Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with Part
Speaker 3: three of our series on the physical property of stickiness.
Speaker 3: Maybe you didn't know we were going to do a
Speaker 3: part three, Maybe we didn't know we were going to
Speaker 3: do a part three, but here we are back to
Speaker 3: finish it out today.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: In Part one of this series, we talked about starches
Speaker 3: and sticky foods, most notably sticky rice aka sweet rice
Speaker 3: aka glutinous rice, a wonderful food stuff that has a
Speaker 3: lot of interesting chemical properties. And this sort of came
Speaker 3: up in the context of my inspiration for this series,
Speaker 3: which was, you know, my young child is eating fruits
Speaker 3: and fruit based foods and those tend to like leave
Speaker 3: mysterious sticky patches all over the house. Now, but so
Speaker 3: we did that in part one. In Part two, we
Speaker 3: talked about the unbelievably sticky feet of geckos, and we
Speaker 3: also talked about a chapter in a book I've been
Speaker 3: reading called Sticky, The Secret Science of Surfaces by Lori Winkless,
Speaker 3: which is out just this year. And this chapter talked
Speaker 3: about different ways that adhesive materials actually stick to one another.
Speaker 3: Seems like it is much more complicated and less well
Speaker 3: understood than you might guess.
Speaker 2: That's right. The one of the realities we keep coming
Speaker 2: up against in this series is that, yeah, the word
Speaker 2: sticky covers a lot of ground, and so you know,
Speaker 2: if you can't just narrow it down and say, oh, look,
Speaker 2: this is sticky and this is something else, like what
Speaker 2: kind of sticky? What flavor of sticky are you talking about?
Speaker 2: It's a very general turn.
Speaker 3: And as we come back to explore the topic for
Speaker 3: one more episode, I'm going to take us in a
Speaker 3: much less physical and more metaphorical direction because I got
Speaker 3: very interested in the idea of sticky mental content. What
Speaker 3: makes a memory or an idea stick in the mind.
Speaker 3: And of course this is a question that could be
Speaker 3: looked at a ton of different ways. I just isolated
Speaker 3: one facet of this issue because it was so interesting
Speaker 3: to me. What I want to talk about is something
Speaker 3: known as flash bulb memories. Rob, I wonder if you
Speaker 3: have similar experiences to this. I remember, when I was
Speaker 3: young hearing my parents and friends of theirs. People in
Speaker 3: my parents' age. You know, they'd be talking at a
Speaker 3: party or get together or something, and I remember them
Speaker 3: saying almost this exact sentence. I remember exactly where I
Speaker 3: was when I heard about the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I remember hearing the sort of thing growing up,
Speaker 2: and then of course post nine to eleven there were
Speaker 2: all new versions of this. Everyone not everyone, but a
Speaker 2: lot of people had a similar take. I remember exactly
Speaker 2: where I was, what I was wearing, what breakfast cereal,
Speaker 2: the ceial I was eating when this occurred.
Speaker 3: Right, exactly right. So in these types of memories, you
Speaker 3: find out about some public event that has happened, and
Speaker 3: you seem to have a memory of that moment of
Speaker 3: finding out that is just rich with incredible, vivid detail,
Speaker 3: and you have extreme confidence about the accuracy of those details.
Speaker 3: I remember my parents saying this about the Kennedy assassination,
Speaker 3: or people my parents were talking to. People our age,
Speaker 3: like you say, might have similar memories about the nine
Speaker 3: to eleven attacks. And if you're one of these people
Speaker 3: and you have a memory of this kind, you can
Speaker 3: almost like go back to that moment bodily right now.
Speaker 3: You remember exactly where you were, who you were with,
Speaker 3: how you heard about it and so forth. I actually
Speaker 3: do have a very clear and strong memory of finding
Speaker 3: out about the nine to eleven attacks in high school.
Speaker 3: I remember we were gathering for some kind of morning
Speaker 3: school assembly and I saw a friend of mine and
Speaker 3: I sat down next to him, and he mentioned that
Speaker 3: he had heard something. I think he think he said
Speaker 3: on the radio or something, but he said mentioned he
Speaker 3: had heard something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.
Speaker 3: And I have no way of knowing now if this
Speaker 3: memory is actually accurate, but it feels extremely accurate. It
Speaker 3: has stuck in my mind like glue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I have similar memories. But I also
Speaker 2: feel like we've covered the we've covered false memories enough
Speaker 2: on the show before, and we've discussed this exact scenario
Speaker 2: regarding these these memories that we think we can trust,
Speaker 2: but ultimately, upon close scrutiny, you know, the details fall apart.
Speaker 2: Like that's enough to where I really I probably distrust
Speaker 2: these memories more compared to other memories, just because I
Speaker 2: know the sort of thing that goes on with them, right,
Speaker 2: So I'm yeah, so I'm hesitant to really even state
Speaker 2: that I was wearing this or I was with so
Speaker 2: and so, and I even even even more recent examples
Speaker 2: of this sort of thing, like I remember where I
Speaker 2: was when I heard about the last presidential election results,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. But when I pause to think
Speaker 2: about it for more than a moment and ask myself, well,
Speaker 2: do you really can you really name all the people
Speaker 2: that were there? Do you remember exactly where you were
Speaker 2: when you were finishing up this kayak excursion and then
Speaker 2: you somebody checked their phone and found the news. No,
Speaker 2: I'm not that confident in the memory.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I guess the irony is that, given how
Speaker 3: much we read about memory research and how much we've
Speaker 3: been primed by all of these studies finding you know,
Speaker 3: the illusory confidence people have in things. Yeah, maybe maybe
Speaker 3: the fact that it feels so so sticky in my
Speaker 3: brain makes me actually more suspicious of it. But people
Speaker 3: in general, I think, are mostly not suspicious of memories
Speaker 3: like this. People in general think, well, yeah, maybe memory
Speaker 3: is inaccurate sometimes. But one I'm absolutely certain about is
Speaker 3: I remember hearing about the Kennedy assassination, or you know,
Speaker 3: decades and decades later, or I remember where I was
Speaker 3: when I heard about nine to eleven. That is like
Speaker 3: the highest quality memory in my brain. And yet, given
Speaker 3: neither of these historical examples, you know, nine to eleven
Speaker 3: or the Kennedy assassination, do we usually have vivid, elaborate
Speaker 3: memories about other events the same week? You know, if
Speaker 3: you ask somebody who strongly remembers exactly how they heard
Speaker 3: about the Kennedy assassination, they don't have detailed memories of
Speaker 3: what they had for lunch the day before or what
Speaker 3: they did after school the day after. So what causes
Speaker 3: the details of a specific memory to become sticky in
Speaker 3: this way where it stays in your mind for, you know,
Speaker 3: sixty years later and still feels like it's in such
Speaker 3: incredibly vivid detail, like you know that you're remembering it
Speaker 3: exactly right. And why do these memories seem so accurate
Speaker 3: compared to our forgetfulness of other memories from around the
Speaker 3: same time in our lives. And why do these kinds
Speaker 3: of intense, detailed snapshot memories tend to be associated. Of course,
Speaker 3: we have similarly intense memories about other types of things,
Speaker 3: But why is a category for these intense vivid memories
Speaker 3: learning about a big, momentous public event, often a public tragedy.
Speaker 3: Another often cited example is the Challenger explosion, and it
Speaker 3: turns out psychologists have actually studied this phenomenon and have
Speaker 3: looked into these questions. They have firmer answers to some
Speaker 3: of these questions than other ones. These types of memories
Speaker 3: have a special name. They're called flash bulb memories. So
Speaker 3: I think the idea behind the name is it's kind
Speaker 3: of like there is a flash photograph taken in a
Speaker 3: darkened room, so everything around it is dark and obscure,
Speaker 3: but the flash goes off and a picture of a
Speaker 3: particular moment is captured and then frozen in memory, perhaps
Speaker 3: for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: In fact, I think if we could ask JJ to
Speaker 2: do this, JJ, can you hit us with just the
Speaker 2: sound effect of a flash bulb, because many of you
Speaker 2: haven't heard it in real life life at this point
Speaker 2: or happened in a long time, but you've probably heard
Speaker 2: it in movies, often with kind of a freeze framed
Speaker 2: black and white effect, which does kind of get to
Speaker 2: the heart of it, like the idea that here is
Speaker 2: something has occurred and it is just you know, flash
Speaker 2: bulb sound effect. It is it is set in your
Speaker 2: mind and it will never change. This is a pristine
Speaker 2: memory of what is occurring.
Speaker 3: Okay, so time to mention a source. I've been reading
Speaker 3: a paper collecting and summarizing the research on flashbulb memories.
Speaker 3: This paper is called flashbulb Memories, published in Current Directions
Speaker 3: in Psychological Science in the year twenty sixteen, and this
Speaker 3: is by William Hurst and Elizabeth A. Phelps. So this
Speaker 3: is trying to look at all of the research that
Speaker 3: had been done up till that point and see what
Speaker 3: conclusions could be drawn. So the term flashbulb memories traces
Speaker 3: back to a pair of researchers named Roger Brown and
Speaker 3: James Koolick who studied the phenomenon and published important research
Speaker 3: on it in the year nineteen seventy seven. So to
Speaker 3: briefly separate out, just so there's no confusion what flash
Speaker 3: bold memories are and what they are not. Flash bold
Speaker 3: memories are memories of the circumstances in which one learned
Speaker 3: about a public event. So it's when you found out
Speaker 3: about a public event, and this differentiates it from first
Speaker 3: hand memories, like the kind of memory where you remember
Speaker 3: an event that happened to you personally, something you were
Speaker 3: there for, rather than something that you heard about or
Speaker 3: read about. So flash bold memories are kind of interesting
Speaker 3: that they straddle two different kinds of memory at the
Speaker 3: same time. In one sense, they are autobiographical because they're
Speaker 3: directly asking you to remember things about where you were
Speaker 3: and who you were with and what happened to you
Speaker 3: and what you felt. But they concern that that situation
Speaker 3: that you're remembering in your own life is elicited by
Speaker 3: a public event. It's not something that happened directly to you,
Speaker 3: but a moment of gaining in information, of learning about
Speaker 3: something that happened to other people. Another distinction is because
Speaker 3: their autobiographical flashbuld memories are different from what are called
Speaker 3: event memories in the literature. That name can be a
Speaker 3: little confusing because it's like, if you have a memory
Speaker 3: of an event in your life that sounds like that
Speaker 3: would be an event memory, but what this refers to
Speaker 3: is information about the public event itself. So you might
Speaker 3: have your flashbuld memory of finding out about the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 3: That's where you were, how you heard about it, all
Speaker 3: that stuff. But then also there would be public event memories,
Speaker 3: which would be things like the date that had happened,
Speaker 3: what time of day, the city it took place in,
Speaker 3: what type of car Kennedy was riding, in the name
Speaker 3: of the alleged assassin, and so forth. This is like
Speaker 3: information about the eliciting event. That's also a different kind
Speaker 3: of memory. So the flash bold memory is an autobiographical
Speaker 3: memory about yourself in the circumstance of learning about this
Speaker 3: important public event. And examples of events that have been
Speaker 3: studied for creating slash bold memories include assassinations and other
Speaker 3: politically charged public events. Also things with a more positive connotation.
Speaker 3: The paper cited, like relevant World Cup victories like if
Speaker 3: your country wins the World Cup, also events like the
Speaker 3: fall of the Berlin Wall, and also natural disasters like
Speaker 3: major earthquakes.
Speaker 2: Okay, but at least some positive things thrun in the mix.
Speaker 3: A lot more negative things than positive things have been studied,
Speaker 3: and I want to talk about that later because that
Speaker 3: may be interesting. I wonder if there are differences in
Speaker 3: how those things are recorded. I guess the news that's
Speaker 3: worth reporting is more often bad than good, right right.
Speaker 3: So Brown and Kolick, the two researchers who did this
Speaker 3: important early work on flash bold memories, argued that even
Speaker 3: though these public events don't happen to us personally. They
Speaker 3: involve so much emotion that the brain records them kind
Speaker 3: of as if they did happen to us personally in
Speaker 3: the moment that we find out about them. So we
Speaker 3: have these unusual levels of accurate and exquisite detail. So
Speaker 3: ultimately they sort of said, these memories seem to be
Speaker 3: reliable and unchanging, like a photograph. In fact, the words
Speaker 3: they use, which are quoted in this review paper, they
Speaker 3: say these memories were quote unchanging as the slumbering rhine gold.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, that's nice. You know, it is interesting the
Speaker 2: idea that even though it doesn't happen to you directly,
Speaker 2: like through our media absorption, we do a lot of
Speaker 2: living vicariously through people in the media, celebrities and the
Speaker 2: public eye and so forth. And then I also wonder
Speaker 2: too you think about how we've evolved as a species
Speaker 2: and the sort of groups we are supposed to occupy,
Speaker 2: and the sort of information about said groups who would
Speaker 2: have like we didn't we didn't evolve to live in
Speaker 2: a continental or global society in which you could have
Speaker 2: something catastrophic occur that did not directly or potentially directly affect.
Speaker 3: You, right, I mean yeah, So I almost think there
Speaker 3: is maybe a mental switch that has to be flipped
Speaker 3: where we can like ignore most of the news we
Speaker 3: encounter as being like, well, that doesn't directly affect me.
Speaker 3: But for some reason, there's an emotional switch that you
Speaker 3: can flip where even if it doesn't directly affect your life,
Speaker 3: it's hit that emotion and now it feels like it
Speaker 3: does It feels like it happened. You know, something that
Speaker 3: happened to the president of the United States feels like
Speaker 3: it happened to the leader of your ten person band.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess there are a lot of moving
Speaker 2: parts here because you can also you know, draw in
Speaker 2: things like social norms and our you know, intense need
Speaker 2: to fit in socially with our given survival group and
Speaker 2: so forth.
Speaker 3: Right, maybe we can come back and speculate more on
Speaker 3: this when we finish with what the research has found.
Speaker 3: So what we have brown and cool, Like they say,
Speaker 3: these memories, they are as unchanging as the slumbering rine goal.
Speaker 3: Do you just remember what happened in that moment and
Speaker 3: it never changes the rest of your life. It is
Speaker 3: like the treasure the under the river, is that under
Speaker 3: the water being guarded by the Rhyine Maidens.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, the three Rhine Maidens.
Speaker 3: But the authors of this review paper point out that
Speaker 3: Brown and Kulick didn't actually have information that would justify
Speaker 3: the claim that flash bold memories were unchanging as the
Speaker 3: Rhine gold because they had nothing to compare their subject's
Speaker 3: accounts too. Essentially, people would be prompted to recall a
Speaker 3: flash bold memory like do you have a memory of this,
Speaker 3: and then people would say, just like we've heard before, yes,
Speaker 3: I remember exactly where I was. This is how I
Speaker 3: found out, Here's what happened. Here are all the details. Now,
Speaker 3: in light of other findings in psychology that people can
Speaker 3: have the strong genuine impression of remembering things in ways
Speaker 3: that you can prove objectively are inaccurate, some researchers started
Speaker 3: to doubt whether these flash bold memories were actually as
Speaker 3: accurate as Brown and Kulick suggested and as act as
Speaker 3: people generally feel that they are in their own lives.
Speaker 3: But this would be a difficult thing to test, right, Like,
Speaker 3: what can you do? You can't follow people around twenty
Speaker 3: four to seven with a video camera and just wait
Speaker 3: for them to hear about a major public event and
Speaker 3: then test them on it later and compare it to
Speaker 3: the videotape that's obviously not feasible. So while testing the
Speaker 3: true accuracy of flash Bold memories to the direct events themselves,
Speaker 3: the moment people find out about these things, that would
Speaker 3: be extremely difficult. But researchers did come up with what
Speaker 3: I think is a very clever proxy, and it's very simple.
Speaker 3: Instead of testing accuracy, they would test consistency, and so
Speaker 3: this would work on the test retest method. So it
Speaker 3: works like this, as soon as possible after a major
Speaker 3: public event, the same day, if possible, or the very
Speaker 3: next day, you give people a questionnaire asking them to
Speaker 3: narrate how they found out and answer a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of autobiographical questions about that moment. You know, where were you,
Speaker 3: how did you hear about it, who was with you,
Speaker 3: and so forth, And then you just hold on to
Speaker 3: their answers to that questionnaire, and then after a delay,
Speaker 3: you give subsets of that initial sample group at different
Speaker 3: periods exactly the same questionnaire. So maybe a few days
Speaker 3: later some people will get it, maybe a few weeks later,
Speaker 3: a few months, even years down the road, and you
Speaker 3: simply compare their answers to the later questionnaire to what
Speaker 3: they said immediately after the event. So what do studies
Speaker 3: of this sort reveal. Well, the results are a little
Speaker 3: bit mixed. There were a few reports supporting some broad
Speaker 3: levels of consistency after delays, but the majority of these
Speaker 3: studies have found substantial changes to flash Bold memories over time,
Speaker 3: and for the most part, we have no idea that
Speaker 3: these changes are happening In our own brains. We remember
Speaker 3: the flash Bold moment one way a year later, and
Speaker 3: it feels intensely vivid, inaccurate, and we are sure this
Speaker 3: is exactly how it happened. We could not be wrong,
Speaker 3: but it's not what we said happened the same day
Speaker 3: or the day after. Now, I guess you could say
Speaker 3: it's possible that the first questionnaire is wrong, that the
Speaker 3: initial reports from right around the time of the event
Speaker 3: are not accurate. But if there are differences between what
Speaker 3: you remember the same day or the day after and
Speaker 3: what you remember a year later, is it likely that
Speaker 3: the memory from a year later is the more accurate one.
Speaker 3: I would tend to think no. And so while consistency
Speaker 3: is different from accuracy, I think it's a decent proxy
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, of course, This also brings me back to
Speaker 2: other memory of related topics we've discussed in terms of
Speaker 2: retrieval errors and the idea that every time you retrieve
Speaker 2: a memory, it is susceptible to change. So frequently retrieved memories,
Speaker 2: or the memories we retrieve the most, are also the
Speaker 2: ones that have been augmented the most. And I can
Speaker 2: imagine you have a synay, it's like, what is causing
Speaker 2: you to retrieve said memory, and the necessity of the
Speaker 2: retrieval then alters the surface of the memory retrieved.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, yeah, I think that may well play
Speaker 3: a role in what's going on here, because there are
Speaker 3: patterns of how we treat different types of autobiographical memories,
Speaker 3: and these flashbulb moments are things that may well be
Speaker 3: sort of unusually rehearsed compared to other day to day memories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And then think, for instance, they can be
Speaker 2: potentially altered by someone else retrieving said memory, someone else
Speaker 2: telling you where they were when such and such happen,
Speaker 2: And then you retrieve your story. But maybe it's a
Speaker 2: little bit different this time. Maybe it's a little more
Speaker 2: like the one you just heard, or it's sort of
Speaker 2: almost intentionally different in some regards compared to the one
Speaker 2: you just heard. There's so many ways you could slice it.
Speaker 3: Despite the fact that I think Brown and Kolick we're
Speaker 3: wrong about these memories being accurate and unchanging, or at
Speaker 3: least being wrong about them being unchanging, they did discover
Speaker 3: something important, which was that these memories are sticky in
Speaker 3: one sense. The research reveals the memories are sticky, but
Speaker 3: they're not sticky in the way that we think they are.
Speaker 3: They're sticky in the sense that they do stick in
Speaker 3: the memory, and we recall them later with great ease
Speaker 3: of retrieval and confidence in their details, and great depth
Speaker 3: of feeling about our ability to relive the moment. But
Speaker 3: they're not actually sticky in the sense of preserving the
Speaker 3: details of what happened on that day unchanged, at least
Speaker 3: not as well as it feels like they do. In
Speaker 3: the words of the authors of this review paper, Hurston
Speaker 3: Phelps quote Brown and Kulick, and researchers employing the test
Speaker 3: retest method are discussing two different claims about forgetting. Brown
Speaker 3: and Kulick treated forgetting as a failure to have a memory.
Speaker 3: You know, somebody's saying I can't remember anything whereas those
Speaker 3: employing a test retest methodology treat forgetting as a failure
Speaker 3: to remember the past consistently. When Brown and Kolik stated
Speaker 3: that there is no forgetting, they are right in the
Speaker 3: sense that most members of the public report having a
Speaker 3: memory even after ten years. That's not true about a
Speaker 3: whole lot that goes on in our lives. But then
Speaker 3: the authors go on as the test retest work indicates
Speaker 3: the memory may not be consistent, but it is long lasting.
Speaker 3: I think that's a really interesting distinction they're making.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there is something about the memory that is lasting,
Speaker 2: which raises the question why does it last? Why does
Speaker 2: it remain stuck to the fridge of memory even if
Speaker 2: the details of the node or the drawing or whatever
Speaker 2: have changed even substantially.
Speaker 3: I think that's a great question. So one thing I
Speaker 3: was fascinated by was details about how the memories change,
Speaker 3: like what actually changes about them. A few interesting observations
Speaker 3: they mentioned. One is that there is a type of
Speaker 3: consistency that emerges in how we remember these memories, but
Speaker 3: it's not consistency to the day to like the original event.
Speaker 3: The way they put it is, once a consistency emerges
Speaker 3: in our memory of a flash bulb event, it tends
Speaker 3: to stick. So I'm just making up this example. But
Speaker 3: for illustration, let's say you answer a questionnaire on the
Speaker 3: day of the event saying that you heard about the
Speaker 3: event because you were up in the morning by yourself
Speaker 3: making coffee and you heard about it on the radio
Speaker 3: in the kitchen, and you can give all these details
Speaker 3: about that. And then you do the same questionnaire a
Speaker 3: couple of months later, or even a few weeks later,
Speaker 3: and you say, you heard about it when you were
Speaker 3: stuck in traffic with your carpool group on the freeway
Speaker 3: on the way to work, and you heard about it
Speaker 3: on the radio. What the research tends to find is
Speaker 3: people will tend to pretty consistently reproduce the second story.
Speaker 3: So you ask them again years on and they will
Speaker 3: tell the same story they told in the later questionnaire,
Speaker 3: So that one tends to stick as if it were
Speaker 3: the original one, and people think it's the original one.
Speaker 3: But for some reason, there's this change that occurs early on,
Speaker 3: within the first year after the event. So it's kind
Speaker 3: of like there is a stickiness quality and a consistency equality.
Speaker 3: But what sticks is not the memory of the event itself,
Speaker 3: but the way it emerges as a narrative in your
Speaker 3: brain typically it's sort of fine. They say that it
Speaker 3: finds this form within the first year after the event,
Speaker 3: and once it finds that changed form in the brain.
Speaker 3: Of course, to be fair, I want to make sure
Speaker 3: I'm saying it doesn't always change. It just does in
Speaker 3: a whole lot of cases. Once it finds that changed form,
Speaker 3: it tends to change a lot less after that. So
Speaker 3: it's the inaccurate or inconsistent story that we start telling
Speaker 3: about how we remember the about how we remember the event,
Speaker 3: that we keep remembering for years on after that fascinating.
Speaker 3: Another interesting thing the author has mentioned here is that
Speaker 3: the inconsistent details that emerge in later questionnaires about these
Speaker 3: flashbulb events are not always like just you know, fabricated
Speaker 3: details from out of nowhere. One common thing that happens
Speaker 3: is what they call time slice confusions, and this is
Speaker 3: essentially the tendency to remember a second or third time
Speaker 3: you found out about an event as the original time.
Speaker 3: So maybe you hear about the event on the radio,
Speaker 3: and then you say in this original questionnaire that later
Speaker 3: the same day you had a conversation with a friend
Speaker 3: about the event a few weeks down the road, you
Speaker 3: might remember the conversation with the friend as how you
Speaker 3: found out about the event.
Speaker 2: That's interesting, again, a lot of moving parts there, right,
Speaker 2: because the first version in theory here is just like
Speaker 2: a solo discovery of the event of the same second
Speaker 2: one is like a social interaction and you know, conceivably
Speaker 2: a discussion about the event with social ramifications. And then
Speaker 2: you're coming back and remembering that. You know, what does
Speaker 2: that mean? Is it? How much of it is like
Speaker 2: the power of narrative, like we were talking about, You've
Speaker 2: given it narrative form, You've given it more life and stickiness.
Speaker 2: Or is social interaction is that something that gives it
Speaker 2: more stickiness, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it also strikes me as though that was just
Speaker 3: a possible example I brought up. I mean, it strikes
Speaker 3: me that generally combining multiple finding out about something events
Speaker 3: into a single event is the same kind of It's
Speaker 3: the same kind of work like you might do when
Speaker 3: you're revising a story you've written to like condense things
Speaker 3: and to like make it punchier.
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, Like, I mean, it even applies I
Speaker 2: think to really unimportant things. I mean, you know subjectively,
Speaker 2: you know things about like where did you discover a
Speaker 2: particular artist? You know, where did you first hear a
Speaker 2: particular song? Like, you know, the less interesting version is like,
Speaker 2: oh I heard it a few times and I didn't
Speaker 2: like it or didn't notice it, and then finally one
Speaker 2: day I just suddenly it sounded good. No, No, you
Speaker 2: want like a more pure discovery story if you want
Speaker 2: to impress people, It's like, well, I was driving along
Speaker 2: this deserted stretch of road and this song started playing
Speaker 2: and it was like unlike, it was unlike anything I'd
Speaker 2: ever heard before.
Speaker 3: I bet this happens a lot, and this wouldn't be
Speaker 3: a flashbold memory, but I bet this same kind of
Speaker 3: streamlining of memories happens a lot in how people remember
Speaker 3: meeting like their partner significant other, because I think a
Speaker 3: lot of times people might be kind of in the
Speaker 3: social orbit of somebody and like meet them a few
Speaker 3: times and it just doesn't really make any impression, and
Speaker 3: then they have a moment where they're like, oh, here's
Speaker 3: the first time we really like talked and got to
Speaker 3: know each other, and they remember that as their first
Speaker 3: meeting when it was not. Actually it was just that
Speaker 3: these other earlier meetings are just not very interesting and
Speaker 3: nothing happened, so you don't actually remember you met them.
Speaker 2: Then, yeah, because sometimes it happens like that in the movies,
Speaker 2: but more often than not it doesn't. More often than not,
Speaker 2: you have that big dramatic moment, you know, that that
Speaker 2: sappy moment of eyes meeting across the room and the
Speaker 2: music kicks in, and on some level, yeah, you want
Speaker 2: to retell your story in a way that fits the myth,
Speaker 2: that fits the you know, the ideal version that has
Speaker 2: presented you to you in popular narratives.
Speaker 3: So, coming back to this paper, studies have tried to
Speaker 3: figure out what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for
Speaker 3: the formation of flash bulb memories, when and under what
Speaker 3: conditions are they formed, But the goal of finding these
Speaker 3: conditions has been it's proven elusive, like it's hard to
Speaker 3: identify features common to all flash bulb type memories. So
Speaker 3: the researchers have asked questions like, is the event being
Speaker 3: consequential to a person's life necessary or sufficient to call
Speaker 3: us a flash bold memory? The answer seems to be no.
Speaker 3: We create flash bold memories for things that don't personally
Speaker 3: affect us. Of course, we do also for things that
Speaker 3: do but they don't have to affect us personally. Sometimes
Speaker 3: things that really have no tangible impact on our lives
Speaker 3: will make one of these type memories. Also, there are
Speaker 3: lots of things that have major direct impacts on our
Speaker 3: lives and they don't elicit flash bold memories when we
Speaker 3: find out about them, so it seems to be neither
Speaker 3: necessary nor sufficient for it to have impact on us personally.
Speaker 2: Plus, the impact is subjective, right, because I can think
Speaker 2: of plenty of examples where a celebrity has passed and
Speaker 2: you'll see or know people, or perhaps you are the
Speaker 2: person who has like a real significant reaction to it,
Speaker 2: And sometimes it's because it lines up with something else
Speaker 2: in your personal life, or it's just you know, you're
Speaker 2: a huge fan and all that's fair, but you know,
Speaker 2: it's a different animal than perhaps hearing about this other
Speaker 2: celebrity that the same week that you don't have the
Speaker 2: connection with, or they don't remind you of your dad
Speaker 2: or your mom or your grandfather or something.
Speaker 3: Right, And unsurprisingly, there's at least some research finding that
Speaker 3: people are more likely to report high confidence in the
Speaker 3: accuracy of their flash bold memories if the central figure
Speaker 3: in the public event is someone they feel a social
Speaker 3: bond with. And that comes around to another factor influencing
Speaker 3: the formation of these memories that the researchers bring up,
Speaker 3: and that's the concept of social identity. It seems like
Speaker 3: flash bold memories, even though they relate to finding out
Speaker 3: about public rather than personal events, are more likely to
Speaker 3: be things that somehow kind of form the story of yourself.
Speaker 3: So to read a passage from Hurst and Phelps here
Speaker 3: quote they play this role in part because they mark
Speaker 3: those instances during which people feel that they are part
Speaker 3: of the history of their social group. In nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 3: wrote and here they're quoting this other researcher. One quote
Speaker 3: recalls an occasion where two narratives that we ordinarily keep separate,
Speaker 3: the course of history and the course of our lives,
Speaker 3: were momentarily put into alignment. Details are linked between our
Speaker 3: own history and history capital h flashball memories are the
Speaker 3: places we line up our lives with the source of
Speaker 3: history itself, and say, I was there, I thought that
Speaker 3: was really interesting. Yeah, yeah, about the intersection of the
Speaker 3: two lines. So, yeah, we tell the story of ourselves.
Speaker 3: But sometimes there's just like the moment that connects with
Speaker 3: the event that everybody else remembers, with something that was
Speaker 3: known and experienced by everyone, almost kind of like the
Speaker 3: forest gump syndrome, you know it just keep you're intersecting
Speaker 3: with known public events in history, and for some reason
Speaker 3: we form these feelings were remembering these events very strongly,
Speaker 3: and they stick with us throughout our lives.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 3: Fascinating, And the authors point out interesting findings that the
Speaker 3: common feelings of a social group about a historical event
Speaker 3: may affect and alter how members of that group remember
Speaker 3: the autobiographical details of learning of that event themselves. For example,
Speaker 3: the authors cite one study that this is the kind
Speaker 3: of finding that it's like almost too perfect, So I
Speaker 3: wouldn't want to hang too much on this study. In
Speaker 3: less similar findings were replicated all over the place, but
Speaker 3: in isolation. It is interesting. So the researchers were Berntson
Speaker 3: and Thompson in two thousand and five, and they studied
Speaker 3: elderly Danes who had something like flash bolt memories of
Speaker 3: when they learned about the German invasion of Denmark, the
Speaker 3: Nazi invasion of their country in World War Two, and
Speaker 3: when they learned about the German withdrawal from their country.
Speaker 3: In these autobiographical memories related to these public events, the
Speaker 3: Danes were more likely to remember the weather as being
Speaker 3: worse than it was on the day they found out
Speaker 3: about the invasion, and to remember the weather as being
Speaker 3: better than it actually was on the day of the withdrawal.
Speaker 3: So like these autobiographical memories are being influenced by like
Speaker 3: you know, sort of like feelings as part of a
Speaker 3: social group about the moral valence or the positive or
Speaker 3: negative valance of what's happening in the news. Finally, another
Speaker 3: feature of these these sticky memories can be illustrated in
Speaker 3: the title of a paper from two thousand and three
Speaker 3: by Jennifer M. Talerico and David C. Rubin, and that
Speaker 3: title is confidence, not consistency, characterizes flash bold memories. This
Speaker 3: was in psychological science again this the year two thousand
Speaker 3: and three. Hurston Phelps write, quote One agreed upon difference
Speaker 3: between flash bold memories and everyday autobiographical memories, even those
Speaker 3: that are raed as important, is that confidence in flash
Speaker 3: bold memories remains high even when consistency declines, whereas confidence
Speaker 3: in every day autobiographical memories declines along with consistency, So
Speaker 3: does that make sense? Like the memories for regular events,
Speaker 3: they decline in consistency, you know, trying to remember what
Speaker 3: you had for lunch or what you talked about at
Speaker 3: work or whatever, that declines in consistency of recall. Over time,
Speaker 3: we remember them differently. But also for those regular events,
Speaker 3: we lose confidence in how accurate those memories are. So ironically,
Speaker 3: for normal memories, we're sort of accurately assessing that our
Speaker 3: fading memories might be wrong. Whereas with these incredibly sticky,
Speaker 3: flash bold memories, we lose consistency of recall. Over time.
Speaker 3: They do degrade in quality, and you can show that
Speaker 3: it changes how we remember them, but we're much more
Speaker 3: likely to say in these cases with very high confidence, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: it's not changing. I remember exactly how it happened.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, the way that I recall it being discussed
Speaker 2: before in the past, when I read about it was that, yeah,
Speaker 2: these these additional details, things like what what was I
Speaker 2: eating for breakfast? Or what did I wear that day,
Speaker 2: or even you know, some of the other things surrounding
Speaker 2: the discovery or the you know, the or the hearing
Speaker 2: of the word you. The brain kind of fills in
Speaker 2: the blanks on that. Uh, it's like that there's something
Speaker 2: more important that has to be solidified in your memory,
Speaker 2: and therefore it kind of like the memory. The rest
Speaker 2: of the memory is rushed. They're like, well, it's like
Speaker 2: there's an assembly crew in there, and it's like, well,
Speaker 2: what should we put down for breakfast on this memory?
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter, just put down anything. We can change
Speaker 2: it later. We will change it later. The important thing
Speaker 2: is that this terrible thing happened or this great thing happened,
Speaker 2: and they heard about it and and yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 2: that you were that they were there, and that they
Speaker 2: they are part of it. I like this idea that
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, it's like the capital h h history
Speaker 2: and lowercase age history converging. Like in a way, it's
Speaker 2: you know, it's it's it's defining self in comparison to
Speaker 2: the larger group. You know, perhaps you can also throw
Speaker 2: in the you know, vital survival information as well. Something
Speaker 2: terrible happened and it has to be remembered because I
Speaker 2: want slash need to avoid terrible things. But yeah, the
Speaker 2: details are not as important. It's that it's that central
Speaker 2: detail that has to be recorded, right.
Speaker 3: That moment of finding out feels entirely like you can
Speaker 3: recreate it in your mind right now. But there's a
Speaker 3: good chance that if you had written down what happened
Speaker 3: to that day and you compared it to what you
Speaker 3: remember now, it would be different. And so a question
Speaker 3: would be, why are we so confident about the accuracy
Speaker 3: of our flash bold memories when research shows that, you know,
Speaker 3: you can show that they're not as accurate as we
Speaker 3: think they are, And this is hard to say, The
Speaker 3: authors point out, you know, there's a general finding about
Speaker 3: memory that quote, vivid elaborateness and ease of retrieval are
Speaker 3: thought to influence the judgment that an event occurred. So
Speaker 3: if you can make the details of a memory really vivid,
Speaker 3: you know, you can just see them in your mind,
Speaker 3: And if you can add lots of details, and if
Speaker 3: you can make the memory come to mind without much effort,
Speaker 3: people have more confidence that the memory is accurate, even
Speaker 3: if it's not. And this would apply to other memory,
Speaker 3: other types of memories too, And they're just maybe features
Speaker 3: of flashbold memories that incubate these qualities of vividness, elaborateness,
Speaker 3: and an ease of retrieval. Maybe because they come up
Speaker 3: often in conversation or maybe because of this, maybe it
Speaker 3: has something to do about this, Yeah, this intersection or
Speaker 3: connection point with history more broadly, that that causes us
Speaker 3: to almost kind of like write them out as a
Speaker 3: detailed story in the mind in a way that you
Speaker 3: don't do for most other events, even important events.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you end up having high confidence in
Speaker 2: this narrative that is ultimately you know, it can be,
Speaker 2: you know, defining of yourself. And so of course you
Speaker 2: can have confidence in it, because what happens when you
Speaker 2: don't have confidence in the in the autobiographical stories that
Speaker 2: define who you are, I mean, you end up like
Speaker 2: I guess, you know, at least like me, because I
Speaker 2: feel like every time we cover these these memory topics
Speaker 2: that kind of if it forces a lot of self
Speaker 2: reflection on the memories that do define me, you know,
Speaker 2: and I think back on them as like, well, you know,
Speaker 2: to what extent is that what happened? And then to
Speaker 2: what extent doesn't matter if it's not like you have
Speaker 2: to sort of face the fact that you know, all
Speaker 2: memories are potentially incorrect to some degree.
Speaker 3: Right, And you know, I want to come back on
Speaker 3: the other hand, and say that all these studies about
Speaker 3: the faultiness of memory, they don't mean that, like, none
Speaker 3: of your memories are accurate. You know, probably a lot
Speaker 3: of your memories are basically accurate. The point is that
Speaker 3: they're not as reliable as they feel.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of truth in your memories.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, there's just like there's a decent chance that
Speaker 3: you remember a lot of things with high confidence and
Speaker 3: in fact it didn't happen that way. Yeah, but plenty
Speaker 3: of things did happen more or less the way you
Speaker 3: remember them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and it cuts both ways, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: it can You can certainly have a memory that is
Speaker 2: more traumatic because it has been made more traumatic through
Speaker 2: recall and through you know, the way that it is
Speaker 2: ultimately embellished through memory. But other times, like you remember
Speaker 2: something with kind of rose tinted glasses, you know, you
Speaker 2: remember the fun part of a particular vacation as opposed
Speaker 2: to the you know, the minor squabbles that may have
Speaker 2: accompanied the endeavor. Right.
Speaker 3: Oh, And because so one thing that springs up is
Speaker 3: that with flashbul memories, because they often involve these these
Speaker 3: public events that are negative in quality that could lead
Speaker 3: people to the to the erroneous assumption that flashbul memories
Speaker 3: work the same way like traumatic memories of first hand
Speaker 3: events work, and that's not necessarily true. We don't know
Speaker 3: the extent to which there are similarities and differences there fully,
Speaker 3: first hand traumatic memories I think are going to be
Speaker 3: governed by possibly some different thing this than these flash
Speaker 3: bold memories are. But that also brings us to this
Speaker 3: question that you brought up earlier, that I think is
Speaker 3: a good one. A few studies have looked at flash
Speaker 3: bold memories elicited by positive public events. You know, follow
Speaker 3: the Berlin Wall, a lot of people who remember that
Speaker 3: see that is a positive thing, or you know, maybe
Speaker 3: World Cup victories for your home country or something. But
Speaker 3: most of these studies look at negative events, and that
Speaker 3: probably just has a lot to do with like the
Speaker 3: nature of big public events in the news. You know,
Speaker 3: there's more often a big negative event than a big
Speaker 3: positive event, at least in how it's covered in the media.
Speaker 3: So if we had more investigations of big public positive events,
Speaker 3: do you think there would be any major differences in
Speaker 3: memory responses or would it be pretty much the same thing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess one of the I mean one of
Speaker 2: the problems is just like the the negative the catastrophic
Speaker 2: headlines are the ones that like instantly come to mind,
Speaker 2: Like when when you try to, I have trouble just
Speaker 2: thinking of of significant good news events that would have
Speaker 2: that kind of magnitude. They would have to be you know,
Speaker 2: you know, things like the you know, the end of
Speaker 2: major wars, the you know, just overwhelmingly good news. And
Speaker 2: it seems like the moon landing maybe moonlanding, moon landing,
Speaker 2: moon landing is a good one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this might just be a fact of reality that
Speaker 3: good news is stuff that tends to develop gradually over time,
Speaker 3: and then you can sort of discover it retrospectively. You
Speaker 3: can be like, oh, something very good happened over the
Speaker 3: last twenty five years gradually, whereas bad news often tends
Speaker 3: to happen all at once.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, I think. I think you're right. Though.
Speaker 2: It's like the way we retrospectively evaluate the importance of
Speaker 2: them moment is key, and you know it's and is
Speaker 2: there like this one moment that really like rings out
Speaker 2: as opposed to like a gradual swelling.
Speaker 3: Right, Like if you're trying to remember a public person,
Speaker 3: if it's a person you have positive feelings about the
Speaker 3: good things they did are probably like a whole career
Speaker 3: of good things that developed gradually and you could develop
Speaker 3: an appreciation for it. It didn't happen one day, but they
Speaker 3: might they die on one day.
Speaker 2: Right. It punctuates this lifetime of achievements or contributions, et cetera.
Speaker 2: You know, forces you to reflect on those and value
Speaker 2: those often, you know, value those even more while also
Speaker 2: feeling you know this at very least intense bitter sweetness
Speaker 2: regarding the whole situation where you realize, oh, I loved
Speaker 2: all these albums that say David Bowie put out, I
Speaker 2: liked the last album, but I didn't know it was
Speaker 2: going to be the last album, and now I do. So,
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of emotions to feel about those moments.
Speaker 3: So there we go. Flash bold memories actually very stick
Speaker 3: but not in the way people think they are. Yeah,
Speaker 3: illusory stickiness maybe so. So I thought that was very interesting,
Speaker 3: and maybe we can come back to other types of
Speaker 3: sticky memories and sticky memory research in the future.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I think we will. You know, we'll always come
Speaker 2: back to memory based topics. All right. For the last
Speaker 2: little bit here, I want to bring it back to
Speaker 2: physical stickiness, I thought it might be interesting to think
Speaker 2: about sticky substances, specifically glues and adhesives in history. The
Speaker 2: most crucial sticky substance to consider in all of this
Speaker 2: is plant resin. Plant resin is exuded by some trees
Speaker 2: and other plants, such as fir and pine trees in particular,
Speaker 2: and most resin trickles out in response to injury of
Speaker 2: some sort to the tree or plant in question. These
Speaker 2: resins are not soluble in water, and they typically lose
Speaker 2: volatile compounds via evaporation, leaven behind a soft residue that
Speaker 2: is initially soluble but becomes insoluble as it ages. Okay, initially, however,
Speaker 2: it's viscous, it's sticky. And if you don't already have
Speaker 2: like the smell memory in your nostrils, well, then if
Speaker 2: you're of a certain age, then perhaps you remember a
Speaker 2: key scene in nineteen eighty nine's Christmas Vacation starring Chevy Chase.
Speaker 2: There's a scene where he has just cut down a
Speaker 2: Christmas tree, and now it's the evening. He's laying in
Speaker 2: bed next to his wife played by Beverly D'Angelo, and
Speaker 2: Chevy Chase is like messing around with them with a
Speaker 2: magazine he's trying and then he's trying to turn off
Speaker 2: the light and his fingers are sticking to everything because
Speaker 2: it's they're covered with tree resin.
Speaker 3: This is a great scene because it's not the point
Speaker 3: of the scene. He's just happening in the background that
Speaker 3: every time he touches a magazine page it tears off
Speaker 3: on his fingers.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm myself have vivid memories which may or may not
Speaker 3: be accurate to reality, of being a kid and climbing
Speaker 3: on pine trees in uh, I guess on around the
Speaker 3: playground at my school and getting sap or resin whatever
Speaker 3: it is from the tree stuck to my hands, into
Speaker 3: my arms. Actually, I remember it going up my wrists
Speaker 3: and stuff, and again may or may not be accurate,
Speaker 3: but what I remember is that it was really really
Speaker 3: difficult to wash off, Like you'd rub it with water
Speaker 3: and soap and it would just stay on there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's just very sticky stuff where, Yeah, if
Speaker 2: you're horsing around in the woods at all, you're going
Speaker 2: to encounter it at some point and you may wonder
Speaker 2: like if will this ever come off? And you know,
Speaker 2: eventually it does anyway. Yeah, then, as far as Christmas
Speaker 2: Vacation goes a lot of broad comedy in that movie.
Speaker 2: But that's kind of like one of the nice scenes
Speaker 2: of more subtle comedy that I always liked, though I
Speaker 2: guess it gets a little broad towards the end of that.
Speaker 2: That's the sequence swimming, knocking over the lamp and so forth,
Speaker 2: and his hand gets stuck to her hair.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I just remember them,
Speaker 3: Am I remembering this right? Like he touches the magazine
Speaker 3: pages and they just tear off on his fingers.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Now, speaking of movies from the eighties and nineties, if
Speaker 2: you've ever seen a little film titleed Jurassic Park from
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety three, then you know the basics of what
Speaker 2: I'm going to talk about next. Insects and other organic
Speaker 2: bits winding up stuck in the tree resin and eventually
Speaker 2: becoming amber. A whole host of insects were trapped in
Speaker 2: this way and later discovered by humans, includes flies, lice, beetles, ants, butterflies,
Speaker 2: and moths. Amber has also been found to contain spiders, webbing, frogs, crustaceans, hair, feathers,
Speaker 2: all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 3: It's nature's museum display case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just I mean, come and get back to
Speaker 2: what happens. Imagine a scenario where a tree is injured
Speaker 2: one way or another by another organism, by something falling
Speaker 2: into it, et cetera. And things on the trees, things
Speaker 2: come into contact with the trees, and then they get
Speaker 2: caught in it. They may overflow them and then ultimately
Speaker 2: preserve them. Now, it is of note on the whole
Speaker 2: Jurassic Park idea. The idea of DNA extraction from a
Speaker 2: mosquito in amber has seen in Jurassic Park. This seems
Speaker 2: to remain unrealized, despite some starts and stops and actual
Speaker 2: scientific attempts to do just this. Contamination by modern DNA
Speaker 2: seems to have played a role in some of the
Speaker 2: false positives that have popped up. Examples, you know, where
Speaker 2: scientists have come forward with the study and said, we've
Speaker 2: done it. We've been able to successfully retrieve DNA in
Speaker 2: one form or another from the contents of this amber.
Speaker 2: And I believe in those cases it tends to be
Speaker 2: a situation where you actually have modern DNA that has
Speaker 2: contaminated the results.
Speaker 3: I sort of hesitate to say this because I didn't
Speaker 3: double check before we recorded. But I think there would
Speaker 3: be a real problem trying to extract DNA from like
Speaker 3: dyne era insects and amber like they do in Jurassic Park,
Speaker 3: just because the DNA molecule degrades too much over time
Speaker 3: for it to last that long. But maybe you could
Speaker 3: feasibly get DNA from an insect in amber from more
Speaker 3: recent times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, apparently there's still scientific debate about how long DNA
Speaker 2: can survive in different settings, but you know, I guess
Speaker 2: it's a never say never situation. Some scientists continue to
Speaker 2: pursue this angle for potential ancient DNA retrieval, and of
Speaker 2: course ancient covers a lot of ground. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: scientists actually succeeded in pulling insect DNA from amber, though
Speaker 2: the amber in question was from twenty fourteen common era
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen to be clear. So it's you know, it's
Speaker 2: not not a not a not a home run, not
Speaker 2: a not a touchdown, or what have you, but you
Speaker 2: know it's something to go on now. As a as
Speaker 2: a tangent, I was looking around about ancient DNA retrieval
Speaker 2: and I got kind of interested in a few different
Speaker 2: a different different angles on this and a twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two paper that the title caught my attention. It was
Speaker 2: from the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution titled Ancient Human
Speaker 2: Genomes and Environmental DNA and the sement attaching two thousand
Speaker 2: year old headlice knits. And this paper indeed explored to
Speaker 2: what extent quote host DNA is protected by the cement
Speaker 2: that glues headlice knits to the hair of ancient Argentinian
Speaker 2: mummies fifteen hundred to two thousand years old.
Speaker 3: Wow, this is my kind of study. What do they find?
Speaker 2: Well, the findings suggest that ectoparasitic lyce sheaths may prove
Speaker 2: to be a reasonable tool in ancient DNA retrieval. So
Speaker 2: stickiness strikes again here, Like there's this idea that you know,
Speaker 2: as we're trying to again, you know, ongoing debate about
Speaker 2: to what extent DNA survives and where it can survive
Speaker 2: and what conditions, this study indicates that, yeah, the place
Speaker 2: to look might be these knits, these little places where
Speaker 2: lice have used their glue to, you know, to hold
Speaker 2: eggs in place. Beautiful though, of course, one can't help
Speaker 2: but go in a sci fi direction. With all of this,
Speaker 2: and imagine half lice, half human mummy hybrids shambling out
Speaker 2: of the cloning tanks. You know where it's like, we
Speaker 2: did it, we clone the mummies. Oh, we've forgot about
Speaker 2: all that lice DNA.
Speaker 3: I am brundle lice.
Speaker 2: Yeah. At any rate, Amber has managed to preserve insect activity.
Speaker 2: You know, we have examples of mating, examples of egg laying, parasitism,
Speaker 2: swarming behavior, just a few examples of the things where
Speaker 2: we can look and say, Okay, not only do we
Speaker 2: see a particular species, not only do we see this
Speaker 2: snapshot in time of what the organism look like. Sometimes
Speaker 2: we can make out behavior. You know, we can also
Speaker 2: sometimes make out key details about individual structures. I believe
Speaker 2: some of this has come up on the show before.
Speaker 2: You know, what did this particular type of insects head
Speaker 2: look like? What did its particular you know, feeding apparatus
Speaker 2: look like? Millions of years ago? Structural colors another thing
Speaker 2: that is sometimes preserved and can be analyzed. And you know,
Speaker 2: we're talking about specimens from as long ago as like
Speaker 2: two hundred and thirty million years.
Speaker 3: Okay, So whether or not Amber can successfully preserve the
Speaker 3: DNA molecule intact enough over time, it can certainly preserve
Speaker 3: macroscopic objects, structures, and almost like scenes or dioramas in
Speaker 3: some case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so something that is physically sticky ends up preserving
Speaker 2: creating a kind of like sticky physical memory for humans
Speaker 2: to contemplate in the far future.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Now, speaking of prehistoric stickiness, speaking of the ancients and sap,
Speaker 2: I thought we might turn to the oldest manufactured glue
Speaker 2: that we know of in human history, and that's birch
Speaker 2: bark tar. This is created by heating birch bark via.
Speaker 2: I think there are four different methods that are that
Speaker 2: are generally recognized. I was reading about this in a
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen paper by Nikas at All published in the
Speaker 2: journal Anthropology. According to these authors, there's condensation method, there's
Speaker 2: ash mound method, there's pit and vessel method, and there's
Speaker 2: raised structure method, which involves earth and mound containing a
Speaker 2: vessel and screen. Those are in order of complexity as well,
Speaker 2: and the more complex the greater the yield. So my
Speaker 2: understanding based on this is like, yeah, if using the
Speaker 2: condensation method, you would have to do so much more
Speaker 2: of it to get the same amount of birch bark
Speaker 2: tar that you would get using the raised structure method.
Speaker 2: So birch bark tar use dates back to the Paleolithic period.
Speaker 2: Our ancestors used it to have to tools to decorate objects.
Speaker 2: But this wasn't only a technology of Homo sapiens. This
Speaker 2: really I found this really fascinating. Archaeological evidence shows that Neanderthals,
Speaker 2: are extinct evolutionary cousins also used it and seem to
Speaker 2: have produced it, using it on at least some of
Speaker 2: their tools. I don't think all of them, but we
Speaker 2: have found Neanderthal artifacts where they used this tar to
Speaker 2: construct their tools, and they use some of the more
Speaker 2: complex methods of driving the birch bark.
Speaker 3: Tar ah so like higher up the list of four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so they weren't just using the most primitive
Speaker 2: version of it, which which I think is also pretty
Speaker 2: you know, potentially insightful about who the Neanderthals were and
Speaker 2: what they were up to. And I think in general,
Speaker 2: whether you're talking about prehistoric humans or or Neanderthals, it's
Speaker 2: it's easy for a lot of us, you know, certainly
Speaker 2: without deeper knowledge of actual tool construction, you know, and
Speaker 2: methods of tool construction specifically in prehistoric times. To assume
Speaker 2: that you know, everything was lashed together, right, everything kind
Speaker 2: of looked like there's kind of an image of a
Speaker 2: stone age tool that may enter your mind and it
Speaker 2: involves like a you know, something wedged in wood, maybe
Speaker 2: strapped with some hide in wood, and you don't think
Speaker 2: about how important adhesive technology was and has never stopped being.
Speaker 3: We talked about this in our Invention episode on chewing Gum.
Speaker 3: I believe, but the Iceman Oatzy, the fourth millennium BCE
Speaker 3: Stone Age mummy who was preserved in a glacier in
Speaker 3: the Italian Alps, was discovered in the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3: Oatzy so many fascinating things about Otzy, but one of
Speaker 3: which was he carried with him this copper axe. And
Speaker 3: the copper axe, the blade of the axe was secured
Speaker 3: to the handle with multiple means. It did have some
Speaker 3: wrapping of leather straps like you were talking about, but
Speaker 3: it also was glued in place using birch bark tar
Speaker 3: adhesives made from the birch tree. Also in that episode,
Speaker 3: we talked about a paper called chewing Tar in the
Speaker 3: Early Holocene that was about indications that lumps of birch
Speaker 3: bark tar had been chewed, and the idea is like, okay,
Speaker 3: was this being used as like chewing gum in the
Speaker 3: ancient world, or maybe maybe was chewing on it a
Speaker 3: way of treating it so that it could be used
Speaker 3: in the creation of tools.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember this discussion now, Yeah, it's it's fascinating again.
Speaker 2: It's so easy to dismiss the importance of adhesives, the
Speaker 2: importance of glues and sticky things, you know, but I
Speaker 2: mean it makes sense too, because again, humans would have
Speaker 2: gone out into the world, they got sticky, they got
Speaker 2: sticky things on them, and everything that they encountered, they
Speaker 2: you know, inevitably asked the question can I use this?
Speaker 2: Is this of use to me? How can I combine
Speaker 2: this with other things to create useful things? And of
Speaker 2: course sticky is going to play an important role there,
Speaker 2: and you know, factors into construction. Obviously we already talked
Speaker 2: a bit of We talked about mud bricks in previous episodes.
Speaker 2: We talked about sticky rice mortar earlier in this series.
Speaker 2: But there are also plenty of other methods of construction
Speaker 2: out there, Like one that I was reading about is
Speaker 2: wattle and daub which you know, sounds like an interesting
Speaker 2: law firm or something. But now this is where you
Speaker 2: have woven flexible branches called wattle, and they're essentially daubed
Speaker 2: up with a sticky combination of such materials as mud
Speaker 2: and clay and possibly dun you know, not all that different,
Speaker 2: I guess in some respects than you know, compared to
Speaker 2: mud bricks. But but again another construction method, another recipe
Speaker 2: for building something that involves using something that is sticky.
Speaker 2: And of course, if you get back into the problem
Speaker 2: of the word sticky and just how vague it is,
Speaker 2: I mean basically that can bring in any kind of
Speaker 2: like plaster scenario, mortar scenario, brick making scenario, and more.
Speaker 2: Now I have to say I really wanted to end
Speaker 2: it on a monster here. I was like, there's got
Speaker 2: to be a nice sticky monster out there, and perhaps
Speaker 2: there is, and I just didn't have time to find it.
Speaker 2: I got really excited when I discovered a Japanese yokai
Speaker 2: known as Beto Beto Son, which is sometimes translated as
Speaker 2: mister Sticky, though this ultimately doesn't really hold up because
Speaker 2: apparently the more accurate translation is mister footsteps. This is
Speaker 2: the connection I think only makes sense within the Japanese language.
Speaker 2: But basically, this is a yokai that follows people around
Speaker 2: at night on dark streets and you hear his footfall,
Speaker 2: so it's like they you know. The whole idea is
Speaker 2: just the sound of being followed in the dark, or
Speaker 2: the potential of being followed in the dark. It doesn't
Speaker 2: actually have anything to do with like a super sticky
Speaker 2: ghost creature, much to my dismay.
Speaker 3: Bummer, I wish it was a monster with like sticky hands,
Speaker 3: like the sticky hand toy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know if anyone out there
Speaker 2: can think of any sticky monsters, especially as we get
Speaker 2: into our Halloween festivities here. Let us know, I guess
Speaker 2: you could. You could have talked about the z morph
Speaker 2: to some extent. It didn't like sticking people to walls
Speaker 2: and in walls.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, it's secreted a stick. You never really see
Speaker 3: it secreting that stuff, do you You see the you
Speaker 3: see the caustic blood. I wonder do you think it's
Speaker 3: only the queen that secretes all of that that sticky
Speaker 3: material that cocoons the people.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it has So I know this varies.
Speaker 2: There's no like hard cannon on this, but I guess
Speaker 2: you have like the warrior xenomorphs, you have the queen zenomrph.
Speaker 2: Do you have like some sort of like construction drone
Speaker 2: type xenomorphor would that be done by the warriors? Like
Speaker 2: who's building that elaborate nest? Like she's busy creating eggs?
Speaker 2: Right that if we're going to compare it to you know,
Speaker 2: like say ant and termite models, you know, her role
Speaker 2: is very specific within the hive, and you must have
Speaker 2: some other classification of the species that's busy building these
Speaker 2: things and secreting stuff and sticking people in walls after
Speaker 2: you know they've after an egg has been positioned in
Speaker 2: the proximity.
Speaker 3: That's right. Ripley famously asks an alien, so who's laying
Speaker 3: the eggs? But I have a secondary question, so who's
Speaker 3: secreting the gunk?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there we go. We knowed that's what we need
Speaker 2: for the next alien film. Let's really dive down into
Speaker 2: who's secreting here.
Speaker 3: It must be something we haven't seen yet.
Speaker 2: A whole movie about the most boring member of the
Speaker 2: but scientifically interesting member of the xenomorp five I'm in
Speaker 2: all right, we're gonna go ahead and close it up there,
Speaker 2: but hey, we'd love to hear from everyone out there.
Speaker 2: What are your thoughts on stickiness? Can you think of
Speaker 2: the sticky monster in general? Oh, and sticky memories? You know,
Speaker 2: this is something we can all relate to, So I'm
Speaker 2: hoping we'll hear from a lot of folks on that. Also,
Speaker 2: Like I just said, we're getting into the Halloween season here,
Speaker 2: and we're gonna quickly be you know, putting together a
Speaker 2: loose outline of what we're going to be covering. But
Speaker 2: now's a great time if you have something particular in mind,
Speaker 2: or if you want to remind us of something we
Speaker 2: said we'd cover in the past but didn't, then yeah,
Speaker 2: write in. We'd love to hear from you. A reminder
Speaker 2: that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast
Speaker 2: with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Monday,
Speaker 2: short form artifact or monster Fact on Wednesday, and on Friday,
Speaker 2: we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
Speaker 2: a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
Speaker 3: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 3: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 3: topic for the future, or just to say hi. You
Speaker 3: can email us at contact stuff to Blow your Mind
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