Thanks for the Memories

small this table is when there are three people around it. Well, that we had three one time while you were gone, we had Holly was on. She was great. Oh I'm glad, Yes, Holly. Holly is always wonderful. So it's it's a great memory of mine to think back on Holly in that episode. You know now that you say the word memory, Yeah, almost as if it were a segue. I recall something. It's a memory I have about a thought I had

about memories. I remember that. So let me take y'all back to a couple of months ago, I please do, Or it might have been a couple of years ago. I don't know. My memory is not very good. When I was researching the brain to brain communication video that I wrote, there was a video episode we did a while back, and it was about the idea of people

communicating without words from brain to brain. So in one of the experiments described in the video, they had two people sitting in rooms in different buildings, and they were using a combination of an e G cap on one end and then a transcranial magnetic stimulation device on the other end to have one person caused the other person's brain to press a button. Right, So that's kind of cool. The brain actually caused the person's finger to push the button.

That's right. Well, the brain caused the other person's brain to cause the person's finger to press them exactly as opposed to the brain itself pushing the button. Just want to be like leaping out through the ear and going to deep right, which would have been brang prang ish. The yeah, the the the idea of being in that video you you were. We were taking that concept of a direct brain to brain communication and saying, what if this could be extended to the point where someone could

transfer an entire brain state to someone else? Right, Sure, we don't know the ultimate end of what can be shared from brain to brain, because this example in this video that we talked about. It was very basic. It It's essentially just a one bit impulse. It's saying press now,

you know, like action, do something. But what the most optimistic advocates of brain to brain communication we're saying is that one day, based on these same technologies, just taken to a much more complex level, you might actually be able to share really complex contents of the brain, such as skills like you could train somebody on a skill like I know kung fu, right, just with a brain transfer, you can put that knowledge brain state into their brain.

Or you could share a memory of yours directly into somebody else's brain without words, going like oh I I had I saw this beautiful sunset once here you go, right, including the emotions I experienced when I saw this thing. Sure, And to be honest, we don't know if something like that is possible or not. It might be, it might not be. But I actually thought about this problem a lot, and while I certainly wouldn't say it's impossible to have somebody else's memories beamed into your brain, I do kind

of wonder because let's imagine how this would work. Uh, Let's say you're trying to transfer a memory of when you were at a birthday party when you were seven years old, and you were handed a little paper plate with a piece of birthday cake on it, and there was a big scorpion sitting on that piece of birthday cake. This is where we learned how terrible Joe's childhood was.

It rained every time there was a pool party. Now, if you have a videotape of this event, it would be easy to transfer a video file from one computer to another, right, assuming it's a common, easily read file type and you have the right libraries, codex whatever to translate the file. But the reason you need something like a codec is that there are potentially infinite number of ways visual information like video could be encoded as information

for storage and transfer. Right, So, if you had a video of this event on your hard drive, there wouldn't be a little picture of a piece of birthday cake with sprinkles and big happy scorpions sitting on it somewhere inside your computer. It would just be a file like any other file, long string of data bits, ones and zeros. We know how that goes. That's some kind of program then compiles or or kind of filters down into a

single image or a series of images rather exactly. So the reason we have common file types and codex and stuff is so all of our computers can agree on how to translate these bits of data into lard pixels on the screen or vice versa from recording them from a lens. But our brains don't have common file types yet, do they know? They don't? Well, you know, we can't even we can't even describe the file types that are there, right, we don't even fully understand how episodic memories are encoded

in the brain. And by episodic memories, I mean something like that, like we're calling a particular event and what happened and how it made you feel. Yeah, yeah, all things like that, as opposed to what we might call semantic memories, which are more like remembering how to do something, or remembering what a fork is for, or or what a scorpion can do to you, or something your birthday

party with your seven. So, when you think about it, describing your memory and words to another person is sort of one crude way of translating or converting a memory file type across possibly incompatible file types. Right, It's like a converter program in a way. But of course, some aspects of the experience can always be lost when you're transferring a memory this way. That's why we find ourselves saying things like, well, I guess you really had to

be there, so something gets lost in this translation. So it's it's even, it goes beyond even the The analogy that we could draw is imagine that we're in the early days of computers, where every computer is its own individual type of thing, and the type of computer I own and the type of computer Laura owns, the type of computer Joe owns are all different types. We don't all have mac os or Windows. There's not intercompatible. There's no way for me to send the work that I

do on mine onto yours and haven't mean anything. They're all based on different operating systems, and so I have I might have something on my machine and I want to share it with YouTube, but I'm kind of stuck because I don't have a way of doing that unless you say, hey, come over and look directly at my screen, which there's no analog for in human brain memory stuff. Yeah, and oh wait, no, hold on, there's that consciousness binding

machine we talked about. Well weight, I dreamed that I was about to say, like, I'd love to the other episode recording will I was a vacation. Uh No. I was going to also say, though, that even even this example with the analogy, it's it's not um, it's not completely accurate. Because with a computer we could actually point to the the the file name and say this represents that memory. We can't do that in the brain to the extent where we can identify a specific series of

neurons and say this represents that memory. Yeah, that's totally true. We don't know if in theory we could one day do that. We certainly can't do that now, and we don't know if we could do it, if that would be at any way transferable. Very good point. Now, on the other hand, in favor of the idea of sort of technological compatibility for organic memories when we record, store, and recall memories, I think we all agree that something

physical is happening in the brain. Like even if you're a duellist and you believe you know that there's something sort of like supernatural, a soul or something going beyond the brain, I think even most people who think this don't think that memory encoding and recall is a supernatural process. Yeah. I think everyone agrees that it's a more than the sum of its parts kind of situation, but something that we hypothetically eventually will be able to suss out. Yeah,

it is. It is a physical thing that happens in the brain. If it's a physical thing that happens in the brain, then it can, in theory at least be measured and recorded by scientific instruments. I'm not sure if it can be without killing the brain, but at least it is in theory possible to see, Okay, here the physical states of every single cell in the brain and

what they're doing in relationship to each other. So you should be able to record with the physical reality of a certain memory being recalled, is Yeah, once we get to the point where we have the data capacity, just the thorough put really to to watch all of those things carefully enough to designate them. Yeah. Sure. And so if we accept that the basis of all our memories is some kind of physical fact about the brain, and those physical facts can be measured, then shouldn't all of

our memories be somehow recordable from the outside. Well maybe and maybe not. So I thought we should look at this question today and sort of examine the field of memory and technology and see what we can reasonably say about where technology and memory meet. Will we one day be able to record our memories onto computers, will we

be able to share them between brains without words? And what the future of memory and technology is and these are all, you know, really cool questions to ask, and we've already mentioned it before in the episode, but there's so much that we don't know about the brain and how memory works that this is going to be largely speculative. We're going to try and lay the foundation of what we understand about memory, but honestly, we are on the very first steps of a very what could be a

very long journey. We don't even know how long the journey will be, right, We we have no idea, right. Uh. Plenty of researchers are working on this kind of stuff, and we'll talk about a few of them later on in the podcast. But first, first, let's talk about what we solidly do know about how memory is encoded in the brain. Okay, Well it's going to be short, alright, So yeah, that word solidly solidly. Uh. You you can you encounter things and you process them and later you

can recall a simulation of the thing that happened. Oh, we we're pretty sure that we know a little bit more than that, a little bit more. There actually has been some very recent uh information coming out from a study that I think, Joe you you came across a blog on on the the idea about something that could really shake up the the idea of how memories are stored in the brain. But we'll get to that in a second. So, first of all, we generally talk about

three uh phases of memory. We talked about the encoding of memory, the storage of memory, and the retrieval of memory. UH. And it's really a complex construction of the results from multiple regions of the brain all working together to encode a memory and store it. So memory remembering things and and forming new memories is very similar to thinking in general. It involves multiple regions of the brain working in concerts.

So it's not like there's one part of your brain and that's the memory factory and that's all it does. There's a lot of stuff that works together to do this. Now, there are some facilitators that are really important in the encoding of memory. So first we have to perceive something in order to form a memory of some sort. See the scorpion, yes, yeah, not just the scorpion. You also see the cake, You feel the plate, you hear the children screaming you, the smell of cake, and scorpion enters

your nostrils. All these things are collectively part of that experience, and you have an emotion of I wanted that cake, or maybe I wonder if scorpions are edible. I mean, who knows what's going through your mind. So those perceptions are integrated into a single experience, and the Hippo campus plays a big part in this. The Hippo campus is kind of working as a manager, pulling all this this the separate lines of data and integrating them into what

will eventually be turned into the memory um. And that pretty much is the collection of all the perceptions that define that experience. Right now, here's where we start getting into things that we believe are going on, but we don't know for sure because we don't fully understand the

workings of the brain. So xts think that the hippocampus and the frontal cortex tag team together to sort through these integrated experiences that the hippocampus has pulled together and determine which ones are keepers and which ones you can toss away. So, in other words, we've got stuff happening around us all the time, much of it we are not consciously aware of because we're not focusing on that at the moment, or if we are consciously aware of it,

we're not going to remember it later. Yeah, we're not. There was nothing going on up in that corner of the room, so we can just blot it right out. Yeah, that that's just a great spot in the memory. There's nothing like you know, it may turn out that, uh, there was actually something going on over there, there was a pinana on fire, but that was not important to the moment where the scorpion was sitting there on your cake,

so it doesn't factor into your memory. It wasn't encoded, um, so if it's not encoded, it just kind of fades away, you know it. Just so, the frontal cortex and the hippocampus together are saying, all right, this is what's important for this memory. This is what we're going to store for later. All this other stuff we're gonna leave behind. It's important. So you don't get overloaded with all the

data around you all the time. But then, of course, from our experience, you can think about how even that is not necessarily a totally clear distinction. I mean, think about all of the things you experience that you probably yourself wouldn't be able to recall clearly just out of the blue. But if somebody sort of like repeated it to you, you know, said like, hey, remember when Jonathan said X, Y and Z, you might be like, oh, yeah,

I think he did say that. Yeah. The same sort of thing that when you encounter a smell that's similar to one that that played a really important part in a memory that of yours, it brings that back. So for me, for example, the one that I will always associate with a particular part of my life is the smell uh that you get when you go to like a giant indoor pool. The chemicals like that immediately takes me back to swim lessons when I was a little kid. Doesn't matter how old I get, as so as I

smell it, boom, I'm back there summer break. It smells like the Gainsville College pool uh and uh and and the terror that I experienced on a weekly basis going to swimming lessons. Uh. So you know, that's the sort of stuff that that like. It just it keys into those those little memories. We'll talk a little bit more about what we think is happening when that goes on. Well, sure, because the memory doesn't exist, I mean the same way that a video file isn't a series of physical images

inside your computer somewhere. That's not how it does, and that's not how the brain does either. It's it's a series of electrical impulses or electrochemical impulses. Rather. Yeah, it's it's these electrochemical reactions in the brain. I mean, we're talking about neurons that are communicating with these various hormones and electrical chemical reactions. It's really complicated. We don't have

a full understanding of it. But our brains are really plastic, right, so when we encounter new material, it starts shuffling stuff around to incorporate it. Sometimes it's a means of comparing a new experience to one that you have already had. This is important for memory. It's an important thing about our survival, right because let's say you've encountered something that nearly killed you and then later on in life you encounter it again. It's important that you remember that it

nearly killed you the last time. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, And that's sort of the way that a particular smell can, like the smell of a food that you got really sick off of, or tequilo or etcetera. Whatever it happens to me that it was um will will turn you off later in the future. Right, So, repeating as supposed to later in the past. Sorry, repeating an experience multiple times reinforces these electrochemical reactions in the order that they

happen and in the patterns that they form. So there's one kind of a prevailing theory, at least for a very long time anyway, that memories are essentially these these um networks of neurons that represent the collective perceptions integrated into that experience. Or it's a it's a pathway of electrochemical signals across a series of those neurons, right right, it's it's a synaptic thing, right, You're looking at the

actual electrochemical reactions across series of synapses. Uh. So that was like the that's like the large theory about the idea of you form a memory. You have this experience, a your brain encodes it and it is translated across the series of neurons through the synaptic communications, and that represents the memory. And every time you remember, you are essentially constructing that same pathway, that same series of of communications all over the little the little thought cards kind

of dashes straight across that that same pathway. Right, it's the it's not the destination, it's the journey theory of right. Sure, sure, but there is a recent study that's kind of challenged that. Right. Yeah, this was the one that I was talking about that Joe had shared with us before the podcast, where the story is that it might not just be the synapses that are important, and maybe the neurons themselves have undergone some kind of change that mean that the neurons have

something of the memory in them. And the reason why I'm being so vague with the language is because we don't have the full understanding of it. We merely have seen an experiment that tests this hypothesis with slug with slugs yea C slugs, because C slug brains and human brains are so similar. Depends on the humans. The experiment was that they did conditioning with C slugs with mild

electric shocks. There's gonna be a lot of mode electric shocks in this episode, for better or worse, but at any rate, the sea slugs, yeah, well they were, they were. They learned to withdraw from the shocks. What other flavor of electrical shocks are are there, spicy, there's nuclear three mile island shocks. Um, So the slugs, the slugs learned to withdraw from these electric shocks. And then the researchers, uh, they they inhibited the synaptic connections. They disrupted the synaptic

connections that were associated. They thought, with the formation of the memory, hey, this thing will hurt you, go away from it. But they they observed the slugs were still

withdrawing even though the synaptic pathways had been disrupted. So that led them to the conclusion that perhaps the neurons themselves must have something to do with memory formation, and it's not just the synaptic passageways, and possibly we would might be able to use that information in the future to treat people who have certain types of memory problems where the neurons are healthy but the synapses are no longer communicating. They the thought is perhaps the memories are

not lost, they just can't be accident. So that's kind of interesting. But again, this is early days, right, that's so crazy, the idea that you could have potential memories in your brain. Yeah, that just you just can't you

can't recall them, but they're there. That's a possibility. Now, whether or not that's actually true, it's still too early to say, but it is an interesting hypothesis, and it may very well be that the actual reality is some combination of the things we already thought we knew and this new emerging information. It's probably a combination of the two. And because you know it's it can be pretty complex stuff.

The idea being here that that it's it's very difficult, very challenging to talk about how technology is going to interact with our memory when we don't fully understand the actual process of creating those memories in the first place. What we do know is that memory memory is malleable, right Oh yeah, yeah, Well, the that that pathway that a memory sort of exists on changes every time, changes

very slightly. Every time you call up that memory. It can potentially change a great deal, But most of the time it's little details, things that either get embellished, like when when you are remembering, you are reconstructing, You're not really. Uh, it's not the same as going into a filing cabinet and pulling out the file marked whatever your memory is seven seven year seventh birthday. Yeah, yeah, it's it's not like. It's not like playing a tape. It's like a reconstructing

frame by frame. Yeah. I I likened it to imagine that you are putting on a play, and the script it represents the original event, the play is the the you you recalling the event every time you see a play. If you go see a play more than once, you will notice that there are little differences in each performance, just because there are a lot of different parts that come along with any play. Uh, and because humans are bad at repeating precise actions precisely. Yeah. Yeah, you can't

do it exactly every single time, right, Yeah. And then some people's brains are like going to see a play where you've got those actors who work by beats instead of you know, they're like the script and important but more. But but either way, you know you're you're going to see have a different experience each time. It might not

be significantly different, you might say. You might say when you walk out, like, you know, I liked it better the second time than the first time, and I can't really you know, there were little changes that were different. The same sort of thing when you're remembering, and your brain tends to fill in gaps too, So when you are remembering something and perhaps the connections aren't going straight through the way they did when you first formed this memory,

your brain's like, well, let's just what'll work. Let's just Fred Fred was there, putting Fred into this memory now and then suddenly friends at your seventh seventh birthday party even though you didn't meet Fred till you were nine. That might happen, um, and you might talk to Fred later and say, you remember when you're you're at my seventh birthday party? Is like, dude, I didn't didn't know you when you were seven, and they will You're like, oh,

I could have sworn you were there. Yeah, So memory is not is not this permanent type of thing. It changes every single time where you remember, and knowing that it changes doesn't affect that that fact, right, Yeah, you can't. You can't concentrate into you can't remember really hard and get the truth of it. That doesn't work that way, which is both amazing and terrifying to me. Probably the stress of trying to force yourself to remember correctly would

make you forget more. Yeah, add in more superfluous details that didn't actually happen. So good luck with that, guys. Yeah. So, one of the things I thought was interesting about all this when I was looking into the encoding and the storage and the t evil bit, is that it really made me think that Sherlock Holmes, at least the the the Benedict Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes is pretty much a uh, you know, as fictional as you can get, in the sense that here's a here's a character who

can walk into a situation and apparently instantaneously perceive everything that's going on. Everything appears to have equal importance in that perception, and uh, and also he has incredible retention. Now, when we talk about story memories, there are three different storage phases, right. There's the sensory stage, which only lasts a fraction of a second. That's the thing that allows an experience to linger after the experience itself has ended.

So if there's a flash of light, that's what allows that flash of light to remain in your memory long enough for it to go to short term memory. Short term memory is something that lasts about thirty seconds. You can usually hold about seven things in your short term memory for about thirty seconds, and then it's about the max of it. Charlotte Holmes apparently can hold an infinite amount of information and retrieve it within those three seconds. No problem. Well, I mean his forehead is very tall,

that is true. I was thinking he might be using one of those memory palace things, right, like the mamonic devices to have you constructed. Well, never mind, I don't want to get a sidetrack anyway. So the long term memory is as far as you can we know, it's it's limitless. You can store an infinite number of memories and long term memory at least, there's no way there's we've never been able to define a limit to it.

So if you were able to, you know, see something and then remember a long term memory associated with that thing, that's different. That's why Charlotte Holmes can come in see a color of dust on a person's shoe and say, oh, that person was in such and such, because that's something that's in my long term memory, not my short term. But just being able to perceive everything at once and

have it have meaning that I would question at any rate. Uh. That is the storage part retrieval, as we talked about already. That's where you're constructing the memory. Each time you remember, you're not you're not going to pull a file. You are building that file all over again. So if we go with that file example, instead of you pulling the file and reading a report, you sit down with a blank sheet of paper and you write the report out

again from memory. That's essentially what whatever, what is happening in your brain. Yeah, so let's talk about how technology can interface with memories already, or or interfere with memories, as the case may be. So again, very much kind

of cutting edge technology and science on this stuff. Uh. And and even when we don't fully understand the mechanics of memory, we can still do stuff to mess with it, which is kind of again awesome and terrifying at the first step of figuring out how something where, because it's going like, let's see what happens if we oh, oh, nope, that was bad. Oh yeah, I mean that seems much easier. Like for a while people couldn't figure out how the ancients built the pyramids, But it wouldn't be that hard

to knock them over. I just think of uh, I just think of the buckerup bonds. I know, No, don't touch that. You don't know what that's connected to during neurosurgery, connected to that scorpion birthday party. Yeah, well yeah. One of the things I was looking into was really an interesting project. DARPA funds that. Uh that's a study that's done by the University of Pennsylvania that's looking into the possibility of using deep brain electrical stimulation to help encourage

memory formation. So this would be for people who suffered traumatic brain injuries or TV eyes as they are referred to. Sometimes, you know, we're talking about stuff that's happening in the brain. Sometimes when you suffer brain damage, part of the damage is the inability to form memories. Something can happen to

some people. So the there's the study of the University of Pennsylvania looking into using tiny electrical shocks in the brain towards the area of the hippocampus in order to help facilitate the formation of memories, so that people who have suffered these kinds of injuries will be able to continue having, uh, you know, a more independent life and be able to form memories. The way they would before

the injury had happened. So that's pretty interesting. And again it's one of those things where because we know a little bit about how memories are formed, we're able to take these these kind of fairly primitive steps in the grand scheme of things. Um we've also talked about inhibiting the formation of memories on forward thinking, specifically in the video series in two thousand fourteen June of two thousand fourteen, so as we record this, it's almost a year since

that video went live. Um I talked about some scientists who were looking into uh inhibiting or in uh doing what they would call an inception memory, installing a memory into mice. And now we come back to the mild shocks. Tell us all about it. Okay, So, yes, they took the mice, they put them into a container that had a floor that could give a mild electric shock, not the very day kind um to the little mice feet, which the mice did not like. The mice associated that

particular box with being shocked. And so if you ever took the mouse out of its happy little safe container and put it into the shock o matic container, the mouse would get distressed, would hide in the corner and freeze and shiver. It was pathetic then, because scientists are supervillains in the James Bond style. Let's see what happens when we take away the puppy exactly. Yeah, good old egon getting into it. So what they did was they

they used optogenetics. They actually altered the mice brains so that they could put fiber optic lines into them and shine light on specific neurons that they had implanted that had this sort of photoreceptive uh reaction, so that when light was shined on them, they would uh they would essentially spark the same pathway that the mice had formed

when they were in the chockomatic box. Then they put the mice into a new environment that was not the chacomatic box, so the mice had no reason to associate it with being hurt. They shine the light on that particular region of the brain so that the mice were remembering getting shocked even though they hadn't been shocked in that room, and they behaved as if the room was

going to be the chockomatic box again. So they were having this kind of um this this new environment, they're they're remembering something that happened, hadn't happened to this new environment. They associate with the new environment and behave the same way. Um,

it's interesting and terrifying. Again, Like whenever we get in the memory, this is where I start thinking because there's so much of ourselves that's wrapped up in memory, and the thought of changing or inhibiting that is uh, kind of brings a lot of questions about how permanent is the self as well? Right well, I mean all of the movies and stuff that deal with this all have

kind of dystopian plots. So we just imagined this would be used to implant false memories and and make us pawns of an evil scheming corporation for bad memories on other people all strange days for you still haven't seen that, have you know? Okay, there's also I mean they also looked into suppressing memories as well, to try and to remove the association of pain with the shock box. That's

also part of the study. I like to think that they did that so that the mice could finally go back to two normal, stress free lives, but that probably wasn't the actual purpose. Probably not. Now, I wanted to mention this isn't entirely on topic, but it is related

to technology and memory. There have also been a lot of people writing about the possibility that, uh, technology is taking the the need for us to remember away from a lot of in a lot of cases, because we've got a place where we can store the information that's

not in our heads, so we can offload memory. Yeah. Yeah, that we've basically uploaded our processing systems to whatever device we're using at the time, and therefore we don't need to remember phone numbers or our division tables or yeah, or or specific events people who are just looking at an event through their camera and taking photos. There's an

argument to be made that uh. In fact, there have been these that have have shown this that people who are taking the photos have a harder time remembering details about the stuff they took the photos of because their brain said, oh, I don't need to remember that, we have a record of it. So these things that you're not taking pictures of, I'm totally going to concentrate and remember details. But this other thing that you took picture of, don't. We've got the picture, why do I need the remember?

And I mean, I know it sounds weird that I'm putting it that way, but that's really what the studies found. So it was kind of interesting. They did this by taking people through a museum and they had them look at all these different exhibits, and at some exhibits they

weren't told which ones ahead of time. They were told, oh, take a picture of this one, and then at the end of it they said, all right, we want you to describe each of these exhibits that you saw, and the ones that people took pictures of had the least amount of detail out of all the ones. That that's in fascinating psychology, especially since uh, in general, I think researchers have kind of pooh pooed the idea that that

developing technologies are removing our capacity to to think. Yeah, I mean, I mean because people have been arguing since like Aristotle, right, is Google making a stupid Yeah? Yeah? Oh if you teach people to read, how will they ever remember anything? You know? Right? Well, yeah, I mean, we've we've been using offloading memory technology from even before reading. You you had, like, you know, the one smart person probably in your in your local group who could remember everything.

You remind me if this Sparry is poisonous or not. Hill. If you didn't have that one smart person, you didn't have a group for very long, right, well, or the other way of putting it is like I offload a lot of memories onto Rachel, and she, I'm sure, offloads some memories onto me, like we remember things for each other. This is the problem, is that I offload my memories to Tibolt, and he, being a puppy, is incapable of giving me any meaningful backup whatsoever. He's adorable. All right,

let's talk about f m R eyes. You know, you can't have a good discussion about the brain without talking about f m R I or fumri as I like to call it. So please tell us all about fumri. Well. For some number of years, the Stanford neuroscience and psychology professor Anthony Wagner has been developing techniques that use brain scans to detect, wait for it, not the objectively defined contents of a person's memory, but whether someone is currently

experiencing a memory. And that might sound kind of unimportant, but it's actually not. It might be more interesting than it sounds. And here's why. So imagine this. You put me in an fm R I scanner and that yeah, well, I know you always want to cram me into metal boxes. But uh, f m R I of course stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging, and that's uh. That's a device that measures brain activity in real time by detecting like increases or decreases of blood flow in regions of the brain.

And so it can be useful for showing what parts of the brain people are using when they're given a certain stimulus or engaging in a certain activity or having a reaction. And so you put me in the f m R I. I am sure you're very pleased with this, But then you've got more in store for me. You show me pictures of faces of people who will be attending a party with me later this evening. Uh it might be a scorpion cake party or some other kind of party. That part doesn't really matter. What matters is

the pictures. Some of the pictures are of strangers, and some of the pictures are of people that I have seen or met before. Now, although lots of complex things are going on in my brain at any given time, and even in the process of memory recall, Wagner's method could potentially analyze my f m R I scans and determine when I was looking at someone I had previously made memories of, thus as seeing in my brain memory or REvil activity, or someone I had never seen before.

Un Thus it saw the brain activity associated with perceiving novel information. In the system they came up with for doing this actually got pretty darn good. Yeah, well, in cooperative subjects, right, and we'll get back to that, right. But but so by by gathering data on what it looks like when a whole lot of different subjects have experienced a memory versus learned new information, Wagner's team built an algorithm that can identify when a new subject is

retrieving a memory with like accuracy. That's that's pretty good, yes, But why would it be interesting or useful to know if somebody was retrieving a memory at any given time. Well, one of the potential applications is in the use of lie detector screenings. So imagine a criminal a proceeding. You could have the old polygraph test for lie detection. But these days we all know that that is highly unreliable. A lot of experts refer to it pretty explicitly as pseudoscience.

It is not generally accepted these days. Well, I think actually some jurisdictions still use them for some purposes, but among the experts they tend to say, like, no, you can't really rely on lie detector tests. And Jonathan, I think you did a video on that for brain stuff, right, And I've done a I did a podcast, a tech stuff podcast a long time ago about polygraphs and how you know their study there there they're keyed in too, look for changes in physiological response. But so like skin

conductance or heart rate. Yeah, it's it's like Matt Murdoch basically, Yeah, it's it's daredevil, but in electronic format. And uh, and you can uh, there's some people who just naturally don't care if they're lying, so there's no real physiology will change in their responses. There's some people who are uh so keyed up about being questioned that they're going to

be giving off, you know, pitives, they're nervous or something. Yeah, And and they're just a lot of different ways that a polygraph machine can come but really it's not even the machine that the person interpreting the results from the polygraph machine can come to a mistake and conclusion. So they are not as you say, they are not reliable. Yeah,

far from scientifically sound. So since then, since we learned that, I think a lot of people in law enforcement, in in the justice system have been yearning for a more scientifically sound way of evaluating the truth of somebody's testimony. So if a system like this fm R I scan or fool proof, it could actually make a great new type of lie detector test. For instance, the suspect accused of a crime claims never to have been present at

the crime scene at all, never been there. Yet you hook him or her up to an fMRI machine and display a picture of the crime scene. Now, is that suspect showing internal brain scan signs of retrieving memories or of cataloging novel information? Sounds amazing, right, Yeah, yeah, that would be great. And hey, we were just talking about a system that does that, right, except apparently it's not foolproof. And props to professor Wagner for pointing this out himself. Yeah.

He and his team published in June of a study about how to beat their own system right. It was called goal directed Modulation of Neural Memory Patterns Implications for fMRI based Memory Detection in the Journal of neuroscience right, because they wanted to test their method in non cooperative subjects. Deceptive subjects you know, like people taking lie detector tests

may sometimes be so. Wagner and his team set up a trial in which twenty four subjects devoted two days to looking at paces while hanging out in an fMRI I sounds like parties super Party. On the first day, they were shown two hundred paces two hundred hypothetically novel faces for two seconds each, then given eight seconds to

invent a story to go along with the face. The researchers instructed them to do this with the idea that it would help the subjects form a memory about the face, you know, like kind of tricked their brain into thinking it was something worth saving. The researchers then shuffled the photos around and these subjects repeated the exercise, and during the second past, their algorithm was able to detect whether the subjects were experiencing memories about six of the time.

Pretty good base, Yeah, yeah, wait way above sure. Uh. Day two, the researchers added two hundred new faces to the original batch and then shuffled the photos into two separate sets. During the first set, the subjects were supposed to react to each face as usual, you know, honestly either recognized the face or exp orians it for the

first time. Then during the second set, the researchers asked them to try to fool the machine, meaning that for faces they remembered, the subjects were asked to focus on things about the photo that they hadn't noticed the first time around, kind of distract themselves from calling up their memory of it. That buttons are on their shirt or something, sure, the lighting, some something weird about I don't know, the

background whatever. Uh. And for new faces, they were asked to recall something or someone that the photo reminded them of in as much detail as possible. It might be like, all right, this picture of a stranger looks an awful lot like an uncle I have. So I'm going to think about my uncle while I'm looking at this picture of a stranger, and that's going to be as if I were actually remembering this person and why my uncle

suspiciously owns a scorpion farm. Uh. You know, there are a lot of repressed memories you guys have been prying back for the so so during during this uh, the second trial, the algorithms proficiency dropped to only with the deceptive subjects, so that that is no better than a coin flip um. It was, I should say, easier for them to fake memories than it was for them to

conceal memories. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me, in the same way that it seems like it would be easier to make up lies and pretend you knew somebody with words than it would be to like hide the recognition in your face when you see somebody you know absolutely you know. Uh. This is why I'm a really bad actor, because when people say things to me, I can't be surprised if if I've heard it times in rehearsal, I'm just like, yeah, no, that's just yeah, yeah,

that's okay. I'm a bad actor too. I only know my que lines and my lines the rest of the show. It's not important. I'm not in it. I don't care. I have no idea what it's even about. Hamlet's about this guy who comes into the Danish uh royal court and sees that everybody's dead, and then he has to go back and report to the King of England. That's what Hamlets. That's a short story, but it sounds kind

of interesting. There's a lot of preamble. Okay, I thought you were going to say, hamlets about a guy who meets a grave digger once. Actually it will be about a grave digger who meets this totally not so dat so So, based on all of these results, Wagner and his team are recommending and and themselves constructing more research into into deception and stress and and how memories are are made and recalled under those kind of circumstances, because they suspect that a suspect trying too hard to be

honest might also throw the results. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Though, I would say the interesting thing to me about this is that we're not at I would say we're probably not at the peak of interpreting these results yet either. So I I would say that f m R I scanning for LIE detection probably can get better than it is, and who knows, we may end up with the system that's pretty hard to beat. At least we could end up with a system that could lead us to possible

further investigation. Yeah yeah, Now, I hope nobody's ever just convicted on the basis of a test lay. Yeah, I would imagine it would be more at least I think the ideal implementation of this would be you are in an investigation phase, and this is a means of finding out if the lead you're on, if you're on the right track, or if you need to switch gears very quickly. As opposed to this is the piece of evidence that the whole case hinges upon that I would definitely be

a lot more concerned about. Um, So let's talk about let's go let's say that we've figured out the basics here. Let's say, let's go ahead, what I don't know, twenty to forty years now, we've now we figured it out. Uh, Let's say, do you think by that time we'll get to this point where we can share memories directly in some meat manner, whether it's brain to brain communication or brain to computer, or you know, some other variation that

we haven't even thought of yet. I feel like it's really hard to say, because we haven't really seen anything like that yet. And to be honest, I've from what I've read a lot of the people who predict that we'll be able to download our memories into a computer, or more precisely, maybe it should be upload our memories to a computer. The basis they often seem to have for saying this is just sort of general stuff about

how great technology is. You know, I've read several like opinion pieces saying, oh, by we'll be able to put our brains in computers because look at how amazing our gaming consoles are today. They're so much more powerful than the computers of the nineteen eighties. And that just seems to me to say, well, like, well, I understand our computers are much more powerful, but I'm not sure if

this is dealing with the specifics of the problem. They're applying the concept of Moore's law universally across all disciplines, and that is not the way Moore's law works or the way the other disciplines work. Yeah, well, More's law might not even work that way. For yeah, yeah, you might end up with a computer that, by volume, is

much much more powerful than a human brain. But so what I mean that doesn't necessarily mean you've conquered this translating problem, like where can you actually extract the semantic value of these structures in your brain and say, here's what this memory is about in a way that would make sense to a machine or to another person, And we even got to a point Joe and I were talking before the podcast started about how, uh, in this world, let's say that we have inner the world where we

are able to share a memory directly to another person, in this brain to brain communication, we can't even be sure that the memory the other person receives is going to be similar to the memory we have. For In other words, Lauren, you have a concept in your head about what the color red is, and you have a concept in your head about what a bicycle looks like, and your version may be similar but different to the

one that I have in my head. And I'm telling I'm sharing a memory with you about a red bicycle I saw now in that technology, would you be experiencing my memory kind of the way you would if you went to see a movie where the two of us philosophical subtleties aside are are witnessing the same thing. It's a visual field of information. Or would you in fact be experiencing my memory but based upon your concepts of

red and bicycle? Are sure? So with with my picture of a red bicycle and my picture of my aunt? Who is writing it? Not your aunt? Right? So we we can't be sure if we get to a point where we can do this sort of memory sharing thing, that the individual elements of the memory will be true to the person who actually experienced it, or if it will be like like you know, I I tell you how to make something, so you end up using the

stuff you have around you to make the same thing. Okay, Well, let's say that we never do figure out a way to decode like the semantic contents of your memory. You know that we can look at your brain, we can analyze what's going on, and we just have no way to connect to that to actual information. We just see

stuffs lighten up. We never find the codec to decode and red like like you're literally looking at a giant panel of light bulbs and you see that certain light bulbs are flashing on and off, but you have no context for what that. There's no red bicycle memory center of the brain that's universal across humanity, which seems pretty likely to me that that is not a effect a

thing that can be discovered, but who knows. There's still one obvious way that we would be able to outsource memory recall, which is that we could outsource memory recording so in other words, we have some means of recording what's going on around us at any time when we would be focusing on it anyway, So we have an actual record of what's happening, not just a reconstruction of what is actual ones and zeros kind of record. Yeah. Yeah, So the idea here is again to bring up the

horrific British sci fi series Black Mirror. There is one episode where characters have a technology that allows them to recall basically everything they've ever seen. They have an implant that just records it all. And now I don't think it's explicit in the episode exactly how that works, Like, is it trying to recall things from their brain, from their memories? I don't think so. I think it's actually

a third party storage system. Yea that yeah, I think so that it's essentially it's it's using your sensory organs as the camera, camera and microphone, and as the screen

to play back on. It's both. Yeah, So if you were to have some kind of third party technology camera implanted in your head, whether it's actually using your eyes as a lens or it's just a little camera on your head somewhere, and then it's attached to a solid state drive in your skull, and it's just keeping it as some you know whatever kind of arbitrary media format that can be interpreted later. This would ensure that encoding and decoding could be compatible, and you could have recording

of everything you see. Yes, it's just not memory, it's not your memory. It would be third party from front to back. It would be essentially the same thing as if you had a cell phone with a with a camera on it, recording everything you know, facing out from you. And again you would you wouldn't say these are my memories. You would just say, here some video of stuff that happened where I was right right. And as you know, those of us who have watched Black Mirror saw that

might not go very well socially speaking. Yeah, yeah, I think it pretty convincingly made the case that this is not really something you want in your life. Yeah, nobody really wants total recall of of everything that happened around them. I mean I I kind of am comfortable in in this cloudy mist of possibility that is my past. My past is getting cloudy here by the minute, So let's go ahead and wrap this up. Only thing I want total recall of is the Paul Verhoeven movie Total Recall.

That's fair. Well, while I cannot guarantee that you will have that, I can at least get you a coup. Come on, John, than open your mam. Alright, So anyway,

we're gonna wrap this up for real these now. This has been a really interesting topic to look into, and I am curious to see where this technology and our understanding of the brain goes and maybe maybe what we're talking about here right now it seems like it's really improbable, maybe maybe impossible to do, but who knows, Perhaps in forty years we'll find out that it's a commonplace and that the things we're thinking about our small potatoes compared

to what's actually achievable. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting topic. I'm kind of disappointed that we couldn't say something more definite, but I think are we just don't have very much knowledge about what's possible in this realm today. Yeah, it comes back to that that problem of us not having that much information about our own bodies. Despite all of the amazing science and technology that we have, we

are ourselves is still kind of mysterious to me. That is the most exciting thing though, because it means there's so much more to learn, and uh, I can't wait to to read up on this stuff because it's really really cool. Now, I have a question for all of

our listeners out there. If there is a subject about which you want to know more, whether it's something that we've covered in this episode, maybe a past episode, or something you just would like us to cover in the future, I would like you to let us know about it. We love getting your feedback. You guys are awesome. Keep it coming. The email addresses FW thinking at how Stuffworks dot com, or you can always drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook. At Twitter and Google Plus,

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