The Techne of Memory

00:00:00 welcome to this Helix event on the technique of memory we are going to start by with a movie done by Vivian Silvera and after that we'll do the introductions thank you Vivian for this wonderful movie uh before I introduce John Williams who is responsible for organizing coming up with the idea and organizing this panel I'd like to tell

00:00:30 you about our future programs on April 8th we have habitable worlds life beyond Earth organized by Professor Chris Impe April 22nd Shakespeare forever organized by Ellen Gilbert May 13 crisis in higher education organized by John tune September 20th emotions we're gonna Professor Catherine Elkins October 21

00:01:01 permanence and impermanence of mathematical Concepts Michael Harris organized that and November 4 planetary intelligence organized by David Greenspun uh John Williams I'm going to be brief because some of you or all of you have this is a professor of English film and media at Yale University and he is the author of

00:01:32 uh the book the the Buddha in the machine or technology and the meeting of east and west the book was won the 2015 Harry 11 prize from the American comparative literature Association and he just completed the manuscript titled World presence the trouble with mindfulness which details the rise of a

00:02:04 new metaphysics of presence that has emerged within the multi-million dollar Wellness industry and mathem physics with important consequences in how we read literature and philosophy today so John Williams thank you Adam thank you all for coming out today this is uh it's wonderful to see you um I'm going to introduce our panels our

00:02:36 panelists I'll begin first with Vivian Silvera whose film we just watched and I think we'll have some things to say about that during our conversation um Vivian is an award-winning artist and filmmaker her videos have been installed at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation MGM National Harbor University of Mary Washington Davidson College for culture and the cube art project Union bank and exhibitions include the art basil Miami art week Berlin the Edward Hopper house

00:03:07 the Albright Knox Gallery the dahesh museum the master Museum and the Museo De La ciudad Mexico her film see memory that we just saw premiered at the Imagine science Film Festival her sculpture the fault was made for the women's studies department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee where it is permanently installed she's a two-time recipient of the Keim gross Award winner of the Valerie de la Court award and the Harriet Whitney frischmuth travel award

00:03:37 from the National Academy Museum of design she also won the Award of Excellence in painting at the Edward Hopper House Museum uh Victoria Lucilla is an author and editor with 20 years of Journalism publishing and digital media experience she's been a founding member and Senior manager of groundbreaking teams at Twitter Conde Nast and NBC in addition she has taught seminars and undergraduate writing classes at Columbia University the University of Arizona and the University of Montana

00:04:09 she's also an editor and Ghost Writer with particular experience in Memoir fiction sociology philosophy and psychology manuscripts her essays and articles have been published in the New York Times Publishers Weekly The Onion the new yorker's website and many other print and online Publications her writing has also been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Thomas J Watson Library as well as Yale University's by Nicky rare book and manuscript Library she earned her ba and MFA from Colombia

00:04:39 and is the author of three non-fiction books that have been published in both America and abroad uh finally Sam McDougall earned his ba in neuroscience and behavior from Vassar College in 2009 and his PhD in neuroscience and psychology from Princeton University in 2018. after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley Sam joined Yale's psychology department in 2020 as an assistant professor Sam's lab uses behavioral experiments computational modeling neuroimaging and neuropsychology

00:05:11 techniques to study motor memory and motor learning one of the lab's main interests is how neural systems that support higher level cognition intertwine with lower level control of the human body the so-called cognitive motor interface Sam enjoys playing and Performing old-time folk and bluegrass music as well later next month uh and actually the um the final panelists Dr uh Daniela Schiller um last but not least is Professor uh in

00:05:42 the department of Psychiatry the Nash family Department of Neuroscience and the Friedman brain Institute at the uh icon school of medicine at Mount Sinai her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories uh Schiller got her PhD in Tel Aviv University and then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University she joined Mount Sinai in 2010 and has been directing the laboratory of affective Neuroscience since her lab has delineated the neural

00:06:13 computations of threat learning how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination and the dynamic tracking affect Estates and social relationships Schiller is a Fulbright fellow and codley frontiers of science fellow and has been the recipient of many awards including the New York Academy of Sciences blavatnik award and the klingenstein Simon's Fellowship award in the neuroscientists so please join me in welcoming all of our Roundtable panelists for our conversation thank you

00:06:46 our conversation will be very free-flowing we'll have some time for questions at the end as well so if anyone would like to get started perhaps on some topic that's interesting to them well I guess maybe I can say so um yeah I just wanted to to Vivian how I love your movie you kind of listen you have conversation with scientists and you listen to the

00:07:18 underlying intuitions all the stuff that doesn't go into the scientific papers because there's no actual data but you you get really the essence of it and put it all in the movie so I think it's it's a lot commentary narrated by Me was Daniela actually who I pursued vehemently until she agreed to let me interview her right it took a year from when I first reached out to her but I had just started this strange stop-motion animation experiment

00:07:51 I didn't know where I was going with it and I was reaching out to neuroscientists and you saw hopefully the list of who I got to interview which really was my favorite part of the process and I had a mind-blowing interview with Daniella in her office and um really moved me so much and so a lot of that narration about The Art of Storytelling and we don't have to be a slave to our past and every all of our behaviors are all of our memories are

00:08:21 carved into our Behavior that's all daniela's words um so yeah so we have a and I call her for every single project now because I'm fascinated by memory and Imagination which is as an artist that's what I'm working on in my new films and that's exactly what you're working on in your lab do you want to talk about memory and Imagination um well we had an experiment to see whether instead of actually being exposed to

00:08:54 triggers in the environment we can imagine them and whether that will create a change in the brain and in our Behavior so we created a situation in the level people learn to be afraid of something like a tone that predicts something unpleasant and usually what you would do in something like exposure therapy you would present that tone again and again until you understand it at tone means nothing but we ask the participants to just imagine it and they did repeatedly and then when we

00:09:25 compare the two groups that were actually exposed to the stimulus versus those that imagine it we saw same reduction in their fear response and also similar neural activations with imagination we could change the neural representation of the memory what underlies our reactions it's incredible so my understanding was that there's no difference if you look at it neurologically between an imagined experience and an experienced experience

00:09:57 is that am I right about that other or there's got there are a lot of similarities uh yeah I wouldn't say it's exactly the same you see the hippocampus which is the brain regions that's very important for memories that is also active when you imagine and you see widespread systems one of them is called the default mode it's a neural system that is active when we have introspection internal thoughts you usually see it kind of coming online

00:10:29 almost like to block the external stimulation and this is a part of it is a system that you see also when you imagine can I interrupt to say that I think that's one of the things I find Most Fascinating about the film is the way that it dramatizes and performs that sort of neural reimagining that happens within a memory that people tend to think of as a recording device as you say but that in fact is the kind of re-articulation of something that's happened the film itself has these beautiful images of paint that a cruise but also leaks and

00:11:01 Fades at the same time and there's a real um sort of painterly quality to the narrative I noticed and to me that's why I think the the question for today about the technae of memory that is the art the way that imagination the way that we engage with objects and tools and works of art in the world affect the way that we imagine memory the way that we function with memory as people um but I think this has a lot to do with

00:11:32 neural circuitry but it has a lot to do with how we imagine art what art can do for us how we learn how we experiment how we be how we become creative in those moments um I remember this being something that Sam and I taught a course together at Yale called the science and culture of memory and one of the things that we found so interesting was just how much the same processes that rely on that we rely on for memory are part of what we

00:12:04 rely on for creativity but also Imagining the future that there's a real way in which memory has an impact on how we think about Futurity yeah right as Daniella just mentioned some of the classic work in neuropsychology involves patients with damage to the hippocampus this region we often equate with explicit memory um and that's true and that is a classic neuropsychological finding replicated many times but another Finding perhaps replicated less but I think pretty well accepted is that those same patients who

00:12:37 have damage to these areas involved in memory actually have trouble imagining Futures so you prompt these patients to imagine a certain type of scene in the future and a certain thing happening to them or happening to to other sort of stimuli and they have trouble with that and the trouble they have looks similar to the trouble that they have reconstructing the past which puts a kind of a fine point on what John's saying that this this Act of Creation that we think of when we think of

00:13:09 making art or imagining a technological future writing a Sci-Fi novel whatever is similar to memory retrieval and the concept of memory retrieval as creation which of course as the movie beautifully mentioned is is actually affects memories right so when you retrieve memories it's not a passive film school that you play right it's a it's a quite invasive Act

00:13:40 I wanted to bring Victoria in because I think what I explored what I explore in painting and in film she explores in her work as a writer and she wrote this Memoir this is how you say goodbye and I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about the journey you went on having a traumatic memory can negatively impact your ability to imagine or to

00:14:14 think in an expansive way about the future but I also wonder about the ways in which we get attached to our memories and the narratives and the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and who the other people in our lives are in the world as a whole potentially Works to our detriment in sort of limiting what we can imagine for our future because we're basing it on these memories that we already have and I don't know

00:14:45 if that's something that your work has looked at or explored of are we ever held back by having too strong of a memory or an attachment and as someone who has written Memoirs you spend a long time sort of in the bubble of what's happened to you in the past and at a certain point you know it's like is this I I think I'm doing something productive but maybe I'm not or maybe there's a line I've crossed

00:15:15 I think you're you're trying to construct a story as as Danielle and I have talked a lot about like Memories fragments that you piece together to to make into a story and I think in your first memoir um you had all these pieces of childhood because because Victoria wrote this when she was very young and right out of college right yes I started it in college yeah so she had this childhood where her father died of age-related suicide and when she

00:15:45 was quite young and she had all as we talked about in an interview you had all these pieces these fragments of memory you said that didn't add up to anything and I think when you were working on the Memoir you were trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together so you could tell a story rather than just have pieces of fragments that didn't sort of add up to something don't you think that's what the the purpose was yeah I think that was part of it and I think also in my particular instance it

00:16:18 was both my own memories also trying to understand the memories of someone who was no longer here to speak for himself and when I knew him was so heavily medicated that even the memories we were making was I wasn't necessarily making them with the person that he might have been under healthier circumstances um and so there was also I think right from the get-go there was actually sort of a lack of trust around the memories that I did have um

00:16:49 and and sort of and also the right what right did I have to some of his memories in terms of finding you know lovers of his from when he had been very young and wanting to speak to them but also recognizing that just because you know I had sort of a sad story didn't mean that they had to tell me you know or share these things that were very personal and private to them you know even if it did uh include my dad and uh you know I imagine many of you are parents in the

00:17:20 room you know there may be things that you wouldn't necessarily want your children to know or if they did know you would want to be the one to get to share them um and so I think that was you know the the power power and control and who owns the rights to Memories uh to memory is something I'm also very interested in and I think when you think about it in the context of Art and and oftentimes there's a public component to Art and so you're putting it out there to be shared

00:17:50 you know then it's no longer just your memory and now you're putting your memory out there and someone's gonna have a memory of experiencing the art of your memory and an interpretation that may or may not uh you may or may not appreciate or want and you know I find that with you know interacting with readers of my work of it you know once once you publish it it belongs to the reader or the viewer and you have to be okay with that

00:18:20 seems to be an interesting Paradox and the way you're describing memory and the way that we experience it as well which is that uh there's an inherent fogginess to memory that when we create a narrative sort of that allows for a coherence that may not actually be there in the mind when we construct a story or a narrative we're giving I often think of this with regard to my dreams if someone says what was your dream and I'd tell a story about my dream in some way I'm betraying the weirdness of it by imposing a kind of narrative voice with

00:18:50 grammatical you know coherence on it and I think that's probably true of memory as well that when we create a narrative we're solidifying something that's inherently uh just a wash in plasticity and malleable in our minds on the other hand this is the other part of the Paradox art seems to defamiliarize memory for many of us if we witness a great film or some work on memory it allows us to revisit that sort of sublime weirdness that memory

00:19:21 actually contains for us as we as we try to navigate our way through these depths of the conscious and unconscious mind so I'm really fascinated by the way that this work in particular that we saw today but many many works of art I notice dance across this Paradox of creating coherence but also defamiliarizing it making us feel sort of weird and interesting in that sense yeah yeah that's part of uh maybe the function of memory to

00:19:54 um to have coherence but at any given moment and maybe this is one of the reasons that memories are changing because each time you Could reconstruct them it depends on the information you have now so it will have a different shape because it has to fit the current conditions and I wonder if we could expand this as well speaking of current conditions one of the topics that we hoped to address in this panel was the the question of

00:20:24 in some ways the Digital Universe the ways that we are more and more exteriorizing our memory into objects that we carry with us or that contain information in the cloud um so many of us for example no longer remember phone numbers because we no longer have to that information has been externalized somehow and the anxiety that one can feel for example when losing a phone I think is is also illustrative of just how much of our memories exist outside of us now and

00:20:56 that there's a really important way in which it's it's useful to think about what that does to our our sensibilities and our memories yeah okay go ahead say more thinking about when I can't find my phone I feel like I lost my memory right I think that's the same kind of panic I think you just crystallized that feeling for me yeah I feel like that conversation is as much about phone numbers as it is about skills and that actually what people really mourn

00:21:27 is that they don't know their way around anymore for example because of GPS right there's a skill that they used to have to sort of you know polish and look at the Rand McNally accent uh uh Maps yeah yeah Atlas side of sitting on the dashboard collecting dust but um I'm curious about that aspect too right because on the one hand we mourn this we say oh I used to be able to get around and I'll you know I can't do it for because of this GPS but on

00:21:59 the other hand we say well maybe now I've allowed myself to learn other skills I've freed up my time somewhat um and as someone with a three-year-old times to me just constantly slipping through my figure fingers so too then the Neuroscience world do we have more space now for everything I think we are incorporating the this is a nice example I like about the calculator right so uh we did have a

00:22:31 calculator but and now we haven't it did hurt us actually it really helps right so you you do incorporate this Machinery into our abilities it's like our external Consciousness right totally is it a coincidence that the campus also has a map like function actually yeah I mean some of the famous work on what we've lost with GPS in humans at least is studying London taxi drivers who spent many years have to spend many years studying What's called the knowledge which is a sort of poetic name

00:23:03 for what's now lost uh so learning every street and every corner and every turn and they have to pass this onerous test to get their license and actually it's been replicated fairly many times at this point that areas of those must be made areas of their posterior hippocampus and actually the specific location within the hippocampus is important for technical reasons but areas of the posterior at the campus actually enlarge when you to spend a lot of time studying

00:23:33 a map so London taxi drivers you can actually follow them before they learn the knowledge until many years later when they've considered to have the knowledge and you see this increase in the gray matter volume so the amount of neurons doing stuff in the posterior hippocampus the exact region you're talking about yeah there's a something very interesting about that Med base and you met the location but what have you learn and the reason here

00:24:03 is that this type of Machinery in the brain actually applies to all manner of spaces just like memory actually memory and spatial navigation are in the couples so what is memory if not you know collection or sequence of scenes that you link across contexts that's also a form of mapping and since then research discovered that that type of mapping occurs also in sound space even social space the way we map the location of others relative to ourselves so the

00:24:36 mapping of physical Space is really just one case of that Machinery of linking between components when speaking of technical memory it's become increasingly strange and interesting in the in the processing of digital information I was thinking earlier about how when I first got a computer someone would ask how much memory is there it was in reference to um this sort of blank storage capacity it didn't contain anything it was it

00:25:07 would be the equivalent of someone saying how much memory do you have well I have 50 blank books on my shelf so I have a lot of memory we tend to think of memory as having content as having kind of intentionality to it whereas in the computational world it was described as this kind of storage capacity increasingly however with AI and I think particularly with what people are talking about a lot right now which is this chat GPT the processual quality of memory and computation has become more and more Eerie more and more strange and

00:25:39 interesting to the way that we think about What machines can do and what we can do by contrast um but of course all of these models all of these are artificial intelligence models are taking vast amounts of data and using it in the kind of mnemonic way to predict what the next line of information should be so the processing of data now by computers is so intense and so vast that

00:26:10 it's becoming predictive and really kind of uncanny ways the way we think about our own memories so the memory of the computer is to predict the future which is what most neuroscientists say now right that that memory is as much about or more so about navigating the present and making a plan for the future than it is about being an accurate recording of the past [Music] yeah but in the context of a human being it

00:26:41 in the service of the organism right we retain information and we retrieve it to make sense of the environment and to make predictions in order to survive you know to to function best in the environment for our own organismic needs chat GPT I don't know what the what the motivation of that machine learning is yet right it's memory towards a goal yeah in

00:27:11 living living things right yeah and you have to wonder course on its face we are intuition is that these large language models don't have goals except just optimizing some to use a jargon cost function which in this case is predicting really well what the next word or phrase in the sentences I I thought that when you were earlier talking about memory you were talking about memory and I think in the in the movie in the film

00:27:43 or more frequently referring to what we call autobiographic memory and that's different from memory of knowledge so it's not very clear the memory autobio but to what degree autobiographic memory helps you navigate the future especially when you say every time you access autobiographic memory it may be changed

00:28:14 so what is the uh what makes it then that uh the people we know with all their autobiographic memories even though the autobiographic memories change they remain the same so if I met Vivian 10 years from now she may be a little bit different but mostly will be the same so how is that

00:28:46 explained in terms of the neuroscientific world than any other explanation I think Vivian will be the same maybe it's a philosophical question or is it yeah we I mean I think we are constantly changing although and we are our changing selves I mean there's some coherence in our representation but

00:29:18 that coherence is dynamic well I agree that we are changing but it seems to me that we are changing because we are on in an ongoing way you have we have other experiences yes and that is different from autobiographic memory so wouldn't you say that in a way we are a product not so much of our memories but our experiences some of which

00:29:48 we may be able to recall correctly or incorrectly and a lot of which we don't yeah absolutely I think that uh it's a very profound way to say that we are instead of saying we are the sum of our memories we really are the sum of our experiences and whatever you're retrieve in the moment um relates to what is it that you are now or experiencing now we have triggers for memories so for example if you if you retrieve something negative that

00:30:19 happened to you it's not that this is who you are it's like something is happening now that is triggering it and if you listen to that you understand who you are now and why is it that you're retrieving it and that memory you might when you store it again might modify might be modified because of that new experience so um when you listen to your memories it's not really an interrogation of who you were it's an interrogation of who you are now yeah actually one of the psychiatrists

00:30:50 that I interviewed Dr Paul Brody who's spoken here before um Paul Brody psychiatrist one of the psychiatrists that I interviewed really talked about how he had grown up feeling very bullied as a child in South Africa and then when he shared that memory with a friend who had been at school with him knowing that they hadn't been friends um he now remembers that memory as if his friend was there with him he wasn't

00:31:22 alone and I know that Daniela you've told a lot of stories about what you learned about your father Daniella's father was a holocaust Survivor but you know and she's spoken about this on on many the moth and many she's told the story really beautifully many times but how you learned something about him and that colored all the previous memories you had of him do you want to talk about that yeah if you're talking about the memories that are

00:31:52 changing uh scientifically we call it the process of reconsolidation there's a there's an event that happens initially and you Consolidated but each time you retrieve it it can be restored again in a modified way and personally my father was who was in the Holocaust never talked about it so I never knew and he was just this person you know I'm living with and this like this block that I don't know what's happening and uh just at one point very close to the end of

00:32:24 his life he finally talked and there's like a whole world uh got exposed and because I study reconsolidation I was acutely aware of like the domino pieces you know how all the previous memories of here are being colored by that new information that I'm having and I'm kind of desperately trying to remember how I thought about him before to document it scientifically but it becomes a semantic memory it becomes kind of just a I know I thought about him differently and it's it's very interesting once you kind of

00:32:54 start to think of this they dynamically Dynamic revisions of memory and you try to track them in your own life it becomes a very interesting process of discovery it's very hard to track it I think it's very hard to hold on to what you previously thought about something yeah yeah well until I guess I'm interested in holding it all somewhat Loosely I keep coming back to Daniella what you

00:33:24 were saying about the sharing of a memory or story as a mean of connection which is absolutely true and and it was in tandem with John talking about the sense of presentation that we have online with our posts on social media or whatnot and obviously that's something that is given a lot of page space these days but I think it's also true that when we share a memory it's not that it's

00:33:54 false or an intentional misrepresentation but it is a representation there's a way in which we choose to share that memory with people or the way in which we choose to dress or show up in a space and so when we you know talk about these kind of fake glamorous lives on Instagram or you know Tick Tock or whatever it's not like that got invented with social media you know that's been part of human nature for a very long time and so I think to me there's this inherent tension and that sometimes we

00:34:26 think you know all these things that have been changed by the digital and in some ways that's true and the way we remember things and how we edit things and how many characters something is is absolutely going to shape Us in ways we don't even know yet and yet at the same time you know I think human beings are human beings and we sort of come back to some sort of default um and and I'm always leery of you know what what your father shared or

00:34:57 what anyone shares with us maybe the new information is valuable but it's but also what's valuable is the way in which they chose to share that or the thing that they remembered and shared as opposed to the thing that wasn't said um and you know it's kind of the the white space on the page can be just as important Victoria could I ask a question as a writer I often I've talked to a lot of writers and quite often you hear the phrase like I didn't know what I was thinking until I started to write it down yeah and I wonder since you

00:35:29 write a lot about memories memoir I wonder if there's a sort of an analog for that in writing about memory that you don't know what you remember until you write it down that maybe that I want to know if there's something interesting about writing something that both slows the mind but also reaches into the memory in ways that you know if you're just simply telling someone something casually that you remember it might be a different kind of experience yeah I think that's an excellent notion

00:36:00 to explore um I would say that when you write something down or perhaps when you paint or you know whatever your medium might be or even to compose a piece of music um if it's coming from a place of memory or recollection it almost gives you the ability to have some awareness around it because you're creating this distinction between yourself and it and so when it's inside you and it's swirling and whatever and you have this you know you're having a whole emotional reaction

00:36:31 to it possibly a physical reaction to it and then when you set it outside yourself well now it's in a place of curiosity because now it's like well well that's interesting and you can play with it in this different way and it's and because it now feels separate from you it's a little bit easier to not be so identified with it and I think that's one of the reasons you know this is certainly not my area of expertise but you know well I'd be very curious to know someone who's just been writing about mindfulness but I know that in

00:37:02 therapy one of the things that is often suggested is to just write down your fears or you know say it out loud to someone and that that can take some of the bite or the sting out of it um and I think in my process of writing um it allows me to it feels safer because now I feel like I have the ability to um now I can play with it rather than it sort of playing with me that's nice there's a real autonomy to

00:37:33 that like there's a kind of it feels like you're claiming a sort of identity in the process of of putting it outside of you interestingly can writing also break rumination because so much of my time retrieving memories is just ruminating on them that's just me I guess say more about what Upper West Side ruminating well just right just kind of you know playing memories on Loop and sort of exploring how you maybe how you could have behaved differently if that's that kind of memory but I wonder if

00:38:04 writing hell I'm curious I'm kind of asking more than yeah theorizing if writing maybe helps because you need to have some momentum when you're right maybe it helps you navigate through memory rather than just sort of hang out in one spot yeah it may help I think it may also not help and one of the questions I have for that might I think speak to some of the other concerns having is what are the structures institutions corporations and so on that curate that exteriorization of memory

00:38:36 you know rumination can happen just about any time you let your mind wander but to put it outside of you either into a work of writing or onto an app or to um in some kind of film you're putting it outside yourself and the difference I think is that in writing that autonomy that sort of volition remains close it remains intimate it's part of that uh you own something about that as it comes out of

00:39:06 you but when memories are exteriorized into vast amounts of digital uh platforms that that in some ways you know I always find it so interesting when Facebook delivers me a memory you know yeah they say they say here's what you were doing you know seven years ago and uh you know quite if you've been divorced you say oh well thank you you know that's that's great or you know these can be you know very interestingly um owned in a way

00:39:38 yeah yeah maybe something that you you know this is another question that we're having from the beginning and that is that how much control uh over the way that we remember do we have particularly because remembering is an act of reimagination how much force of our own control that we have over that maybe before there's an answer to that I think it's tied into the question of life experience playing a role in who we are and part of the experience is also interactions that we

00:40:10 have with others who remind us who we are in one way or another yeah because you remember what happened to us the other day you know for sure um and they I have a feeling that helps to sustain a sense of some continuity in your own personhood because other people keep yeah now it's been exported into someone else it's a gigantic space yeah what effect might that have just that's your question yeah I mean one of the questions that raises is the idea of collective memory right and the fact that when we have memories often we share them even if

00:40:43 they remain [Music] um unarticulated they're there in some ways so we can both exteriorize into these structures but into groups of of loved ones or people or uh Associates actually AO Scott I think just stepped down as a film critic at the times oh at least I saw this on Twitter so I need a fact check but yeah yeah I remember Ed some knotting heads I think his reasoning and his motive was that fandom had driven him crazy this idea that

00:41:14 there's these Collective groups that all sort of share a narrative about how good this Marvel movie is or whatever whatever it is and that it drove him nuts because he could write a bad you could pan a a Marvel movie and have this entire Collective group was Borg a fan sort of go after him I think that he was sick of that and I think of that as being like the exteriorization in this case more of like opinion but you can you can call it memory I was also thinking about um what Victoria said about

00:41:46 externalizing Ry in writing and I was thinking don't you do that as a neuroscientist too I mean let's say memory is very ephemeral it's very nebulous it's very hard to grasp like we talked about in many of the interviews it could be a feeling that washes over you but I could shape the memory as an artist or take some control over memory but I would think that studying memory as a neuroscientist would be also gratifying in that same way and that you're taking this thing that has this

00:42:17 unconscious power over you and you're really breaking it down to its Essence and it's also giving you control in the way that creating an artwork about it would give you some control yeah it helps to understand the Machinery if you understand the mechanism of how it works you start also to kind of understand why what's the purpose of it and then you internalize it but I think of a thread that's going on here is really about autonomy and

00:42:51 because we keep saying how much control we have and you're saying it's like okay if I put it outside now I have kind of a space I think that's one of the biggest uh I guess myth about memory which is that we don't have control over it it just comes out of somewhere and that's it and if you have bad memories you really are doomed if you think like that but that process I think that Victoria is describing and also by externalizing you

00:43:24 know when you have monuments these are triggers and they do force you to remember because they're triggers right so if you are surrounded by them that is a way of controlling the shared memory or the societal memory but thank you for understanding the mechanism of memory we we can understand that it's actually something that is separate from us and when you have a memory you can interrogate that process you can observe it you so in a way you separate the memory from yourself you develop like a

00:43:55 relationship with the memory it's not it's not who you are and you don't accept it as a given the minute you kind of start to reflect on it then you're doing something like an artist you start observing it you start and if there's no choice if you are surrounded by triggers that you can't control then you can start to maybe maybe develop a manner of regulating your responses to um yeah not to not to let memory take

00:44:27 control over you so it's kind of it's a lot of introspection going on it sounds mechanistic but but like an artist it's really like a habit we develop and we become actually we have we gain more freedom in how we interact with our memories I think you did that in your lab because I remember you did this I read about it where you've you you created a fear memory in your poor unsuspecting people and then you expose them to the trigger but then you try to

00:45:00 pair the trigger with some you tried to pair that same fear memory with something positive like a beautiful flower or something and you were able to change that Association right do you want to talk about that it is not about controlling memory you know you don't want to develop this rigid tendency it's it's about the fact that the memory doesn't control you yeah and that's why when you say it that it it's about empowering it's a very I think beautiful way to say it it reminds me of

00:45:31 how much uh people with deficient memories or Amnesia feel a sense of powerlessness in the process that there's a really wonderful documentary online about a guy named Clive Waring who was a BBC uh music director in the 1980s and you know came had a virus in his mind and it destroyed much of his hippocampus and he cannot process any memory Beyond six or seven seconds so each moment for this

00:46:02 man is as if he was awake for the first time now the doctors at the time told him to try to keep a journal a diary in order to track his experience and maybe help cope with some of the frustrations of it but on the documentary they detailed his journals and they are one entry after another of saying first moment awake first ever Consciousness first time I've seen my own writing and then that'll be like you know 9 15 a.m and then at 9 30 he'll say again first

00:46:35 Consciousness first time being awake only he goes back and Crosses out the earlier entry because he recognizes his handwriting does not remember having written it and thought no I could not have been awake then for the first time this is this now is truly the first time being awake but it and it don't it didn't mean if you were to take some of the terror out of that it almost sounds like a moment of Nirvana like continual wakefulness but but it's not of course it's a nightmare right he's he's ex he's

00:47:05 in extreme suffering as he goes through this most babies come out screaming without memory yeah no that powerlessness of I mean that's an example of someone really not able to connect to exteriorize themselves into writing and it prevents them from occupying a particular identity that's so important to who they are really that said they're and there are scenes in that documentary where his wife arrives oh yeah right and he gets into this giddy joyful State and hugs her and

00:47:37 kisses her and she can go about for a sandwich and come back and he's a Zippy's seen her he's like oh my joy my love yeah yeah it's like distance makes the heart grow fun but like six yeah yeah but it you know that's hard for her too right she for decades you know to encounter your husband and have him think it's the first time again yeah but I think that speaks to Daniela knows a lot about which is the the multifaceted nature of memory you know so many discussions of memory and thinking about memory is about explicit conscious time

00:48:09 travel right the type of memory that we think of when we watch much Memento Christopher Nolan's rather excellent film actually and I think um it's it's if you look at the Machinery of the brain and actually if you write down you know ontology of the functions of the mind for memory you'll find that that's actually one relatively modest aspect of human memory um I study maybe the most boring type of memory which is memory for motor skills but I think if we think of who we are I

00:48:41 would say that my musician being a musician a hobbyist musician but I would still say that's part of who I am but that's nothing to do with my conscious memory really and has nothing to do with social experiences it's something I practice it's almost like a a log of time I've spent doing something that I care about but it exists in a in a place where just like Clive rearing who is a musician himself could see a sheet of music and play perfectly a piece that he had learned 20 years ago even though seven seconds ago he just to his mind

00:49:12 became alive I think when we Define when we do the eye in my memory we tend to kind of bias ourselves I think towards this conscious time travel aspect of memory rather than all these deep implicit memories that whether it's our ability to play music or recognize the face of our loved one or right um feel a certain way in a certain situation I think that's really I mean as Freud would say right we were here in this psychoanalytics Center that's that's

00:49:43 really the the meat of I would argue yeah really the meat of it so the philosopher once talked about how uh originally the skeptic's argument against the existence of time was that time doesn't exist because it's made up of three parts this is Aristotle's argument that there is the past which no longer exists the future that does not yet exist and the now which can only be defined in terms of what it isn't because no how no matter how thin you

00:50:13 slice it there will still be a thinner now so the time then is made up of Parts none of which exist August how do you write a memoir yeah his response was to say no actually in every now there is this threefold stacked complication of having retained something just that's just happened and also anticipating and expecting something that's just happening so if you you know Doremi Faso you you're not just hearing the Doremi that I

00:50:45 articulated in that sentence you're anticipating the latti do to come right so his argument was that that the now that we experience is never simply a point in time it's this very densely compacted sensibility that allows us to reach backwards and forwards and allows one to be almost in a kind of GrooVe as you're saying right if you if you've memorized a piece of music or your favorite song often the lyrics can come

00:51:16 rushing back to you as you're singing it but if someone asked you you know what's the third lyric of the song you would I don't know right but there's something about the perceptual quality of being into that part of I guess what's called working memory that allows you to um to be where you are now in that kind of complicated now yeah I think this is where we go back to coherence right because at any given moment to pass the present and the future should make sense right

00:51:49 right yeah it's a big tension in the Neuroscience of studying memory is that there's sort of there's a tension between two competing goals one is to remember new novel experiences and log them and the other is to generalize over your experiences and lump them together and connect them and you know I think you can think of a lot of certainly with these new AI Technologies um there there's that's a big question there is of these these sort of

00:52:20 massively trained giant networks of information that seem um to be full of a lot of specifics and they're good at that you know logging somewhere in their memory very individual events and the question now and it seems like this is where progress is being made which I think it makes everyone excited but also maybe anxious is that now they seem to be building structural structures of knowledge that can sort of generalize I know it's a little jargony but if the really this is sort of the critical thing that the the

00:52:52 hippocampus seems to be important at that sort of that's what the difference we've all read that journalists who interacted with chap gbt Sydney right like completely off the rails and I think there were a couple of interesting things about that one is this is something I think we're all going to confront we would interact with a person the way you might interact with a chatbot because you could just repeat the same question over and over and over again and my wife says I do that sometimes we do the chatbot seemed to almost

00:53:25 respond to the expression as if it just woke up yeah I think I keep thinking too about individuals who maybe are in a place of redemption and for them their past or their choices or their memories are traumatic not necessarily because of something that happened to them but choices they made or things that they did to other people and and not wanting someone in that moment to be limited or

00:53:57 defined by their memories to be able to say there there is a future that is not an equation of what you did in the past and that doesn't mean that their memory or those actions can't help to find that expansion in that new Step but I think that's a important component too of what if you are ashamed of your memories and what does that mean for your present and your future yeah I think there are

00:54:29 psychological theories that suggested what we remember in autobiographical memories or actually what we remember at all is only what is self-relevant so if you remember something that is could be ridiculous you know something you did in third grade or something you'd be ashamed of it's because it's still relevant because it tells you something about who you are or what you want to be or the fact that you were seen in a way that you wouldn't want to be seen so if you if you use that it's kind of just to understand

00:55:00 what is it that's bothering you and which is why you're being attacked by that memory then the memory becomes a tool right to just some information that you can use to let it go you know or just process it in a different way I think that phrase predicted the past is one I love that it's like almost a new operational definition of memory that I'll take with me from this yeah I think so you know if I'm using a lot of equations in his uh so computational

00:55:30 narcissist is all information right is about probabilities right and of making right given evidence so you can do that exactly toward the past as well right right it's all it's all just some number between zero and one so that's what makes these new these new AI Technologies so powerful I mean I I think you can it's good to be excited and anxious about them for many reasons but they do behave they are kind of

00:56:01 making probabilistic predictions and in some superficial way and not maybe deep ways but in some superficial way that's what memory is is doing too so yeah I think maybe just to kind of return to what I said before there are different types of memories that I think will lump all of them together and some of them are those that we put on machines you know like a lot of semantic knowledge facts memories of episodes but procedural memory and modern memory is something that we carry with us and also maybe the

00:56:34 most important type of memory is emotional memory uh I don't see how you can have it yet in our mission chain and this is something that is very unique for us having triggers that build up emotion in you as if you you were back in that in that event and you feel it as if it's happening now I think the example of the person in the documentary that demonstrated that right without having any explicitness right of his wife he had that emotional memory from happiness well

00:57:05 um before this that wonderful Roundtable becomes a memory we'd like to ask any questions of our panelists and please come on up to the microphone or in search of not memory of fruits I think that your discussions okay good

00:57:37 great lighting 100 seconds you'll come up and you can ask the question or get your comment up here yeah yeah if you want to hear your words and it gets recorded it won't be remembered if you don't yes I have a mundane question about how we retrieve memories I'm not talking about emotional memories more factual ones before this started I was trying to tell someone about this Foundation that supported Helix in his early days and I couldn't remember the name while

00:58:09 watching the video it came to me like 10 minutes on the Templeton that foundation and uh this happens I don't think anything to do with this film because it happens to be all the time I can't remember something I'm walking or doing something else I'm not consciously trying to remember that name but that comes to me anyway what's going on in my brain at that point no one will ever know yeah I don't think we know but we can speculate that

00:58:40 at the very basic level there's a kind of activation of neurons that were active at the time of the encoding and they represent their memory and by trying to remember of having like a little bit of the time you get this process into motion actually if you try to make an effort to remember maybe you interfere with that process but when you let it go that process kind of continues unconsciously but anyway I can improve that but there there is this famous Baker Baker experiment where one of the

00:59:12 things that people have often when that when they have a block that is it's like on the tip of the tongue I don't know what it is it's quite often a name and some scientists conducted an experiment where they gave people a group of photographs and said their names this is Mr Baker this is Mr cobbler but instead of telling them you know the next group they told them this person is a baker this person is a cobbler and they were much more capable of remembering the profession of the person the exact

00:59:43 same word of the person doing it but it's because when you tell someone that they're a baker you're saying quite a bit about their episodic life right whereas the name is yeah it's a in a way you're handing off a narrative of some kind and so all of these different parts of the brain become associated with it so good um I I think something that's really interested me in this conversation is that I feel like we've danced around the

01:00:13 topic of trust um and we've had a lot of kind of conversations or you know kind of tangents about you know we can be creative with this thing we can understand that when we bring our memory back it's different it's not the same or when we create art sometimes someone else helps us sort of realize something about it um and I'd love to hear kind of like how you guys think about um sort of our our growing or different relationship to how we trust our memories um especially in this sort of

01:00:44 externalizing memories versus internalizing I think that we have this sort of internal ability to trust our memories because they are so variable which really sounds to me almost you know kind of backwards but we have this sort of like an immutable thing uh one plus one equals two we we trust that but we don't really need to know anything more about it um and when we externalize the memory and we put a a photo in Google photos it becomes this thing that becomes immutable it's just ones and zeros and

01:01:16 so we end up I think having this kind of different relationship with how we should trust a kind of growing or a different memory of what might have happened before and after that photo um and I think that when we create our I was really struck when you said you know when you externalize a memory and you create you're writing it there's this volatility to writing it there's this ability that you can say I'm gonna erase that word I'm gonna change that word I'm gonna edit that line down and that I think allows us to kind of create a trust to it and I would just love to hear kind of how you guys think about it

01:01:47 um I'm not sure we should trust our memories um you know I want for me the way I think of memory is that it's a a conversation so it's information and it's not that you can't trust it but I think it's valuable to be a little leery and to not make assumptions um and I mean we were talking earlier about uh the power and the beauty of

01:02:18 collective memories but conversely if you think that you share a memory with someone and then you share it or it comes to pass that they don't remember it that way you know think about siblings growing up in the same household you know inevitably they're going to have different memories of the same event um and how painful that can be um that you that you don't have that it's not shared that it's not Collective um and and I think that's one of the reasons that fandom becomes so powerful

01:02:50 right it's an agreed upon notion we're gonna double triple down on it um so I yeah I I am almost um I don't know that I want to trust my memory because in some ways when you decide that you trust something does that stop the conversation but then well it's definitive and now I know this and there's no room for growth as opposed to well this is how I remember

01:03:21 it in this moment and and then as a writer and a researcher I want to have more conversations I want to be able to be in a place and this is hard I think for a lot of us for understandable reasons where we are open to someone else's interpretation or open to a different memory or version um and to and I think the work is in not finding a difference in memory to be

01:03:51 threatening yeah it's actually it's really incredible um for me to listen to you because you know you come from from writing from art uh and I come from from science and machines and to exactly the same conclusion it's like almost a word for Words thinking that because I've interviewed both of you yeah the words I would use is that yeah I treat it like a hypothesis testing you know and when I have a memory it's like

01:04:22 okay it's possible so you kind of hold it's like you hold multiple paths at the same time and you kind of say okay this is probably the has the highest probability I'm gonna go with that for now but so it's like actually living with uncertainty or with this point that is surrounded by a cloud of uncertainty but embracing it and that's the liberating part but before before you can form a memory before you have a memory you have to pay attention right so the first stage of cognition is

01:04:54 attention and then you only form a memory of the thing you've paid attention to so in terms of different interpretations of different it's just that one person was paying attention to something one sibling was paying attention to something and one sibling was paying attention to something else it doesn't invalidate any of the memories it's just that where where was your focus to form the memory that said they're they're true false memories

01:05:28 I have to buy much of it by Elizabeth Loftus a controversial figure it's actually a very interesting New Yorker profile for from a few years ago that's worth the read but do you know the the Lost in the mall experiment people know this experiment I can quick quickly uh describe it it's been replicated actually last year very in a very large sample so it's not one of those psychology experiments you feel bad you've mentioned because it didn't actually was it wasn't actually real so you take experimental subjects and you secretly go talk to some of their

01:05:58 relatives you can call those the Confederates here and you say look I'm going to tell Jane that when she was three she was lost in the mall and it was this kind of emotional thing for several to 10 minutes she was lost in the mall and yet the parents eventually found her the convenient thing is that because of we're actually all amnesiacs in this room because of something called infantile Amnesia if any of us here claim they have a memory from below two years old they're probably not telling the truth no offense and so uh anyway you do this and

01:06:30 you could you can actually convince like about a third of the people in these studies you can actually convince them that it happened and then a slightly lower percentage I believe maybe a fifth of them they can actually report that they recall it consciously even though it's a complete fabrication now I think you know you can overestimate that result and say oh all memories are no it's not true right most most memories are tied to something real but I think you're totally right about the attention point and then I think even below that is that you actually you

01:07:00 can kind of do Inception well I think it's what Daniella was I don't know if she said it now she said it when I interviewed her first emotion is the greatest encoder of memory right did we talk about that so if you're imagining being lost at the it Oliver Sacks wrote this uh essay called speak memory based on nabokov's book so speak memory which is why I called Mind C memory after both of those but um he wrote this piece in

01:07:31 the New York Times book review where he was criticizing his own early Memoir because he had written about being in London during the Blitz and then his old your brother told him that was me you were in the countryside but he had written him such a vivid letter that conjured up emotions that he encoded them he absorbed it as his own memory and then as an adult wrote about

01:08:02 it as his own memory and I think this speaks a lot to just what we do as artists or just how we judge other people Malcolm Gladwell has this great piece I forget which book it's in but it was in the New Yorker at some point called Something Borrowed where he talks about this playwright who was sued for plagiarism because she had written this play about this um this investigator of serial killers and it turned out that she had taken

01:08:34 verbatim some of the language from This Woman's Memoir and when he actually went to meet her he he was much more forgiving because he had actually she had actually also used verbatim some of his lines and she said he said she's free to use it she invented a whole brilliant play out of this that was beyond anything that came from my work or from her work and she didn't have any memory she had no knowledge that she was

01:09:04 plagiarizing and and there have also been stories I know Oliver Sacks talked about Helen Keller being taught um uh being read I guess through Braille by Annie Sullivan in her hand stories and then she was accused of plagiarism when she was an adult when she wrote stories that borrowed heavily from those Early Childhood stories she was told but sax speculates that you know if you're literally sort of absorbing the story for her through touch she had no idea

01:09:35 that this didn't arise from her own thoughts so this whole idea of absorbing certain stories and like Daniella said neurologically it often looks very similar when you imagine an experience right is when you actually experience it so we were experiencing it in a way if your emotions are experiencing it right true false memories yeah another question yes in the end it's actually uh acts upon what you're

01:10:06 talking about but uh so the experiments in which you imagine something and it's almost identical to actually being triggered by the real thing can you set up a system or procedure for yourself to do that and change yourself um and is that observable in your neuroscientific however You observe things in the brain does that change observable you know what I mean like can I set up a

01:10:39 system like how long does it take does it take a month to change the memory of how long does it take and if I wanted to set up a position change something and alter that memory so that I have become a different person um yeah is that possible um yeah I mean there are studies that show that that let's say you took uh you had the negative memory and then you were instructed to write about it in a

01:11:11 more positive way as opposed to writing something neutral and you look at the pattern of that memory at the beginning and afterwards you do see the pattern changing yeah so these are just a very controlled uh experiments that indicate that and in parallel people use it in everyday life and in the clinic but exactly the timing I think I think you have to work it out trial and error thing well I guess I have a sort of complex

01:11:43 response um it's a little bit microscopic and telescopic as I'm listening to the whole discussion I realize that maybe our Consciousness maybe our inner life has changed by all the vast knowledge we have the first thing when I came into this room people have said well the brain is more elastic than you imagine there's more information now than ever before how much can the brain absorb and then from there I went to writers who speak about dialogue is the only true reality that we know reality through the

01:12:14 dialogical process and then I go back to Cezanne who said well I am who I am because I have a link in the history of the art history past and then we go back to the self and the South now seems such a vast assortment of things that there seems to be a great variety the way one can describe memory and the self so the autobiographical world is then becomes a very complex world the because all these factors are now entering and one wonders

01:12:45 how elastic are our brains to begin to Encompass all the information we're receiving and all what we have read I mean we're adding on the cerebral part too because we're all made up of some kind of education so where you know where the true self becomes a very complex but a very wonderful journey I happen to be a painter so I know something about that world but um painting I think somebody mentioned an interesting thing about painting I think you that the painter paints and then he destroys the painting

01:13:17 and then he reimagines the painting in other words that process the very complex process includes so many aspects of who the self is because the self at first thought they knew something and then it then it it this then it this uh dissolves and then it comes back again anyway the the biggest point that I wanted to make is this elasticity and how are we all going to we we can't expect to Encompass all the complexity of it but I think dialogue is a very important part because that becomes part

01:13:48 of the self before we answer maybe we could ask the one more question and then we could try to answer both together because we have one more no that's okay so I wanted to share one thing I read this morning GPT for that's no memory so they reported the reporter gave the example that he I think was he asked the system to write a resume so for Indian food or something well done then he asked the system to write a 2000 page

01:14:21 essay on no I don't know bicycle writing and he said so tell me the recipe and the Machine couldn't remember the recipe so I just wanted to share that I hope it's good news or bad news but um I was interested if you guys could comment on institutionalized memory she didn't talk about that and it generally shows up in monuments I mean I mean about it is Art so it's sort of a physical manifestation of it but today when nobody remembers anything the same way what happens with institutionalized

01:14:53 memory and how do we codify that so it's a little different I think the chat GPT thing was a safety measure they put in after this whole explosion with the New York Times Reporter so they didn't they now limited so you can't have as long conversations because it can go off the rails and also you they don't want the the chat bot thing to have a memory because it go off the rail so I think it could have but then they eliminate it that's my understanding of what happened that seems right yeah

01:15:24 remember this is does this go into that yeah yeah this would be called like working memory yeah so remembering something from a few seconds or minutes ago but now choppy cheapy tea and all these large language models have been trained on these giant corpuses of data and they've been trained in such a way such that there's what are called weights which is in a machine learning term for just relationship between different aspects of the internal workings of the model that predict sentences and words and that certainly could be called memory right that's a very large-scale semantic memory yes

01:16:04 institutional memory and then the previous question as well yeah well learning about the previous question if something was on my mind earlier we were talking about the weight memory functions yeah namely how similar it is to sort of a lot of theological ideas about iconography not icons are supposed to be sort of living there's they have a life where we sometimes also refer to the living Constitution that's another example something that's in black and white and it's fixed and again it's supposed to happen so the living quality to it I think that somehow touches on

01:16:34 the idea of plasticity in the brain does anyone that's popular yeah I think for a go for institutional and then the the dialogue part but so institutional memories are memories of society and societies are entities they are actually living entities and they have experiences they have memories and and the institutionalizer monuments are decisions that the society makes of what to remember it's an explicit decision because these

01:17:06 monuments are triggers right whenever you go by them it triggers so it's uh this is the cost of a shared memory and what the society is making and there could be a dialogue about that right it's a people can argue which monuments we want to have and whatnot but it tells you something about the society and it can change right you can make a decision about a monument or a way to commemorate an event at some point and 10 20 30 40 years later you can make a different

01:17:37 decision based on more information or a different committee made up of different types of people and uh and they can sit side by side almost in the sense of I think there's something to be said for retaining in some way the memory of the past choice that we now maybe regret or feel that we've outgrown because it's important to remember that we did that and not to pretend that we never did

01:18:07 that but that notion of decisions can be undone or can evolve but I think Danielle is absolutely right you know what is an institution who are institutions and um and we have to Grapple with that and there's transparency and I I think that's it's acknowledging this was the memory that we made can we make a new one and can it be all

01:18:38 the more powerful for the fact that we weren't on autopilot and that maybe this time it has a new level of resonance that the other one didn't have before okay let's just go back to the dialogue it's such a a beautiful uh maybe final question because the dialogue the idea that dialogue is important um William compasses a lot of what we've been talking about we've been talking about the hippocampus as uh the memory

01:19:09 region and also the the region that Maps the environment and we talked about memories as this coherent line right it has to be continuity and for that space to happen we need coordinates and we need reference point and I think dialogue is a reference point this is why we're so miserable when we're lonely we're kind of lost in space but the minute you talk to someone it anchors you to some reference point and and it also through the sharing of

01:19:39 the memory it gives this anchoring um it gives your space meaning and something you can navigate around yeah that's beautiful the other thing in the film that came out beautifully is the representation of a palimpsist which before he talked about covering them developing an image covering it and then picking the painting over it and creating another image after that I think that's interesting and I have a feeling that connects to the question about why when you're making an effort to remember a particular name you might

01:20:11 not come up with it unless you're distracted because the covering up is some other Act of something something's being suppressed let's say and it's being covered and that may be suppressed for a reason right and then when you try to search for it you go what the heck is that name again and then stop making the effort it can emerge again you'll see the horse I couldn't remember what I had painted before to be honest with you it was a great experience the process of making the paintings and the animation was

01:20:42 really echoed the process of remembering because I would make these thousands of painting Stills in my studio you and I honestly have so many paintings that I can't remember what scene they originally were like in my new films so I have to categorize them in folders let's say it started as an image a painting scene of a movie theater but now it's like a boat on a river and I have no idea if I haven't written on the back of the painting all the stages it's been through and then when I watch it

01:21:14 when I play it in motion it's like I'm watching it for the first time I have no memory of how it's changed over time yeah no they're not today so anyone else have any questions before we wrap up come on come on yes please come up I mean I think it's sort of been such a fun I know yeah it reports you better if you if you do that it's sort of Ideal

01:21:46 touched upon a little bit but this for me what comes up is the relation ship has become to some degree marginalized in life it depends on what you're expected or you do but I wonder from uh purely neuroscientific way how do we measure a memory is there a way to really say this memory is true or is it

01:22:18 enforcement or is it a memory that I want a desired memory you know that question is something that I'm very interested in psychoanalysis wonder if there are parts of the brain that gets lit up is there any relationship and is there any way to measure it even if there is you know yeah there's no metric of Truth however

01:22:48 you could do an experiment where let's say you measure a brain signal when someone views a certain stimulus and then you see if that same brain pattern of activity in the brain gets reinstated later and you could judge how similar is the reinstatement to the original event and you could put a metric a little bit on that which is how similar two patterns of our activity are one that happened when you encoded something and one that happened when you recalled it later but that doesn't tell anything about truth I think you have to talk to

01:23:20 a philosopher if I can give a somewhat philosophical answer to that I think that when we talk about truth one of the more coherent definitions is to say that it's descriptions of things the way they really are but the word descriptions is very important in that because it means that truth can only exist where there are sentences right and descriptions we know are elastic you can always couple together a better one and I think that

01:23:52 the elasticity of our memories is related to the ephemerality but it's also related to our ability to build upon them with greater or lesser coherence right so in a way our memories are the vehicle for our ability to describe things and therefore the sort of metric of Truth in the end but it also sorry depends on truth you know fiction writers always talk about how the work of fiction contains a lot of

01:24:24 truth that you know same with feature filmmakers you know that by Taking Liberties you're able to get to a greater truth and I there's this Samford Meisner who was this famous acting teacher used to give direction to his students that acting was living truthfully under imaginary circumstances which I love and which really I think about all the time with my painting you know like I'm imagining all of this stuff it's you know my film's called a documentary but there's not a single

01:24:55 ounce of documentary footage in it which I you know it's all imagination so I think you can have truth and fiction at the same time can I can I jump on this yes absolutely my I sense that perhaps some of where your question came from is a frustration that I think a lot of people feel regardless of their views in say the political realm of feeling like you know what is true there's a lot of untruths and I think part of why a lot of these

01:25:26 untruths or these falsehoods have so much power and have become so dangerous is because they are speaking to a larger underlying truth the one other comment I'll make about that is that um you know I think this we have this feeling and I think this was dispelled to some degree in what we're talking about today that memory is like a representational system and that's all it is so if it's a representative representational system we think well either it correspond to the truth or it doesn't and that may not be exactly how the memory is or what

01:25:56 we're calling memory it's it's it partakes a representation but that's it's much more Dynamic unlike a film recording or a transcription or whatever so either a definitional distinctions to be made as well right when we say something is is a truth or one is true to something right if it's good often when we use the word true we mean a kind of fidelity like if you're true to your partner or your your true to the experience in the fictional work or something right but the idea of Truth

01:26:27 seems to be something that requires a kind of articulation of some kind of your integrity yeah our integrity yeah okay well everyone thank you so much okay foreign thank you