Memory: The Hidden Pathways That Make Us Human

foreign began one of the most famous novels of the 20th century with a passage in which the protagonist bites into a tiny cake served with tea and it triggers a flood of childhood memories and perhaps a more familiar example when Anton ego is served a plate of Ratatouille he is thrown back to a childhood reverie that proves life-changing is it that particular events become etched in our minds seemingly impossible to forget while so many of us cannot even remember what we wore yesterday [Music] well as we all know intuitively there is a very powerful link between memory and emotion our brains prioritize emotional memories for encoding and recall and the more intense the emotion whether positive or negative the more intense the memory foreign but where in our brain do these memories exist and how are they stored what happens when these processes go awry in either new memories however emotional The Experience cannot be formed or the brain goes overboard and stores every experience and to what extent do our brains take creative Liberties crafting deeply emotional memories of things that never actually happened many of the processes that determine how we encode and retrieve memories remain a mystery nevertheless the last decade has witnessed enormous progress scientists at Columbia University recently identified a specific neural circuit that tags information with emotional associations thereby enhancing memory at least two other teams the United States are currently working on prosthetic devices to boost fading memories via electronic stimulation and here in Australia genes once derided as junk have been shown to play a pivotal role in regulating fear that research has even revealed that emotional events May reshape us down to our very DNA the same time there's also New Hope for those experiencing the debilitating consequences of the most traumatic of such emotionally evocative events we will talk to a group of leading scientists whose research illuminates these and other vital links between memory and emotion their work seeks to reveal how the rich swirl of memory emotion and self-awareness shapes who we are as individual human beings and that's the issue which will serve as our guide tonight as we take a deep dive into memory the pathways that make us human [Music] good evening thank you so I'm Brian Greene co-founder of the world Science Festival with Tracy day and it is our great pleasure to finally be back here in Brisbane live and in person last time of course is back in 2019 which of course does strain the memory with everything that has happened in between it certainly has been a traumatic time in many different ways but when I consider my own memories when I try to push myself to really think back to the earliest memory that I really can conjure up in my mind it's the following it's a bright sunny day I'm in a stroller my dad is pushing me along and I'm playing with little beads that are on a rod right in front of the stroller my dad pushes us down 81st Street makes a right turn goes to 82nd and Columbus in Manhattan to his favorite hot dog stand I don't know if you have hot dogs as you call them you know it's like a little cylindrical piece of beef right or they call it beef I I really don't know what the heck they they they have in there but anyway so my dad buys himself a hot dog and he buys me one usually they come in a piece of bread a bun but for me a little toddler he gives it to me in my hand and I take a bite Crunch and I eat it now as someone who's been a vegetarian since nine years old that memory is actually kind of traumatic thinking back to that but but here's the thing when I actually think of that memory I I really I can I can I can feel the day I can feel the stroller going down the street hitting the bumps in the sidewalk I can I can feel the warmth of the hot dog I can really taste and smell the crunch but I'm seeing it in third person I'm watching myself do that and so it's not an actual memory or at least it's a modified memory or a changed memory or in some sense My Telling of that story over the years say to my my kids and my family has somehow transformed the way I reflect back on an event that actually did happen but in my mind it now takes a different form and so that's Central to the kind of question that we are going to be investigating and exploring here tonight how is it that memories are encoded how can they be modified how do they stay stable over long periods of time and what happens when that stability starts to drop away and can memories be volitionally manipulated or modified and when we get to the point where perhaps we're able to do that the question is should we or can we or will we and to guide us in exploring these questions tonight we have four wonderful experts participants who I'd like to bring in now our first guest is Timothy Brady who is a professor of cognitive neuro epigenetics at the Queensland brain Institute whereas lab studies the fundamental molecular mechanism underlying fear related learning and memory welcome Tim our yes thank you our next guest is Veronica o'keen who's a neuroscientist a retired professor of Psychiatry and a consultant psychiatrist at Trinity College Dublin with over 30 years experience in the field she's the author of a sense of self memory the brain and who we are welcome Veronica [Applause] next we have Gail Robinson who is the director of the clinical neuropsychology doctoral program at the University of Queensland she is a clinical neuropsychologist whose research focuses in part on brain Behavior relationships welcome Gail thank you [Music] and finally rounding out our group here tonight is Oliver Bauman who is an assistant professor in the School of Psychology at Bond University whose research focuses on human spatial perception memory and emotion welcome Oliver and of course welcome to you all [Music] so you all study memory that's that's your day job or perhaps even beyond your day job your own memory I gave one example where I sort of can push myself back to probably two-ish something like that three-ish what do we know how far back can people typically go and how far back do each of you go and do you trust those memories Tim what you started off for myself I think my some of my first memories were probably at the age of three and I can remember one moment where I I fell off a balcony in the front of the house into a rose bush that could have been your last memory your first and your last I remember the the Thorns wow yeah and is that why do you remember the emotion attached to it so we'll get into that absolutely yeah so Veronica um the first memory that I have is looking down on an orange cardigan that my mother knit and remembering the curvature of the button at the time I was sitting on something which I later found out was a box and because we were moving house so clearly that made an impact on me I was about three again around the same age right absolutely so Gail how about you well I think I'm a bit older actually I was trying to think is there anything before five and I really just have maybe two memories of I think I was about five one we caught the train across from um Canberra all the way to Perth as a family and I remember being in the lounge room of my grandparents place in Perth we were playing a card game or some sort of game but I wasn't allowed to play because I was probably being naughty so I just remember being told off for some reason I don't remember much else so there was some trauma there too then right yeah yeah Oliver yeah I'm actually would have a problem knowing which phone was the first but I have a couple of early ones which would be around three to four years of age including one where I made my first ever purchase I remember like I'm buying like a little bag of stickers in the shop and my mother sent me in with the coin to buy it myself so it must have been three or four at that stage and um yeah that's one of the early memories so those are early memories and I think you know all of us have some variation on the themes the details differ but we can usually push ourselves pretty far back there are many things most things in fact in our lives we don't directly remember I mean if you were to ask me you know what I was doing on Whatever May 17th of 2006 I'd be very hard-pressed to to give an answer to that but there are some dates that that we all do remember for instance 911 right I mean 911 is one that you know I don't think there's anybody who's around at the time that doesn't have a pretty Sharp vivid memory of of that day so you know part of it's obvious right that was a very different day but can you take us a little bit further say Tim just to get us going what is it about that kind of an experience that leaves such a lasting impact in our memories I think it's anything that has a lot of emotion attached to it and a lot of surprise that kind of triggers the the Pathways in the brain to etch those memories for the long term right so you know with respect to 911 I remember exactly where I was where were you I was in a car driving to the New York border with my friend from was from Jordan to get his Visa renewed huh yeah we didn't we didn't make it to the border that day wow yeah amazing yeah and I suspect you didn't cross that border for a long time yeah be my guest yeah uh Oliver can't take that any any further is there something about the power of emotion that primes the brain yes so emotion is obviously um an important currency for the brain to know when to encode something or not because encoding a memory is expensive for the brain um and therefore emotion surface and as a signal to you know how much to invest and you know what memories to prioritize and how much um you know effort to put into it and quote them so therefore you're without emotion we would unnecessarily encode information we might not need to and you know that's a huge cost to the system but could you imagine and and Veronica Redding come to a specific example where you're going to take us through some of the neurophysiology that actually is behind this but more fancifully can you imagine you know so perhaps a life form maybe even on this planet but let's imagine an extraterrestrial life form that is able to form memories in a selective manner but is not based on emotion is that a peculiarity of the human species or do you think that's sort of a general quality Nature's Way of having a selection effect on which memories we should store answer the ones that have the biggest emotional impact well I think that it's pretty uh ubiquitous in nature for a survival mechanism to have um a driver like like emotionally relevant memories or or um intense memories or typically the ones that are causing threat or fear in us and that's absolutely essential for survival right so it's it's across all species so given that Veronica can you take us to you have some slides where you can lay out to get a sense of a traumatic experience yielding a certain kind of emotional response that generates a memory so you can take us through this exam sure well I think the first thing to say in relation to emotion and memory is uh that emotion is is energy and that is the energy that lights up the neurons in our brain and the energy can be internally generated or externally generated and 9 11 was a fantastic example of a stimulus that was globally experienced and that was individually experienced and that we all remember but we also remember it in a a collective way so there is a collective memory and the collective emotion that's present what I'm going to talk about is something that isn't Collective it's something that we're all familiar with but thankfully um at least not in my lifetime and hopefully not in most of your lives times will you be ever confronted with this threat so uh the threat I'm going to talk about is a gun being put to your head so what happens when a gun is put to somebody's head or something threatening like that is the light waves from the gone the image goes to the back of the eye that of course is a form of energy LightWave is a form of energy that's converted to electrical energy and the electrical energy travels along the neurons to the back of the brain to the visual cortex note that the brain is surrounded by the cortex and the cortex essentially interprets the sensory World it interprets the visual world in the back of the brain the auditory world the touch world so all of the senses come to the surface of the brain and after they land there and already our visual cortex knows what a gun looks like because we've learned it um as we've developed and the signal then shoots into the center of the brain into a place called the hippocampus the hippocampus is absolutely Central to memory because it's the Memory Maker in the brain so the Memory Maker in the brain is directly adjacent to a structure called the amygdala and the amygdala is um at what I call the emotional spark plug of the brain and frequently we speak about the emotional Center and we speak about the memory Center but in reality the physiology is that these two structures are so densely interconnected and so uh the the neurons and the dendrites and the connections between them are almost inextricable so as you see the gone the memory is immediately triggering an emotion in the amygdala so we've gone from visual sensory to identifying that two memory two emotional Center in the brain and this translates into experiences in the body into the sense of fear through a the signals from the emitter going to a place called the hypothalamus which is just above the surface of the brain and the hypothalamus is the headquarters for the autonomic nervous system in the body and that mediates the flight and fight response at an extreme but also other emotions and that may not be as extreme it could just perhaps pump your heart with excitement it could be a sad image it might make you have a crushing sensation in your in your chest so the range of experiences that the autonomic nervous system mediates in our body is very variable and it's a whole range of emotions there but essentially they're immediate they're being manipulated through the hypothalamus and the autonomic nervous system and I think it's important in terms of trauma because we're all interested in trauma here is that if something very severe is threatening an individual that this very same memory system of the hippocampus and the amygdala and the hypothalamus activates another system in the body the endocrine stress system so you have exactly the same brain circuitry if a threat is very severe that activates the stress hormone about 10 or 20 minutes later depending on the severity of the threat and this system is not a nervous system it goes into the bloodstream and it carries a hormone from the hypothalamus to the adrenal glands and in the adrenal glands the hormone cortisol is released so you can see here how acutely the body deals with an immediate stress by releasing adrenaline and the peripheral nervous system in the body and then over time a more sustained response in terms of cortisol kicks in to keep us Vigilant to monitor the stress but presumably that serves an evolutionary function of survival but presumably if you have a sustained release of these hormones it begins to act against the the being that's the case as well no absolutely absolutely there's a thing called allostatic load which is basically the wear and tear that stress reeks on the body and too much cortisol we I I've done a lot of research in depression and one of the main areas of research that I've been involved in in fact is looking at the effect of cortisol on the brain and very interestingly in terms of memory cortisol has specific effects on the memory Center in the brain on the hippocampus so if we're severely stressed over long periods of time and of course depression is one of the most extreme forms of mental and emotional and cognitive stress well you're actually damaging your memory by being in a sustained state of depression absolutely so the hippocampus over time following chronic exposure to stress hormone the dendrites the neurons start to retract the hippocampus actually shrinks but at the cost of it the amygdala actually does the opposite so the emotional Center expands it shows hypertrophy so you can see there becomes a shift in a bias towards strong emotional responses so at the cost of memory though but is that sort of a kind of runaway process it sounds like it'll feed on itself it would yeah and over time there's yeah well it's called a Cascade hypothesis because the more stress you have the smaller your hippocampus becomes the more emotionally driven you become and this of course creates more stress which feeds back and further damages the memory Center so Oliver just to um go back a bit to the evolutionary roots of this all back in 1872 Charles Darwin published uh somewhat lesser-known volume in in the general world but certainly a volume that's well known in the academic world describing the emergence of emotions as a quality of of the human species and so what's our view today on the evolution evolutionary roots of emotion and the way that feeds into the formation of memory yeah I guess you have I think an important aspect highlighted by Darwin is that emotions have a function because when we experience them in day-to-day life often we feel they're just there to reward us or punish us and you know we want more of the good and less of the bad emotions but obviously they've been put in place through Evolution to ensure survivors so that even the simplest form of animals would probably feel good if they find a little bit of nutrition and feel bad if there's like bit of water that's too hot or too cold and so from the simplest forms of animals to the highest forms emotions have evolved to guide us to the good things that you know allow us to prosper survive and grow and then keep us away from the bad things and and our brain has involved in humans of course compared to simple animals but still the same mechanisms that emotions are simply there to protect us and to guide us and that then also via the memories now Gail we we were talking so far about memories if it's a single thing right I mean there's so many at least from an intuitive standpoint different kinds of memory right you know I I know how to drive to our house in the country I don't even think about it but somehow my memory takes me there I'm speaking right now I'm not trying to draw up the words by searching in my memory but somehow it's happening right and yet there are other memories when we talk about them where they're really there in a more definite form as opposed to something that's in the background so you can take us through the different kinds of memory and and perhaps even give us a sense of how does the brain decide which kind of memory mechanism to use yes so there are different memories we always um I guess when people talk about my memory is not so good really they're talking about episodic memory and our episodic memory is really our memory for ongoing events so where was I when this happened so right now we're actually forming an episodic memory we're all here together we're at this memory event this is a a certain place and time it's tagged it's specific to right now so this becomes a personal autobiographic memory as well of this event and now another type of memory is what we call semantic memory that's our facts about the world so that's our knowledge our general knowledge we can Define memory we can look it up in the dictionary it's almost the dictionary definitions that's our semantics but both the semantic and episodic are also what we call declarative so I can tell you about it I can tell you about that event I can tell you about you know a fact about memory you know memory in the hippocampus is a crucial Center so that's a semantic fact that I can declare now those things are not quite as separate as they seem because tonight we're learning about memory and maybe for you it might be the first time but as you learn more about memory it becomes free from tonight and that becomes more of a semantic knowledge fact but these are all again explicit or what we can talk about that's contrasted with implicit memories or what we can learn as a procedure or a process so learning to ride a bike you probably I don't know if you can remember exactly what had happened but most people when you learn to ride a bike somehow you just do it you actually can't tell me exactly how you learned it or how to do it it's sort of we know you learned because you no longer put your feet on the ground you're not wobbling you're stable and you're not crashing and perhaps you're going very fast now so that implicit memory is different and sometimes when you try to explain what you're doing you don't do it as well right because exactly right and one other type of memory I guess we should talk about is the working memory our short-term memory which is most people think short-term memory is the thing that you keep for a few days or a few months or a few years but it's actually just a few seconds up to a minute so have a short term or a working memory you've got to hold the information like a phone number if I tell you my phone number Veronica you can keep rehearsing it till you put it in your phone and write it down but if you don't rehearse it or put it somewhere it disappears so that working memory is very temporary and it needs work to keep it up so all those different memory systems are useful for different things if you're working at your grocery bill you're going to do your working memory or if you're trying to tally up whether you've got enough money but if you're um going to qpac for a memory event then next week you'll talk about that as an episode it'll be part of your autobiographic memory and so do we understand at the level of say brain physiology or perhaps even right down to a molecular level the different kinds of memories people talk about functional neuroanatomy or networks now but actually the neuropsychology when we work with patients with brain damage we actually have a very good lesion or damage in the brain Behavior relationships so things like the episodic memory we've all been talking about the hippocampus and that's certainly the memory Center for episodes and the personal memories to encode but in terms of the semantic memories really we talk about the anterior temporal lobes bilaterally so slightly different area and then our working memory depending on whether it's for verbal information like a phone number that you hear or if you say go to an art gallery and you look at a nice painting it's a sketch or a picture so that is very much in the right hemisphere as opposed to the auditory verbal what you hear is more in the left but a different part of the brain than your personal memories and the semantic facts and then the implicit or learning motor skills is again slightly different so there are different parts of the brain that support the different types of memory and one other thing I just probably should say is our frontal lobes have a very big role in encoding being able to focus your attention to see what is that information how am I going to get it into the store or into the via the hippocampus you know you need to organize the information perhaps you need to do things to it in order for the information to go in well and then to retrieve it at a later Point again that's the frontal lobes the left and the right have different roles but from an evolutionary perspective the thing that has always perplexed me a little bit but again evolution is a random process so it's not like it was fine-tuned by some being above to be optimized but one why do we have to work so hard to get certain kind of learning in a certain kind of behaviors into the place where we don't have to think about it so we can do it like the riding of the bike or the playing of the piano I think so many of us would benefit if the trajectory from learning to automatic Recreation of what we were learning was an easier path why is it so hard well I I feel like there's two different types of the memories so the emotion we've talked about and it's almost um as if the emotion can almost short-circuit or or almost trigger so the emotion changes the internal organ our internal sense and it almost alerts the sensory system the perceptual system to encode the information but the prefrontal cortex in a way is the top down more effortful so I feel like there's a more automatic route to Memories going in but there's also the effortful having to create a strategy having to focus attention having to do those things so why do we need that is that related to the evolution of the frontal lobe I would say probably yes there's a lot to be said about experience too though in optimizing the Brand's ability to predict what's coming next so they always say that memory is the path for the the bridge from the past to the Future sure so we we get better with time so so things that are happening later in life you know it's it's built on a foundation of experiences that can then help the brain bypass that slow learning process you're talking about and it starts to fill in the blanks based on the on memory so new learning is make is a lot more uh facilitated and if we talk about the D sorry no obviously that that's one important point I suppose memory in a sense we're representing the external World in our memory and we're creating models of the external World in our memory and the world is full of uncertainty so I think having very cut and dried shortcuts um Can can lead to representations of the world that are very extreme so I think we need to maintain skepticism um in in that sense are you saying so a more gradual process allows more experiences to contribute and so you don't get wild swings and thinking the world is this where that way it kind of averages out over time that's right I mean memory Pathways change very slowly and that certainly has an evolutionary function because you know Revolution generally doesn't work slow change works and it's the same with the knowledge it's the same with Neuroscience we build things up very modestly you know we move from the periphery in we don't make big leaps in science we we move in slowly and carefully so Oliver you know we are all surrounded by an enormous number of memory storage devices right we've got hard drives we've got the thumb drives you know we walk around with these computers and phones and so forth there's a more analog version of storage that I think comes to mind when we're talking about memory which is kind of a film strip as if the way that we sort of store an event is like these series of still images that are somehow in our brain even our opening piece use that metaphor where we had a projector Illuminating one still after another in the you know the sprockets of a film strip are any of these reasonable metaphors for helping us to understand how memory actually does function I mean in one way the film strip is not too bad because um encoding our experience so if you're in this place we have Vision we have sound we have thoughts happening at the same time and our brain tries to capture all of it so initially actually you know one second afterwards we literally capture all of it and then as time goes by um filtering happens and so we kind of keep um like skeleton of that event after a couple of minutes or later and um if you want to tomorrow remember that event then our brain will bring back that you know Skeleton version of that event and I mean you can already feel that it's not the real thing because you can you know if you memorize something it's not taking over your vision like putting on VR goggles but it's more like um you know an unclear image and um but it's it's really a representation of the actual event so that if you remember something the same neurons or subset of the same neurons would become reactivated so if you look at the new picture like a new drawing today and then remember tomorrow the neurons that are active from seeing the picture and remembering the picture they will overlap and will be less active by remembering but this will be maybe 20 of the neurons um that you get reactivated again so our visual cortex get active if we remember something visual our orderary cortex get activated if we imagine hearing a sound and for other memories all of that comes together so in a sentence really just yeah I'm reactivation of patterns that have had been active during the actual experience so here's the thing I I fully understand how say a digital camera can capture an image at least in principle I'm not getting into the technology of it but you know the photons are coming in and the camera itself is able to measure qualities of the incoming light and store that and then reproduce it in order to give us a digital representation of the image good I understand that I understand how sound sound is recorded I understand sound is a vibration of air and I understand how vibrations can be encoded even mathematically and then used to recreate a version of that sound again but but here's here's the thing that that perplexes me a little bit and perhaps you guys can help me with this when it comes to the brain we don't only store the things that you just described we don't just store the scene we don't just store the sound we don't distort the other senses melon touch and so forth we also store our reaction to that stimuli and when it comes to the reaction there's such an enormous range of human emotion how does the molecular structure of this or that molecule in the brain hold on to that kind of almost infinitely variable information can you help me get my brain around that well I don't think it's actually an explicit memory but what it is at the very deepest molecular layer level it's a the threshold for the way the neurons will respond in the future so they call it metaplasticity right so it's a change that occurs at Deep layers or levels of of a cell's function which changes its responsibility okay so when when cells are neurons are firing in the brain they it's a coincidence detector where they'll be at a certain stage of activity those neurons become integrated into a new memory but they themselves then their threshold for future responsivity it has changed forever right and then that allows them to be part of the existing memory and future Integrations of new information but but like Verona you you discussed the hippocampus in your little beautiful mini discourse as the Memory Maker and I've also read you describe it as sort of the memory indexer oh I don't want to put words in your mouth but I'm pretty sure should I read that how does it do that in other words I totally understand that if you're able to recreate similar neural firings to what my brain is doing right now if you're able to tomorrow get the same neurons to fire as they're firing right now I should be recreating something that's very close to like you you said Oliver just a subset because I don't want my arm to start moving tomorrow and I'm thinking about tonight I just want to have the memory without the action and therefore we want to scale out certain things but how do molecules how do molecules store enough information to elicit those future neural firings in the right pattern that I can call them up tomorrow how do they do that well there are certain neurons that actually encode the temporal context of experience so that will fire in sequence in combination with the population of cells that are are active at the time of an explicit memory but did you want me to explain the molecular basis maybe maybe just quickly I wouldn't go too far yeah just this is really just for me you guys can just think about something else for a moment if you don't mind no but yeah take you through the slide or oh yeah why don't we do that sure absolutely all right so every time you know we experience an emotionally charged event the brain releases uh neurochemicals neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin and those neurotransmitters change the threshold of responsibility of the neurons and that establishes new contact between neurons but what we found in recent years is that these neurotransmitters actually enter the nucleus of the cells of the neurons in our brain okay and they find their way in there and then they start to interact with proteins in the nucleus of the cell so what you're seeing here is a picture of um your DNA okay and the yellow is DNA wrapped around these core proteins called histones and we now know that neurotransmitters that are released during these emotionally charged events actually find their way in and interact with these proteins these core proteins and it'll be it elicits something called a Cascade of epigenetic modifications so that's this is part of the genome that controls the expression of the genes so what happens you can see that the DNA is tightly wrapped around these proteins under normal situations and then when they're bombarded with dopamine or serotonin the DNA relaxes now it's accessible for Activation and much like a dimmer switch okay there are chemical tags that occur on our DNA in response to learning which allows the DNA to be turned up or turned down in the moment but also in priming it for future responsivity so you can almost say that your memories are causing a change at the level of your DNA so everything from structure changes so we know about the right hand double helix that Watson and Crick discovered but during a learning event the DNA will flip and it'll go the other way in a left-handed turn and that makes it more amenable to modification so just why I understand so you know the old version that I think many of us are familiar with is we think about memories as synaptic connections right or sort of the wiring of the brain the hardware doesn't change in terms of the ingredients it's just the connections between them changes are you suggesting that it's beyond it's more than that yeah so fundamentally it's still about the contacts between cells but at a deeper layer for this whole metaplastic future priming event to respond in the future there are changes that occur at the level of DNA okay so what happens like a showing there is there's structure changes in DNA and it's the DNA of particular neurons there'll be neurons that are active at the time of a given experience right so they can be the same or different depending on what experience like they could be overlapping right and there's different regions of the genome that are responding as well um but fundamentally what happens here and I'll take you through it a little bit is once that DNA is opened and primed for Activation reader proteins come in and start to read off the code and then it starts to spit out a molecule that you'll all be aware of now called RNA and these RNA molecules there's many different kinds and they exit the nucleus now that we're coming back out macro level we're going back out to the synapse again so these RNA molecules that have were expressed from the DNA leave the nucleus travel along the processes of the cell to the points of contact between other neurons called the synaptic compartment and there these RNA molecules do all kinds of interesting things to change the way our cells talk to each other right so you have a two it's two pronged right so you have a signal going in changes the DNA makes it more amenable or responsive the threshold changes for its reactivity and then that in turn sends a message out to establish those contacts between cells which you we all know of and that leads to long-term memory so it's both and and so these rnas they're somewhat different than from the traditional RNA molecule that we'd imagine just you know go into the ribosomes and coding for proteins these are somehow making the synaptic connections stronger or yeah well they're they're called Regulatory rnas and it turns out that 98 of our genome actually encodes for these rnas that don't make a protein and it's the tip of the iceberg in terms of our understanding but we're making Headway in in understanding how certain classes of RNA that don't make a protein are actually transactional and they they process information inside the cell so they tell different molecules where to go in this case they tell molecules that in the synaptic compartment what to do they're coordinating all these events and it's pretty interesting when you think about that that RNA predated everything even DNA sure RNA was the first molecule on Earth yeah and now it has this um Exquisite role in establishing the structural context of memory right so it's like an internal system the brain keep track so that the process that you just described you know you don't write over a previous change if it was a memory that you want to be stable presumably you want to go to a different location for this kind of change you think every neuron has the opportunity of more than ten thousand contacts with other neurons and somehow it keeps track well let me know you know there's you know Grandma's you know 89th birthday leave that alone you go to another part of that I don't know how I think that's where the whole idea of recreating memories comes in like there's yeah I can't answer that question explicitly but I can say that in general experiences change the threshold of responsibility in neurons and that the emergent property of that is memory and so so Oliver let me ask you this you know if I if I'm going way back you're remembering something you know when I'm five years old and and you described it eloquently in terms of you know you're you're coming close to a recreation of the neural firings of the experience when you're five and that's how you are having a memory of that time but my brain now has been undergoing like Decades of transformation through like the processes that we're talking about so it's a different brain today than it was when I was five so how is the case that those neural firings that are mimicking what my brain was doing decades ago still yields the same kind of memory in a different brain I mean I guess it's um it's um careful process of Maintenance So that obviously the cellular change over in the body um would not change the information content and um so therefore I mean I think the changes or the threat of change is actually more coming from experience or I'm not using information so that the brain again the idea of trying to be efficient would update information would kind of downgrade information and to therefore our interaction is probably a bigger threat from that perspective even though obviously it would typically act in our favor then just the typical cellular renewal process that takes place but would typically leave information intact because you know for the same reasons it's you know Suddenly It's not that important functions of our brain stop working you know because of the changeover and and therefore the same would apply to the memory mechanisms as well and and can we segue from that to retrieval right so you're you know that's how memories are formed and again anybody jump in on this how well do we understand the retrieval process you know at say you know a physiological level but also a molecular level I mean it depends on which level you look at because like looking at the molecular level is very different than you know working with patients or doing neuroimaging so from my perspective mostly coming from your Imaging is looking at pattern completion so that typically retrieval happens if you get a partial input that reactivates the complete memory and that partial input can be something from outside like the smell aside a word that can reactivate the complete memory or it could be internally generated that if you want to remember something then essentially we generate a retrieval key which then also will just activate that isn't that sort of circular when it comes to the internal version it almost feels like to generate the memory I've got to have the memory in order to stimulate the memory so where does it where does it come from one solution to the problem is that our memory is always active to some varying degrees and some parts of a memory are more active than others so it's just you look at it as a network with different levels of activity so therefore there's always something active and we can therefore nudge it more in One Direction that leads to more activity in that area which then leads to it eventually becoming conscious so lots of our memory are just kind of potentially retrievable but not in our Consciousness but um um and only a small aspect of it is currently um obviously there are some there are some ideas that there's active inhibition so your memories are already always online and ready to go but they're being actively inhibited so this neurotransmitter called Gaba that's critical for that process and if you relief the break turn down Gaba then it can promote the retrieval of memory and then there's other ideas that it's even electrical based signaling what I would say between what what you're saying um you know the molecular level is infinitely complex so if you multiply what you're saying 10 by 68 billion multiplied by 15 000 dendrites potentially per neuron you have this system of fabulous complexity and that's pervasively connected so you can it it's you know it's dizzyingly complex so you can you can approach it from any of the levels that we're taking it from and you can this it's a never-ending story and the other thing about memory is it's it's uh the brain is a circuit and not only is the brain a circuit but the brain and the body is a circuit as well and if we're talking about memory and emotion and I suppose you know I'm basically a medic I you know I think a lot of the time we forget about the body when we're talking about the brain but remember emotions there they are experienced in our body they may be made in the brain but they're actually experienced within our bodies so you you can you can take memory from the level of the Madeleine from the level of touching somebody's finger up to the level of trying to understand um RNA transactional Concepts and it's it's all memory it's it's it's what makes us human I think ultimately that's a good point about the body and the Brain connection so that in cases of traumatic memory like PTSD there's this massive Drive of the periphery right which causes problems with being able to retrieve memories so some forms of treatment for PTSD actually Target the peripheral system so they give Propranolol which is a beta blocker people used to use it for high blood pressure or folks with Stage Fright right so they would suppress the physiological well I'm afraid of you so suppress the body's response which then promotes the cognitive function so it's intimately connected and so Gail you you you in your practice you you've you've dealt with the extremes of of of memory and just just to get into it you know there's um a wonderful story I'm sure many people are familiar with it boar has wrote the story about a character funes who could not forget anything at all and at first sight that sounds like something that many of us would sign up for right I mean you know when you when you forget important moments in your life there's a sense in which they feel gone almost and yet in this story this fictional story it doesn't turn out so well for the character because when you're not able to forget anything at least in the hands of Borges the character couldn't generalize everything was so specific every event was distinct there was no category of events that allowed a coherent Narrative of life to to to actually be written so what's your experience with patients I gather there aren't many but some who can't forget that's right they're out many and I have worked with both extremes those that have lost all their memories as well as those that can't forget so we're really talking uh about highly Superior autobiographical memory and actually I think Rebecca is here the only person in Australia who actually has that phenomena but this is something where memories are just coming and and arising constantly many memories so it becomes intrusive and we're not talking about memories like 911 or you know big events that we all remember we're talking about what did you have for breakfast what day is it what was the weather like you know what what um happened during the day you know did you walk down the road so these are memories for everyday mundane events that just keep getting stored and stored and stored so the specifics as you say just keep adding up so it's almost like a filing cabinet that is full of every day of your life now some people can do that from say middle childhood or early teen Rebecca actually goes you know quite a long way back so her her mind is constantly giving these memories or bringing them forward and at what level of resolution and again if I'm probing in a way that somehow is no inappropriate but I mean is it like what happened at you know 6 36 p.m on Tuesday or is it more it can be that specific I mean obviously certain things would stand out more so you know if it's a family event or a birthday but it's really it's personal memory so when it's related to your personal events so it's not just memories for information in the news on the day so it really is about what you did so for Rebecca it is what she did on a a daily basis and we've tested that out experimentally going back looking at different dates and asking questions and probing that in different ways and it's actually phenomenal just how much information there is now it comes at a cost you know the cost is the intrusion so she doesn't sleep very well or that's a bit of a problem you've almost got to actively preoccupy your mind in order to be able to get to sleep otherwise it's just constantly having memories or different thoughts keep coming so and it is it limited to experience I mean for instance um can uh I feel funny uh can Rebecca like remember the digits of pi you know is is it that only if that's of Interest so she can actually remember every line every bit of the Harry Potter novels so the seven Harry Potter novels because she's interested we actually compared so what she could do with people who also said they were Harry Potter aficionados so we didn't just pick anybody like me I haven't read all the books but we certainly looked at other people that had that interest but it's different so so it was quite effortful to learn those but in fact it's it's um that information is actually what we call semantic memory but she has personal memories around learning those books and and have you do you understand I mean I mean is the brain structure that yields this capacity different from well no so structurally we've actually done some very fancy Imaging where we just looked at every structure related to memory so the hippocampus the amygdala the prefrontal cortex the temporal lobes every structure when we compare to sort of a normal data set they're all like the same size so it's not like there's a massive hippocampus sitting in her brain it's not because of that so you know one idea is that it is just the connections um possibly stronger but we haven't actually we haven't got that evidence and in fact worldwide there isn't really strong evidence that that's the case and how many individuals worldwide do we know of with that capacity I think there's somewhere between 60 to 100 now there was about 60 there's probably more at this point and and this fellow who I remember them Solomon sharashevsky do you know that name who studied by luria in the Soviet Union yeah there's a whole on this so it's slightly different so that that case actually um used mnemonics so had some tricks and also had more of a photographic memory so there's some little differences but it's it has some similarity you know one of the things that really struck me when we were um doing some tasks is I showed Rebecca this black and white scene of a beach now I've used this all the time we elicit spontaneous speech and clinical practice it takes about a minute well I've shown lots of people and they've never mentioned colors or sounds but when Rebecca looked at this scene she was describing the The Sounds the smells the colors well this is a black and white scene so the richness of which she is encoding that so the taste the smell so there's a lot of extra information available she assigns to the experience that that's right so that she ascribed to that whereas I have never heard anybody else do that so it makes me wonder whether actually that information is available to all of us but maybe we are filtering it out so in some sense there's no filter so the details and the rich richness are coming in and being retained whereas you and I were probably comes in it goes away it just um sort of flows through right so Oliver I'm just wondering so Tim described the possibility that memories are kind of always there they're just suppressed if we inhibited him and and now this is an example where the memories are always there and they're not suppressed um which which can have positive and negative impacts as you're describing so what is the role of of suppressing or forgetting memories is there an evolutionary utility to that I would say twofold I mean first of all saving energy in terms of maintaining or building those memories and you know the brain consumes 20 roughly of our energy needs that's a good reason but also to ensure functionality so that you know especially evolutionary speaking often we had to make quick decisions and we still have you know crossing a road and all that so we have to filter out a lot of information incoming information about a lot of our mnemonic information as well just to be able to react appropriately because this yeah always everything comes with the cost and absolutely and like if you park your car yesterday you need to remember it when you park your car but today if it was yesterday I don't want to know so it's just taking up space right so some things you want to but if you forget it that's my question if you forget where you parked your car yesterday has it really been erased or has it just been suppressed and it's still there I would argue you probably didn't encode it in the first place so when you parked your car and walked into the shopping mall what were you thinking about where the shop you were going to were you thinking about what you're doing next or were you actually focused on what you were doing in the moment well Alva you've actually done studies on the relationship between location and and memory so you have insight into this um yeah I mean one aspect also I think the interference is the other one so that especially with like the parking examples a few everyday park in the same general area but somewhat often in a different spot that and that's this issue of like overlapping memories and our brains trying to be efficient and not store you know 10 000 entries of where we park our car but trying to keep the the most relevant and that sometimes might go wrong because maybe we have paid more attention yesterday than we kind of did today so that system is not error error free but overall it would be still typically calibrated for you know the best efficiency in our day-to-day life and of course one thing that we all fear is the the exact opposite you know as as we get older and as we're living longer so many of us experience parents or loved ones who go the other direction they begin to to lose memory so is there any insight that we gain from the extreme where one can't forget in order to deal with the extreme where one can't remember well I mean I think it's partly related to training and and what can you do to maintain or to maximize your memory right now so this richness of encoding the absolute the attention that goes on that you know that's something that from midlife or even earlier life we can be almost working on or being aware of making it conscious so there are practices things like mindfulness things like the meditation attention training strategy training so all of those cognitive skills that you can sort of boost and put in top-notch condition I guess you would say right from well middle middle age like I thought earlier if you can those are good skills to do you know whenever someone says to me I've always you know I lose my keys I lose this I always think what were you thinking about when you did it and they are always thinking about something else so their mind in a sense is wandered off so there's those basic things that we can all do to help just keep our focus and our attention being deliberate and that's the the prefrontal cortex also that top-down control of just our cognitive abilities our thinking skills I think we all think it's out of our control and it is to a degree there's the biology sure but there's certainly a lot of things minimizing the stress so that we don't shrink our hippocampi you know all those little things really add up and you want to keep your in a sense your thinking skills in good condition it's like you exercise to keep your body in good condition you can also do training and exercises to help the thinking it's interesting because it seems like the cost of of experience across the lifespan is this the wicked cost is that it leads you to be on autopilot and you become less attentive to new learning events so over time our experience which is meant to optimize our ability to predict the future based on our memories actually works against us because then we stop paying attention as much because we're on autopilot exactly that kind of integrates into the aging process automatic versus the you know the automatic processing versus the active and I call it the active thinking or active thought yeah yeah I suppose I I'm I think you could look at it in a slightly different way um I'm not sure they're working against each other and in a sense I think the we don't need to pay as much attention to things as we gain more experience and I think that's you know you see that particularly in professions where a lot of knowledge is based is experience based rather than book based and you know an older professional if I was asked to go to a younger or an older doctor I go to the older doctor because I want them to I want them to understand at an abstract level of what's happening to me I want them to be quick I don't want them to do 100 tests I don't want their attention on every detail that doesn't require that attention what I want is them to be able to filter through it all and focus on the issues that are important and I think we with memory we we tend to be very focused on Executive function on speed on attention but there's there is an awful lot of abstract information and that accumulates over the years and that's hugely important in terms of not you know in terms of us individually as we age but also in terms of society that older wisdom um it really doesn't need to be part of the way we live together collectively but do you think that that would have an impact on the processes of memory updating right so every time we there's a theory that every time we recall information the brain changes its state to enable the updating of new information right reconsoleration yeah so that could also be impacted in the aging process as well right that's right so that there's a kind of a gray zone of what's being updated and what new information is able to come in because of the executive attentional processing that so no so no doubt that that's explains what I started with with my memory of being very young and and I see it as a third-party Observer so I've somehow in the reconsolidation process have changed have changed that memory so so to what extent are our memories as we get older just sort of manufactured using the input of the memory of an earlier stage of Life are we simply telling ourselves made up stories that have some semblance of Truth corroborated by others yeah right exactly so like I I don't know if one can quantify it but what fraction of my memories are are real and what fraction of them have I just fiddled with over the past decades for one reason or another well I think there is a reconstruction so you know you almost reconfigure every time you pull the memory out of the drawer yeah you know it it depends if you pull it out now then this situation is going to influence and in a sense combine with that memory so next time if I if I'm sitting on the beach then that's actually going to interject so there is a level of construction is is one of the words that's thrown around now where you reconstruct and put it together based on your thought processes at the moment so there is a combination or a recombining of details in a new way and they feel just as real yes and maybe again I don't want to get all meta here but maybe they are real I mean the real to me as an individual even though they don't have a direct basis in a past experience well and it may have a seed of a basis in a passage yes exactly so so in in some sense it's almost like the tree growing it's the same tree but it's now got a lot more hanging off it I think it it's very individual as well like how much some people have very strong images or or memories for word for word you know I have a niece who almost can word for word regurgitate entire conversations she's been doing that since she was about five so her auditory memory is fantastic so that's very different from somebody else so we all have strengths in what Remains the core but then different details come together in a different way so given that given that we all do that throughout our entire lives is there a chance that in the not too distant future we'll be able to do that volitionally to be able to do something like you know Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind I mean get into the brain well maybe you're talking about future thinking because that's also something now where people people really say that if you're constructing your past memories in fact it helps us it's very adaptive in helping us to imagine the future so it's the same sort of process so this is quite helpful if I want to imagine if I did this and then I did that you know and I'm planning to do something in the future then I can actually work out what the consequences are and then make a choice will I do that or not so I think the memory in talking about this in terms of the past actually can help us think about how do we train or teach people to in a sense have more of a metacognition about future well that's a very useful obviously important role of memory to god future Behavior but I I'm thinking about something a little bit it more intrusive right which is you know we began by talking about trauma and its role in creating memory one can imagine that there are evolutionary util usefulness to be able to respond to that because if that gun is in your face at a future time you now have experience with that and that allows you perhaps to deal with that situation with greater efficacy than you would if it was the first time that you encountered it good absolutely on the other hand their downsides certainly of having those traumatic memories can we learn ways to suppress those and is that perhaps a way forward normally we talk about something you don't want to suppress you want to talk it out you want to work it through and sometimes that works for many people for some people it doesn't but what if we could go in there and excise that well there's a memory there is a pretty significant literature on the idea that um when memories are retrieved they're subject to modification and that's being kind of harnessed as an explicit therapy for people with phobias or PTSD so when they retrieve that that fear response or that memory there's an intervention that could be applied right they back in the 50s they used ECT so electroconvulsive therapy which caused Amnesia of the event that was recalled at that moment in time and then later on in pre-clinical studies folks have been using something called protein synthesis inhibitors at the time of retrieval right so when the memory is in that labile State they can intervene and erase the memory that was reactivated and how effective is that and it's now we're moving into this I mentioned Propranolol that is one therapeutic approach to helping folks with PTSD and phobia to help them suppress those um invasive memories and is that viewed as a in the clinical world is that viewed as a promising way of going forward well well I think first of all the the initial point you made is very important that it's not always good to talk and it's not always good to ventilate and it's not always good to re-traumatize somebody by reopening those Pathways in a very Vivid way and sometimes it's more appropriate particularly in situations of a more severe trauma to to try and forget um and certainly in my work I've seen people who've had psychotic experiences that are really quite horrifying um I think it's very difficult for us to imagine psychotic experiences unless we have been psychotic ourselves I mean essentially what you're you're you're hearing voices the way you are hearing me now so they're not voices in your head as is commonly thought there are voices out there and if there's nobody there well then somebody there may be hidden speakers in the wall there may be extraterrestrials from Mars that are listening in but somehow we can't see so all sorts of bizarre and dark and sometimes grotesque worlds are attributed by what are usually nasty auditory hallucinations and in situations like that certainly it would be untherapeutic to try and do anything other than tell that try and explain to the person that their brain was firing off and that they were having all these experiences that they're not based in reality and that they're better off coming into the shared what I call the shared reality that we're all lucky enough if we are lucky enough to be able to share in you're all hearing my voice you're not hearing some other voice that's trying to talk over mine so you're not confused you're in the world you're in the moment you're in the shared Consciousness that we're all a part of so certainly in situations like that I I think it's counter therapeutic to to go into therapy to delve in to investigate those experiences and then if we come back to just thinking about the memory of that you're strengthening it you know by going I'm back you're you're actually adding to it and it becomes almost stronger yeah um and in some some situations I think Tim you're probably referring to phobias so in that sense sometimes you can change the association with the memory and that's based on some of the the different pavlovian type learning so you can actually weaken that or strengthen something else to it so you can meddle with memories in that sense which can be harmful and helpful to ride the old ones and that's the clinical decision making as to when do you do that when do you not yeah so one one final area in the remaining time that just want to spend a a little time on asking you about I think many of us think of our personal identity as being bound up with our memories or maybe even being our memories it's almost as if I am the collection of of my memories that is who I am right that's what distinguishes me from others in your you know clinical work and research work do you come to a more nuanced version of that or a solidified version that that really is what we are as human beings long collections of memories that summarize our experience as a living system on planet Earth Oliver I mean I guess we can look at identity from two sides from the outside I mean obviously even if we lose our memory the people surrounding us still have memories of us so but yeah I think from our personal point of view in terms of who we think we are memories would be crucial and I can that would make sense given that we forget a lot of information that was our our sense of identity is somewhat changing you know when we age um yeah and the more information you would have about our childhood I guess that would enrich or um our identity so I think yes definitely intimately linked memories of ourself and yeah and you know I immediately think of a patient I worked with um I was working in London at the time Sheena McDonald she was quite a public figure and she had a severe brain injury from a from being run over by a police fan and she actually made a documentary who am I now if I don't have my memory it was really the whole premise of that and she really felt that her identity was affected she had quite severe well she was in a coma and then she had post-traumatic Amnesia which was a stage where she wasn't laying down new memories for about six weeks and then it was about six months that she had patchy memories but she struggled and she repeatedly came back to that question and that made me change my view and really think about our identity and when you lose that memory you maybe feel the same but she was asking am I really the same or do I just think I am and I guess for all of us I don't know as I get older I certainly feel that um I I think that some of the details or the detailed memories disappear a little bit but I don't feel that that's changed my identity as if there's some essential core yeah that's you and the memory is somehow wrap around that but if the memories go the core still is process but if you if you don't have a frame of reference of people that recognize you and you recognize them even if they're telling you things about yourself that you would have once known then you don't you you don't have a sense of who you are right without that recognition of the person yeah in front of you right yes so there's a sense that you know my identity is tied to the group who is around me and and how do you relate to me you know partly that's where group and Social Psychology comes in where the identity is formed in relation to others or in relation to what you think I am or what you even have a room and you didn't recognize anyone any every time you walked into the room it would be very um disturbing I think your foundation would be unstable right yeah I think I think we're coming back again and again to the whole issue of connectivity and I mean we all live in a moment of Consciousness so our memory and the past exists in the present and it is in the conscious moment of the present that we predict the future as well and I think that the human you know the human race is is very like like memory we're living in a current situation but we have a high level of awareness of of the past and we're trying to prevent past mistakes in our future behavior and I think we are evolving as a species in the same way that we evolve and develop personally so so memory binds us together it was like the coming back to the to the 911 we all watched the same clip visually again and again and again and that that Consolidated that memory that is a collective memory that we will always share and that will always be with us and we're not going to get a New York confused with Chicago in that memory because that's a very solid core memory and also the pizza is quite different but yeah nice yeah so I I think it's about connection and I I really think as you get older that's one of the wonderful things about not being young and being older is is that your sense of connection with the world I think expands so that the big the big Collective memory that is the human race and the human project that we're all a part of we're all a part of a collective memory we're all a part of of that project and yes Jean-Paul satra said you know we we make a narrative and then we recreate it and we recreated constantly and um Alice Monroe said something very similar um in the last decade so we are evolving but memory is important because we learn from that in in the journey in terms of moving forward and and so as we we look to the Future one can imagine that the rapid increase in our technological facility will allow for an interface between the biological and the technological do you do you envision that there will be a time that human memory is not just a collection of molecules in this Gloppy three pound squishy gray structure that sits in this bony cave perched on our shoulders but rather we're able to hook up to other devices that can assist us so that you know we don't have to have this worry about losing memories or suppressing Memories We just sort of put them off to the external cert you know and then we bring it back whenever we want is that science fiction or is that something that you think is potentially going to happen I feel in many ways we're already offloading our memory in what sense using iPhones and devices as our guides right with us as the intermediary at the moment but we don't have to worry about phone numbers anymore we don't have to worry about how to drive or where to drive our car we're not reading Maps anymore yeah let me just you're right but but are they not more than me Mystic aspects of memory they're like the non-human parts of memory and I'm very happy that my children don't have to learn times tables anymore a London taxi driver would speak otherwise that's right they used to be incredible yeah but now right I know but I still think that there there is human memory and human memory is is part of the human condition and a machine will never mimic that that in my books I mean in some ways you're talking about you know the semantic memory we can offload yeah and and these personal autobiographical the things that are essentially relevant and personal that that is the human bit too and that's also those memories which we don't have to pay um lots of effort to encode we were talked earlier about it how hard it is to memorize but it typically only pertains to information that um you might not have an interest in so once you develop an interest then it's not difficult anymore and So like um Harry Potter books there example like everybody who's a Harry Potter fan would have no problem memorizing the story you know reads it once and can answer the questions but it's much harder with the times table and um and therefore um yeah like the social memory you know social relationship those aspects that aspects that um kind of coming or maybe we lean on technology a bit more and then it frees up creativity yeah that's right positive way of putting it down and so you you know we began this conversation like one of the initial questions I asked was you know how is it possible that molecules can store the the the feeling of a warm breeze on the ocean or or the sensation of you know a birthday cake when you're six years old but underlying that specific question which has to do with memory is the Allied question of Consciousness right how is it possible that matter can yield mind how is it possible that matter can yield these inner worlds of sensation of which memory of course is an integral part but you know there's the whole world inside of our heads does does your work on memory make you feel that you're getting closer to an answer to that question as to what is consciousness and do you think that it is simply physical or do you think it's something beyond the physical I think Oliver gives us a sense of the complexity of the processes involved and that just um in how much more complex the processes would be to I guess fully understand and explain processes like Consciousness and um and what do you think is is it simply matter creating Consciousness or is it something else I mean it would be hard to save a certainty because I guess we're not there yet to kind of you know pinpoint it with certainty so oh come on save us some some certainty well I'm hoping for surprises yeah well I don't think there's something out there if that's the question you're asking well is there something beyond the molecules I I think I don't think that there is but many people disagree with it I would have thought that you would say that there there is my guess would have been that you would have thought that there is but am I wrong you're absolutely wrong okay no consciousness is a multi-layered thing yes and at the outer reaches of Consciousness we are looking at ourselves and that is why we have a feeling as if there is something out there I agree with you but that is the ultimate in Consciousness and and that's that feeling that there is well I I like when you bring in different levels of complexity so energy matter you know what does it give rise to is there something that is it all just within me I I think energy extends Beyond I think it's partly in the relationship in the relationship with different things so I think that the energy is actually quite key in all of that so I don't think which is in the molecules which is in the little levels it's in the bigger levels so I'm probably more on the I think there are some metaphysical or some things that are bigger than what we can imagine right now I think it's a little bit too reductionist to say it's the little molecules running around and that's it now I noticed the expression on your face when you said reduction like that oh you know you know for me it'd be it's reductionism you know you know is it just sort of a difference I I I guess you know I am very interested in creativity and creative thought how do you generate new ideas so for me I feel like I don't want to reduce down to the littlest level of molecule I like the complexity of when things come together synergistically and make something Beyond what's actually just there so I I don't know whether that's a physical Beyond what's there or whether I'm saying it's an energy Beyond what's there but I think that there's more yeah so the only thing that I would say to that and then I'll I'll leave it to him to take us out I don't consider that we are reducing things through reductionism even though the words sound so similar have the same root rather I think it's utterly remarkable that these ingredients called atoms and molecules can somehow come together in complex ways and yield the creative impulse and the creative output I mean how remarkable is it that molecules can look at themselves and wonder about how those molecules are doing what they're doing I agree we're on the same page then okay in that sense your view Tim oh well I mean I have a lot a lot of things to say about that but well let me tell you you have a negative one minute and 22 seconds to do it so we've got we've got DNA it's a four base code right computers are made of ones and zeros so already we have a device that's inside of us that has a computational memory storage of getting it's a quadratic Improvement right and then on top of that four bases in each of the four bases can be chemically modified in four or five different ways which again offers an opportunity for an incredible amount of storage yes memory but but but is that a full description do you think of what's Happening inside of our heads or or not I suspect you think that it is but I don't think the words because I got the wrong ones no no I'd like to think that there's the capacity for a great amount of storage in at the level of our DNA so I can break it down to the most reductionist right level we could talk about fermians another day right right well well that you know that's a anyone want to give a final remark before we wrap it up or um yeah so this has been absolutely fascinating conversation on mind memory Consciousness trauma emotion and the swirl of all these ingredients that yield the structure that we call the human being so I want to thank you for human beings for joining us here tonight for this discussion please thank our group [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 337,062

Keywords: Brian Greene, Memory, Neuroscience, episodic memory, semantic memory, declarative memory, procedural memory, explicit memory, implicit memories

Id: VzxI8Xjx1iw

Length: 88min 32sec (5312 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023