Steve Ramirez: How Memory Shapes Grief, Addiction & Who You Are

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Every time we recall a memory, it's kind of like
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hitting save as on.
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A Microsoft Word file.
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But we have the choice of what we want to
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edit into that save as file. Like we have the
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choice of do we want to delete some lines? Do
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we want to scribble in some new words or some
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new paragraphs? And I think that with psychedelic-assisted therapy, what
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it does is it potentially opens up the file a
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bit longer so that we have more of a time
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to go in and write in or edit out the
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details that we think are problematic.
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Welcome to Unstoppable Brain.
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I'm Dr.
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Kyra, and we're here to translate neuroscience into behavior change
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and the life you want. Our guest today is Dr.
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Steve Ramirez. He is an associate professor of psychological and
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brain sciences at Boston University. And we talk about memory
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because he has a book called How to Change Your Brain,
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which I think you should definitely read. It has to
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do with who we are. Our memories and what we've
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experienced is, if you think about it, the building blocks
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of who we think we are, our perception, our take
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on life. We talk about addictions. We talk about grief
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and loss and death. And it's just a really rich
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conversation about everything that we're facing right now as modern humans,
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doom scrolling and all the shorts that we're seeing on
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social media, all those things and how it's affecting our memory.
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So with that, please welcome Dr. Steve Ramirez.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited
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to be here.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So I do not know where to start with your book.
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There's a lot to unpack here, especially as it applies
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to our real life. And so, you know, in this pod,
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we really like to take science and immediately apply it
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to what does this mean for my life and how
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can I live better, that kind of thing. And oftentimes,
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I think neuroscience is gets locked away, you know, in
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this language. And you address that in your book in
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terms of, you know, the pedantic kind of jargony way
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that scientists learn to talk to each other, right? So
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for those of you who don't know, when you are
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in a lab, it is like a war zone. You
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have to stand up and present things. And the whole
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game that you're playing is like, can somebody shoot you down?
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And then there's kind of this hidden scoreboard of like,
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you know, who wins the round, if you will, of
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that battle? And can you defend your ideas? So in
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that world, right, you adopt this really complicated language in
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order to be taken seriously. And then you do something
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crazy like yourself and you become a professor, you know,
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and you have to translate that to non-neuroscientists, right? So
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the first thing I want to deal with is, you know,
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what do you think with your book, How to Change
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a Brain, what do you think is the kind of
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primary message to the public that they can understand that
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is so essential about that, that they should know about
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their brain?
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Yeah. So there's a couple of things.
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I think the first that comes to mind is to
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really be wowed by how amazing our memories really are
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and how amazing memories really can be. For instance, like I,
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I think about this in terms of, you know, I
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can think of the best day of my life and
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within a few seconds I get euphoric and giddy and
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excited to go out and explore the world. Or I
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could think of some of the harder days of my
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life and within a few seconds be moved to tears.
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So depending on which book of memory I've decided to
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pull out of the library, I can either be moved
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to tears or be euphoric in like five seconds or less.
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So the fact that our memories can change do that
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without breaking a sweat and without really even batting.
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An eye is incredible.
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And we all have that capacity to pull from those
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libraries of memories and to see how it changes everything
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from our thinking to our mood to how we interact
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with the world. So that's probably the biggest scientific message
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is that memories are capable of adjusting our entire biology
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head to toe. The personal message in the book is
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that It really was a way for me to honor
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my late friend, Shu Liu.
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And that was a way where I could write.
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The book from the perspective of my memories of our
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time in lab together, where we were able to artificially
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manipulate memories, but use that time together to really just
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think more fondly about like, we did really exciting science,
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but we just had a great time also being lab
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partners and chilling with.
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Each other day in and day out.
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And that humanity, that kind of beating heart that happens
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behind the scenes in science is something that I really
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wanted to take center stage in the book.
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I really appreciate that you brought that in because science
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can be very boring and sterile sometimes. And I really
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appreciate that you brought in Shu's story and your relationship
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and the level of inspiration that you had from him.
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It made me think about, because we've all lost somebody,
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you know, even if you're a younger generation, Gen Z,
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you might've lost a grandparent, you know, and a dog,
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you know, whatever, this life is full of loss, right? And,
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and how we cope with that loss and how we
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remember that loss. And I often think about death as
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a messenger or a teacher, you know, what is this
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particular death that happened in this particular way teaching me?
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And one such death in my life was a high
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school friend for anybody who's a high school buddy who's
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watching this. Her name's Stacey Bell. And she was perfect.
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And I was imperfect. I was, you know, kind of
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my grades were, you know, because I was very depressed.
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And she seemed to have a really loving family. And
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then she all of a sudden got hit by a
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truck in the middle of college and in the middle
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of Oklahoma while she was going to do something very
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lovely and volunteer for, you know, homeless people in Tulsa
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or whatever, you know, so, so it was just tragic.
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And I immediately felt like I have to live for
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Stacey now. And it really, it really, she kind of
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inspired me to elevate my game in her honor. And
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I think that's what I was catching on from your
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experience with SHU. So why don't you, why don't we
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honor SHU for a second here? And, you know, I
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don't want to get emotional, but, you know, like such
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a beautiful relationship between you two.
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Yeah.
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I mean, first, thank you for sharing all of that.
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Like it's, it really is a testament to just how,
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how fragile life can be and how like there's a
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real whiplash that happens, right? When someone passes away, like
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there's no real playbook for it or preparation for those
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kinds of things at all. And I think you hit
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the nail on the head that one way that one
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transformation that we all undergo is that we all become
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some kind of memory in some capacity. And like we
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all kind of exist in the brains of the people
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who we've influenced or touched in some capacity in our lives.
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And it's really it's the best way I can think
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about it is that it's one of the most bittersweet
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truths that I can think of. And, you know, the
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irony of studying memory and knowing that we're in the
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process of becoming a memory is not lost on me.
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And it's something that to me, the best word I
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can think of describing it is that it's very providential
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where like shoes life, the way that it influenced me,
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it became so much more of a cornerstone of my
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personality and my approach to science and my approach to
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life after he passed, because It forced me to reconcile, like,
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who am I as a person? Who am I as
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a scientist? What does Shu mean to me as a person?
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What does Shu mean to me as a scientist? And
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how can I begin to even scratch the surface of
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resolving something as complicated as grief, let alone having to,
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in a sense, repurpose our memories and our times together
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in a way that I think could help me resolve
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grief and define some kind of purposefulness for our time
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together beyond just thinking about it and feeling bittersweet about
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the times we had together. And the way that I
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think I've attempted to do that at least is twofold.
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And one is through our science that I really do
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believe that the science that we do in the lab
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is shoes influence in the scientific world in perpetuity. Like
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it's something that is there forever because the work that
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we did on being able to manipulate memories started off
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with the two of us, but now there's thousands of
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projects that are centering on this idea of trying to
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alter memories in some capacity. And to me, like every
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data point that's collected, there's a bit of shoe in
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there in all of them because of how fundamental he
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was to these discoveries. And then the personal level is
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more of one thing that has been able to particularly help.
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And this came, I think this, I came to this
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realization when writing this book is that Losing someone is,
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I mean, it's got to be one of, if not
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the hardest things that I think that us as humans
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can possibly go through. So it feels weird sometimes to
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think about if there's an upside or a silver lining
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when we're talking about death, because it almost feels crude
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to even suggest that. But I will say that one
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of the things that has been helpful on my end is,
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in a sense, being able to use my time of
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grieving loss and accepting what loss truly means. But being
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able to now hold the door open for others that
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might be going through something similar, because I can relate
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and I can connect on a level that I just
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really wouldn't have been able to before, not having experienced
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the depths of loss and how hard it could be.
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So one kind of like sort of recycling of our
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time together that I think has actually been the gift
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that keeps on giving is being able to connect with
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others over something as terrible as losing someone. Because without
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saying really much, we already know like, oh, wow, that
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you've been through the gauntlet of the roller coaster of
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human experience that happens after loss. And we all have
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our own ways of trying to make sense of it
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and trying to resolve it. But connecting and being able
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to help alleviate any semblance of grief or suffering or
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so on has made it feel a different kind of
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purposeful nowadays. And writing about it for sure gave me
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that language, I think, to be able to connect and
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ideally to help on that human level.
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Yeah, and I'm going to sort of indulge here because
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I have little snapshots into your world over the years,
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given how old I am. And one such memory was
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when I was in medical school at UCSF, there was
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this finding, and I know that it's just a little
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pebble in terms of your world at this point, that
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people who had trauma, PTSD, that when they scan their brains,
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the hippocampus, which is, you know, the public, if they
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know anything about memory and hippocampus, that's it, right? That's
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where most people are. So we're going to kind of
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color in the extra places around that fact, right? Including
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the cortex and things like that that have now been discovered.
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And I want you to really describe that because I
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have such a simple understanding of memory and so does
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everybody else, right? And so in PTSD, they had found
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that the hippocampus would shrink. And I thought, that's interesting
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because my mom has PTSD. She went to Native American
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boarding school involuntarily. She lost her mother at age five.
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She was assaulted in foster care systems and things like that.
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So it's very much epigenetic in me to care about
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that and to think about what what does trauma do
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to the brain and especially what does it do to memory? Right.
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So if you think about it that way, how, how
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would you fill out that story of trauma and that
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you could take the big trauma, the little trauma in
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this case, you know, loss is a trauma, you know? And,
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and so you went through that process and maybe describe,
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you know, cause she was only 37. Am I right?
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Yeah.
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And so here you are young man, you know, dies.
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And it didn't even say, you didn't address like how
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he died. And I think that's probably private for that reason.
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But that is also kind of an ambiguous grief too, right?
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And so how did you respond? How did you, did
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you go into therapy and did you start a grief
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group or did you first have a reaction to that?
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Oh, for sure.
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More of a reaction of like disbelief at first that,
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you know, the idea that when we met in 2010,
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for instance, we agreed from the jump that everything that
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we did and everything that we were successful over, we
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were going to share. That one plus one equals three,
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and that two brains working together are better than one,
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and that science doesn't have to be this individual isolation
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effort at all.
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It can be the total opposite. I love that. Yeah.
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Our dream was that when there's discoveries in science that
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we would be like the situation room in like NASA
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where everyone's like cheering when the Rover lands on Mars,
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like that kind of thing.
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So we had like a.
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Very like wide eyed egalitarian, let's all be comfortable sharing
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success because like every data.
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Point is, it's.
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Making an unknown known in the pursuit of knowledge here.
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So it was something that we found just very like,
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fundamentally at our core, we thought knowing was better than
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not knowing and we could just know more together.
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Like it was really that sweet. Yeah.
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Like that's straightforward of a philosophy. And we did, we,
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all of our like invited talks, we would do together posters.
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We would do together our papers. We published as co-first
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authors where we just thought like, okay, let's just keep
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doing this because it's a winning recipe and it gets
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rid of all of the politics. And it's just fun
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that way to be able to not think about, some
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of the bureaucracy and just kind of get down with
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doing the science and interpreting the science. So we imagined
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a kind of future together that was pretty dynamic duo
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throughout our career. And then to me, like I had
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such a like wide-eyed romanticized view of this is my
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forever lab partner. Like this is the person that I
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can really, sort of my intellectual crutch and in a sense,
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like a big scientific brother and, that was there looking
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after me as a grad student at the time, and
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that meant the world. So when in 2015, when he passed,
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that future that we imagined together was not just impossible,
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but I had to kind of begin asking, what now?
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How do I possibly.
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Move forward without a literal other scientific half here that
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I leaned on for so much, but also grew with
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throughout the process?
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The answer was.
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That no, like I think a hefty chunk of me
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really had to break first before I could really learn.
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How to put the pieces back together.
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And like at the time, for instance, I think I
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was already developing, if not like in the beginning stages
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of drinking problematically. But after he passed was around when
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I had to finish grad school and around when I
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was going to start up my lab in 2016. So
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there was a lot of moving pieces that were happening
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all at once that had to do with both my
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livelihood and my career. So not surprisingly, when I started
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drinking more, it was less to really escape anything. And
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weirdly enough, it was so that when I drank, I
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could let in all of the feelings that I otherwise
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really tried to like shove down and ignore for the
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majority of my life because I didn't understand them. And
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I certainly didn't have words for them at all. And
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I think that was really the brutal reality that I
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encountered first was, oh, man, I have so many thoughts
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and feelings about things that have to do with life
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and death. And I have zero answer for any of them.
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And as a scientist, that really tugged my heartstrings, but
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it really bothered me. And I didn't have answers for
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any of this. So Continuing to drink kind of helped
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me at least. It's weird to say that it helped me,
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but it helped me ignore those problems and to really
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just kind of like let all of my emotions just
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come out. And then over time, it got to a
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point where it was no longer even close to sustainable.
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And I realized that, wow, like I am now just
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going down this one road path towards or being in
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the throes of addiction and not really knowing how to
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emerge out of it. especially like I tried so hard
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to make sure it never got in the way of
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my work, but that was at the expense of the
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other human part of me that exists outside of work
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that was slowly deteriorating because it simply didn't make sense
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to not have a lab partner around. And again, let
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alone figuring out all these new stages of my career
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on my own. So at that time, it took years
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of starting and stopping and starting and stopping. And I'm
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a combination of therapy. And then ultimately it actually took
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my childhood best friends and my wife to have an
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informal intervention. That was the thing that actually like very
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literally saved my life. And this was February 18th, 2021.
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And that was the day that the next day I joined,
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it's called Recovery Elevator. Cafe Ari is an online community
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of people trying to escape from drinking.
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That was.
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the thing that I needed more than anything and without
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even knowing, because the first day at the, at the
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meeting that we had, I was just like in awe
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that there were people there that were 20 or 77.
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And the common denominator was drinking was ruining our lives. And, um,
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I learned this saying that, you know, you either, you
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either keep on drinking and you give up everything or
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you give up drinking and you get to keep everything. Um,
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And it just became so crystal clear to me that
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I love my wife.
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I love my best friends. I love my family.
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I do Cheesecake Factory Sundays with my parents every Sunday.
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I love the science that we're doing, despite now having
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to learn how to do it on my own.
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Quote unquote.
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And all of those pieces, I realized drinking was not
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going to solve any one of them. And stopping drinking
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was not going to solve any one of them. But
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stopping drinking would now give me the opportunity to be
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myself and a person again in a healthy state. that
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could help me tackle these problems.
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One by one.
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So that community was the thing that taught me that
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the other sayings, the opposite of addiction is connection.
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And that is true for the brain.
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And that is true for our social circles. And it's
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the community of loved ones and the community of people
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living in recovery that was the game changer to get
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my life back under control and to really then feel
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like a new sense of empowerment over What can I
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do as a person?
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And how do I honor someone's memory?
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Then that means like I had to really work on
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myself so that I could muscle forward, which thankfully was
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the case since 2021.
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That's so relatable because, I mean, if you think about
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the timing of that intervention, you're also in the thick
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of COVID.
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Yeah, right.
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And it was not just okay to drink. It was like,
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A joke, like, you know, everybody was was hooping it
375
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up and things because it was just a grief response, right?
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A collective global grief response because we didn't know what
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to do with ourselves. And so much had turned upside down.
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So much was disrupted and we, we had to reevaluate,
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you know, who we were, what we were doing, why
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we were doing it. I love that you found that, connection.
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00:20:07.559 --> 00:20:10.160
I love that saying, you said, the opposite of addiction
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is connection. Because I've noticed in my own research that
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nobody changes alone. It's kind of a similar concept, right?
384
00:20:18.700 --> 00:20:24.809
So when you experience this loss of Shu, there's this
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00:20:25.609 --> 00:20:28.390
almost like a twin. It makes me think about like
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00:20:28.470 --> 00:20:32.150
twins who lose their twin, that deep of a feeling.
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And you're in this very academic heady environment having all
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these emotions and then you're avoiding those emotions or you're
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00:20:42.089 --> 00:20:46.230
metering them with this substance, which so many people do,
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00:20:46.730 --> 00:20:51.769
whether it's cannabis, alcohol, you know, you name it. And
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isn't that what we're trying to do in terms of
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our brain? We're trying to avoid a memory or we're
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00:20:59.319 --> 00:21:03.759
trying to avoid a feeling. And One more thing about that,
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00:21:04.180 --> 00:21:09.829
Antonio Damasio, who's one of my favorite old guy neuroscientists,
395
00:21:09.890 --> 00:21:13.190
has had this posit of you can't really have a
396
00:21:13.589 --> 00:21:18.230
memory without an emotion attached to it. If you knock
397
00:21:18.349 --> 00:21:22.359
out the amygdala channel to the emotional centers or the
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00:21:22.380 --> 00:21:28.279
emotional networks, then you can't really store a memory or,
399
00:21:28.380 --> 00:21:31.299
or maybe it's, maybe it's not a solid or something
400
00:21:31.339 --> 00:21:33.299
like that. So maybe, maybe unpack that a little bit.
401
00:21:34.359 --> 00:21:34.859
Yeah.
402
00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:38.519
So it's funny you mentioned Antonio Damasio. I think the
403
00:21:38.559 --> 00:21:40.480
feeling of what happens is one of the books that
404
00:21:40.500 --> 00:21:44.109
got me into neuroscience and, you know, how was the
405
00:21:44.130 --> 00:21:45.369
brain conscious and things like that.
406
00:21:45.410 --> 00:21:47.009
I love it. I love it. Yeah.
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00:21:47.450 --> 00:21:50.269
The, I think I'm to maybe to bring it full
408
00:21:50.309 --> 00:21:51.349
circle and unpack.
409
00:21:51.069 --> 00:21:54.750
Some of the neuro of it. There was after shoe.
410
00:21:54.589 --> 00:21:57.950
Pass, I saw this cartoon and the cartoon was, has
411
00:21:57.970 --> 00:22:00.380
a bubble and it has a bubble and it has
412
00:22:00.619 --> 00:22:02.460
the bubble in the middle is just grief. It has
413
00:22:02.500 --> 00:22:05.599
a larger bubble around grief and that larger bubble begins
414
00:22:05.640 --> 00:22:07.819
to grow and grow and grow and grief stays the
415
00:22:07.839 --> 00:22:11.910
same size. The idea there being that grief doesn't go
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00:22:11.950 --> 00:22:14.809
away and that it's always something that we live with.
417
00:22:15.089 --> 00:22:16.609
I think of it, you know, kind.
418
00:22:16.490 --> 00:22:18.910
Of with for a little bit of levity, I think
419
00:22:18.950 --> 00:22:20.650
of it as like a 15 pound weight on our
420
00:22:20.670 --> 00:22:23.599
back that hurts at first to carry everywhere we go.
421
00:22:23.980 --> 00:22:25.990
But with the right With the right.
422
00:22:26.230 --> 00:22:30.910
Help, support, therapy, community, soul searching, we can have a
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00:22:30.930 --> 00:22:33.430
better posture and muscle up a little bit over time
424
00:22:33.490 --> 00:22:35.839
and learn to carry that 15 pound weight. And then
425
00:22:35.880 --> 00:22:37.779
before you know it, you might even be able to
426
00:22:37.819 --> 00:22:39.839
train someone a bit or help them to carry that.
427
00:22:39.720 --> 00:22:40.619
15 pound weight.
428
00:22:41.180 --> 00:22:46.380
So the way that that circle grows is by building
429
00:22:46.619 --> 00:22:50.099
more memories in life and by having more experiences. And
430
00:22:50.119 --> 00:22:52.559
the point being that grief does not change and it's
431
00:22:52.599 --> 00:22:55.839
something that we carry with us together forever. But the
432
00:22:55.880 --> 00:22:58.960
life that we build around that grief can grow as
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00:22:59.039 --> 00:23:01.920
much as we permit it to grow. And that's one
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00:23:01.960 --> 00:23:05.609
way of helping to at least, in a sense, resolve
435
00:23:05.650 --> 00:23:07.869
some parts of that grief is by building a life
436
00:23:07.990 --> 00:23:08.890
full of more.
437
00:23:09.369 --> 00:23:11.029
Experiences and full of more memories.
438
00:23:11.329 --> 00:23:15.339
And for me, it was particularly meaningful because once I
439
00:23:16.359 --> 00:23:20.160
entered the recovery community and became sober and let go
440
00:23:20.200 --> 00:23:24.029
of alcohol and slowly started rebuilding my life, I realized, okay,
441
00:23:24.150 --> 00:23:27.049
I have to live life now such that all of
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00:23:27.089 --> 00:23:30.109
the good moments are in high definition 4k and with
443
00:23:30.170 --> 00:23:32.650
sober eyes, but all of the bad moments are in
444
00:23:32.690 --> 00:23:35.680
high definition and in 4k and with sober eyes as well.
445
00:23:36.140 --> 00:23:38.539
The latter is what I had to really learn to
446
00:23:38.579 --> 00:23:40.640
live with, because that's the part that I had to
447
00:23:40.680 --> 00:23:42.460
learn to turn all of the feelings and thoughts that
448
00:23:42.500 --> 00:23:44.680
I had that didn't have any words or any, they
449
00:23:44.700 --> 00:23:48.319
felt like these amorphous blobs of blah, that as I
450
00:23:48.359 --> 00:23:51.690
began the process of writing the book, going through therapy,
451
00:23:51.750 --> 00:23:55.190
sobering up, those thoughts began to have words that I
452
00:23:55.210 --> 00:23:58.690
could use to attach to them and frame the thoughts.
453
00:23:58.819 --> 00:24:00.519
And now suddenly I had a little bit more of
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00:24:00.599 --> 00:24:04.079
control over my sense of self. And then what would
455
00:24:04.119 --> 00:24:09.700
end up happening is that the feel-good memory folder we
456
00:24:09.759 --> 00:24:12.119
all have, I think, is how we build that circle
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00:24:12.279 --> 00:24:15.900
around grief and continue to expand our lives. So things like,
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00:24:16.369 --> 00:24:20.490
getting married, recording the audio book in studio with my parents,
459
00:24:20.829 --> 00:24:24.069
getting a puppy, like the really, the feel good moments
460
00:24:24.130 --> 00:24:27.990
that make life, I don't know, it's the good stuff
461
00:24:28.029 --> 00:24:33.170
in life, right? That I get to experience firsthand what
462
00:24:33.230 --> 00:24:36.250
it feels like to have that circle grow around grief.
463
00:24:36.309 --> 00:24:40.130
And that was all based in memory. And in particular,
464
00:24:40.509 --> 00:24:43.150
with positive memories, which was something that was very near
465
00:24:43.190 --> 00:24:45.700
and dear because that was the last project you and
466
00:24:45.740 --> 00:24:49.880
I worked on together was on artificially reactivating positive memories
467
00:24:50.259 --> 00:24:54.819
to alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety and rodents. So it,
468
00:24:55.200 --> 00:24:58.400
I realized that by, by building more and more of
469
00:24:58.440 --> 00:25:02.069
these positive experiences, whether it's through just living life and
470
00:25:02.109 --> 00:25:05.089
like sobering up and letting myself feel all of life
471
00:25:05.710 --> 00:25:08.230
or go intentionally going out of my way to build
472
00:25:08.269 --> 00:25:12.869
positive memories or experiences like gratitude journaling, traveling, doing the
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00:25:12.910 --> 00:25:15.390
things that I'd wanted to do before that now suddenly
474
00:25:15.430 --> 00:25:17.849
I didn't really need permission for because I realized like,
475
00:25:18.430 --> 00:25:22.400
whose permission am I asking? Like life is, we're all
476
00:25:22.460 --> 00:25:26.140
on like the same ship here, right? So it weirdly
477
00:25:26.579 --> 00:25:30.329
helped me live my life more broadly, but in a
478
00:25:30.369 --> 00:25:32.829
way where I would end up forming more and more
479
00:25:32.910 --> 00:25:35.710
positive experiences that even today, just a few years out,
480
00:25:36.190 --> 00:25:38.809
I can think back on and lean on and say, like, man,
481
00:25:38.890 --> 00:25:41.670
that wouldn't have been possible had I kept drinking or
482
00:25:41.710 --> 00:25:44.809
that wouldn't have been possible had I not began to
483
00:25:44.849 --> 00:25:47.619
at least understand what loss and grief means to me
484
00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:50.420
and what parts I'm scared of and what parts I
485
00:25:50.900 --> 00:25:53.200
sort of can squint at and have a rough idea
486
00:25:53.240 --> 00:25:57.119
of some acceptance of the fragility of life and so on.
487
00:25:57.480 --> 00:26:00.309
But to me, the beautiful part was that it's all
488
00:26:00.369 --> 00:26:03.049
based in memory because all of the experiences that we
489
00:26:03.109 --> 00:26:06.730
have leave a measurable change in the brain the same
490
00:26:06.769 --> 00:26:09.339
way that losing someone leaves a measurable change in the brain.
491
00:26:09.710 --> 00:26:10.269
And I felt a.
492
00:26:10.359 --> 00:26:13.259
Little bit more in control knowing that I can be
493
00:26:13.299 --> 00:26:16.380
the one steering my own ship in the direction of growth.
494
00:26:17.720 --> 00:26:21.059
As uncomfortable as growth is, it was the most necessary thing.
495
00:26:21.420 --> 00:26:23.420
And I think that the fuel for that growth was
496
00:26:23.500 --> 00:26:27.210
thankfully the positive experiences that I had come my way
497
00:26:27.430 --> 00:26:28.730
during those intervening years.
498
00:26:28.789 --> 00:26:29.769
And even now for that matter.
499
00:26:30.430 --> 00:26:33.869
Good on you for taking that road eventually. And also
500
00:26:33.910 --> 00:26:38.319
for your loved ones for, intervening, you know, time where
501
00:26:38.359 --> 00:26:40.359
you were, you know, the thing that really stuck out
502
00:26:40.380 --> 00:26:43.859
to me there is that through therapy, you were able
503
00:26:43.940 --> 00:26:47.099
to have a language that you didn't have before. The
504
00:26:47.259 --> 00:26:50.519
language was the drink, you know, I don't know what
505
00:26:50.559 --> 00:26:54.220
I'm feeling. I can't locate within my own mind what
506
00:26:54.279 --> 00:26:58.109
this swirl of memory and thought and emotion is. And
507
00:26:58.180 --> 00:27:01.309
so the alcohol allowed you to kind of be more
508
00:27:01.549 --> 00:27:05.009
open to it. Now let's talk about the more extreme things.
509
00:27:05.339 --> 00:27:07.559
version of that that I think about, not from an
510
00:27:07.619 --> 00:27:12.640
addiction perspective, but from a therapeutic perspective, is things like
511
00:27:12.779 --> 00:27:20.589
psychedelic-assisted therapy, where ketamine, which is a dissociative or psilocybin,
512
00:27:21.849 --> 00:27:27.509
allows somebody, MDMA, allows somebody to approach something that is
513
00:27:27.589 --> 00:27:31.789
kind of this hotspot in their memory and work with
514
00:27:31.849 --> 00:27:36.920
those memories that otherwise in the sober sense would be
515
00:27:37.019 --> 00:27:41.650
too hot to handle, too overwhelming for the circuits, right?
516
00:27:41.690 --> 00:27:46.349
For the nervous system. And so how does memory and
517
00:27:46.710 --> 00:27:51.259
working those memories and this kind of psychedelic process, which
518
00:27:51.480 --> 00:27:55.500
has been found to be very neuroplastic, you know, and
519
00:27:55.539 --> 00:27:58.440
we should just call it that the brain is very
520
00:27:58.500 --> 00:28:03.609
dynamic and very plastic, right? So if anybody thinks that anybody...
521
00:28:03.799 --> 00:28:07.509
watching this thinks that they, it's over for them. I
522
00:28:07.720 --> 00:28:10.650
argue that, you know, we're constantly changing. It's just a
523
00:28:10.670 --> 00:28:12.609
matter of like, where do you want to change to,
524
00:28:12.910 --> 00:28:17.130
you know? And, and, and this, this amazing response that
525
00:28:17.150 --> 00:28:20.950
you had of like almost buffering all of that pain
526
00:28:21.380 --> 00:28:27.779
of losing shoe with positive experiences and, and love and
527
00:28:28.119 --> 00:28:33.089
joy and awe, right. And, and gratitude. So going back
528
00:28:33.140 --> 00:28:36.259
to the, the psychedelic assistant, like, you know, what do
529
00:28:36.279 --> 00:28:39.480
you think about these kind of hot, too hot to
530
00:28:39.559 --> 00:28:43.680
touch memories? And what are your thoughts as a scientist
531
00:28:44.180 --> 00:28:46.839
about how we could get there where it could be
532
00:28:48.619 --> 00:28:52.529
safe to handle without going through the ethic that you
533
00:28:52.549 --> 00:28:55.930
were talking about before of in your book of like,
534
00:28:56.230 --> 00:28:59.869
you know, the, the endless sunshine of the spotless mind.
535
00:28:59.910 --> 00:29:01.329
Is that what the movie was called? Yeah.
536
00:29:02.890 --> 00:29:03.349
Yeah.
537
00:29:03.390 --> 00:29:03.589
Yeah.
538
00:29:03.609 --> 00:29:03.750
Yeah.
539
00:29:03.829 --> 00:29:04.190
Eternal.
540
00:29:04.210 --> 00:29:06.390
Yeah. I actually cried at that movie. I think, I
541
00:29:06.430 --> 00:29:08.410
think it should be, you know, required watching for all
542
00:29:08.430 --> 00:29:12.220
high school students because it is this, this dilemma of
543
00:29:12.799 --> 00:29:16.339
what makes us is all of our emotions, all of
544
00:29:16.519 --> 00:29:21.400
our rich experience, all of our losses, all of our overcomings,
545
00:29:21.680 --> 00:29:25.329
you know, all of our, uh, you know, dysfunctions, all
546
00:29:25.349 --> 00:29:27.210
of our periods where we didn't know what to do.
547
00:29:27.269 --> 00:29:29.930
We got lost. We were alone. Um, All that kind
548
00:29:29.970 --> 00:29:32.710
of stuff is so rich that the ethic you bring
549
00:29:32.710 --> 00:29:35.230
up in the book of, you know, is it ethical
550
00:29:35.230 --> 00:29:38.640
to delete all these things? Whereas I think that the
551
00:29:38.640 --> 00:29:44.490
psychedelic assisted therapy allows us to not forget the memory,
552
00:29:44.509 --> 00:29:48.650
but maybe lean into the fact that as you have discovered,
553
00:29:49.279 --> 00:29:52.480
memories are plastic and they constantly mutate, right? So just
554
00:29:52.539 --> 00:29:53.079
take it from there.
555
00:29:53.839 --> 00:29:56.940
Yeah, that's exactly how I think of memory, which is
556
00:29:57.000 --> 00:30:00.539
that it's... It's like the saying that you can't step
557
00:30:00.579 --> 00:30:02.720
in the same river twice. And I think of memory
558
00:30:02.779 --> 00:30:07.069
that way, that we can't recall the exact same memory twice,
559
00:30:07.289 --> 00:30:10.470
even though it feels that way. And it's because when
560
00:30:10.509 --> 00:30:13.130
we recall a memory, I mean, I think it's kind
561
00:30:13.170 --> 00:30:16.190
of popular knowledge now that memories are reconstructions of the
562
00:30:16.230 --> 00:30:19.089
past and that they're not like videos or iPhone videos
563
00:30:19.130 --> 00:30:21.549
of the past for that matter. But we can go
564
00:30:21.589 --> 00:30:24.519
a step further that every time we recall a memory
565
00:30:24.539 --> 00:30:26.720
that It's kind of like hitting save as on a
566
00:30:26.740 --> 00:30:29.710
Microsoft Word file. But we have the choice of what
567
00:30:29.750 --> 00:30:32.549
we want to edit into that save as file. Like
568
00:30:32.609 --> 00:30:34.710
we have the choice of do we want to delete
569
00:30:34.750 --> 00:30:37.069
some lines? Do we want to scribble in some new
570
00:30:37.109 --> 00:30:39.089
words or some new paragraphs? And I think that with
571
00:30:39.109 --> 00:30:43.630
psychedelic assisted therapy, what it does is it potentially opens
572
00:30:43.779 --> 00:30:46.259
up the file a bit longer so that we have
573
00:30:46.319 --> 00:30:48.319
more of a time to go in and write in
574
00:30:48.500 --> 00:30:52.180
or edit out the details that we think are problematic.
575
00:30:52.940 --> 00:30:55.180
So I think of it this way that When we
576
00:30:55.240 --> 00:30:59.430
recall a memory, we know it's susceptible to modification and
577
00:30:59.450 --> 00:31:03.009
that sometimes we're inadvertently updating it depending on our mood
578
00:31:03.049 --> 00:31:05.369
and depending on what we're doing and thinking and so on.
579
00:31:06.009 --> 00:31:09.519
But we can be intentional about it, such as in
580
00:31:09.730 --> 00:31:12.880
the clinic and say, well, if we're recalling a memory,
581
00:31:13.339 --> 00:31:16.339
I think it's about 80% of people would not want
582
00:31:16.400 --> 00:31:19.779
a memory erased or just full blown erased by any means.
583
00:31:20.289 --> 00:31:23.869
But if we could somehow just chisel out the debilitating,
584
00:31:23.930 --> 00:31:28.170
gut-wrenching emotional component, then that number goes up a bit
585
00:31:28.230 --> 00:31:30.390
that some people would say, I don't want to get
586
00:31:30.450 --> 00:31:34.660
rid of the entire memory of something traumatic. It's the
587
00:31:34.700 --> 00:31:37.380
debilitating feeling of when I think about it, I can't
588
00:31:37.400 --> 00:31:43.680
think about it anymore because suddenly you're impaired, whether it's socially, internally, both.
589
00:31:44.480 --> 00:31:47.039
So I think of it that with psychedelic-assisted therapy, if
590
00:31:47.369 --> 00:31:50.650
and therapies that are effective for that matter in general,
591
00:31:51.049 --> 00:31:54.690
what we're doing is we can keep that file open
592
00:31:54.730 --> 00:31:57.640
a bit longer to edit in or edit out details
593
00:31:58.220 --> 00:32:01.279
and take advantage of how plastic memories really are and
594
00:32:01.339 --> 00:32:04.599
how malleable they really are so that we can change
595
00:32:04.680 --> 00:32:08.809
them in some direction that we find healthy. And I
596
00:32:08.849 --> 00:32:11.059
think that to get to the ethics part, I think
597
00:32:11.079 --> 00:32:13.380
that's probably the most important thing that we can do
598
00:32:13.480 --> 00:32:16.339
up front is we got to give ourselves an ethically
599
00:32:16.380 --> 00:32:19.940
bounded goal of why we want to manipulate memories. Because
600
00:32:20.349 --> 00:32:24.099
we could manipulate memories in the form of You get
601
00:32:24.140 --> 00:32:28.200
a two second ad on social media and then two
602
00:32:28.240 --> 00:32:31.180
weeks later you're buying the shoes, right? It's like we
603
00:32:31.720 --> 00:32:34.680
know through psychology and marketing how that works. That has
604
00:32:34.700 --> 00:32:37.880
the unfortunate byproduct of trying to change your mind for
605
00:32:37.940 --> 00:32:41.700
the sake of making someone else's bottom line thicker, right?
606
00:32:42.039 --> 00:32:45.339
Whereas if we have the ethically bounded goal of let's
607
00:32:45.480 --> 00:32:49.960
alter a memory that is debilitating us in some clinically
608
00:32:50.059 --> 00:32:53.720
meaningful way, then if we can edit that memory or
609
00:32:53.839 --> 00:32:58.160
edit out the gut-wrenching, debilitating feelings while keeping that memory intact,
610
00:32:58.559 --> 00:33:01.480
then we have the goal of restoring health and wellbeing
611
00:33:01.539 --> 00:33:04.859
back to the organism or to the individual in mind.
612
00:33:05.319 --> 00:33:07.819
So that way we're manipulating memories for the sake of
613
00:33:07.880 --> 00:33:12.839
restoring health and wellbeing and not necessarily for more sinister
614
00:33:13.000 --> 00:33:18.349
reasons that memory manipulation just is loaded with sinister connotation.
615
00:33:18.670 --> 00:33:22.430
So I think it's important to confront that upfront and
616
00:33:22.549 --> 00:33:25.670
give ourselves a set of ethics for why we're studying
617
00:33:25.730 --> 00:33:29.819
what we're studying. And it's to try to benefit humanity
618
00:33:29.839 --> 00:33:31.319
for the sake of our health and well-being.
619
00:33:31.339 --> 00:33:35.339
You know, there's so many things that just shot off
620
00:33:35.380 --> 00:33:40.400
in my mind, like to follow the trails there. That,
621
00:33:41.039 --> 00:33:42.960
I think where I'm going to go with is, is
622
00:33:43.019 --> 00:33:45.940
it true? So just tell me myth or fact, okay?
623
00:33:46.500 --> 00:33:50.380
Is it true that if I access a memory of
624
00:33:50.440 --> 00:33:54.470
my childhood, You know, I had a memory of drowning
625
00:33:54.809 --> 00:33:57.950
when I was four and I flipped backwards into a
626
00:33:58.009 --> 00:34:01.630
pool and my parents were inside, you know, yucking it
627
00:34:01.650 --> 00:34:05.400
up with their friends. And I really, I remember like
628
00:34:05.460 --> 00:34:08.760
seeing the water surface and seeing myself sink because the
629
00:34:08.880 --> 00:34:10.019
chair was pinning me down.
630
00:34:10.039 --> 00:34:11.360
Oh, wow.
631
00:34:11.739 --> 00:34:14.480
And then I don't know what happened. And then I
632
00:34:14.539 --> 00:34:18.409
woke up, you know, poolside and apparently I kind of
633
00:34:18.449 --> 00:34:20.769
like died and came back in that moment, but I
634
00:34:20.809 --> 00:34:27.360
don't really recall it. In that kind of memory bank,
635
00:34:27.820 --> 00:34:31.519
when I tell you this right now, or I think
636
00:34:31.579 --> 00:34:34.719
about it five years ago, or I tell a therapist, whoever,
637
00:34:35.300 --> 00:34:38.329
is it mutating in this conscious way, like you were
638
00:34:38.369 --> 00:34:42.489
talking about with the Word doc, where I'm deliberately mutating
639
00:34:42.550 --> 00:34:45.849
it for the better? Or is it also true that
640
00:34:46.440 --> 00:34:48.659
The brain is kind of, you know, anytime you check
641
00:34:48.719 --> 00:34:50.599
out the book from the library, it's a different book.
642
00:34:50.780 --> 00:34:55.090
You know, it slightly mutates regardless of whether we intend
643
00:34:55.130 --> 00:34:56.829
it to. Like, which of those is true?
644
00:34:57.630 --> 00:35:01.230
I think the latter, that every time that we recall
645
00:35:01.289 --> 00:35:06.239
a memory, bits and pieces change that usually are inconsequential.
646
00:35:07.480 --> 00:35:09.920
They become consequential, of course, you know, when we're using
647
00:35:09.960 --> 00:35:13.320
them for things that require facts to be facts, like
648
00:35:13.340 --> 00:35:15.230
in the court of law or things like that. But
649
00:35:15.250 --> 00:35:18.190
for our personal, for our lived experience, my guess is
650
00:35:18.210 --> 00:35:22.550
that like the majority of those memories are probably largely intact.
651
00:35:22.590 --> 00:35:24.949
And there's bits and pieces that change and warp over
652
00:35:24.989 --> 00:35:28.050
time as we recall them, like whether it's the different
653
00:35:28.090 --> 00:35:30.280
point of view that you see the water from or
654
00:35:30.300 --> 00:35:31.710
the hue or the color.
655
00:35:31.489 --> 00:35:33.579
Or where the memory begins and ends.
656
00:35:33.619 --> 00:35:37.219
Like it's the the tough part there is how much
657
00:35:37.260 --> 00:35:40.420
of the experience was really encoded and how much of
658
00:35:40.519 --> 00:35:45.519
it really exists in your brain somewhere. inaccessible for whichever reasons,
659
00:35:46.099 --> 00:35:48.239
or how much of it was just not encoded at all,
660
00:35:48.599 --> 00:35:53.360
because a very big traumatic event happened at the time
661
00:35:53.389 --> 00:35:57.409
of that experience happening. So I think about it in
662
00:35:57.469 --> 00:36:03.429
terms of, we change memories every single time we recall them. Subconsciously,
663
00:36:03.449 --> 00:36:06.230
it just happens. This is just what memories do. One
664
00:36:06.250 --> 00:36:10.289
theory out there is that it's not so much because
665
00:36:10.489 --> 00:36:13.590
our brain is trying to rewrite the past or anything
666
00:36:13.630 --> 00:36:16.769
like that, but it's because it turns out that the
667
00:36:16.809 --> 00:36:19.090
same brain areas that we use to recall the past,
668
00:36:19.510 --> 00:36:23.949
we also use accidentally to make false memories. But we
669
00:36:24.030 --> 00:36:27.510
also use that area, like the hippocampus, to imagine ourselves
670
00:36:27.570 --> 00:36:30.820
in the future. And that area is also active when
671
00:36:30.840 --> 00:36:33.780
we're dreaming, for that matter. So one theory out there
672
00:36:34.219 --> 00:36:39.000
is that our memories are our brain's best prediction of
673
00:36:39.079 --> 00:36:42.699
what happened. So because it's the brain's best prediction of
674
00:36:42.760 --> 00:36:46.239
what happened, predictions change all the time. So there's going
675
00:36:46.280 --> 00:36:48.219
to be little bits of, wait, what about this detail?
676
00:36:48.260 --> 00:36:50.619
Maybe that's more accurate. Or wait, no, I think I
677
00:36:50.659 --> 00:36:53.219
remember it this way. Maybe that's more accurate. So our
678
00:36:53.260 --> 00:36:55.079
brain is trying to stay a step ahead of the
679
00:36:55.119 --> 00:36:57.949
present all the time to avoid getting eaten, that kind
680
00:36:57.989 --> 00:37:01.269
of thing. So if we're doing that and constantly making
681
00:37:02.079 --> 00:37:05.679
predictions of what we think happened, that can at least
682
00:37:05.760 --> 00:37:08.710
begin to explain why we're prone to certain memory errors,
683
00:37:09.090 --> 00:37:12.170
why things like false memories may exist. But also it
684
00:37:12.190 --> 00:37:15.369
may be that we have memory so that we can
685
00:37:15.429 --> 00:37:18.860
imagine the future. And we have imagination because we have
686
00:37:18.940 --> 00:37:21.380
memories of the past. So this, I think, is a
687
00:37:21.400 --> 00:37:25.079
kind of beautiful theory that it says it's really that
688
00:37:25.139 --> 00:37:28.730
the brain uses memories so that it can make predictions
689
00:37:28.969 --> 00:37:32.030
to enable its own future and enable its own livelihood.
690
00:37:32.050 --> 00:37:35.730
And I'm really privy to that theory because then it's,
691
00:37:36.110 --> 00:37:38.469
it's kind of agnostic about whether you're thinking about the
692
00:37:38.510 --> 00:37:41.909
past or thinking about the future. Just our experiences, our
693
00:37:41.949 --> 00:37:45.510
memories are our building blocks that we use to combine
694
00:37:45.550 --> 00:37:48.650
and recombine in our brain, whether it's to dream or
695
00:37:48.710 --> 00:37:52.809
literally to imagine a different future. And I think that's
696
00:37:52.829 --> 00:37:55.170
a very, like, I don't know if it's uniquely human,
697
00:37:55.230 --> 00:37:58.289
but I think it's a profound faculty that we have.
698
00:37:59.469 --> 00:38:02.550
I like that you're bringing in the prediction aspect of
699
00:38:02.590 --> 00:38:06.980
the brain. And you talk about engrams, which I was
700
00:38:07.019 --> 00:38:09.159
ignorant to the idea of that. Is it kind of
701
00:38:09.179 --> 00:38:12.199
just like a neural network where it's all these different
702
00:38:12.679 --> 00:38:16.949
harmonious or symphony type of areas of the brain? Because
703
00:38:17.329 --> 00:38:20.869
for those of you who don't know, and you're more
704
00:38:20.929 --> 00:38:26.170
focused on one area or one little spot within the brain,
705
00:38:27.150 --> 00:38:31.130
the current thinking is that there's this whole concert going on, right?
706
00:38:32.150 --> 00:38:34.639
It's not just this one even though you can localize
707
00:38:34.679 --> 00:38:37.909
a lot of activity to this particular thing under this circumstance,
708
00:38:38.590 --> 00:38:41.210
that the modern way of thinking about neuroscience is that
709
00:38:41.250 --> 00:38:44.670
the whole brain is like playing chords, not individual notes, right?
710
00:38:45.429 --> 00:38:48.030
So that's called an engram. Am I tracking? Is that
711
00:38:48.360 --> 00:38:50.000
an okay way to explain that?
712
00:38:50.579 --> 00:38:53.519
Yeah, that we think of an engram as the physical
713
00:38:53.559 --> 00:38:57.699
manifestation of memory in the brain. So engrams are the
714
00:38:57.739 --> 00:39:01.219
physical manifestation of memory in the brain, and that can...
715
00:39:01.909 --> 00:39:05.599
cover everything from all of the changes that happen at
716
00:39:05.639 --> 00:39:08.800
the genetic level, at the level of individual brain cells,
717
00:39:09.280 --> 00:39:12.900
at the architecture of brain cells, at thousands of brain
718
00:39:12.920 --> 00:39:15.880
cells firing in very particular patterns with each other to
719
00:39:15.920 --> 00:39:19.679
produce the symphony that is memory, and so on. And
720
00:39:19.780 --> 00:39:22.570
we think, as you mentioned, that we think of engrams
721
00:39:23.269 --> 00:39:27.809
as a 3D web of activity that exists in the brain.
722
00:39:27.909 --> 00:39:29.489
So it's not live.
723
00:39:30.280 --> 00:39:32.480
Eternal sunshine in this case, where you can go into
724
00:39:32.599 --> 00:39:34.980
one point of the brain and say, that's where the
725
00:39:35.019 --> 00:39:36.760
memory is located, let's zap it.
726
00:39:37.260 --> 00:39:39.860
It's more of a 3D spider web of.
727
00:39:39.940 --> 00:39:43.409
Activity that recruits the entirety of the brain, because every
728
00:39:43.449 --> 00:39:47.449
memory has its associated sights and sounds and smells and emotions,
729
00:39:47.849 --> 00:39:49.710
and those are the going to recruit. the parts of
730
00:39:49.750 --> 00:39:52.010
the brain that are involved in processing sights and sounds
731
00:39:52.070 --> 00:39:55.369
and smells and emotions. So I like the symphony example
732
00:39:55.429 --> 00:39:58.409
because it means that all of our brain cells are
733
00:39:58.489 --> 00:40:03.280
different kinds of instruments that when tuned together can play
734
00:40:03.599 --> 00:40:07.139
and produce seemingly magical things like consciousness or our ability
735
00:40:07.179 --> 00:40:10.900
to recollect the past. And then when some of those
736
00:40:11.000 --> 00:40:14.099
instruments are out of tune, we start noticing some of
737
00:40:14.159 --> 00:40:19.050
these impairments that may accompany, for example, a neurodegenerative disorder
738
00:40:19.110 --> 00:40:19.630
or so on.
739
00:40:21.409 --> 00:40:24.530
So let's just establish that, you know, our memories are
740
00:40:24.630 --> 00:40:29.420
kind of the bank of our identity, right? You know,
741
00:40:30.039 --> 00:40:32.519
if we don't have memories, what happens to somebody who
742
00:40:32.559 --> 00:40:36.280
doesn't have any memories? Is that possible? Because you talk
743
00:40:36.320 --> 00:40:38.659
about in the book that even if you knock out
744
00:40:38.739 --> 00:40:42.050
the hippocampus on both sides of the brain, that the
745
00:40:42.090 --> 00:40:45.010
cortex is kind of the long-term storage. For those of
746
00:40:45.030 --> 00:40:48.130
you who have seen Inside Out, it's the long-term memory
747
00:40:48.150 --> 00:40:53.539
and all those stacks of balls or whatever with the
748
00:40:53.619 --> 00:40:56.280
net net of all the different emotions that those were
749
00:40:56.320 --> 00:41:02.679
stored under, right? And if your cortex is holding everything anyway,
750
00:41:04.099 --> 00:41:06.570
is it always true that even if you knock out
751
00:41:06.619 --> 00:41:09.789
the hippocampus that you have a sense of self? And
752
00:41:09.829 --> 00:41:14.769
is that sense of self illusory or perceptual? Like, you know,
753
00:41:14.789 --> 00:41:19.769
in Buddhism, there's so much focus on you know observing
754
00:41:19.809 --> 00:41:23.889
the mind right and so from an experiential perspective that
755
00:41:23.929 --> 00:41:27.389
whole body of work has a lot of parallels to
756
00:41:27.409 --> 00:41:33.190
the wet lab of neuroscience in today's time and it
757
00:41:33.230 --> 00:41:35.570
makes me curious like you know do they have it
758
00:41:35.650 --> 00:41:38.949
right that it's all just a perception of who we
759
00:41:39.010 --> 00:41:41.190
are especially if you take into account the level of
760
00:41:41.489 --> 00:41:45.969
mutation of each recalled memory and so like How do
761
00:41:45.989 --> 00:41:47.809
we not just go, oh my gosh, I have no
762
00:41:47.869 --> 00:41:51.690
idea who I am. And it's all kind of like
763
00:41:52.550 --> 00:41:53.889
a house of cards, right?
764
00:41:54.349 --> 00:41:57.469
The Buddhism example makes me think of this study from
765
00:41:57.550 --> 00:42:01.699
way back when that claimed that every decade or so,
766
00:42:01.860 --> 00:42:04.500
all of the atoms in our body turn over. So
767
00:42:04.739 --> 00:42:08.139
supposedly all of the atoms that make me today are
768
00:42:08.519 --> 00:42:11.119
different than from 10 years ago, than from 20 years ago,
769
00:42:11.179 --> 00:42:13.480
than from 30 years ago. So am I the same
770
00:42:13.539 --> 00:42:15.219
Steve as I was when I was five years old?
771
00:42:15.619 --> 00:42:17.829
or 15, or 25, or so on and so forth.
772
00:42:18.349 --> 00:42:21.989
And I guess I have two responses, and I don't
773
00:42:22.010 --> 00:42:24.510
know that I'm personally satisfied with either, but one of
774
00:42:24.550 --> 00:42:26.829
them is, yeah, I think of memory as the thing
775
00:42:26.849 --> 00:42:29.840
that threads and unifies our overall sense of being, and
776
00:42:29.860 --> 00:42:32.500
that whenever we have damage to areas like the hippocampus,
777
00:42:33.300 --> 00:42:36.519
our ability to thread that sense of being over time,
778
00:42:36.960 --> 00:42:38.800
it's not that it's totally wiped out, but it is
779
00:42:38.840 --> 00:42:42.949
dramatically impaired. So for instance, people living with hippocampal damage
780
00:42:43.550 --> 00:42:49.110
often may have very different kinds of dreams or impairments
781
00:42:49.150 --> 00:42:52.250
in even imagining themselves in the future for that matter.
782
00:42:52.650 --> 00:42:54.750
So some of these fundamental properties that we think the
783
00:42:54.789 --> 00:42:59.800
hippocampus is important for, recalling the past, reconstructing narratives, projecting
784
00:42:59.840 --> 00:43:04.480
ourselves into the future. But there are, I think, still
785
00:43:04.760 --> 00:43:08.579
many memories that survive hippocampal damage, and the field is
786
00:43:08.599 --> 00:43:12.800
still wrestling with how and why and how much How
787
00:43:12.840 --> 00:43:15.719
much conscious detail of those memories do we truly have
788
00:43:15.840 --> 00:43:19.579
access to without a hippocampus? And it's a bit controversial
789
00:43:19.900 --> 00:43:24.199
because one claim is that we might remember a lot
790
00:43:24.239 --> 00:43:27.489
of detail, but because areas like the hippocampus are impaired,
791
00:43:27.909 --> 00:43:31.969
our ability to really relive those memories from our first-person
792
00:43:32.030 --> 00:43:35.230
point of view, that that sense of self is what
793
00:43:35.269 --> 00:43:38.210
may become impaired when we have hippocampal damage.
794
00:43:38.630 --> 00:43:40.670
And maybe on the broader picture, the.
795
00:43:40.630 --> 00:43:43.630
Way I think about this is that I think of
796
00:43:43.690 --> 00:43:46.250
memories as the building blocks that we use to build
797
00:43:46.309 --> 00:43:49.380
today and project ourselves into the future. And that those
798
00:43:49.409 --> 00:43:53.260
kinds of building blocks are it's a mystery today, in
799
00:43:53.300 --> 00:43:56.960
my opinion, what the true building blocks of memory are,
800
00:43:57.280 --> 00:44:00.619
because we know, for instance, that like DNA is to
801
00:44:00.699 --> 00:44:05.260
life as what is to memory. So what is the
802
00:44:05.320 --> 00:44:08.400
DNA of memory? I think that it kind of will
803
00:44:08.420 --> 00:44:12.199
probably depend on who you ask nowadays, but we'll get there, right?
804
00:44:12.219 --> 00:44:14.739
It doesn't break any law of physics. I think it's
805
00:44:14.780 --> 00:44:17.619
just that it's tipping our cap to the fact that
806
00:44:17.699 --> 00:44:21.289
we have one lifetime to try to reverse engineer what
807
00:44:21.789 --> 00:44:24.869
evolution had four billion years on Earth to produce. So
808
00:44:24.889 --> 00:44:27.570
there's definitely going to be some curveballs still in the making.
809
00:44:29.440 --> 00:44:32.599
I think is definitely the greatest area of mystery that
810
00:44:32.699 --> 00:44:36.719
we have, right? And a couple other huge pockets in science,
811
00:44:36.760 --> 00:44:41.110
at least. So is it that people without hippocampi, the
812
00:44:41.150 --> 00:44:45.929
plural of hippocampus, is it that those people don't evolve
813
00:44:46.289 --> 00:44:49.289
their sense of self? Is it locked somehow in time
814
00:44:49.309 --> 00:44:54.380
associated with the date of the loss of those areas
815
00:44:54.420 --> 00:44:54.739
of the brain?
816
00:44:55.420 --> 00:44:58.119
I think it depends on the extent of the hippocampal damage,
817
00:44:58.159 --> 00:45:01.869
since there's no two damages of the brain ever really
818
00:45:01.909 --> 00:45:02.429
look alike.
819
00:45:02.969 --> 00:45:03.610
Yeah.
820
00:45:03.650 --> 00:45:07.510
So my understanding of it is that it's our ability
821
00:45:07.610 --> 00:45:11.110
to mentally time travel back to the past or imagine
822
00:45:11.150 --> 00:45:14.050
ourselves in the future, that our ability to put ourselves
823
00:45:14.110 --> 00:45:17.449
from that first person point of view that can experience
824
00:45:17.639 --> 00:45:21.820
an episode of our lives, that that's what becomes impaired.
825
00:45:22.199 --> 00:45:24.940
But I do think there's still very much a sense
826
00:45:24.980 --> 00:45:28.429
of self that's evolving. It's evolving differently and it's evolving
827
00:45:28.469 --> 00:45:33.289
without some of the crucial building blocks of hippocampal based memories.
828
00:45:32.909 --> 00:45:33.449
That we need.
829
00:45:34.030 --> 00:45:37.750
But there is, I think, a lot of reason for
830
00:45:38.050 --> 00:45:41.090
hope and it's very, it's down to the science even.
831
00:45:41.409 --> 00:45:45.469
So for instance, with memory loss, I think is a
832
00:45:45.489 --> 00:45:49.139
good example of this, where in different cases of amnesia,
833
00:45:49.590 --> 00:45:59.710
So whether it's Alzheimer's, neurodegenerative disorder, addiction-related amnesia, sleep deprivation-induced amnesia,
834
00:46:00.010 --> 00:46:02.110
or even the one amnesia we all share, which is
835
00:46:02.210 --> 00:46:05.510
infantile amnesia, our inability to remember what we did before
836
00:46:05.550 --> 00:46:08.300
we were three more or less. that in every single
837
00:46:08.440 --> 00:46:11.320
one of those cases, our field has been able to
838
00:46:11.460 --> 00:46:14.389
artificially restore the memory that was thought to be lost.
839
00:46:14.869 --> 00:46:20.230
So that to me says maybe in Alzheimer's, in sleep deprivation,
840
00:46:20.329 --> 00:46:24.949
in addiction, in infantile amnesia, maybe the library of memories
841
00:46:25.030 --> 00:46:28.159
may still be intact, but the librarian is on strike now.
842
00:46:28.519 --> 00:46:31.219
So we need to figure out a way to reintroduce
843
00:46:31.260 --> 00:46:34.219
a new librarian to reaccess the memories that were thought
844
00:46:34.239 --> 00:46:37.469
to be lost and so long as the library, the
845
00:46:37.489 --> 00:46:41.150
brain is intact. And that to me has been like
846
00:46:41.170 --> 00:46:44.469
a big reason for hope that in almost every case,
847
00:46:44.530 --> 00:46:47.610
including traumatic brain injury recently, that in almost every case
848
00:46:48.150 --> 00:46:51.610
we can think of, memories are actually a bit more
849
00:46:51.670 --> 00:46:55.489
notoriously difficult to break than we previously thought. But the
850
00:46:55.530 --> 00:46:58.969
part that is easier to break is the accessibility of
851
00:46:59.030 --> 00:47:05.039
those memories. And that's what we think is underpinning some
852
00:47:05.079 --> 00:47:08.820
of these disorders or our inability to recall certain memories
853
00:47:09.199 --> 00:47:11.469
is because we may have lost the machinery we need
854
00:47:11.489 --> 00:47:12.670
to access those memories.
855
00:47:14.010 --> 00:47:18.349
So just to unpack that, um, the, the librarian or
856
00:47:18.409 --> 00:47:21.769
the machine to access the memories is, is the hippocampus
857
00:47:21.829 --> 00:47:26.300
in that case. And, uh, hippocampal damage can be, you know,
858
00:47:26.320 --> 00:47:29.619
N of one, you know, each person is different. And
859
00:47:29.679 --> 00:47:32.900
so you don't, we don't really know because those aren't repeatable, uh,
860
00:47:34.230 --> 00:47:40.199
lesions or damages, that we don't really know how much
861
00:47:40.679 --> 00:47:44.119
this is affecting the library versus just the library and
862
00:47:44.159 --> 00:47:46.340
getting the books, that kind of thing. But it seems
863
00:47:46.420 --> 00:47:48.719
like on the other side of that damage that the
864
00:47:48.760 --> 00:47:52.219
library is intact. And is it true to say that
865
00:47:52.260 --> 00:47:55.789
the library is kind of akin to, in psychology, the
866
00:47:55.869 --> 00:47:58.369
idea of implicit memory? system?
867
00:47:58.849 --> 00:48:01.170
It can, a lot of our memories, yeah, can exist
868
00:48:01.230 --> 00:48:03.829
in like as implicit memory systems where most of our
869
00:48:03.869 --> 00:48:07.269
memories are dormant right now. Like I, we usually think
870
00:48:07.309 --> 00:48:10.519
of it one memory per memory kind of thing, and
871
00:48:10.539 --> 00:48:12.519
that the majority of the memories that we have in
872
00:48:12.559 --> 00:48:15.320
our brain right now are silent or dormant and not
873
00:48:15.380 --> 00:48:16.400
necessarily active.
874
00:48:16.840 --> 00:48:19.139
So we can either restore.
875
00:48:18.679 --> 00:48:22.019
The librarian by trying to come up with different therapeutic
876
00:48:22.780 --> 00:48:28.389
interventions that help out the hippocampus, or if we're working
877
00:48:28.429 --> 00:48:32.349
with mice in particular, we can be the new librarian
878
00:48:32.449 --> 00:48:34.610
because we can find the cells that hold onto these
879
00:48:34.670 --> 00:48:38.610
memories and turn on only those cells to only turn
880
00:48:38.670 --> 00:48:41.010
on that memory. And there's actually some studies out there
881
00:48:41.050 --> 00:48:44.619
showing that you can track memories throughout the brain. And
882
00:48:44.820 --> 00:48:47.519
even if you get rid of the hippocampus, you can
883
00:48:47.619 --> 00:48:49.900
go to other parts of the brain and then still
884
00:48:49.920 --> 00:48:53.260
get that memory back. So it's almost like maybe there's
885
00:48:53.300 --> 00:48:56.639
multiple traces of a memory that exists in the brain.
886
00:48:57.050 --> 00:48:59.329
And that other brain areas become kind of like the
887
00:48:59.369 --> 00:49:03.650
backup generator that they're only used really when called upon.
888
00:49:03.949 --> 00:49:06.019
But when you get rid of the hippocampus, that's certainly
889
00:49:06.059 --> 00:49:07.760
an instance where it becomes called upon.
890
00:49:09.059 --> 00:49:12.320
And in the, you know, you mentioned turn on the genes.
891
00:49:12.340 --> 00:49:14.320
So I have to do a little shout out because we're,
892
00:49:14.590 --> 00:49:17.610
you know, right after the announcement of the Nobel Prize
893
00:49:17.710 --> 00:49:19.730
for Optogenetics with Dr.
894
00:49:19.769 --> 00:49:19.969
Karnak.
895
00:49:20.809 --> 00:49:25.429
Deisseroth. And you mentioned him in your book as kind
896
00:49:25.449 --> 00:49:31.989
of a fundamental, you know, infrastructure by which modern neuroscience comes.
897
00:49:32.050 --> 00:49:34.949
And I, I don't want to get into the, the
898
00:49:35.329 --> 00:49:38.489
the nerdy level of that, but just wanted to, you know,
899
00:49:38.570 --> 00:49:42.210
acknowledge that, you know, you are sitting on top of
900
00:49:42.349 --> 00:49:46.530
his shoulders, who's sitting on, you know, and I found
901
00:49:46.550 --> 00:49:49.610
it really fascinating that, you know, we had this conversation
902
00:49:49.639 --> 00:49:52.760
and that just happened and it was all kind of synchronistic, right?
903
00:49:53.260 --> 00:49:57.099
So going back to memories, a couple of things. One
904
00:49:57.179 --> 00:50:03.579
is the human memory attention span juncture right now is
905
00:50:03.679 --> 00:50:07.440
under attack. Because we are living in a world in which,
906
00:50:07.480 --> 00:50:11.590
you know, there was just a big lawsuit about certain
907
00:50:11.730 --> 00:50:17.210
technological features of social media, for example, that serve up
908
00:50:17.269 --> 00:50:20.630
this very short term, you know, short clip content. And
909
00:50:20.750 --> 00:50:23.989
actually our conversation will probably be clipped in a different way.
910
00:50:24.030 --> 00:50:26.349
You know, there will be like a long tail of
911
00:50:26.429 --> 00:50:29.289
certain people who watch the whole conversation and then many
912
00:50:29.329 --> 00:50:31.449
more people who watch just the short clips. And that's
913
00:50:31.469 --> 00:50:33.429
just the world we live in, which kind of makes
914
00:50:33.449 --> 00:50:37.199
me sad, honestly. But But I also notice in my
915
00:50:37.960 --> 00:50:41.969
own memory, what's happening is that if I watch shorts,
916
00:50:43.070 --> 00:50:46.449
I will literally have a thought, not after I watch
917
00:50:46.469 --> 00:50:49.070
the shorts, but if I'm watching shorts in the morning,
918
00:50:49.110 --> 00:50:52.699
let's say as I'm drinking my tea, and I'm getting
919
00:50:52.719 --> 00:50:57.179
this flip card of too much content of different kinds,
920
00:50:57.739 --> 00:51:00.159
too much switching costs in my brain, whatever you would say,
921
00:51:00.800 --> 00:51:03.510
then by the time I get to work, And I
922
00:51:03.550 --> 00:51:05.570
have a thought, oh, I want to look up this thing.
923
00:51:06.010 --> 00:51:09.170
I go to my phone, I go to the, you know,
924
00:51:09.250 --> 00:51:13.690
search engine on my phone and I literally forget. And
925
00:51:13.829 --> 00:51:16.210
I was like, oh my gosh. At first I was like,
926
00:51:16.289 --> 00:51:20.230
am I just aging rapidly suddenly? And then I realized, no,
927
00:51:20.289 --> 00:51:22.590
it's the short form content. So then I had to like,
928
00:51:22.860 --> 00:51:26.139
just like an addiction, I had to, you know, get.
929
00:51:26.159 --> 00:51:26.519
Rid of that.
930
00:51:27.860 --> 00:51:32.170
And, and really monitor myself kind of metacognitively, which means
931
00:51:32.230 --> 00:51:35.250
I'm watching myself do the thing, um, to make sure
932
00:51:35.289 --> 00:51:38.489
that I wasn't consuming too much of this. It's almost
933
00:51:38.510 --> 00:51:40.150
like dessert. Like I was just like, huh?
934
00:51:40.510 --> 00:51:40.789
You know?
935
00:51:42.190 --> 00:51:44.590
And so if you think of it that way, there's
936
00:51:44.630 --> 00:51:48.829
not much nutrition and human brain is dealing with more content,
937
00:51:48.929 --> 00:51:52.690
more information than it ever, ever has been presented with
938
00:51:52.809 --> 00:51:56.199
or barraged with, with these designs that also came out
939
00:51:56.219 --> 00:51:58.539
of Stanford in the lab that I was in of
940
00:51:58.659 --> 00:52:02.820
how to get people's attention to be, you know, addictive. Right.
941
00:52:03.519 --> 00:52:06.940
How are you seeing your work square with, you know,
942
00:52:06.960 --> 00:52:11.059
about memory and about motion square with this modern world
943
00:52:11.079 --> 00:52:13.980
where we're just annihilating people's memory systems?
944
00:52:15.019 --> 00:52:20.579
Yeah, I think about this a lot because short form
945
00:52:20.639 --> 00:52:24.219
media in any capacity can have a purpose and I
946
00:52:24.280 --> 00:52:26.840
think of it sometimes nowadays as a little bit like
947
00:52:26.900 --> 00:52:31.820
fast food, where fast food is not inherently good or bad.
948
00:52:31.980 --> 00:52:33.079
It's just fast food.
949
00:52:33.340 --> 00:52:35.510
But if we have fast food for breakfast, lunch and
950
00:52:35.550 --> 00:52:38.690
dinner every day, suddenly we're not getting the nutritional profiles
951
00:52:38.730 --> 00:52:41.530
that we need that we think will help sustain well-being
952
00:52:41.570 --> 00:52:44.210
in the biological system that is us. I think the
953
00:52:44.250 --> 00:52:46.969
unfortunate sinister part is when we start looking at things
954
00:52:46.989 --> 00:52:50.139
like attention and memory as an economy. where it's like,
955
00:52:50.199 --> 00:52:53.480
it's not, it's biology. So if we think about it
956
00:52:53.559 --> 00:52:56.119
as an economy, we can squeeze as many dollars out
957
00:52:56.159 --> 00:52:58.989
of it as we want. But that seems kind of
958
00:52:59.050 --> 00:53:01.650
not ethical. And that seems like we should certainly have
959
00:53:01.690 --> 00:53:03.469
a little bit more of like a moral compass of
960
00:53:03.489 --> 00:53:08.130
a conversation that, right, that actually views things like our
961
00:53:08.170 --> 00:53:12.929
memory and our attention as biologically fallible things that can
962
00:53:12.949 --> 00:53:16.030
be all too easily hijacked. I mean, for instance, like
963
00:53:16.070 --> 00:53:19.280
that The least surprising finding in the world, unfortunately, is
964
00:53:19.320 --> 00:53:22.840
that now that gambling is basically legal everywhere, that men
965
00:53:23.039 --> 00:53:25.380
from the ages of 18 to 35 have like a
966
00:53:25.380 --> 00:53:28.289
60 percent increase in gambling addiction. So this to me
967
00:53:28.369 --> 00:53:31.690
is a classic case of like where we're putting the
968
00:53:31.730 --> 00:53:34.590
money first and then we're being reactive and thinking about
969
00:53:34.610 --> 00:53:37.789
the fallout later when gambling we have the capacity of
970
00:53:37.849 --> 00:53:41.590
being proactive and saying, maybe why don't we pilot out
971
00:53:41.630 --> 00:53:43.239
some of these things, which, you know, unfortunately some of
972
00:53:43.260 --> 00:53:45.860
these companies probably have and then ignored already because the
973
00:53:45.900 --> 00:53:48.599
data wasn't in their favor. But the idea is that
974
00:53:49.179 --> 00:53:54.059
people's memories and decision-making is notoriously easy to control on
975
00:53:54.099 --> 00:53:57.079
a population level. Like we, we all exist in our
976
00:53:57.199 --> 00:54:01.769
own like correlated bubbles here. So it's pretty easy, I think,
977
00:54:01.809 --> 00:54:05.449
to say, let's, Let's put some of these ads out
978
00:54:05.489 --> 00:54:07.880
there or some of this bit of content from bots
979
00:54:07.980 --> 00:54:10.679
that will suddenly sway everything from whether or not we
980
00:54:10.719 --> 00:54:14.659
trust science to politics to who we're voting for. And
981
00:54:14.719 --> 00:54:17.519
it's like it's not even to get overly political.
982
00:54:17.699 --> 00:54:18.400
That's just the truth.
983
00:54:18.579 --> 00:54:21.280
Like, that's just the way these things work, because what
984
00:54:21.320 --> 00:54:25.099
we're doing is we're consuming content that is ubiquitous. that
985
00:54:25.119 --> 00:54:29.139
is ubiquitously changing our minds and behavior. And I think
986
00:54:29.179 --> 00:54:31.090
that what you did, to be honest, is like the
987
00:54:31.840 --> 00:54:34.800
most helpful nugget of wisdom is to be metacognitive about
988
00:54:34.840 --> 00:54:37.929
it and say, is this a little bit too much
989
00:54:37.989 --> 00:54:43.010
fast food? Maybe after watching reels for an hour, I'm
990
00:54:43.050 --> 00:54:45.670
suddenly no better off. I'm like, well, I just wasted
991
00:54:45.690 --> 00:54:47.110
an hour of my life. Why did I do that?
992
00:54:47.630 --> 00:54:50.750
Because I'm very easy to convince to like, oh, I laughed.
993
00:54:50.789 --> 00:54:51.949
So let me click on the next one and the
994
00:54:51.989 --> 00:54:54.380
next one. And the companies know this. So I think
995
00:54:54.429 --> 00:54:58.019
it's definitely like it's it's not to say like burn
996
00:54:58.059 --> 00:55:01.079
it all down, but we should be super cognizant of
997
00:55:01.139 --> 00:55:04.340
our relationship with these tools that may not exactly have
998
00:55:04.519 --> 00:55:06.260
our psychological interest in mind.
999
00:55:06.280 --> 00:55:09.360
Yeah. And it's it's the incentive. You know, like you said,
1000
00:55:09.400 --> 00:55:12.039
it's it's the financial incentive. You know, my grad students
1001
00:55:12.079 --> 00:55:15.440
who start at Stanford, you know, with really, you know,
1002
00:55:15.639 --> 00:55:19.599
innocent questions and then went to meta and is are
1003
00:55:19.619 --> 00:55:22.300
kind of like doing the dark arts of behavior design
1004
00:55:22.360 --> 00:55:25.519
in that way, you know, are. not bad people. They're
1005
00:55:25.539 --> 00:55:30.840
just locked into a system that rewards them to, you know,
1006
00:55:31.739 --> 00:55:35.429
basically exploit the neuroscience and, you know, for, for bad,
1007
00:55:35.690 --> 00:55:38.949
you know, or to, to get people to not have
1008
00:55:39.329 --> 00:55:42.909
rich and thriving lives. And so, yeah, it, I mean,
1009
00:55:43.150 --> 00:55:46.760
I think that talk about the implicit memory system. I
1010
00:55:46.860 --> 00:55:50.380
think that as we experience more and more of this, like,
1011
00:55:51.239 --> 00:55:55.019
rage baiting and doom scrolling and those kinds of things
1012
00:55:55.239 --> 00:55:58.460
that are really subjecting our brain. And even the young people,
1013
00:55:58.500 --> 00:56:02.309
like they know, they know when there's scams or when
1014
00:56:02.329 --> 00:56:05.090
somebody's trying to manipulate them and things like that. And
1015
00:56:05.170 --> 00:56:09.090
so my dream is that people wake up and realize, oh,
1016
00:56:09.150 --> 00:56:13.929
it's not this fabricated manipulation at all. Like we actually
1017
00:56:14.449 --> 00:56:17.010
love each other. We actually know each other. We actually
1018
00:56:17.489 --> 00:56:19.539
can relate to each other because we all want the
1019
00:56:19.579 --> 00:56:20.139
same thing.
1020
00:56:20.829 --> 00:56:21.469
We want love.
1021
00:56:21.489 --> 00:56:26.050
We want safety. We want belonging. We want interest and
1022
00:56:26.369 --> 00:56:30.730
meaning in our lives. And my hope is that as
1023
00:56:30.789 --> 00:56:33.820
we get saturated or we saturate the brain and the
1024
00:56:33.880 --> 00:56:38.860
younger generations show us that that's meaningless, that just like
1025
00:56:38.900 --> 00:56:42.059
the fast food chain, there's a reason why not everybody's
1026
00:56:42.099 --> 00:56:43.460
eating fast food three times a day.
1027
00:56:44.000 --> 00:56:44.260
Right.
1028
00:56:45.300 --> 00:56:48.869
That's a minority of the population doing that. And the
1029
00:56:48.949 --> 00:56:51.590
most of people are like, Oh, whole foods, you know?
1030
00:56:51.849 --> 00:56:55.309
So I think the pendulum will eventually swing where we
1031
00:56:55.590 --> 00:56:58.010
kind of wake up out of this, this, you know,
1032
00:56:58.170 --> 00:57:02.030
imagined a war game, if you will. Right. And look
1033
00:57:02.050 --> 00:57:04.889
at each other and say, Oh, wow. I'm, you know,
1034
00:57:04.909 --> 00:57:07.949
I know who you are and I feel the same way. And,
1035
00:57:08.139 --> 00:57:14.940
and that relatability across peoples is my, my vision for humanity. And,
1036
00:57:15.159 --> 00:57:17.619
you know, I know that there's a lot of obstacles.
1037
00:57:17.659 --> 00:57:18.900
I know there's a lot of things that we have
1038
00:57:18.940 --> 00:57:22.030
to deal with, including, I was thinking about, you know,
1039
00:57:22.119 --> 00:57:24.969
my husband and I argue sometimes. I'm sure you as
1040
00:57:25.030 --> 00:57:29.190
a husband and your wife might do that too. And
1041
00:57:29.570 --> 00:57:31.949
one of the things with memory that's so, you know,
1042
00:57:32.010 --> 00:57:35.010
disabling for me is when I'm in the heat of like,
1043
00:57:35.489 --> 00:57:39.579
you know, he said, she said, I say, well, then
1044
00:57:39.619 --> 00:57:41.320
you said this. And he's like, I didn't say that.
1045
00:57:41.719 --> 00:57:45.579
It's never more obvious to me. that the brain aid
1046
00:57:45.679 --> 00:57:48.440
does not recall things accurately. So we need to be
1047
00:57:48.679 --> 00:57:53.739
super humble and super questioning of, you know, there's that
1048
00:57:53.780 --> 00:57:56.960
bumper sticker, like don't believe everything you think. And that
1049
00:57:57.239 --> 00:58:00.119
then the second thing is just to give grace to
1050
00:58:00.239 --> 00:58:03.639
one another, um, in this, in this world where we
1051
00:58:03.679 --> 00:58:06.949
are walking around with these, like, you know, really flawed
1052
00:58:07.010 --> 00:58:10.070
memories that even if you don't have Alzheimer's or anything,
1053
00:58:10.250 --> 00:58:14.360
you know, deteriorative, um, that we have, we're flawed. And,
1054
00:58:14.719 --> 00:58:16.659
and that gives a little bit of hopefully a grace
1055
00:58:16.699 --> 00:58:21.070
and a buffer to each other of what did you
1056
00:58:21.090 --> 00:58:24.329
mean by that? Or did you say that? Like, just
1057
00:58:24.449 --> 00:58:28.369
almost like curiosity being the antidote for that certainty that
1058
00:58:28.429 --> 00:58:30.389
our brain is telling us that it was this and
1059
00:58:30.429 --> 00:58:32.489
he did that and he said this and you know,
1060
00:58:33.150 --> 00:58:35.449
all that stuff. So I just, I just wanted to
1061
00:58:35.929 --> 00:58:38.050
end on that note. What do you think about that?
1062
00:58:38.070 --> 00:58:40.340
Do you think we can improve our relationships?
1063
00:58:41.409 --> 00:58:44.630
Yeah, I completely share that worldview though, to be totally honest.
1064
00:58:44.650 --> 00:58:47.829
Like I'm very, a cup is three quarters full person
1065
00:58:47.909 --> 00:58:51.889
in that we're like, it's.
1066
00:58:50.559 --> 00:58:51.579
Not doom in my head.
1067
00:58:51.619 --> 00:58:53.860
It's not doom and gloom, but it's not ponies in sunshine.
1068
00:58:54.079 --> 00:58:56.679
It's a pony walking through brimstone kind of thing. So
1069
00:58:57.179 --> 00:59:00.039
I think that with reality, yeah, I think there's no
1070
00:59:00.079 --> 00:59:04.269
substitute for reality. And then what we see, whether it's
1071
00:59:04.309 --> 00:59:06.170
the news or online, it's not to say, oh, it's
1072
00:59:06.250 --> 00:59:08.760
all a lie or it's all true, but we got
1073
00:59:08.780 --> 00:59:11.179
to be curious and take it a bit with a
1074
00:59:11.199 --> 00:59:11.800
grain of salt.
1075
00:59:11.900 --> 00:59:13.139
And I think that you're right.
1076
00:59:13.539 --> 00:59:16.179
Whenever I go, for instance, and give science talks, it
1077
00:59:16.199 --> 00:59:18.590
doesn't matter which state I am in or even which
1078
00:59:18.630 --> 00:59:22.030
country for that matter. When you see thousands of people
1079
00:59:22.070 --> 00:59:24.190
that are there that care about the brain or care
1080
00:59:24.230 --> 00:59:26.949
about neuroscience, That's not what's making it on the news,
1081
00:59:27.090 --> 00:59:29.869
and that's not what's going viral on social media often.
1082
00:59:30.230 --> 00:59:32.969
It's the bad news that very much exists and that
1083
00:59:32.989 --> 00:59:35.940
we very much obviously have to continue to do stuff about,
1084
00:59:36.300 --> 00:59:37.739
or do even more of it for that matter.
1085
00:59:38.239 --> 00:59:40.059
It's to say that when we have our boots in.
1086
00:59:40.019 --> 00:59:44.559
The ground, that there are very real reasons to be hopeful,
1087
00:59:44.920 --> 00:59:48.719
and we often find that in each other. So by
1088
00:59:49.119 --> 00:59:51.289
connecting the dots between each other, like Bill Nye the
1089
00:59:51.329 --> 00:59:54.150
Science Guy has this quote of like, everyone in the
1090
00:59:54.190 --> 00:59:56.230
world knows something you don't know. And I think that
1091
00:59:56.269 --> 00:59:58.309
if we approach each other in the world that way,
1092
00:59:58.670 --> 01:00:02.429
with a bit of learning from each other, within reason, yeah,
1093
01:00:02.449 --> 01:00:05.150
I think that that would be a pretty good antidote
1094
01:00:05.210 --> 01:00:09.650
for at least increasing our empathy with each other over time.
1095
01:00:10.510 --> 01:00:14.199
That's a perfect end note, Dr. Ramirez. I really appreciate
1096
01:00:14.239 --> 01:00:20.340
your positivity, your vulnerability in a world where that's not encouraged.
1097
01:00:21.590 --> 01:00:28.050
the truth telling, the translation of the really complex neuroscience
1098
01:00:28.090 --> 01:00:32.070
that you deal with into our daily lives. So I
1099
01:00:32.090 --> 01:00:33.969
would just say, keep doing the good work.
1100
01:00:33.989 --> 01:00:35.849
Thank you. Yeah, will do.
1101
01:00:36.730 --> 01:00:39.409
And I really am grateful to have you here. So
1102
01:00:39.489 --> 01:00:40.789
thank you so much for your time today.
1103
01:00:41.269 --> 01:00:41.630
Thank you.
1104
01:00:41.670 --> 01:00:43.349
This was such a pleasure. And I hope to see
1105
01:00:43.389 --> 01:00:44.250
you again sometime soon.
1106
01:00:44.730 --> 01:00:45.289
Yeah, let's do it.