms
Speaker 1: are most effective at curating the information that's hardest for
Speaker 1: us to hold in our heads. How long we talked
Speaker 1: to mom, or what day of the week we've splurge
Speaker 1: on an extra cookie? And I thought, yeah, that that
Speaker 1: is right. There's a kind of a data read out
Speaker 1: of yourself. It doesn't mean that's you necessarily, but it
Speaker 1: might give you a clearer picture of the ways that
Speaker 1: you behave at least the way that you're manifesting. I
Speaker 1: guess now. One of the most extreme examples of the
Speaker 1: predictive power of analytics, I think it is a Facebook example,
Speaker 1: and it's from a user name that who detailed on
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed how Facebook sorted out his sexual identity before anyone
Speaker 1: else did. Right he uh. He He ended up seeing
Speaker 1: an ad for for a for an article and it
Speaker 1: was about coming out as gay. Yes, it was like
Speaker 1: how to come out as gay or something to that effect, like,
Speaker 1: so you've decided to come out, and here are the
Speaker 1: events that led up to that. Because he was mortified
Speaker 1: by this, because he thought, what is going on is
Speaker 1: Facebook looking at my text messages on my iPhone? Because
Speaker 1: the night before he had received that advertisement, he had
Speaker 1: texted a friend for some advice on how to come
Speaker 1: out to his parents. Yeah, because if anyone's not aware,
Speaker 1: like this is still this is a huge deal in
Speaker 1: an individual's life when they when they come out, even
Speaker 1: just you know, partially to people in their surroundings about
Speaker 1: their sexual identity. Right, this is very sensitive information. And
Speaker 1: he wanted to try to get to the the end
Speaker 1: of this and figure out how Facebook has served him
Speaker 1: up such a an on target advertisement. Now it seems
Speaker 1: like it's probably just coincidence, but he went for to
Speaker 1: all of his activity on Facebook and everything that he
Speaker 1: had ever liked or identified with had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with being gay. And the only thing that might have
Speaker 1: given Facebook a clue is that he made a comment
Speaker 1: on a friend's link um and that the friends link
Speaker 1: was Ohio Senator Rob Portman announced his support for marriage equality,
Speaker 1: and his comment was just saying that nothing is cut
Speaker 1: and dried, that's all. And most likely those algorithms, again
Speaker 1: are pretty robust enough to have delivered him an advertisement
Speaker 1: about sexuality and coming out. So, I mean, for some people,
Speaker 1: obviously it's going to raise questions about you know why
Speaker 1: he had just texted the night before and then received
Speaker 1: the advertisement, but most likely again this just had to
Speaker 1: do on that that one comment that he made, because
Speaker 1: we're putting so much of ourselves out there into the
Speaker 1: cloud that you know, we're building this kind of reflection
Speaker 1: of who and what we are. Yeah, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a fabulous episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror that that
Speaker 1: that utilizes this, where an individual dies passes away, and
Speaker 1: that individual happen to be a heavy social media user
Speaker 1: and this takes place in a fictional near future. But
Speaker 1: after this happens, there's a service that allows uh that
Speaker 1: allows you to communicate with sort of a reassembly of
Speaker 1: that persona based on the information that they have placed online.
Speaker 1: So essentially using the aga the algorithmic understanding of a
Speaker 1: departed loved one to rebuild them in the digital world,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about before. I just wonder if you
Speaker 1: try to create your own image of yourself algorithmically how
Speaker 1: and then sort of communicate with that person or that
Speaker 1: being or that information, how close would that be to
Speaker 1: who you feel you actually are? Yeah, well, there it
Speaker 1: seems like you get into that whole issue about is
Speaker 1: there a single unified me? You know, because I'm different.
Speaker 1: I'm a different person inside, I'm a different person with
Speaker 1: different people. We have mentioned this before, but it probably
Speaker 1: bears mentioning again that web surfing habits may be able
Speaker 1: to predict depression. You now, this is a two and
Speaker 1: twelve study from Missouri University of Science and Technology. We're
Speaker 1: talking about depression screening questionnaire that was administered to two
Speaker 1: d and sixteen students. Thirty percent um were identified as
Speaker 1: having perhaps depression. And what they did is they gained
Speaker 1: access to that thirty percent of their internet usage, of
Speaker 1: course with their permission. And what they found is that
Speaker 1: depressed students tended to email an instant message more frequently,
Speaker 1: and we're more likely to download videos or songs and
Speaker 1: play more online games than those who weren't depressed. Of course,
Speaker 1: I kind of take issue with that because sometimes I
Speaker 1: think it's a matter of how much time you have
Speaker 1: on your hands, and we are talking about students. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true, and you know, it's also worth saying. And
Speaker 1: it's also which which comes first, right, is their situations
Speaker 1: where if one has a lot of free time on
Speaker 1: their hands, maybe they're a little more prone to depression,
Speaker 1: or maybe if something happens in one's life. That is,
Speaker 1: you know, that might lead to depression. It may also
Speaker 1: lead to a little more extra time, so you lose
Speaker 1: your job. So I mean it's hard to really to
Speaker 1: track it and pin it down to sus up. And
Speaker 1: then what do you make of people who are life bloggers? Right?
Speaker 1: People who are doing this on purpose. They're taking as
Speaker 1: much data as they can and trying to make a
Speaker 1: story of themselves about it intentionally, right, And we're talking
Speaker 1: about like people who produce annual reports of their activity
Speaker 1: as obsessively logged throughout the year, you know, which which
Speaker 1: again kind of comes back to that idea of people
Speaker 1: with photographic memories as as ultimately suffering from a severe
Speaker 1: self obsession. And that's where all of this comes from.
Speaker 1: This is a kind of the externalation of that using
Speaker 1: various uh, you know, either record keeping devices or outright
Speaker 1: social media devices to to just keep very precise records
Speaker 1: of what's going on and externalizing all of their memory. Well,
Speaker 1: and that's where this idea of the future of outsourcing
Speaker 1: memory comes into play, because if just even ten years ago,
Speaker 1: we weren't that dependent on our our smart devices, our smartphones,
Speaker 1: what is the next ten years gonna look like when
Speaker 1: you have something like Google glass amassing data in an
Speaker 1: intentional way, right, I mean we're talking about video, we're
Speaker 1: talking about photographs, um, and we're talking about uploading all
Speaker 1: of that to the cloud. Yeah, I mean because these
Speaker 1: photographs we take especially, I mean, they're they're they mean
Speaker 1: a lot to us. You know, we're taking pictures of
Speaker 1: our children, We're taking pictures of the places we go,
Speaker 1: and like some of these end up being like the
Speaker 1: last photographs of people before they die. You know, these
Speaker 1: are these are essential things. And then for that to
Speaker 1: to say suddenly vanished because you're you know, your phone
Speaker 1: was lost or your account was hacked, like that could
Speaker 1: be heartbreaking, right. So you know, you have things like Memoir,
Speaker 1: which is an app that will sink and store photos
Speaker 1: from your phone and your computer in the cloud, which
Speaker 1: makes sense, right because you have all this stuff, what
Speaker 1: do you do with it? And it organizes it all
Speaker 1: by date and then pulls in data. This is the
Speaker 1: interesting thing from social networks like Facebook, Instagram in four
Speaker 1: square to provide more social context. So the idea here
Speaker 1: that the co founder Lee Hoffman is trying to hone
Speaker 1: in on is that he can create they can create
Speaker 1: something like a memory, a real memory, because we know
Speaker 1: a memory isn't just like a one thing. We know
Speaker 1: it's connected to all sorts of stuff, probably things that
Speaker 1: we can't even you know, quantify quite yet, but we
Speaker 1: know that a memory has to do with smell and
Speaker 1: taste and what you see at the time and what
Speaker 1: you feel at the time is just pegged all these
Speaker 1: different associations. Yes, and it's and and you can forget it,
Speaker 1: and you can also you alter it every time you
Speaker 1: you look at it, and it can be flawed for
Speaker 1: a number of reasons. But what we're talking about here
Speaker 1: is there the recording of saying, you know, actual image
Speaker 1: of what happened, or an actual audio of what happened,
Speaker 1: or a GPS tag of exactly where you were at
Speaker 1: a given time. So memory in a sense becomes more
Speaker 1: more exact. And oddly enough this factors and do another
Speaker 1: episode of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, which
Speaker 1: came out in two thousand and eleven, UH and Black Mirror,
Speaker 1: by the way, excellent series, but only for our mature
Speaker 1: audience members out there, because it deals with some some
Speaker 1: some pretty dark, bleak UH subject matter, and this particular episode,
Speaker 1: the entire history of you. All of the individuals in it,
Speaker 1: at least those who can afford it, have this thing
Speaker 1: called a grain implanted. It's like a brain implant, and
Speaker 1: it basically takes anything they see is recorded, like all
Speaker 1: just the videotape of their entire life is seen through
Speaker 1: their eyes, is recorded and then can be recalled later,
Speaker 1: can be inspected, say at the airport before you board
Speaker 1: a plane, they want to see your you know, your
Speaker 1: flash through your last forty eight hours to make sure
Speaker 1: you're not up to any any mischief. And another like
Speaker 1: and basically the whole episode explores some of the various complications,
Speaker 1: uh and traumas that can occur when you have that
Speaker 1: kind of you call it, you're disposed. You know, that's
Speaker 1: really interesting because I was just thinking about this other
Speaker 1: device is called me Meadow, and it's a wearable camera
Speaker 1: and it takes um five megapixel pictures every thirty seconds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like that kind of thing. Yeah, in two thou
Speaker 1: eleven it was science fiction, near future science fiction, but
Speaker 1: now we're already seeing the stuff rollout. And then you
Speaker 1: have something called life Logger, which is actually another device
Speaker 1: that will document your life for you sort it, upload it,
Speaker 1: contextualize it. And I was thinking about this movie called
Speaker 1: Until the End of the World. I think it came
Speaker 1: out in the eighties but I can't remember. Um but
Speaker 1: in it. The reason I bring it up is because
Speaker 1: it's this post apocalyptic world and people have access to
Speaker 1: their memories just like a film on these devices which
Speaker 1: kind of looks like iPads now um or mini air iPads. Uh.
Speaker 1: But anyway, they become completely obsessed in hamstrung in their
Speaker 1: efforts to even kind of move forward in this life
Speaker 1: because they just keep going over this information of excessively
Speaker 1: of how their lives used to be. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it instantly brings to mind, you know, very very Buddhist
Speaker 1: ideas of of peace. You know about how if you
Speaker 1: if you were shackled to the past or shackle to
Speaker 1: the future, then you're not really experiencing any amount of freedom.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not living in the in the moment
Speaker 1: at all. And it's it's important that we forget things,
Speaker 1: you know. It's easy, it's easy to to discount that
Speaker 1: and you know say, oh, I wish I remember this,
Speaker 1: or I musha remembered that. And I was just thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking about photographs. So, like, imagine a
Speaker 1: time not too long ago where you had a loved
Speaker 1: one die and and you know, if you didn't have
Speaker 1: access to you know, paintings or drawings or whatever, you
Speaker 1: could easily forget that person's face in a matter of time.
Speaker 1: You know it would you would, or at least you
Speaker 1: would you reach that point where we would doubt your
Speaker 1: own memory of their face. And that's that's kind of
Speaker 1: powerful to think about. But on the other hand, we
Speaker 1: need to be able to forget things like painful memories
Speaker 1: need to dull over time, Like time doesn't heal all wounds,
Speaker 1: but it does feel some wounds, and we need those
Speaker 1: wounds to heal well. If you have a memory that's
Speaker 1: particularly special to you, the ability to dwell upon it
Speaker 1: and obsess on it, does it become trite? Then it
Speaker 1: becomes so well known and so well trod territory that
Speaker 1: it becomes kind of dull to you. Yeah, potentially. Yeah, alright.
Speaker 1: So the next thing we're gonna talk about before we
Speaker 1: wrap things up here about outsourcing memory is something called
Speaker 1: a neuroprosthesis, and I kind of want one of these.
Speaker 1: It's not available for humans yet, but I see advantages here.
Speaker 1: There's a team at wake Force University headed up by
Speaker 1: Sam dead Wilder and by the way, funded this research
Speaker 1: was funded by DARPA, and they created this neuropros thesis
Speaker 1: that promotes task specific neural firing. So what they're talking
Speaker 1: about is of course racist macaques, right, and which is
Speaker 1: a huge step by the way that they're using these
Speaker 1: primates as supposed to rats, which they're doing they've been
Speaker 1: doing for years, um. But they take an array of
Speaker 1: electrodes and they implant them into the hippocamp us of
Speaker 1: the monkeys and they're able to both record neural activity
Speaker 1: and stimulate it. And then using a mathematical model called
Speaker 1: MEMO m I m O, the researchers determined the pattern
Speaker 1: of activity that was seen when each animal correctly performed
Speaker 1: each type of trial, which is called a strong code,
Speaker 1: and then when they failed, which is called a weak code.
Speaker 1: Now that the end all being of this thing is
Speaker 1: that they were able to go in and manipulate the
Speaker 1: strong code when they were going back to do this
Speaker 1: specific task and then bolster the brain's memory the response
Speaker 1: of what to do next, that is the correct thing
Speaker 1: to do next. That is crazy, it's essentially an electronic
Speaker 1: brain enhancer. Yes, and doesn't that kind of I mean
Speaker 1: for certain tasks that seems like it might be kind
Speaker 1: of lovely, right, I mean of assuming you can turn
Speaker 1: it off, turn it on. But then some people might say, well,
Speaker 1: why would you ever turn it off? And and to
Speaker 1: what extent does it become like uh, you know, the
Speaker 1: the issue of say, at all prescriptions in in in school.
Speaker 1: You know, you might become addicted. Like you we were
Speaker 1: like I don't know how to think without this thing exactly,
Speaker 1: or I think I essentially they all look around you
Speaker 1: a bit about electronic brain enhancers. Eat, so they show
Speaker 1: somebody with that's addicted to electronic brain enhancers and they're
Speaker 1: just like sweating in a room and they have like
Speaker 1: several these little electroids attached to their their head. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but you get into issues like is it fair that
Speaker 1: some people have have have these things and some people don't,
Speaker 1: and then there are some people too dependent upon them. Uh,
Speaker 1: it gets our cybernetic future is is weird? Well, does
Speaker 1: that take away the sense of free will to write?
Speaker 1: Because narrative is something we shape and we decide how
Speaker 1: we're going to report the facts and and think about things,
Speaker 1: and if it's there, if there are a set of
Speaker 1: algorithms doing that for us, maybe then we don't really
Speaker 1: have the free will we think we have. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a good, good point. And another thing about
Speaker 1: algorithms to keep in mind too, To go back to
Speaker 1: transactive memory for a second. Transactive memory works, it works.
Speaker 1: Been using it for a while again, externalizing our memory
Speaker 1: and the people around us. And again we're treating the
Speaker 1: Internet the cloud more like a person than we're using
Speaker 1: transactive memory when we engage with the cloud. But transactive
Speaker 1: memory works best when you have a sense of how
Speaker 1: your partner's mind works, how your how the coworker's mind work,
Speaker 1: how your your mates mind works, etcetera. Um. With the Internet, though,
Speaker 1: who knows the mind of the internet. The the the
Speaker 1: Internet is not a person. It's this this vast uh
Speaker 1: sea of knowledge, and it's ruled over by algorithms, by
Speaker 1: media companies, by search terms and and what kind of
Speaker 1: results that they're gonna they're gonna get you. Uh you
Speaker 1: know again, what kind of what kind of mathematical equation
Speaker 1: is deciding what information you see? What information is hidden
Speaker 1: from you? So that's the quote unquote person that you're
Speaker 1: that you're externalizing your memory in. That's interesting to look
Speaker 1: at it as a partnership. And if you don't know
Speaker 1: what the other side of that is, then how can
Speaker 1: you really offshore that memory in a way that makes
Speaker 1: you feel like okay about it? Yeah? I mean I
Speaker 1: wouldn't go so far as to say that we are
Speaker 1: outsourcing our memory to this dark, unknowable god, but it's
Speaker 1: at least a gray, unknowable god. It's all part of
Speaker 1: the Panopticon. It is, I have to say it that
Speaker 1: way contractually, Okay. So it's an eye opening topic. Just
Speaker 1: researching it made me really think about some of the
Speaker 1: ways that I approach memory in my in my private life,
Speaker 1: in my my home life, even in in in my
Speaker 1: work life. Here, like, I can definitely see myself outsourcing
Speaker 1: some memory test to you. Hopefully not too many of them,
Speaker 1: but I know there are things. For instance, someone will
Speaker 1: ask me about an episode we've done and they'll be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you did that episode on such and such, and I'll
Speaker 1: say and I'll either say or think, well, I don't
Speaker 1: really recall that one all that much because I think
Speaker 1: that the part you're asking about was a portion of
Speaker 1: the podcast that Julie really had more of a handle on,
Speaker 1: so like, on some level, I was saying, I don't
Speaker 1: need to know that, because Julie is going to know that,
Speaker 1: and vice versa, and I think it just kind of
Speaker 1: brings home this idea that no man is an island
Speaker 1: and to himself right right, as romantic as that idea is,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially if you know, if you're a writer,
Speaker 1: you're an artist, or you're a you know, a scientist
Speaker 1: working on your own in the dark. We like to
Speaker 1: think that where this there were this brain, this single
Speaker 1: brain in the universe. But it's not that simple. We're
Speaker 1: a brain in a body, and that brain that that
Speaker 1: embodied brain is sharing a communal space with other embodied brains,
Speaker 1: that's right. Or one big oozy organism, one big slime
Speaker 1: mold trying to make its way through the maze of life.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a good movie, which yeah, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it. I'm sure everyone has some
Speaker 1: interesting feedback on this particular topic, and we would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you about it. Is how how do
Speaker 1: you fear that feel that your memory has changed over
Speaker 1: the course of the past a few decades, if you're
Speaker 1: old enough to actually, um, you know, have have you
Speaker 1: risen up on this this tide of internet and got
Speaker 1: to experience it and then many of you were born
Speaker 1: straight into it and maybe you have some feedback on
Speaker 1: it as well. What do you think about this outsourcing
Speaker 1: of memory and how do you think it's going to
Speaker 1: affect us in the future. You can find us a
Speaker 1: number of different ways, of course, as usual, just go
Speaker 1: to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
Speaker 1: our home base, that's the mothership. You'll find all the
Speaker 1: podcast episodes there, the blog post, the videos, as well
Speaker 1: as links out to our social media accounts like Twitter,
Speaker 1: Facebook and Tumbler. And if you want to watch the
Speaker 1: video specifically and you want to just be really focused
Speaker 1: on that aspect of what we do, go to YouTube,
Speaker 1: go to mind Stuff Show, hit that follow button and
Speaker 1: then you'll be able to be right there on top
Speaker 1: of everything. Let's put out Yeah, that mind Stuff show.
Speaker 1: It shows us talking like in our human forms, and uh,
Speaker 1: sometimes we we talk about the topics that we already cover,
Speaker 1: and sometimes we go a little bit off script and
Speaker 1: go into other bits of stuff. So yeah, and if
Speaker 1: you've you've checked out the YouTube in the past and
Speaker 1: you're like, I don't like what they're doing, etcetera. Check
Speaker 1: it out in the future, because we have a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of new ideas that are coming out. We've been
Speaker 1: we've been learning how this video thing works as we go,
Speaker 1: and I think we have some truly exciting content and
Speaker 1: we have a lot of fully closed naked man that
Speaker 1: we're featuring. Okay, yeah, good good. You can always finish
Speaker 1: your thought by emailing us that blow the mind at
Speaker 1: Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
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