The Many Minds of Memory

00:00:00 good day everyone welcome back to the Helix Center I'm Gerald herwitz I'm the associate director of Helix and we're here with a wonderful panel today on the many minds of memory we're g to allow Beverly zisy to give you more detail about our wonderful panel uh before that I want to mention a few uh make a few comments first of all I hope everyone is holding on and doing well through this pandemic it's been a very long Hall everyone's had to adapt to it

00:00:31 including uh us here at the Helix Center including these Zoom roundtables but we do what we can right and we're getting through this um I want to mention that we have a few uh additional round taes coming up we're anticipating on February 20th we're going to have a talk on populism and then sometime in March date to be determined uh a talk on Placebo nobo response there may be yet a additional one on

00:01:02 stress later into the spring so that's it for now I'll hand it over to Beverly zisy welcome um I was just saying that this is our second Zoom Helix program we're not sitting in a circle with each other we're not bouncing off each other's chemistry in the same way at all but we have a particularly wonderful Lively creative and deep group of presenters today for

00:01:34 whom I'm very grateful that they were able to change the date from last March 14th which was the cusp of covid to today so I want to express my appreciation to all of you we have Physicians neurologists an artist dog cognition research author and if you after the program look at their biographies you will see an

00:02:04 extraordinarily varied and deep um list of accomplishments so that we don't take up the whole program talking about them rather than hearing from them I've asked each of them to go around and tell us just say what what your um profession is and maybe your title and what you most want to be remembered for professionally and then for all the credentials we can each research that on our

00:02:35 own so can we start with uh Christina alberini sure hi everyone first of all I'd like to thank uh everyone at the Helix Center for organizing these these e meetings they are very important so that we can keep being connected uh and second let me tell you what I'm doing I am a professor of neuroscience at the center for neural science New York

00:03:07 University and I have been studying for now about 30 years the biological basis of learning and memory and of course if we want to get into biology we have to use models we are not using humans uh because we need to get into the brains of uh models and understand what type of biological mechanism change with learning and which one are important for making memories and of course memories come in different types we I'm sure

00:03:38 we'll discuss about that uh so the questions we have in the lab is mostly about memory formation and storage uh and also about how memories are retrieved so when we recall memories what happens to the biology of the brain and what are the biological mechanisms that come into play to change those memories because at every single recall we change our memories and and the and the storage of

00:04:09 information uh and uh what do I want to be remembered for in my for my professional contribution well I hope there is many more things to come so I'm looking into the future uh but ideally of course is not only to um progress uh uh significantly in the understanding of the biology of memory which is what we do but also to find mechanisms through these studies that are important for memory losses and diseases of memories

00:04:41 and those are many uh I can just mention a few of course Alzheimer disease and neurodegenerative diseases that come with memory loss but also cognitive impairments in neurodevelopmental disorders as well as problems of memories due to traumatic experiences or addiction I'm GNA stop there thank you you're on mute Beverly we can't hear [Music]

00:05:13 you Richard author distinguished author well um hello everybody um and thanks to Helix organization um I'm not a dog recognition expert um although the first half of my career maybe I was in that I was a publisher and editor and recognizing the dogs and the successes as part of my job and more recently although I continued editing when I came to the states my first freelance job was

00:05:45 to edit the autobiography by Rudy Giuliani but I normally like to keep quiet about that um I've written um four published books since coming to the states um uh I've also contributed Ed to a book more recently the presence of the past essays on memory um for the academica Press um in terms of what I'd be most uh pleased to be remembered for I suppose it's the book that I've got coming out in June which is called the

00:06:16 history makers which looks at people who have influenced our our ideas shaped our ideas of the past from Herodotus to the TV age um so um I'm very much here with the hat of a historian um um but with a particular interest in how memory Works which of course has had a large part to play in the writing of History thank you very much Richard and

00:06:48 then the neurologist um gatri Devi who is also the author of spectrums of Hope about the Aging brain gaty thanks for having me Beverly um I'm a neurologist I'm director of Park Avenue neurology and I'm a clinical professor of Neurology at downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn I've been a cognitive neurologist for 26 years now I can't believe it's been that long and um love my job and what I'd like to be

00:07:20 remembered for is two things one that Alzheimer's disease is a spectrum disorder and it it is informed very much by the brain that the person brings to the illness your strengths and weaknesses inform how you develop it how you manifest it and how you respond to treatment so it's very different for example from kidney disease where you can the same kidney condition um means

00:07:50 the same thing in multiple people whereas all Simer in one person is a private Alzheimer's and very different from Alzheimer's another person and the same thing with mild cognitive impairment or memory problems that they vary and are very very private to each person's brain um and the second thing I'd like to be remembered for is um the systematizing of menopause related cognitive laws women going through menopause have cognitive laws which can

00:08:22 mimic that of early Alzheimer's and when it's not recognized and treated as such and unfortunately neurology we don't actually get a menopausal or um a history of um anything related to the uterus from women as a rule um that systematization um I'm I'm very proud of we just published that in um the Journal of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology so thank you very much for having

00:08:54 me and thank you for being here and Andy Lee who is a nurse neuroscientist at the University of Toronto and has been working on memory disorders for many years Andy everyone um thank you for uh the organizers for inviting me it's a real privilege to be here and to be a part of this panel um so it's bever just said I based uh in Toronto at the University of uh Toronto I'm out at the scarra campus and I'm a cognitive neuroscientist so my lab uh is

00:09:24 interested in how a group of structures in the brain probably the most familiar one to lot of people is typ a campus how that's involved in memory processing so we do a lot of brain Imaging MRI scanning we uh look at patients with amnesia and our particular interests are how memory interacts with other things so uh perception being one decision making um and if there's one thing maybe I would like to be remembered by I think um I think that was re asked this ear I was thinking what do I want to be remembered by and I wasn't quite sure

00:09:57 but I think maybe maybe I'm not ambitious enough but if in 10 20 years uh at least one thing that we've discovered um is is has actually contributed to our understanding of how the brain actually processes like time in memory or or visual items in memory and gives us a little bit of understanding in into why patients like Alzheimer's disease patients have memory problems um i' I'd be happy so so that that's my my my answer to that question that is quite ambitious Andy

00:10:29 and we have an author and a researcher and professor at Barnard college at the dog cognition lab and I think her last book has really marked this particular era as far as I see from the people that I'm in contact with which is our dogs ourselves a story of a singular Bond Alexandra thank you for being here thanks Beverly and thank you to the helix Center I'm pleased to

00:11:00 be with you all here um as Beverly said you know I'm a teacher at Barnard college and I'm a senior research fellow there and I head the dog cognition lab so I'm a cognitive scientist studying non-human animal mind and the dog is the my non-human of interest um and I've written widely on on dog mind and the dog human Bond um I think I'd like to be remembered for bringing our attention back

00:11:31 to um Imagining the umelt the worldview the perspective of non-human others I think um and I don't know if I have fully imagined the worldview of others but maybe um by the end of my life that can be an accomplishment I look back on for now it's just bringing people's attention to the perspectives of others and remembering that there is a perspective that is different from the human perspective thank you so much Alexandra and it

00:12:03 reminds me that um in at the temple The Healing Temple of es scapus if a person had a dream a patient who went there and had a dream of a dog it was considered a very positive prognosis so I I sort of work out of that template myself these days and um then we have a lady that I met the last Chinese Lunar New Year cesto Winchester who is an artist an

00:12:35 activist artist a journalist a broadcaster and she will tell you of some of the projects that she has created uh thank you Beverly and the Helix Center for um hosting this discussion um I think uh this discussion sort of came out of the talk that we had at that dinner where we were talking about if history is the collective memory of a Nation then what happens if

00:13:07 you're consistently missing from that story or you're constantly vilified in it so um you know what happens to your present and how does it affect your future so I for the I used to be at NPR which deals with the history of the moment but I think my husband writes history and looks at history at a longer range and I think that perspective is important and uh uh because I'm married

00:13:39 to him I've been given the opportunity to look at a slice of History through a perspective in a lens that is often not not shared and that's the Japanese American or Asian-American History and uh if you look at that America can look very very different and so can Freedom the idea of freedom so my project that I would like to be remembered for is uh it's called Freedom From Fear yellow bow project I'm a conceptual artist although I use

00:14:09 Ceramics um it's really about history and about um identity time memory so um it's uh I took 120 yellow t- bows that I hand pinched and I took them to all 10 US concentration camps um uh that was in the United states in the 1940s and I photographed them and uh because of that they've sort of been invited to different places um I have to say not

00:14:40 many people like this story and there's been a push back on it but I really thank this panel for giving me a platform thank you so Richard you agreed to start the discussion itself yes I drew the Short Straw because everybody else was keeping sensibly quiet um I think I just begin

00:15:12 as you know I'm not a psychiatrist psychoanalyst or um any of those disciplines with having read recently Paul Ricker's book memory history forgetting and in that book he has 79 in his index and contents pages together 79 different categories under memory so where on Earth does one start and I thought that to start the ball rolling I would refer to Sigman Freud um who saw

00:15:44 memory as constantly transforming reorganizing um revising and that even in our introductory comments that people have made um was acknowledged but I want to start by asking the other members of the panel the other point that Freud makes and he says that memory is essentially creative what do people think he meant by that and how does that tie in with your own

00:16:17 studies I think I can start um yes so to get to these questions let's remind ourselves and who is listening to us that memories come in different flavors as you mentioned they gave 79 categories of memories and of course there are different ways to categorize them uh one or two major ways that in Neuroscience we use to categorize memories is

00:16:49 according to their duration long me longterm memories shorter memories shorter memories they last for very short time memories they last for long time that's very easy to remember uh and why are they different they are different because the mechanisms that the brain used to make and express these memories are different uh and uh and another way to categorize them is according to what they do there are different memory

00:17:21 systems and different types of memories we have declarative explicit memories or we have uh in contrast to this implicit type of memories uh for example the explicit declarative memories are the memories we talk about so if we are here today and we talk about what we have learned those are declarative memories and in the same system also memories of general knowledge uh if if if I say City you all

00:17:53 know what I mean by that concept uh so those are part of one memory system which is processed by the medial temporal L that has been demonstrated uh by many many studies in humans as well as in nonhuman animals if uh part of this memory system is impaired or or or their activity the activi is blocked those memories do not form those longterm memories do not form um as opposed to other uh uh major

00:18:25 system of memory the implicit type of memories the memories of how to do things is not they're not spoken they are performed for example if we go skiing we have to learn how to ski and then we remember those are a very very strong memories uh memories of how to drive a car ride a bike tie your shoes everything we do that we learn and memorize which become sort of automatic those are part of the implicit memory

00:18:57 systems and isn't that talking muscle memory muscle memory is performance so the performance include the muscle memories and those are part of the implicit memory system because we perform those memories we execute them in an implicit way we don't think about after we have learned we don't think about how to turn the wheel when we drive a car right we just do it automatically and in the same implicit memory system we have also emotional

00:19:27 memories memories that that uh that are expressed without a conscious awareness so the other distinction is conscious awareness versus not implicit types of memories are not conscious in their expression an explicit Type R so there are many different types of memor now I don't want to go on and on because it's a long story but um so is it a creative process like frud suggested so first of all I have to say the frud was brilliant in in predicting uh let's say in his

00:20:00 writing so many many aspects and and processes that we then in Neuroscience discovered in the memory in the memory domain is it a creative process I think I I I yes I do agree and why because when we form memories and they are stored uh if we need to retrieve them because there are Recollections something that reminds us of whatever happened in our history in that precise

00:20:31 moment we are living a different experience at a different time so now the new experience in the present is going to be Associated somewhat to whatever is recall and is going to be restored in in in in another context so that is already a a processing of the memories which happens as you can imagine every moment every every day but also we re-elaborate memories so if we

00:21:03 think about something and we recall experiences uh and and we start thinking about something else because of an emotional for example an emotional uh experience that is so important to us we start creating associations new associations which will become new memories and so the creative process is about who we are made of the multitude of experiences through learning memorization Recollections and

00:21:35 re-elaboration I hope that gives some some um topic for discussion I might complement that by answering Richard your question in a slightly different way I mean I hear when I think of whether memory is a creative process to which I also Ascent I think that my interpretation is to say that um memories are not necessarily veridical in other words they're not necessarily representative of the world

00:22:06 that's out there because they are interpreted through the subjective self and it really puts to the point whether if we could view everyone's memories other humans or non-humans whether we would recognize them in other words whether they are even understandable or kind of interpretable or translatable by others right and and so I I to me that's very generative way to begin this conversation and thinking as Christina said not only about the re-encoding and the changing of memory

00:22:38 that happens with me with remembering but also about the very creativity of memory to begin with that it is an interpretation of a moment or a scene or a fact or an experience um and says something is incorporated with the self which might be imposs possibly subjective I agree with you Alexandra and Christina as well I think um all

00:23:11 memory is a fabrication of our brain every single memory we have reality is really truly a fabrication of our brains um and it's an individual reality which is not necessarily parallel to the reality of someone right next to you because it's always filtered through your experience uh through your neural networks um through your interpretations um and through your editing of what you see um so not only

00:23:42 are you going to have alteration and Distortion of memory as you recall but you also have um a true editing and Distilling of memory as you lay it down so there's a tremend tremendous amount of editing that goes on in both the laying down of memory what you choose to attend to um how you choose to store it what you choose to link it to whether or not it's real again all reality is a

00:24:15 fabrication of our individual brains um and then how you choose to reproduce it which is always going to be different from one person to the next even if you agree on the generalities the detail are going to be different because each of us chooses to remember um something different so Freud um was absolutely correct in terms of how he formulated memory hello yes hello yeah yes go ahead

00:24:47 set set go yes set um I I have to say that I think there's a difference between personal memory and Collective you know National memory like history and um I think one of the battles that we're having in America right now is for the story and the history of America and basically there is a narrative that starts with Columbus and there's George Washington and uh you know Adams and uh

00:25:21 um you know Jefferson and then it goes to Lincoln and then FDR and then we're at today and um in that story uh the history of the original people that were here is missing for example um there were there was a survey um about five years ago I think they uh found out that 40% of Americans believe that no Native

00:25:51 Americans are alive today and that they are extinct like dinosaurs and you know if you read newspapers and our and our history books you sort of believe that um they're actually very much alive a lot of them have were put on reservations they've moved into cities to survive and they're still there and the other story that never gets out it's usually uh race is a big issue today and um the reason why race is

00:26:24 often only seen in a white and black d Y is because the whole history of nonwhite laws is never talked about in our history books and the not white laws were all determined in our court of law and they came out after the Civil War so it was determined in 1870 which was an update of the original naturalization law of 1790 which said that only white people can become a

00:26:56 citizen um was changed in 1870 to include Africans and persons of African descent so after that there's there's been law after law after law which people who were not African but who were deemed not white had to go to court because they were excluded from citizenship from practicing law from marrying other people um from uh you know they couldn't even testify against

00:27:26 white people Chinese could not testify against white people and then all Asian people were banned from the United States in 1924 which was actually the first year that Native Americans were allowed to naturalize so there's this whole history that's missing so I mean is that a creative process maybe it is creative doesn't always mean good right yeah we tend to think creative means good but it doesn't have to be it can be creative in an evil way

00:28:00 right your thoughts to me it's almost like a what setco is saying it's almost a destructive it's a destructive process um in that we can create memories but we can also um I mean one of the the big questions that people ask is can we actually remove memories so unpleasant memories can we remove them for our own own benefit um and unfortunately maybe what you're describing is the sense of that there's Injustice happening and so people choose not to talk about it and so if we don't reinforce that type of information and it's the same with our own own memories if we don't reinforce

00:28:32 and rehearse some of our memories then those memories uh weaken over time and and we we forget about them um and what we tend to we we can often choose what we want to remember um so there's a lot of workout there where people say can we suppress certain memories can we enhance certain memories and so the ones that give us the joy the ones that we think other people will enjoy listening to the ones which are um politically correct for example those are the ones that people like to to talk about a lot um uh and so those are the memories that are

00:29:02 that are strengthened and those are the ones that propagate and unfortunately memories or events that you describe of unfortunately those are the ones that that get destroyed and and not talked about as much and I think that raises the issue very often of whose memory is it is does one have one's own memory does one have parents memories ancestral memories who who's whose memory do we think is what we are recalling and

00:29:34 registering and being imprinted by that Richard Richard um of course one can have one's memory impaired but I think the whole question of what is forgetting is another issue but I'd like also to introduce this idea which comes to me from having read joh F's book um Moon Moon walking with Einstein when he talks about the power of memory and in

00:30:06 our introductions we talked about people talked about um failures of memory or where the memory faculty is hurt but he says well not only did the ancient Greeks have a god of memory because they thought it was so important but we know whether it's um from chess players or Lori drivers playing air chess um or even taxi drivers who um you probably know in London have to um take a particular test they have to learn all

00:30:36 the places and all the streets in the city um and it's been tested or shown that um taxi drivers have expanded brains um through having trained their facility in this way but when they give up their career as taxi drivers um that expansion shrinks again and it raised us a question of to what extent can we build up our powers of memory if we've got people like um taxi drivers or chess

00:31:08 players improving their memory or conjurers indeed what can we do to make our our me the memory faculty of our brains more powerful and be able to do more with them so Richard um so you actually doesn't take much effort to change your brain at a physical level you can practice violin for two days and change the amount of your brain you can physically demonstrate more area of your brain de

00:31:41 you know devoted to that practice one thing I wanted to mention which you brought up um and wanted to emphasize is you know we all tend to prize memory including the ancient Greeks but forgetting is just as important for remembering and to be able to forget and to be able to normally forget is important for learning I mean if we didn't forget to crawl you know um and we're willing to then we wouldn't have

00:32:12 learned to walk if we didn't forget our first love it would be hard to fall in love again um so forgetting is very if we forgot if we didn't forget to babble you know it would be harder to learn to so it's important to understand and there's this whole emphasis in modern society of having to remember and you know and memory being equated with intelligence um and and kind of um to the detriment of the importance of forgetting so um I I'd like to be a

00:32:42 proponent of that forgetting is very good for us and important uh for our brain um and this wonderful book by um Lura Uh Russian um uh psychologist called the mind of an demonist and he talks about a patient or or a man who has studied who forgot how to forget and it significantly interfered with his ability to function in a daily um in a productive way on a daily basis I'd like

00:33:13 to teach my dogs to remember commands better Alexandra I don't know how to do that and not forget you know that you also remind me of the vores story FES the memorial right where where he represents a character who could not forget and actually how crippling it was and and disabling of being able to act um and there are a lot of questions that have already come up but I I mean to the to the sort of how do we remember better

00:33:43 how does a non-human remember better that's so interesting because I think it has a lot to do with our directing of their attention right and our inability to realize what is Salient to them in order to um and allow for the encoding um which will which which is easy for them to do that they can easily learn to learn commands learn to remember commands but we're not always as good at creating an environment which um allows

00:34:13 them to pick up on the Salient cues um but if I can also just add one other thing to this like interestingly frothy sea of ideas um it was something that cesco and and Andy were hitting on about um a cultural memory and how exclusion of people from a cultural history is is a kind of power um that those who are doing the excluding have over the excluded and I was thinking

00:34:45 about how um when studying non-human animals there's always a question of whether they have memory at all right and this is partially because we can't ask animals to do memory tasks and give us verbal responses as are many of our memory tasks right and so even though non-human animals are studied for their memory as analoges to human memory still when I will be asked about dogs you know do they can they remember anything which is which is ridiculous of course they

00:35:17 can I mean all their behavior evinces it but because we can't see into their brains we kind of assume that maybe there's an absence there and I'm wondering if the sort of way we disallow non-verbal others from having memory is similar to the kind of historical exclusion uh Memorial exclusion of peoples from our history I'm just seeing an interesting analog there I I'd like to say something here because I was shaking my head because

00:35:48 there is so much work done on memories in non-human animals and of course they have memories uh we canot we can say that they are not talking to to us but that's just one single way to express memories memories is how to do things is how to recognize places is how to navigate spaces we have tons and tons of evidence in non-human animals that they have memories and memories are like any other thing evolutionarily conserved and

00:36:19 there is so much studies ongoing to understand uh the biological basis of memories that have shown that in different species there are a number of conserved biological mechanism so certainly they're not declarative memories but we I I you know I disagree to even doubt that the that nonhuman animals have memories um and I want to bring uh to one more point which I think it was brought up in terms of um memories and

00:36:52 the subjectivity the individual ways of memorizing and and remembering and processing information I'm not sure we choose to do that uh I'm not sure it's a choice because a lot of our representations and memories are implicit so we're not conscious of it so we don't have choice in that sense is the unconscious part of brain that guides our decisions and and those are of course

00:37:24 based on experiences and recollection of memories and and experiences we have over and over or new experiences that we have at some point we react in certain ways according to our history that's why it's very individualized so we are studying now in the lab something that to me is very exciting and that is how the memory system establish itself how do they form how does it mature and so we are looking at the

00:37:55 biology of uh episodic memories in rats and mice uh at the age of infancy when we know that those memories are formed but rapidly forgotten and this very rapid forgetting is believed to be the the reason for infantile Amnesia the the the the uh the process I don't know how to call it the the phenomenon by which as adults

00:38:29 we do not recall experiences of the first let's say three years of life uh and Freud gave the first explanation of infantile Amnesia um um we don't think it it it now is in agreement with what we see so but now we have we are studying the biology of these memories form in the first uh few days corresponding to the first few years of life in humans and

00:39:00 found that there is in fact the very concerned evolutionarily concerned rapid forgetting the animals learn and they forget very rapidly compared to later ages and when we look at the biology we found that the biology is very interesting and unique different than the other ages they use mechanism of so-called critical periods those are temporal windows in life in which the brain is particularly responsive to

00:39:32 experience and with these responses it matures the functions so let's say the visual system that has been studied a lot in the critical periods we are born we don't see the way we see in adulthood and through seeing through the function of seeing so all the stimulus that go through the eyes and the Brain those shapes the brain to the point that that you know when he's matured is able to function like an

00:40:02 adultery so we find the same similar mechanisms in uh our experiments of episodic learning and memories so what this tells us is that during this temporal window we better have the best stimuli and experiences to mature our abilities to learn and remember and and and we tested and found that it is the type of experience that matures the function in other words if they are

00:40:34 exposed to one type of experience they mature the ability to memorize like adults that type that domain of experiences but not other types that are processed by the same system so there chrisa could I ask can one will oneself to forget can what can one will oneself to forget decide to forget can one make oneself forget well I'm I'm sure if if you start saying I'm going to change my attention

00:41:08 and not um pay attention to to whatever you want to exclude over time that will lead to more forgetting than if you don't do that but that is one single you know it's a small um how do I what do I want to say it's a small um part of the memories compared to all the memories we have the memories we have is the expression of the

00:41:38 experiences and our brain is molded according to the experiences we have and during these critical periods what we see is key for the development of the function um You Know Rich I I just wanted to say something to Richard for a moment and a metamorphosis the ability to forget is really described you're meant to drink of the river of Le and that was a major part of the

00:42:09 orphic the whole orphic experience of creative transformation and so all of those Metamorphoses all those Transformations depended in Avid on that ability to forget so I think that that's been part of our sort of a more reflective experience of memory in the brain and that's a good pickup There's an actual book by David Reef um called In Praise of forgetting yes and

00:42:39 he makes he makes the point that remembering is a barrier to reconciliation whether it's between nations between couples whatever which is why that part of memory is so important yes and in with patience you often get that someone cannot forgive and then they get to an age where they forget and then there's reconciliation actually one of the happiest you know one of the keys to happiness I found in older patients is

00:43:09 the ability to forgive to truly forgive and forget yeah and the one other point I wanted to make for Richard's question was um that forgetting is an is almost an unconscious incessant constant process as we're listening right now there are so many things that we're forgetting I'm forgetting the the way the light falls in the room I forget the number of you know the colors on the the screen Etc so it's an incessant constant process

00:43:39 unlearning is a little bit more conscious so to decide can is a little different yeah can I just join in about um well I want to say con uh um the idea of forgetting I mean they say that if you cannot forget the pain of childbirth you would probably never have another child again and so forgetting is part of the process of living you know um and as

00:44:10 for forgiving I think part of the problem of of memory and forgetting or forgiving is that you can't forgive unless you knew in the first place and what happens if your nation is constantly telling you that whatever you think you remember didn't happen which happened to me a lot at NPR where I was told that you know the Four Freedoms and you know Injustice and didn't doesn't

00:44:41 happen in America because you know we had Four Freedoms in America and I just wrote a an opinion piece in my local P paper the Burkshire Eagle you might want to take a look at that but there were a lot of people who were excluded from those four freedom and where we continuously say that uh that doesn't happen in America so what happens if the forgetting is imposed on you from the outside you know you haven't chosen to forget for for um to forget it or you

00:45:15 know you're not allowed to if you if it's it's like gaslighting it didn't happen so you can't forgive because it never happened in the first place so it creates this odd Catch 22 and and I've been looking into the Japanese American experience and it's really really um bizar it's like watching the movie Gaslight where they keep saying you know this happened and they're being told no it didn't doesn't happen here in America and uh you know that's happened to Asian

00:45:47 people for most of American History um it's uh their Native American history is uh and the laws written against them is mimics what they use against Asians we're we're talking a great deal about time about memory and time different temporal periods and I'm wondering about memory and space Andy could could you say something about that and maybe Alexandra how is it that when

00:46:19 you're taking your dog to the vet as soon as you get two blocks away the dog begins to shake because there's something about the space of the approach and in terms of what it's like to be a person of several cultures whether ancestrally or in terms of one's own life and the effect of space where you are or you forget something you have to go back into the room where you first thought of it before you could pick up the memory of

00:46:51 what why you you move to the other room Andy could you say a few things about this yeah so I guess the way that we we often conceive of memory um and now I'm talking about episodic memory so personally experienced memories or the biographical memory people often talk about the the what where and and when um so when did something happen which is the time which we've been talking about uh the what actually happened um and of course the where and and the where often has uh really become a prominent piece

00:47:23 um historically at least in in memory research a lot of this driven by um so cells in the hippocampus which seem to indicate the spal location of an animal in an environment and so a lot of research has really been driven by by the what sorry the where which is the spatial piece and just in terms of what you were talking about um that really speaks to uh the fact that we we learn associations so a lot of our memories are associations between different pieces of information and because space is so pervasive so we you know even

00:47:53 where we're sitting now as we walk around we're in a space in a particular location often our memories get anchored that way so there we have certain associations ass with certain locations and so therefore when we either retrieve those memories or we go into certain locations those may may trigger those associations to come back so in the case of the dog example you're giving I mean Alexandri will be able to speak a little more to time than I would but just being in a certain location um could trigger certain memories associated with with approaching a particular Target spatial location um so so that's probably what's

00:48:25 what's going on on there um and so the way a lot of cognitive neuroscientists think about memory is that we almost like have a memory map in our brains where it's a combination of this spatial information with this temporal information which which gets bound together as almost like the the scaffolding of our memories and lots of other pieces of information that can attach to it so like emotions whether something's rewarding or not rewarding for example um so they all get put together in into this big memory map but but space is a is a key component of this

00:48:55 map and certainly in terms of experiences that are traumatic I think space and perception of course has a huge effect in that way and Alexandra could you help us out with what is it in dog memory that seems to be spatially related well I mean Andy has said it best and he's the neuroscientist here and of course what I liked uh about what he said was this emphasis on learning

00:49:26 through associations so memories being triggered by an association which is a way that we think of um sometimes nonhuman animals learning more than ourselves but that is of course analogous or identical in in nonhumans and in humans that we learn through associations and so it is not at all surprising that dogs can remember uh arriving at a vet or a person who they've met once or being in a place um that they've been before and had a bad

00:49:58 experience that shouldn't surprise us at all and I think what I what I'm interested in in your question Beverly is sort of why would we be surprised by that and I think it's because we don't think some in some level we're not thinking about companion animals or or non-human animals as having kind of personal stories right autobiographical memories that they um ruminate on that they sit back and reflect on and and that's only because well we we're not sure if they

00:50:29 do have a kind of sense of self over time right we and they don't have a a verbal way to express that um but also be because we are familiar with each other's um autobiographical self through analogy and through our telling each other about our our history and our experiences so we just have to look at dog behavior and realize that their behavior is showing us their memory but we often aren't we're not as accustomed to that to seeing other others memories uh visible just in their

00:51:01 behavior we're used to seeing their memories visible in how they respond and how they articulate their experiences we we start off and made a very important distinction between explicit memories and implicit memories and um but you'll notice that as we go along in the conversation we tended to default to when we mostly talk about memory we default to sort of explicit memories and I wonder when we talked about create creative memory and destructive memory we'll call it we we were are we mostly

00:51:33 referring to explicit memories and is that same creativity found in implicit memories on the one hand and right do dogs for example have some degree of explicit memory that's sort of what Alexander is commenting on just now I just wondered if we could talk about that creative uh aspect of implicit versus explicit well Socrates um when people started to write things down was disgusted because he said if you memorize things take things into

00:52:04 yourself as a memory you experience them more deeply than when you see it um on a tablet or whatever and I'm wondering what other panelists feel about that whether in our day-to-day Rush of taking in information and not particularly memorizing it we're losing in the depth of our response to it Richard so one of the things that we um need to think about is how intricately in the way the brain has developed um

00:52:36 memory is tied to emotion um so the amydala Jola do at NYU has done a lot of work on this in terms of how the amydala is tied to memory and it allows organisms including um including uh dogs um I wouldn't call them lesser animals greater animals to um to evolve and survive and adapt so um so in terms of how you know the feeling of something taking it in with Socrates it would have to do with the emotion how much you

00:53:08 imbue this memory uh with some kind of emotion how relevant it is to you um as opposed to facts memories for facts uh which are sometimes devoid of any kind of emotion unless it means you have to study to take an exam um so that is important I think in terms of the distinction between um um how well we remember things and how much emotion plays a role in Remembering um Alexander I have a question do you think that um

00:53:40 dogs have more of an emotional memory than people do sort of because of their absence of uh articulating themselves telling the story of to themselves we assume um I I I have to be agnostic about that I think I think that what I'm I would imagine is more of the dog's experience is a kind of Fuller fleshed uh perceptual memory in other words in modalities that maybe don't always occur to us as part of

00:54:11 memory formation so for instance old faction right where of course old faction is a Big Driver of learned associations and can we all can talk about that prian moment right of or a moment from Child an early memory that is invoked by a scent that you encounter again um but that's actually fairly rare we don't do we're we're not daily creating Alla Factory memor all Factory primed memories um but I but of course

00:54:44 if if one is an animal who is more living in that modality I think that they are um and so in so far as Al faction is actually closely tied to emotions you know perhaps so it's um but uh I don't think any there would be any reason that they'd be more emotional per se right vers versus analytic if if that's the contrast you're drawing it depends who their owners are can I can I I would please I would like to ask

00:55:17 something that was triggered by what GATRA said about emotion she at first said that uh you in terms of your first uh romance that you forget that in order to be able to have other romances now what what is it you forget you still may remember the name of the person you may recognize the person in the street uh you may remember some of

00:55:49 the places you went out together to but what you don't have is the emotions that you had at the time so what's and you mentioned emotional memory so how do we understand emotional memory versus what is more cognitive memory uh the other thing I wanted to ask and this has been on my mind for a few years and I haven't found sufficient I haven't been able to understand it for

00:56:20 myself sufficiently is what Christina mentioned about experience so that experience with the first uh love of your life can continue to have an impact on you for a period of time do you consider that memory or do you consider that something else those are the two thoughts I wanted to see if there could be some clarification for me on it and I don't know if I can offer

00:56:50 clarification but I can certainly comment a little bit on it um I think we're ultimately all mammals dogs humans and we really have this large overlay of our Neo cortex which tries to bring rationality to our decisions I mean Daniel Conan has written about this in Thinking Fast and thinking slow that we try to rationalize our very basic instinctual Behavior by giving it a narrative that fits in with

00:57:21 our thinking at the moment but it's really ultimately quite emotional this science of Economics is emotional even though we think of Economics as a very dry subject um so so I so to answer your question or to try to talk about it a little bit um when you're talking about emotions and how they uh affect memory um it makes it appeals more to the core brain more to the Primitive brain um and

00:57:52 um it's harder to erase which is why PTSD is such issue because it's their you know strong connection with emotion and that's why repression Freud's famous stories of repression are also an issue because it's a negative suppression if you will of memory so that's my thinking I don't know what else you wanted to say something yes me yeah um no sorry go ahead set go you

00:58:22 were trying to say something before oh um no I well it's that's okay it's all right go ahead Christina yeah to add to what was just said I if if if there is no emotion or veilance emotional veence there is no longterm [Music] memory uh motivation is based on emotions so if there is no motivation

00:58:52 there's not going to be any longterm memory there has been also a lot of experiments done looking at the level of stress and memory strength and what they have found is that a little bit of stress or emotion negative emotion in some cases when they have been measure as aversive memories uh or positive in other in other experiments is essential to have longterm memories and increasing the

00:59:22 level of stress or emotion you certain point is beneficial to have more memories more detailed memories more longlasting memories and after a certain level of stress then there is a decrease of memory strength and uh uh and and storage or at least they are not expressed anymore so it's like an inverted you effect a little bit of stress and emotion is necessary to to store me

00:59:54 longterm memories too much is bad because then we distort the memories and and the storage is only on certain um uh representations or cues or whatever is that that the experience was and it can be also sort of inhibited uh probably for a defensive mechanisms let's say a very a very strong trauma um if we ask what happened after

01:00:26 that traumatic experience often they say I don't remember no but I was trying to comment on the on the very simple thing which is de's exam G's example you have so you have your first uh romance yes you remember a lot about that but you don't have the emotion so well how do you how comes you don't have the emotions if you

01:00:56 whatever intense loving feelings you have you don't have anymore in fact gatri said if you contined to have them you couldn't move on well and can very many of those early love experiences turn into obsessions I think that's a whole other a whole other I I think it depends but for for the sake of the discussion yeah let's say that there is no emotional memory then the question is do you think that's memory yes absolutely everything that

01:01:29 memory by definition is whatever is uh stored and maintained over time and therefore that maintaining of that information will influence our behavior in the present moment yeah um can I yes I I remembered what I was thinking about emotion and I think it's that it's not that you forget that the emotional feeling you probably just transfer it onto someone else you know because I know I remember how I felt in my first

01:02:02 love and I know that maybe I don't feel that way about this other person because there's a lot of other memories that are piled on top of that original love that no longer makes me feel that way but I remember that feeling and when I meet somebody else and that feeling is there it's it's not that you lost it it's just that you're now associating it with somebody else and oh Andy can I just bring up one more thing the other thing about emotion is what if your the emotion that's associated with you is

01:02:34 fear and um hatred and um which is what I often experienced um growing up uh when I was eight years old I was walking home from school and somebody wrote in chalk sets goes a go home um this was in you know the early 7s and uh no 60s late 60s and um it turns out it was my neighbors it was two girls that

01:03:05 lived in my neighborhood and I'm not sure why they wrote that um other than that maybe they learned it from their parents um but uh you know I've even growing up and you know going to journalism school I didn't learn any a lot of this history um anti-as ISM that was legal or um most of the uh history that I learned about Asians was negative and fear-based

01:03:35 um and I still get it today I've been to dinner parties in the birkar where people said um oh the Japanese you had to be put away you know Pearl Harbor or the Japanese had you had to be nuked you know um so to me that's really scary um and I guess to them it's perfectly fine because I'm associated with uh people and a memory that triggers fear so what do you do when that is

01:04:05 constantly applied to you even though I I was I wasn't born then I promise I'm not scary Andy did you wanna you wanted to respond there I just wanted to add something really quickly um in response to basically uh Ed's question earlier about um you know moving on from a past romance and I think uh one potential factor which may help us do that as well uh is that often our memories transform over time so when we think about our

01:04:37 episodic memories the way like cognitive scientists think about that is that you you have a reexperiencing of the event so maybe emotions come back uh people talk about jumping back in time we put ourselves back when we experience that relationship perhaps and all those memories flood black but what often happens to those types of memories as well is that over time they begin to transform in the sense that they may become uh more semantization

01:05:25 you actually experienced that yourself or is that someone telling you that that's what happened and that became your memory and so there's that distinction between like a factual memory versus a personal experience memory and perhaps maybe that's what happens with you know some of the relationships way past is that over time they transform a little bit we detach from them slightly personally those emotions uh depending on how the relationship ended um maybe it was an amicable relationship or whether it wasn't that may influence things but maybe one factor is that those memories become a little bit more slightly more

01:05:56 santized and those those emotions that were attached with it we don't re-experience them again and so that then allows us to to you know put that relationship in the past and move on to a new one I'm sure that's true one remembers a memory it's like remembering the photocopy rather than rather than the real thing I I was wondering how much we could say that that fact that you just describe where memories are sort of fungible that that's a feature of explicit memory as opposed to implicit

01:06:28 memory I'm trying to tease that out here we we might open this up now to questions from the audience um they probably have some of the same questions that we do Jerry do is this the moment to include the audience I think that's a sounds like a good idea um let's see I think that here we are our I think Alex yeah yeah I I I have the questions collected just want to thank everyone who's viewing through zoom and on YouTube thank you for your

01:07:00 comments and questions so um I've recorded them as we gone through the zoom so if you wrote more than one I'm going to uh State your first one and then go through everyone else is and hopefully if we have time get to the others again um there will be some editing on my part just for time sake so please forgive me there and also if I mangle any pronunciations of names in advance I apologize okay okay so um the first one was from s Mason damro and uh they asked are you familiar with

01:07:32 research showing applying metformin to a type 1 diabetic this delays the oncoming of Alzheimer's uh if so please comment on this uh process so I'll just briefly mention that there's a lot of research now on um insulin resistance and um various risk factors for developing dementia and Metformin and drugs like that are helpful in this area um so um there's still a lot of research to be done

01:08:03 here okay then um just a comment to bring some levity to the conversation um Vicky Madden had wrote early on practically everyone I know has gotten a pandemic puppy so that's not a question but I think it's a nice a nice comment to add um she asked the question but unfortunately she's a little later on so hopefully get to her question but the next one was from Manan uh slow um is selective memory not in a perjorative sense a defense

01:08:36 mechanism I would say the analysts in our audience are best to take this no well I think in a way we've already addressed it that in order to to keep going we tend to take in what we think we can handle in the moment and one of the very compelling aspects in this pandemic period is how many supressed memories have come forth now I think there's something about the isolation there's something about the

01:09:07 amount of empathy we feel for others uh that is somehow it's enough of a hot house experience that what we didn't think about before because we had to keep going is now emerging and coming up don't know if others are having that that experience as well and yes I was saying to Alexander earlier that I've never seen a period of time where so many people became so dependent on

01:09:39 the um Inc unconditional affection of their pets in part in part because it's so difficult for people to be together in such you know an intense way that it's almost as if the the dog dogs become some kind of mediator in this situation oh yeah I think that's I mean I think that's exactly right they're a symbol of a time before and the ease of dealing with others and they have become the others the social presence right who

01:10:12 who are near and we can touch I think it's also interesting to remember that there are also dogs who are experiencing this time for themselves but new puppies are not experiencing a pandemic they don't know it's an unusual time right right so their memory of this time this is this is the ordinary life for them and and I think that is will be an interesting dissonance unfortunately if we kind of un quarantine and we assume that they are adjusted and ready to to um Live Life by themselves for

01:10:44 instance but the question about selective memory goes back to the fact that um one's brain the memory part of one's brain is constantly transform form in and reorganizing and goes back to what one of us was saying earlier about the experience of child birth I don't think for what I can put together that women forget child birth but they relegate it for the health of their life in the present and the future so it's

01:11:14 not a forgotten memory but in as much that one's brain or one's memory part of one's brain seems like a complex computer it's ref certain experiences so that they're not immediately upon us I do believe Richard that we do actually forget severe pain you know the the physical pain of childbirth um it's hard to recreate as speaking as you know someone you it's really really hard to recreate the intensity of the pain

01:11:46 immediately afterward um it can happen but it's rare from a neurologic perspective I I would assume I would assume that pain essentially stops when it stops yeah yeah yeah but to add to what Richard was saying the forgetting that happens in the first few years of life this least to infantile Amnesia uh that is actually an apparent

01:12:16 forgetting you're right we have tested uh these memories that are apparently gone if you give reminders later on in life to these animals the memories come back I remember we had a patient who spoke German for um grew up in Germany came to the United States when he was 14 or 13 learned English really forgot all of his German um or maybe he was even

01:12:46 younger maybe he was seven or eight and then he had a stroke and um the only thing he could speak in was in German and it was very hard family who didn't understand any German so to your point that you know we really never forget anything it's just our ability to retrieve things including emotion is much harder uh over time and what Jerry had asked earlier about the difference between explicit and implicit memory and its attachment to emotion I think of

01:13:16 implicit procedural memory as something that's a a cable as as opposed to explicit memory which for the most part memory for events and facts um is much more like a cobweb um and cables are often laid down better if they are wrapped in an insulation of emotion so that's that's a great I yeah I just want to um add to the um idea of suppressed memory I'm I'm not a memory expert

01:13:48 obviously but in looking at the history that I've been examining for the last uh 10 years um a lot of the Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by their own government just for being Japanese um uh did suppress that they they had they suppressed it on purpose and they didn't teach it to their children just so that they could survive um and move on with their lives it was it was essential it was a survive definitely a

01:14:19 survival mechanism yeah yeah can I I you know there something that gatri brought up that I I this is a language issue that I've always been interested in as a cognitive scientist is which is the sort of two sides of thinking about selective attention and forgetting so you earlier said sort of we're forgetting and I and I agree with this we're forgetting a lot of what's happening right now right so we're all experiencing in theory something of the same we're in the same moment we can see each other there's

01:14:49 some overlap in our experience but we're sort of not attending to some is that do you think do you think think it's the same it's appropriate to say that what's happened is we're forgetting that already because in fact it's not been encoded really it's not been explicitly coded where it it hasn't been rehearsed by us so it's sort of almost that it's just never experienced in a way it's as though it's never experienced at all and that's the type of thing that can't be brought back right later but I do feel like sort of slipperiness with language around

01:15:21 selective attention and selective forgetting that question brought it up and just attention and and how memories encoded to begin with well also I I feel like our experience of the pandemic is probably different than you know an essential workers who has to get up every day and you know go to a hospital or something like that I mean I feel lucky that I just get to stay in my birtu your home and it's I I don't have those memories that an essential worker has because I never experienced

01:15:53 it I think Alex we should go to the questions yeah yeah so next one was from Esther Dyson I guess this is more of a comment but I could turn it into a question I think would be interesting given Richard's uh mention in passing about computers um they said as they're listening to the intros they they thought like the quote unquote editing sounds is more like attaching things to a framework and the recognition of object as an AI so I guess a question would be like how do you think the formulation of how humans form memories relates to how an AI works or I guess

01:16:26 like a a deep Learning Network I'd say the primary difference would be that um there's no emotion involved with an AI so that and that's a huge difference um and you know obviously the richness of the parallel distributed networks that both humans and more advanced AI systems share um are are obviously AI systems are evolving and they're learning fuzzy logic they're learning to learn um but

01:16:57 emotion is the big difference you know between the two systems I don't know Andy Christin the rest of you Andy what do you think I agree and and I would say I mean just speaking practically I would say that the way that as humans the way we do it it far exceeds anything that that a like a deep new network could do I mean there are studies out there on on babies and how they do statistical learning how just repeating stuff and they pick up patterns that enables babies to learn language for example far

01:17:28 exceeds anything that you could throw like an ability of a de newal Network to recognize objects um so I think some of the principles are shared but in the human brain it's it's expanded and more complex in a way that we're only beginning to scrape the service of of how some of that learning occurs okay so the next um question I sorry if I didn't mention the last one was from Esther Dyson this is from Amy Olson could you please speak to the phenomenon of phantom Limbs and how the

01:17:58 mind remembers a body part there's no that is no longer present but it's perceived as if it [Music] were so Phantom limbs is that the question yeah sorry Phantom limbs yeah so you know as I mentioned before our realities are our brains right so if our brain thinks that we have pain we have pain so um if the brain thinks we have a limb we do have that limb so there's a part so there have been um numerous studies which I won't go into but basically ATT testing to this that um

01:18:31 and the brain is unable to differentiate for example between social rejection versus actual pain because the same area of the singlet cortex lights up um the brain doesn't assign a difference which I think is very interesting in terms of pain um in terms of the emotional circuitry involved between physical pain and emotional pain they both coales in certain parts of the brain um so Phantom limb just means that that part of your

01:19:01 brain still thinks you have um you have a limb attached um and that's why chronic pain is such an interesting condition to treat because even when the nent event is no longer you know it's it's it's gone the brain can elaborate on the pain and make it as large or as wiow down as it chooses to um and it's not a conscious process can you make it conscious um that's an interesting

01:19:32 question you know all kinds of you can remember many things uh by rehearsing you know the idea of changing an explicit declarative memory like how do you learn to play the violin to an implicit cable type memory um involves rehearsal um so yeah I would imagine you can I mean you can uh one of the things that I work on is in terms of changing um the brain's perception of chronic pain and one of

01:20:02 the ways we do that is by using brain stimulation to turn down the area of the brain that perceives the pain without actually doing anything about the um the actual event that's causing the pain whether it's a neuropathy uh or an amputated limb um for yeah so it's it everything happens in our brain whether it's real or not which sounds kind of silly to have to say but it's hard for us to truly grasp I think

01:20:34 sometimes Christina do you have thoughts you'd like to add to this no okay no I think she did a fantastic job okay okay okay yeah so uh Dave asked how can one forget or change a negative memory I think do do we want to answer that I think it's been sort of fleshed out through the conversation so just to note that I got your question Dave there um Sachin paban sorry if I mispronounced

01:21:06 that uh apart from cues of survival or for survival excuse me is there a reason we were inbred with memory what are we here to remember being on Earth for I'm not sure I understood the question what's the reason to have memories yeah what's the biological necessity for memory biological reason is to survive but in

01:21:37 addition they want to know in addition to survival so besides survival is there any other uh reason well Consciousness I mean Ed Gerald Edmund called Consciousness the remembered present suggesting that we're experiencing reflecting and remembering all at once and that's what Consciousness is you know if you ask the question what's it for it looks to me like the only sort of

01:22:07 obvious answer would be for survival it may do other things other than promote survival and I think that's what makes it a lot of fun obviously we don't remember we're not fun as a case may be but I mean isn't memory like you know does a rock have a memory so maybe you know because we're animals well we've evolved differently a rock doesn't have to cross the road and if you didn't have

01:22:38 exactly but of course the one thing that remains all the arguments about where Consciousness comes from which we still haven't resolved Andy do you have thoughts you'd like to insert here not in particular I I would say that the survival is is the main piece um yeah okay um so next one is from Vicky Madden um they were curious about dream

01:23:09 remembrance so they said um is the reason why they potentially forget memories or the way that they retain memories is that they have to tell it to themselves and put it to language right away and if they don't they'll forget it so like how does one go about remembering a dream um this is the idea that that somehow speaking of it or talking verbalizing a memory does something go some way towards U instantiating it or

01:23:41 creating I I once did a dream sleepover seminar at the rubben Museum of Art where we were right there with people waking up just as they were waking up which is very different than seeing patients in your office and they would report the dream while they were waking up and then the next morning we would have a group and everyone would discuss or say report their dream the content in every case

01:24:14 was exactly the same what changed was the linear time sequence so that when the person was waking up they said this happened but before that this happened before that this happened and then when they told the dream in the morning it was like a linear narrative that that was very interesting so I think you know some of what seems so ridiculous in dream memory is actually because we're changing the time SE we're looking at it from The Waking

01:24:46 time sequence so I think if you accept that where there's an anomaly then there's more of a tendency to be open to your dreams record them remember them yeah um if I could just share a story my husband loves trains he's a train fanatic and he made us watch this uh documentary about the bullet train in Japan and supposedly since its um invention and uh Inception

01:25:16 it has had I think only one death um accident and which is pretty remarkable considering Japan ja an has the most earthquakes of any nation in the world and they said that one of the things that they do and I've seen this on on local trains in Japan where um the conductor points at something and then he says something and then um it's like point and there's something to with verbalizing and pointing um that they do

01:25:48 and we kept looking like who is he talking to because he didn't have earphones he didn't have anything and it turns out that it's a Memory uh Aid and now they use it at hospitals with prescriptions you they make you look at the name you say it out loud and then you point again and it improves the accuracy by I don't know how many fold so us reading it looking at it and then verbalizing it actually

01:26:19 does something to the memory process yeah I wanted to just say something really interesting and I never knew this and I don't know if you ever experienced this but I had a a graduate student who is now in medical school and he grew up in Japan and he came to the United States when he was in his 20s and he had trouble he had to unlearn the difference between L and R he actually had a lot of

01:26:52 trouble pronouncing saying well there is no well in Japan it was just I thought it was so interesting that no in Japan there is no r or an L there's only in between there's a it's not a l and it's not an r and what he said is he had trouble hearing the difference yeah couldn't hear the r or the L so a lot of times he had to put it in the context so I thought fascinating because it's not something you routinely think about no but also

01:27:24 move on to the next question oh sorry yeah um so uh Elizabeth Manis asked is there a distin well I think this actually is a good uh piggyback off what guyu was talking about is there a distinction between forgetting and unlearning Richard do you have a sense of that as a historian again going back to willfulness or rather the exercise of

01:27:57 one's will um there was a British officer in the um early to mid 19th century who was going through um a a section of Europe and he was saying to them well can you he said to one man can you remember Napoleon and the man said yes he was well over six foot tall with long blonde hair and anyway what he wanted to remember was um a conquering

01:28:30 General looking like a viking God so he um unconsciously created this image which had nothing to do with with fact except the fact of what he thought a conquering um officer should look like so to that extent um one can unconsciously will a memory interesting yeah and Oliver sax talks about

01:29:02 um reciting to members of the family various events in their shared past and the family saying but you weren't there and it's the same process they' have like to have been might we also say that forgetting is a larger category and unlearning to the degree it's a separate thing it's a sub subset of all forgetting does that sound reasonable yeah sounds good unlearning

01:29:34 means that we have learned something and then we unlearn forgetting is part of many processes one of the things you'll remember the famous line in Death of a Salesman um when the wife says attention must be paid one of the aspects of learning and unlearning is paying attention um we've all seen on Andy's

01:30:05 wall above um the television set in the bookcases um a number of telephones but did we pay attention to the fact that he has four telephones Out Of Reach in his living room no but I saw the gorilla walk by I don't know if the rest of you saw that gorilla all right so maybe it's the grill in the room not the elephant in the room well I think we've come to the end of our

01:30:36 time well can we get one or two more questions or you if you would like to uh yeah I think there I could pick sort of two apologies to others but I think there's sort of two um that could be think interesting so one was from Robert maati um you wrote a long thing but I think I can understand what you're saying is probably best answered by Christina um he was sort of curious about the physiological process of explicit memory recall and he was what he's referring to I'm pretty sure is like structural changes with protein so

01:31:06 I think was I think what he's alluding to is with ltp a long-term potentiation causing uh protein fold changes and I think he was curious whether such protein full changes are what leads to recall right so that the certain position of the protein over time is what leads to recall I I that's I'm I'm assuming also I've had some experience in Neuroscience research myself and my master I I've read this before so I think that's what he's referring to yes yes I'm going to give a brief answer because it could be a lot of

01:31:37 discussion about recall it's could be another topic for another Helix uh uh meeting we don't know anything about the mechanisms of recall it's very difficult to study because it's an instantaneous it's it's a it's a moment that happens and studying the biology of that is is is going to be the next Frontier I'm sure uh but has not been as easy to approach as encoding in new memories and long-term memory uh consolidation and

01:32:09 storage information so recall is a major major question uh I would not equate this with ltp first long-term potentiation is uh the equivalent is believe or suggested to be the equivalent of long-term memory long-term potentiation uh or memories formation let's say but not recall uh there are studies of course that can reactivate

01:32:40 the the electrophysiological measurements but again um relating that to recall of memories is a big jump as you can imagine you know one electrophysiological measurement is a monodimensional understanding compared to the complexity of the brain so that's why only oh no I apologize when I when I was referring to ltp I was mostly not in terms of recall but it's as you talked about it's what I to me creates the network and the system

01:33:11 from which the memory sort of first builds upon through synaptic pruning and what have you and obviously LTD long-term depression the ser and the cellum but yeah that's that's a whole other discussion for another day um and then um I get okay this is a good this is a good light one I think because um it's a good one that ended off this person it was uh chudy LaVine asked how is it when you do a cross puzzle if you leave it and come back you'll then remember the the words that you couldn't remember before but it

01:33:41 comes like this without thinking about it the computer warming up it goes somewhere into the default default network but it's your brain's processing it even if you're not paying conscious attention it's like coming up with an answer to a problem that you had at night you wake up and you know the

01:34:12 answer in the morning I think it's the same sort of thing and not so much a memory issue I would think but it relates also to um getting offline not having your brain occupied with something else so that it has an opportunity to sort of reconfigure itself and perhaps come out with an answer of course doesn't always work but there is this idea that either sleeping on it or taking a break doing something else can improve uh performance well I'd like to thank

01:34:43 everyone so much for your wonderful contributions there's so much that hasn't been said but I think we've all learned we've all all I hope recorded and I hope many of us will remember much of what was said but it was all terribly important and I thank you so much for participating and thank you Beverly for organizing it and moderating yes and I wish you all very well very well as we proceed to

01:35:15 manage next year in person thank you goodbye everyone who's come thank you for being with us thank you everyone all right thank you take care byebye bye

01:35:52 bye for