January 3, 2025 • 63 mins
It sounds like a quandry straight out of science fiction -- given the opportunity, would you erase your own painful or traumatic memories? Join Ben and Matt as they separate science fiction from science fact (along with the fuzzy border in between), delving into the murky mechanics of memory, the treacherous way our brains handle recollections, and the profound implications posed by living in a world where memories can be artificially created, monetized, or erased.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Folks, As we are traveling through the holidays, taking a
little time off for our own completely non sketching a
mysterious adventures, we are presenting to you some of our
favorite classic episodes. Do you guys remember doing this one? No?
Because I was men in black mind erased about it?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
M wait, what are we talking about? You know?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Luckily we wrote this down. The past us is helping
the present us now. Back in twenty nineteen, it was
us we apparently asked ourselves, can memories be erased? What
would you do? You know, if you had a very
troubling traumatic memory of an experience that was so invasive
(00:41):
it messed with your present day life? You know what
I mean? This happens since memories a big deal, you know.
Shout out to every college kid who partied too hard
one time and now can't see a specific like brand
of alcohol or drug without five getting nauseated? Is this
like Sailor Jerry's shout out gold Schlagger? Just okay, not
(01:04):
as classy as it sounds, so jeger for me.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Wooo give me all of those guys. I just want
to drink up that syrupy Southern comfort, just that straight
triple sec Oh yeah, guys, is this kind of like
the Blind Eye Society's Memory gun. You know that gravity
falls thing. I hope everybody's seen gravity falls. I know
I'm way late to that already, but I finally, like,
(01:28):
I am obsessed with it and I just can't get enough.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
And you know, maybe I have seen it, but we
just don't be right. We know that the realm of
science fiction and science fact is increasingly getting fuzzy. So
check out this episode. Hope this message finds well. Folks.
Tell us the weirdest thing that you've seen with memories.
(01:53):
Oh shout out, uh Mendela effect or Mandala effect or
barn Steve Potato Potato zane. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt noel
Is on an audio adventure.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Quick before you forget your comments, your feedback,
your concerns, or your suggestions. Go ahead, at any point
(02:52):
while this episode is playing, pause it and give us
a call. Speak your conscience, speak your truth, let us
know if you do not want your words to go
on the air.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
That's right. Also speak your untruth whatever you wish, give
us a call. One eight three three std WYTK. Now
speaking of truth is an untruth. Then we've spoken many
times on this show about the the memory that you
(03:24):
have or an image in your mind is just the
last time you thought about something, Right.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
That's true. That's true. Longtime listeners will will remember this
because it's a very handy thing to point out whenever
we dive into any number of topics. And that is
a take for instance, well, we'll talk about memories a
lot today. Take for instance, the memory of the first
(03:50):
time you ate spaghetti.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Right, Okay, got it.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
That's it. That's a good that's a good example because
it ties into taste, smell, texture, all these other sensory
things that play a huge role in encoding memory.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
But and it's also probably not the first time you
ate spaghetti.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It is almost definitely not. It may not even be
a real time that you ate spaghetti, you are just
remembering the sensations that you associate with spaghetti. So we
just may have helped you make up a memory that
never happened. And today's show is about memories. Think about it, Matt.
(04:32):
Memories are humanity's earliest version of time travel. You can
hear a snatch of song, a vivid image pops up
in your mind, or something as small as a taste
can send you rocketing out of the present into the past.
In some cases, this is amazing and beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Think about smelling a cookie, a specific kind of cookie,
sure right, I mean it really is time traveling.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
A fresh baked cinnamon cookie or a Christmas cookie. Yea,
I see on it. This has been the launching ground
for so many crucial parts of human existence, and a
lot of literature and art as well remembrance of things
passed by proost. Essentially, it all starts because this guy
(05:21):
dips a Madeline into I think tea or some sort
of beverage and he tastes it and he goes wow.
I should write hundreds of pages about us.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Madeline is a cookie, correct, yes?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Or a biscuit?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, biscuit? Oh my gosh, you excuse us, right, But
then also think about the way people who are suffering
from Alzheimer's are able to retain memories through music, right, Like,
they may have difficulty recalling certain people, places or events
in their lives, but they can sing and hit every
(05:59):
note of a song from the sixties that they really loved.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Right. And then in the hope of current research and
future research is that you can you can use that
connection in some way to make even further connections.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Right, exactly, spot on. And here's the thing. This is
the reason why I really appreciate you using the word
hope there matts because as amazing as memories are, we
still do not understand everything about them. We know, for example,
that memories can be as as you said earlier, surprisingly treacherous,
(06:35):
and memories of the same event can change drastically over time.
That's why, especially in the days before widespread video and
audio capturing ability existed, that's why so many people would
swear they were at these big historical events after the fact,
they didn't think they were lying, you know what I mean,
(06:57):
the hundreds of thousands of people people who claimed they
were watching you know, like the Hindenburg disaster. Well, that
would probably be more in the millions or people who
claimed that they were in or around Tombstone at the
time of the so called wild West, right and during
the titular shootouts and stuff. Those people don't feel like
(07:21):
they're lying. They genuinely think they remember it. And now
we find ourselves inexorably drawn into the world of philosophy.
If a person's thoughts, their experiences, and their beliefs are
indeed the basis for the reality in which they exist,
then were they there.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, that's a tough one. And we're also going to
get into realms here with memories of something like trauma.
And you know, we're talking everything we've been talking about
right now, or memories that we would probably want to
retain or at least a hone or to have the
best version of, or we think we have the best
version of.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
But when you're speaking with memories of trauma or something
like that is there, you know, perhaps there is reason,
and rightly so, for us to want to alter those
memories or maybe even change them. Sure, and some people
have attempted in the past to do this.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Right, we know that people can, through accident or intention,
alter memories in various ways. One of the big debates
regarding this would be the technique known as hypnotic regression.
There are people who will swear up and down that
hypnotic regression has been used as a psychotherapeutic tool to
(08:45):
help people remember things that they had suppressed due to trauma. However,
and this is not to say that doesn't occur. However,
the evidence also shows us that people can be guided, steered,
pushed toward remembering things that did not happen, or remembering
(09:09):
things that happened in a different way in the objective reality.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, and there are techniques in psychological ways to try
and alter your own memories, either for good or for bad,
or those of other people. But some of the kind
of self changed things, or like memory palaces, constructing it
within your mind and then altering the way you view
this certain time or event. There's a lot of fascinating
(09:36):
stuff there.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
It's true, and we will inevitably hit different aspects of
this and along the way today we will show you
a little bit about how to hack your own memory.
But this is again for information purposes only. Yes, Paul
Matt and myself are not doctors. And even if we
(09:57):
were taking medical vice from a podcast is a terrible idea, uniport,
no caveat, terrible idea.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Even basic psychological advice. We don't take it from me
at least.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
I wouldn't even follow any of our film recommendations of
being honest, at least none of mine. So I'll also
share in the course of this episode a very odd
personal memory. And I would love some help or answers
about this because I still have questions. But okay, we
(10:33):
know that we can alter our own memories and other
people can alter our memories. We know that we don't
understand everything about memories. But what if we could take
it a step further? What if we could actually erase
a person's memory, a specific memory. In other words, what
if we can take the plot of Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind from the big screen to reality. That
(10:57):
is what we were exploring today, and to do so,
we need to first understand what exactly human memory is.
So here are the facts.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Let's begin with a summation of this idea of what
is a memory by a gentleman named Richard C. Moe's Mohs.
He wrote how human memory works for our friends over
at HowStuffWorks dot com. I was gonna say something that is,
like we remember thee or something like that, like we're
no longer officially with them, but they will always be
(11:30):
with us. Memory itself just describes the process by which
our minds store and then recall information. And again, it's
kind of connections, both literally and physically and metaphorically.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Mm hmm exactly. So for most of us Moe's writes,
we talk about memory as though it is another part
of our body, a thing we possess, like our organs
or our fingers. But the tricky part here is that
memory does not exist in quite the same way. We
(12:04):
can't touch it. It's more of a concept for most people,
or at least this was the case for the majority
of human history, and it may be tempting for us
to think of every single memory that we've ever had
as a single, discrete, specific thing. Imagine your first day
(12:25):
at school, right, or one of your first days That
memory probably exists distinct for a lot of people. Or
remember the first time you told a romantic partner you
love them and so on. You can put yourself back
in that moment.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, just your meet cute, even the first time you
saw your current partner.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Right exactly. When we think of these things on the offset,
we think of them as a single point, a snap
in this huge tapestry of experience that never ends until
we die and maybe continues a little bit after that.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
But the problem is that all things are interconnected here,
and memories no different. Your first day of school also
conjures up the idea of like your trapper keeper, your backpack,
what you have for lunch. That's sleepless night before the
first day of school.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
It's also being colored by your subsequent experiences with school
and how you feel about, you know, high school. Let's
say you're let's say you're in college. Right now, when
you're thinking about your first day of school, those memories
are hitting because of the way memory functions. As we're
going to get into here, it's hitting all of these
different parts of your your memories.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah right, because each of these things is really the
product of some incredibly, incredibly complex Rube Goldberg esque cognitive processing.
Every time you or my or anyone recalls a memory,
our brain is reassembling these very different impressions from a picture.
(14:03):
A spider web of cells scattered all throughout your brain
in different areas each memory that you have, and the
larger concept of what we call memory is a group
of different systems or webs interacting and playing a role
in creating, storing, and recalling experiences. Mose has a great
(14:24):
example of this. He talks about a pen. He says,
you know, if you think of an object like a pen,
your brain achieves the object's name, okay, pen, It's shape, cylindrical,
often right, overwhelmingly, its function okay.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Rites stuff, disperses in.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
The sound it makes when it scratches across a page.
For a lot of us, we would probably be more
familiar with a click sounds. So each part of the
memory of what a pen is exists in a different
part of your brain, and then all you need is
to think or hear the word pen, and boom, it
(15:03):
all comes together so fast, so quickly. You're not buffering.
There's no speed, there's no moment where you're totally lost,
and you're thinking, well, that sounds a sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Well for some of us, myself included, recalling specifics of
things is becoming more and more difficult again as myself,
as I get older. It's odd, it's like the connections
there aren't quite as steadfast as they once were.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So neurologists are still only at the
beginning of understanding how all these different little mental processes
come together to form what we call memory and to
create what we call remembering. We do know a little
(15:57):
bit about how memories form. When everything goes right.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah exactly. So the first thing that happens is your
senses are interacting with something in the world generally, and
these things, these sensations that your senses are picking up,
travel to this place in your brain called your hippocampus,
which then integrates various separate sensations into a single cohesive experience.
(16:22):
So again, kind of what we were talking about earlier, Ben,
let's go back to that love of your life, and
in this way, let's say it's your meat cutes. The
first time you turn a corner, there's the person you
end up being with for the rest of your life.
You think about the way they looked, perhaps what they're wearing,
the way their hair was. You heard their voice for
(16:43):
the first time, or at least what you're imagining now,
remembering the way their voice sounded. The first time you
smelled whatever cologne or whatever you smell they had going
on the deodorant, maybe it was just their natural smell.
This all gets rolled up into this single experience that
we consider to be the memory. Right, And according to
(17:05):
Moe's he actually goes into this into the actual occurrence
in your brain.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Right. He walks through how the hippocampus along with the
frontal cortex analyzes these sensory inputs. This, this is the
process of encoding. So if essentially think of your hippocampus
(17:33):
and the frontal cortex as the bouncers at the bar
of your recollection. Oh right, they're at the door. And
what they will do is they and we're totally anthropomorphizing
them here, but they will say, let's say you're walking
by and you smell an amazing eero stand right, yeah,
(17:54):
and walking by a whole all guys or whatever, and
you smell this and it's a great it's a great smell.
Or you see something distinct there, someone's making shwarma or whatever,
and this goes to your brain. These sensory inputs, the
visual input of watching that scene, the olfactory input of
smelling that food, and then your hippocampus your frontal cortex
(18:18):
are the they're the entities that say this is or
is not important, This does or does not make the pass.
As we indicated earlier, if they make it through, if
your long term memory, even your short term really, if
they make it through and become a short term memory.
They exist in a small chunk for no more than
(18:38):
twenty to thirty seconds for most people, and then someone
can ask you like, hey, what was happening there, you know,
twenty five seconds ago, and you'll be like, oh, there's
this guy's making sharma. It was great, you know, not
life changing, but yeah, you want some shwarma. That's how
that will work. But let's step back for a second.
So as these bits of infration get collected in short
(19:02):
term memory, they're stored in different parts of the brain.
We still don't know how our brains identify all these
things and know what to match to which events. Right,
so we know that we do know the physiological or
i should say the neurochemical process. Here. We all have
(19:22):
nerve cells in our brains. They connected things called synapsis, right.
A sygn apse is a connection there, and these cells
fire electrical pulses across the space between your nerves. And
when they fire, these electrical pulses. It triggers the release
of these neurotransmitters. Think of them like chemical corriers. The
(19:44):
neurotransmitters spread the information they carry across the spaces between
the cells. Each single brain cell can form thousands and
thousands of these links, creating all these the connections, these
webs that we mentioned earlier. The typical brain has about
typical human brain I should say, has about one hundred
(20:06):
trillion synapses. But these connections are not set in stone.
They constantly change as your brain cells organize themselves into
different groups to process information in different ways. And here's
where long term comes in. Every time that your brain
cells send these messages to one another, the synaptic connection
(20:29):
between them grows stronger. We can't emphasize this enough. This
is real mind over matter. Your thought processes, the things
that you choose to think about with no ostensible physical
action of your own, these things will change the physical
composition of your brain. I believe we may have mentioned
(20:50):
it on previous episodes, but we can see this effect
over time and it becomes quite profound. London taxi drivers right,
the area of the brain associated with spatial reasoning in
taxi drivers who have been driving for decades is physically
noticeably significantly larger than that of the ordinary driver. Same
(21:15):
thing with the parts of the brain responsible for empathy
in Buddhist monks who have meditated for quite.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
A while, as well as professional magic the gathering players
who've been playing for long enough time like, it's crazy
how many cards they have to remember and all the
different actions.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
I mean, you've done some real Twilight Zone stuff. I'm
gonna be honest with you. We also know that filtering
occurs during this encoding process. Most people don't remember most things, right,
But we still don't know exactly how this works. We're
going to pause just for a second. Let's all try
to remember what we examined here, and then we'll be
(21:55):
back to explore short and long term memory after a
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
And we're back now. As we were discussing before, not
all memories are created equally, and not all of our
senses are stored in the same way. Because really, if
you think about how much stuff we interact with every day,
how many things we see and smell and touch, if
we kept all of that, it would be it would
be nearly impossible to sort through, even with the processing
(22:28):
power of our brains. So a lot of experts actually
believe that memory exists in three stages. A lot of
times you'll hear short term versus long term memory, So
let's jump in here. The first type is the immediate
sensory memory. That's just what is occurring right now, the
way this table feels when I touch it. Then there's
short term memory, which is again about that twenty seconds
(22:51):
or a little bit, you know, give or take a
certain period of time. I remember how that table felt
when I touched it. And then finally long term men
and then that is just me when I'm walking around
at the house thinking about what that table felt like
when I touched it, right or I'm remembering it for
the next time. So each memory has to successfully pass
(23:11):
the filtration to get to the next tier to go
from sensory to short term to long.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Term and long term memory can store as far as
we can tell, an unlimited amount of data for an
infinite amount of time. But yes or sorry, an indefinite
amount of time. There's not a hard limit on it
the way short term memory is. We should also make
a slight detour here to say yes. So called total
(23:39):
recall memory edetic memory does exist, but it is very
very rare. That's the ability to recall something in near
totality after having only seen it once briefly. And there
are people who really can do this. There are people
who have the ability to look at a photograph and
(24:02):
then draw it really accurately from memory. There are people
who can tell you what they had for breakfast on
you know, June fifteenth, nineteen ninety eight, and they can
tell you what time it was when they had breakfast.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
You know. Yeah, but like you said, extremely rare, extremely
extremely rare. For me, I couldn't tell you what I
ate for breakfast yesterday.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Right, And true photographic memory, as far as we know,
like the actual facts, true photographic memory has not been
universally proven. There are compelling things, right. But then this
ties into the idea of the so called savant syndrome. Right,
(24:52):
So that's a story for another day. But the rules
we are describing for memory applied to easily ninety eight percent,
if not more, of the human population. Matt, You're absolutely right.
Long term memory is something that you have to earn.
If you're a little lingering scent of jasmine or lavender,
(25:13):
you start off in sensory memory, and you have to
crew up with other sensory with other sensations right to
progress through that hierarchy and hit the you know, hit
the big win, the immortality of a long term memory.
Most people have a pretty good memory. So the brutal
(25:34):
truth of this is any of your friends, any of
our friends who say, ah, I'm terrible with names, or
I just say a goat such a terrible memory. The
fact of the matter is, I'm not gonna say they're
lying to you, but they're not really trying to encode memories.
Most people are pretty good at this sort of stuff.
(25:56):
Various factors affect our memory at different junctures, and like
a lot of other physical faculties, memory does seem to
degrade with age, but we all typically start out with
a pretty sharp ability to recall things. One thing that's
interesting about how memory can be affected. Every time this
(26:17):
great computer cult your brain retrieves, it goes into I'm
thinking about the best way to put this. Okay, So
we have all probably heard the idea of set and setting,
or seen in setting for people who do hallucinogens. Right,
if you are already feeling anxious and you ingest a
(26:40):
hallucinogenic substance in a place that is a very stressful environment,
you know, or like sirens randomly go off, and there
are four hundred strangers you don't know, right, and they
all want to get in line for the bathroom. Essentially
every outdoor concert ever, whatever. Yeah, then you're going to
have a weird time. Memory is also vulnerable to the
(27:03):
present physical surroundings that you are in when you generate
a memory. So if you are having if you are
having a great time, you're super relaxed. Let's picture it.
You're on a hot tub on the shore of a
beautiful island. It's a nice, cool ocean breeze, the sun's setting,
(27:27):
You're hanging with people you like or whatever. You're at peace,
get a cold, frosty beverage, sitting on the rim of
the hot tub, whatever, and you remember something that was
sad or painful or hurtful. The fact that you are
in a nice, relaxed, secure, comfortable setting when you recall
(27:48):
this is going to study show, or studies seem to
indicate strongly, it's going to help mitigate the psychic trauma
of that earlier thing. The stuff that surrounds us in
the present affects the way we see our past.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, no, that I can totally see that. I mean
that's why if you're going to see a therapist or something,
it is in that type of set and setting that
is meant to be serene right as you're working through
some memories that are perhaps painful. It makes a lot
of sense. Now I'm now thinking all therapists should just
have hot tubs. Yeah, frosty beverages.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
I mean, you've been saying that for years.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Sunset and it good to go.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Only at sunset night therapy. That sounds like a strange show,
maybe on cinematic.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, late night HBO something
like that.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
So, so these long term memories differ from our short
term memories. Our short term memories are actually going to
be They're going to have a higher chance of being accurate,
just because our long term memories are based on the
repetitive intrusion of our present scene while we're remembering something, right,
(29:04):
So they get a little diluted. We play that game
of telephone. But there we have it as a very
very brief look at what human memory is and how
it works so far as we know. Now, why are
we talking about this because for hundreds of years, people
have been trying to alter memory in one way or another,
(29:27):
whether through the propagation of differing historical narratives aka burn
all the books, h censorship, let's get rid of anything
in that picture at Tianneman Square, right, hypnosis, hypnotic regression,
brainwashing like that old scene in Star Trek The Next
Generation where someone is torturing Picard and telling them to
(29:50):
see a different number of lights.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, or a pledge of allegiance that you have to
say every day when you're at school.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Right, which I bet is encoded in your memory too,
and also with a little bit of cadence, right, Like
you can probably recite the entire alphabet in your native language,
but if you have a native language that teaches children
the alphabet in the form of a song, it's kind
of it's really difficult to do it backwards, right.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
I still can't because.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
We don't know all you know, we don't know all
the letters independently we know the song. Yeah, it's like, oh,
which number is H. I'll get to it, just give
me a second. But yeah, So we've we've had this
history of people attempting to tweak modify revised memory, and
(30:40):
we've had mixed results. In fact, for most of human history,
the idea of purposely, surgically and precisely deleting a memory
seemed relegated to the world of science fiction. But what
if we could turn it into science fact. Here's where
it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Man. We're already deleting memories, and at least we figured
out how to do it right. That doesn't mean we're
doing it effectively necessarily, but some people have been figuring
out the means, and there are multiple studies, current and
very recent studies that confirm that it is indeed possible
(31:22):
to remove a specific memory or memories from an individual's brain.
That sounds crazy. That sounds like eternal sunshine.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
But it's real, and it is crazy. Be real? Does
it make it not crazy?
Speaker 2 (31:37):
I know, I know, I agree.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
With you there, like okay, So there's a twenty seventeen
study from the Columbia University Medical Center on snails.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Oh okay, all.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Right, And so they found that different types of memories
stored in the same neuron of marine snails can be
selectively erased here's the important part, without removing the other memory.
So they can just snip the one out. Here's how
they did it and those as reported by Science Daily.
(32:08):
They stimulated two sensory neurons connected to a single motor
neuron of the marine snail. One neuron, one sensory neuron
was stimulated to induce an associative memory, something that brings
up other experiences. Another was stimulated to induce a non
(32:29):
associative memory. And they found that they could measure the
strength of each connection. And by measuring the strength of
each of these snaptic connections, they could find the increase
in the strength of each connection produced by a different
stimuli was maintained by a different form of a protein
(32:51):
called protein kinase m PKM. And they have a couple.
There are two versions of this right side and a
b side associative memory, non associative. And they found that
if they blocked the specific type of PKM molecule involved,
(33:11):
they could block and erase the memory that needed that
that needed that enzyme in order to hit the conscious mind.
So it's all just chemistry.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
See this to me, just the fact that it's being
that snails are our subjects to try and figure out
if a memory can be you know, changed or deleted.
It definitely brings up questions for me, more philosophical questions
about the snail. But we do know neurologically those neurons,
those the way they're at least if you think about
(33:48):
it mechanically, how it's functioning is very similar to human neurons.
There's a you know, there's a thing that that remembers
a connection that then goes to a motor neuron which
will cause you to actually do something to physically make
a physical change in your body. And then these two
other pieces that they're messing with are just the thing
(34:09):
that actually holds the connection to the memory.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
So yeah, so they found that not only could you
block that recollection, but you could erase it by blocking
not PKM itself, but you could erase the memory by
blocking other molecules that help produce PKM the enzyme or
(34:34):
protect it from breaking down. So you can they not
only found the switch, they found the stuff that removes
or installs the switch. Whoa again, justin snails, because you
have to start small so you don't freak people out.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Right, Yeah, I guess so, I mean I get it. Well,
the good thing here is that this isn't some kind
of diabolical there's no diabolical behind wanting to figure out
what this is, or at least that's not stated. According
to our understanding is that these researchers are doing this
study to try and find some way to remove non
(35:13):
associative memories that end up triggering PTSD in people. Also
any kind of anxiety like either in general or otherwise
within humans. I very much like this. I think many
of us listening would would could do with this. We
would appreciate this. But again, the researchers also are very
(35:34):
very careful, at least according to the sources that we're using.
They're very careful to say that this is kind of
a proof of concept, right, a proof of principle, if
you will, And it's not absolute proof that we can
do this within humans, right.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
We're more showing the relationship the cause and effect between
these molecules. But there are other studies in body by
researchers at the University of California from back in twenty fourteen.
They found that light can be used to erase specific
memories from mice using a technique called optogenetics.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah, and this is where it's feeling closer and closer
to the eternal sunshine. Stuff actually using a physical medium
to change memories.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Right, and it's not as cool as the memory erasing
flashlight and men in black. Not yet, not yet, not yet.
So the scientists in this study used genetically modified mice
as their experiment and their control groups. The genetically modified
mice had nerve cells that would literally glow green and
(36:43):
express a protein allowing the cells to be switched off
by light. Light being the mechanism, and so this allowed
the scientists to trace the path of more or less
a memory from nerve cell in the cortex and hippocampus,
and they could see which cells were activated in learning
(37:05):
something new. They could also see which cells turned on
when the mouse was remembering something, and then they could
use a fiber optic cable to switch those cells off
using light.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah, whoa, it sounds so sci fi, but this is
how they summarize it.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
They train the mice by placing them in a cage
where they got a mild electrical shock. Now, normally mice
placed in a new environment will nose around and explore,
but when placed in a cage where they have previously
received a shock, they freeze in place because it's a
fear response.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Right, Yeah, you could see. You can see why it
would be illegal to do this with human subjects because
they first showed that they could label the cells involved
in learning and later in recollection. Then they were able
to switch those cells off, so that and then put
(38:02):
the mice back in the place where they got shocked,
and the mice had no idea because they they their
memory had been erased.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
So they just nose around like they would if it
was just another cage.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
And then they did their homework, you know, Methodologically speaking,
they kept it hygienic because they were able to show
that turning off different cells didn't mess with the memory
at all.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Right, So so they did find they were able to
hunt down the physical manifestation of a memory, which is
mind blowing. But this is just the beginning. We've talked
about erasing memories in animals, but what about creating memories?
(38:47):
What about the memories of human beings like you listening
along or Matt or Paul or so on. We'll explore
that after a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
And we're back. Now this is where we get into
the real, possibly creepy territory, because we're talking about making
memories that aren't real, or at least aren't exactly the
same as they could be altered too because science, as
it turns out, they're learning that some of the same
(39:28):
processes that we used or that we can manipulate to
erase memories can also be used to insert new recollections
that we haven't actually ever collected. It won't be a recollection,
it will be a new collection.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, let's just be a collection. Yeah, this is interesting.
This came out just a few days ago, I think
August twenty seventh, twenty nineteen, in the magazine Nature, scientists
published a report proving that they've been able to create
new memories by reverse engineering natural existing memories. And this
(40:06):
is even weirder than it sounds. Okay, so what they
did is they took they took one brain, one animal brain,
and they got a natural memory from it, right, something
that it would want to avoid because as you can see,
(40:27):
they're teaching on very primal levels pain response usually. And
then after they had mapped out the brain circuits involved
the switches, the patterns they had traced the web essentially
for this specific memory, they quote unquote trained another animal
by stimulating the brain cells of that animal in the
(40:48):
pattern of that first memory. This created an artificial memory
that behaved in the exact same way as the naturally
occurring one, the same a recollection pattern, the same retention everything.
So the quote from Nature reads this way. And these
were mice, I should say. In the recent study, the
(41:10):
natural memory was formed by training mice to associate a
specific odor, in this case cherry blossoms with a foot shock,
which they learned to avoid by passing down a rectangular
test chamber to another end that was infused with a
different odor, Carraway. The Careway scent came from a chemical
called carbone, while the cherry blossom scent came from another
(41:32):
chemical acedophenoe. The researchers found that this cherry blossom scented
chemical activated a specific type of receptor on a discrete
type of olfactory sensory nerve cell. Again, just like proost,
smell is a primary a primary medium for the encoding
(41:55):
of memory, and.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it
makes total sense as most animals over time use that
the scent, the sense of scent to find.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Their way, the sense of sense to hunt.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
To know their mate, to know like.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Everything and that still happens now, right, So, like that
earlier study, these scientists used optogenetics to activate those olfactory
nerve cells and what they found, of course, this is
surgically implanted fiber optic cable in their heads. It's not
(42:32):
like they're waving a flashlight out.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
The whole thing sounds barbaric when you think about all
the shocking and the inserted cables, but let's continue.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
But it's for science, that's right. So what they found
is that they could replicate this memory pattern in another mouse,
and that mouse would behave as though it had personally
experienced this earlier foot shock just from the sense, just
from the scent would help trigger the memory. Right, So
(43:04):
they have a little bit of insurance here because it
would you know, technically, theoretically it would be possible just
to use that experience of pain of shock to make
a transferable memory, but doubling down by activating olfactory sensations.
(43:24):
You know, that's pretty much what they're studying there. That
implies a lot of stuff, potentially not all of it good.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
I know.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
We're supposed to be very positive and extol the benefits
that this could pose for people suffering from very real
very torturous conditions like PTSD or generalized anxiety. But that's
not where it's not like fire can fire can warm you,
it can also burn down your house. Technology has never
(43:57):
come with any sort of inherent and ethical mandate. I
don't I don't know. You know why I'm I'm so
boxing a little bit about this, Matt is because, of
course DARPA has entered the game.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Of course, of course they were in this game before
they even announced it. I'm telling you, really, that's going
ton't surprise any of us that DARPA was like raising
their hand, going, well, we'd like to be involved, because
researchers associated with DARPA created this thing. It's a prosthetic
to allow for better memory.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Recall, Yeah, the march towards super soldierdom continues. This is incredible.
They're describing it as a prosthetic, and in the trial
they conducted, they showed a thirty five percent improvement in
both short and long term retention of visual information. Couple
this with the drugs that mean people don't have to sleep.
(44:56):
Couple this with you know, the genetic research going going
into the idea of giving people, you know, unbreakable bones.
Incredible BMI naturally that kind of stuff we're building potentially
super people. Of course, you know, I'm being a little
(45:17):
bit alarmist because all of these things are kind of siloed,
like the I think most of the people who are
working with DARPA money are just trying to prove they're
one very specific thing.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, but once you vulture on that stuff, the future
looks bright for very few.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
So we also know, since we're speaking about humans, we
know tale as old as times. Certain drugs can impair
or hinder memory. Right, if someone drinks too much, they
may not remember the entirety of what they did while
they were drinking. If someone is using certain narcos or
(46:00):
something that will also impair their memory, or some herbal supplements, yes,
some herbal supplements cough cough, but what about how far
does that go? Are there any drugs that are specifically
designed to erase entire experiences while and this is the
tricky part. Yeah, this is the part that herbal substances
(46:22):
cough cough. Narcotics and alcohol don't do. When they remove memories,
they remove like entire periods of memories. Yes, what if
there was a way to reach into the jenga tower
of human memory and steal entire floors without toppling the tower.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
That would be getting us into fully eternal sunshine territory, right,
like removing a single person from your memory inside the
Jenga tower that is all of your memories.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Right yeah, yeah, a real life eternal sunshine.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
And we have another report here, this time it's from
Scientific American and quote. Neuroscientists at McGill University and collaborators
have just reported in Molecular Pain.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Which is a scientific journal, not a really great name
for like an early two thousand zip up.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Well, it certainly sounds like both. But they've stated that
the chemical with the evocative acronym zip ZIP.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
That's ZIP, not Ziprecruider.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Nope, but do use them if you need to hire
ZIP can selectively wipe out the nervous system's memory of
the chronic aches and pains that plague about one in
four North Americans, apparently leaving other memories intact. Now that's incredible,
removing the memory of chronic pain. It makes you wonder
(48:01):
because again I've said this before, my back hurts. It
always hurts if I if I don't remember that it hurts.
Is that what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
It'll just be a brand new day of pain, like.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Oh, that that does hurt. That's weird. Why is my
back hurt?
Speaker 1 (48:17):
It will be your first time, every every time.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
It's what I've always wanted.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
You've always wanted, brand new back pain. I'm tired of
the same old back pain. Yeah. ZIP is the street
name for something called zeta inhibitory peptide. This inhibits the
memory preserving enzymes we mentioned before, pkms, right, so this
is pkm zeta. We don't know enough to determine exactly
(48:45):
where this stuff should be applied. We do know that
it definitely works. So this puts us a very strange,
very strange crossroads. Here's what would happen if you applied
it now. It would have to be injected directly into
your spinal cord. Is done over the counter tablet and
(49:06):
probably never will be. And if someone did that today,
injected some of this ZIP up into your spine, we
don't know. We know it would erase some stuff. We
just don't know what you might say. Oh okay, eternal
sunshine style, I no longer have to remember this breakup
(49:30):
that has riddled my life with regrets which you know
not to get too personal. I'm sure everybody has personally
experienced that or knows someone who has. You can see
why you would want that to go away. But you're
rolling the dice in a game that no one knows
the rules for. You might you might remove that breakup. Sure,
you might also remove the memory of your parents and
(49:52):
your entire family along with it.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
You'd begin mistaking your wife for a hat.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yes, yes, exactly. And I think I mentioned earlier the
idea of talking about an inexplicable memory. I want to
share this and see if we all have things like this,
and you know, you might surprise yourself when you find
that you have a similar thing. I have memories that
(50:22):
I know logically could not have well, I don't understand
how they would have occurred. So one of my earliest
memories is being on the second floor of a church
window or something like that, looking down and there's very
bright green grass. There is a police car with the
(50:45):
sirens on, parked on the grass, and there is a
white bed by the window with handcuffs and like blood
on the bed sheets. I've had this memory ever since
I was a kid, so whole leeh right, So it's
got to be. It's surely the logic glance would be,
this is something I saw on television right when I
(51:07):
was a we tyke, maybe before words something like that.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Maybe.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
But I think we all have those sensations or those
those sort of tableaus, right that we we think like
this is a very vivid image for me, Yeah, but
I don't know where it's where it's from.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
I have one like that, similarly, in a church with
a tornado warning of some sort or a sirens going
off and having to duck down and hide in a
darkened room while the sounds of a train go by.
But when I've recalled this to my mother, because it's
such a vivid memory of mine, sure she doesn't. She's
(51:42):
not exactly sure where when that would have occurred, or
which church or anything like that. And it's kind of
similar in the way that I don't know if it
actually happened.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Did we get mind wiped?
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
That's the problem with this. Let us know about your
your strange memories too, because for the first time in
human history, at least that we can recall, we are
on the verge of artificially controlling the individual perception of
the past. We have been making attempts as a species
to control the collective perception of the past. But now
(52:18):
we can open up the hood of every individual mind
and start to tinker with it. We're close to doing that.
And here's where the conversation gets sticky, because yes, as
you said, Matt, the obvious hope is this can be
used to remove painful traumatic experiences that trigger anxiety panic PTSD.
But also the same technology could possibly be used to
(52:41):
non consensually remove memories.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
That's the MiB style, right right.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Or whatever happened to us at that church. That's crazy.
I had no idea that you had a similar memory.
But like, what are some examples beyond PTSD about how
this stuff could be used.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Well, imagine that you're living in a country with some
kind of authoritarian rule. Right, Maybe you don't agree with
those people who are running the country, so you'd be
considered a dissident. Now imagine that within this country, you
end up being detained and you don't really recall exactly
what happens. But let's say you black out for one
reason or another, and you wake up hours later and
(53:21):
you can't remember all of the things that your government,
this authoritarian regime doesn't want you to remember. You remember
your family, you remember that you have a job that
you're going to every day. But for some reason, you
just feel calm, like everything's okay mm hmmm.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Or maybe you even have a different memory implanted, and
your memory is about how good it felt to you know,
say the pledge. Whoa, wow, which sounds like sci fi territory,
but you know, it wasn't so long ago that the
idea of erasing memories sounded like sci fi.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
And then imagine that occurring in mass right, not just
one person.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
Yeah, and here's another one. Imagine this is a little
bit less less sinister, maybe because this could be legal
at some point. Imagine you work with an organization, whether
state or private, that requires you to handle proprietary information,
sensitive documents, top secret, compartmentalized, your eyes only stuff. Whoa,
(54:29):
And then part of your contract says that when you retire,
you leave your job, that set of memories gets wiped.
Speaker 2 (54:39):
Dude, Imagine if it's just a short term contractor position
with something like Groom Lake or Area fifty one where
you only work for six months and then you get wiped.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
And then you wake up with you know, hundreds of
thousands of dollars in your bank account and a very
vague letter thanking you and warning you.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
From some front company. You'd certainly prevent the next Bobblasar.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yeah, quite possibly. And also again to be completely fair,
this is this is spitballing in speculation. We there.
Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah, but again I don't think any of these are
that much of a stretch.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
Yeah, but there's just so much more that would have
to happen with the science of it. Very true, We're
still unless the technology already exists and as somehow been
successfully suppressed, We're still very far away from these things.
But now they are possible, if that plausible.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Yeah, I mean it's very much a black mirror style,
like we can kind of see this occurring, or these
would be how it would These are a lot of
the things we can imagine it being used for.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
And here's another one. This one I think will be
exciting to some of the entrepreneurs in our audience today.
Imagine a world where you can pay to recreationally experience
the memories of other people.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (56:01):
So let's say it's another thing Disney gets evolved in.
They map out the memories of historic moments as experienced
by firsthand witnesses. They get like someone who's landed on
the moon.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Oh, they get doctor rendezvous memories.
Speaker 1 (56:19):
Yeah, they get doctor buzz rendezvous memory of landing on
the moon. They map it out, and now you can
pay whomever for them to implant that memory in your
head so that you get the first hand experience of
doing that. You can also live vicariously and do you know, philosophically,
(56:39):
it's almost the same as doing it yourself, right to
have the first hand memory, so you could participate in
crimes that you're not legally culpable for it because they
already happened.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
That's what it feels like to rob a bank.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
That's what Yeah, exactly, that's what it feels like to
rob a bank or something.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Oh. Oh, they would do terrible things for other stuff too.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
Right, And then if the memory becomes inconvenient, just have
it removed. And given that we would be talking about
a private entity selling this stuff, I bet there would
be a lot of money spent on figuring out how
to make the memory implant temporary. Yeah, because you want
to sell a service now, right, not a product, so
it would eventually degrade. But then also to end on
(57:22):
a positive note, is one I'm personally excited about. Imagine
the potential for learning. One day we might be able
to encode knowledge sets. Right.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
That's that's full on matrix stuff right there, exactly.
Speaker 1 (57:36):
It's not that far from neo. Right. You can wake
up being able to play a piano, speak.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
A new language, or say, I know kung fu.
Speaker 1 (57:45):
Maybe you're in a plane that's going down and you're
you're talking to the air traffic control and they say, okay,
break open the glass door by the by the cockpit
hallway and inject yourself with this, and then you know,
just lacause now you know how to land the plane.
(58:05):
You know, we're we're very far away from that, and
we don't know whether we'll ever reach that level of sophistication.
But the truth is this is potentially an enormous tool
for people who have stuff they don't want you to know.
They may be able to use it sooner than you think.
Speaker 2 (58:25):
Wow, it's really intense. And just to for my own
for my own happiness here, I can imagine if you
combined a bit of a controversial technique which would be
hypnotic regression, but maybe even take regression out if you
combined some kind of therapeutic counseling session with some of
(58:47):
these peptides, with some of the drugs and the enzymes
that we're talking about with ZIP and these things, and
to affect PKM. Imagine if you were given a dose
of something that was going to erase the things that
you think about for the next ten minutes to thirty minutes.
Then you have a guided counseling session that walks you
(59:09):
through the first time you saw your current partner the
first like the way they smell it, walks you through
all of that stuff as this enzyme or whatever it
is is actually degrading all of those connections. Then you
do it like three, you know, to ten times in
a row, and then eventually it's just gone.
Speaker 1 (59:28):
I don't know, I see what you're saying. There's also
this question, though, and of course this changes person to person,
but there's always this question what makes us us? A
lot of people who are maybe less on the spiritual
side will say you are, we are, or every person
(59:50):
is the sum of their own experiences and their own
synthesis and understanding of those experiences. Right, what I'm getting
at here and I need to find more articulate way
to think of this getting at is the question of threshold.
How many unsavory or unwanted memories can we remove before
(01:00:12):
it begins to affect core components like personality.
Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
It's a great question. I'm gonna say, around fifty.
Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Let's go you know what, Let's go for it. Let's
let's get past the mice, get straight to the people.
Let's do some experiments.
Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
But in all seriousness, if any of the technologies and
the experiments happening right now, if any of it comes
to full fruition, and this is only projecting just from
my own experience, but I can only imagine a lot
of service men and women, people who've served in militaries,
people who have been through traumatic experiences, would really appreciate
(01:00:55):
it and stand to benefit from a lot of this
stuff if you could do it in a safe way. True,
I really like this could be incredible.
Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
And memories are you know, as they say, memories are
one of the most important things a person has. Memories
at least up until now, or one of the only
things a person could possess that could never be taken
away from them.
Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
That's right, Memories and loose.
Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Diamonds memories and bags of loose diamonds. Thank you so
much for tuning in, folks. We hope that you found
this as fascinating as we did, and we hope that
you find the possible ethical concerns and possible consequences as
thought provoking and potentially disturbing as we have found them today.
(01:01:49):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think you can reach to. They have a
Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook X and YouTube
on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
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Speaker 1 (01:02:21):
We are the entities to read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Folks, As we are traveling through the holidays, taking a
little time off for our own completely non sketching a
mysterious adventures, we are presenting to you some of our
favorite classic episodes. Do you guys remember doing this one? No?
Because I was men in black mind erased about it?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
M wait, what are we talking about? You know?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Luckily we wrote this down. The past us is helping
the present us now. Back in twenty nineteen, it was
us we apparently asked ourselves, can memories be erased? What
would you do? You know, if you had a very
troubling traumatic memory of an experience that was so invasive
(00:41):
it messed with your present day life? You know what
I mean? This happens since memories a big deal, you know.
Shout out to every college kid who partied too hard
one time and now can't see a specific like brand
of alcohol or drug without five getting nauseated? Is this
like Sailor Jerry's shout out gold Schlagger? Just okay, not
(01:04):
as classy as it sounds, so jeger for me.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Wooo give me all of those guys. I just want
to drink up that syrupy Southern comfort, just that straight
triple sec Oh yeah, guys, is this kind of like
the Blind Eye Society's Memory gun. You know that gravity
falls thing. I hope everybody's seen gravity falls. I know
I'm way late to that already, but I finally, like,
(01:28):
I am obsessed with it and I just can't get enough.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
And you know, maybe I have seen it, but we
just don't be right. We know that the realm of
science fiction and science fact is increasingly getting fuzzy. So
check out this episode. Hope this message finds well. Folks.
Tell us the weirdest thing that you've seen with memories.
(01:53):
Oh shout out, uh Mendela effect or Mandala effect or
barn Steve Potato Potato zane. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt noel
Is on an audio adventure.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Quick before you forget your comments, your feedback,
your concerns, or your suggestions. Go ahead, at any point
(02:52):
while this episode is playing, pause it and give us
a call. Speak your conscience, speak your truth, let us
know if you do not want your words to go
on the air.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
That's right. Also speak your untruth whatever you wish, give
us a call. One eight three three std WYTK. Now
speaking of truth is an untruth. Then we've spoken many
times on this show about the the memory that you
(03:24):
have or an image in your mind is just the
last time you thought about something, Right.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
That's true. That's true. Longtime listeners will will remember this
because it's a very handy thing to point out whenever
we dive into any number of topics. And that is
a take for instance, well, we'll talk about memories a
lot today. Take for instance, the memory of the first
(03:50):
time you ate spaghetti.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Right, Okay, got it.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
That's it. That's a good that's a good example because
it ties into taste, smell, texture, all these other sensory
things that play a huge role in encoding memory.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
But and it's also probably not the first time you
ate spaghetti.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It is almost definitely not. It may not even be
a real time that you ate spaghetti, you are just
remembering the sensations that you associate with spaghetti. So we
just may have helped you make up a memory that
never happened. And today's show is about memories. Think about it, Matt.
(04:32):
Memories are humanity's earliest version of time travel. You can
hear a snatch of song, a vivid image pops up
in your mind, or something as small as a taste
can send you rocketing out of the present into the past.
In some cases, this is amazing and beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Think about smelling a cookie, a specific kind of cookie,
sure right, I mean it really is time traveling.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
A fresh baked cinnamon cookie or a Christmas cookie. Yea,
I see on it. This has been the launching ground
for so many crucial parts of human existence, and a
lot of literature and art as well remembrance of things
passed by proost. Essentially, it all starts because this guy
(05:21):
dips a Madeline into I think tea or some sort
of beverage and he tastes it and he goes wow.
I should write hundreds of pages about us.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Madeline is a cookie, correct, yes?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Or a biscuit?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, biscuit? Oh my gosh, you excuse us, right, But
then also think about the way people who are suffering
from Alzheimer's are able to retain memories through music, right, Like,
they may have difficulty recalling certain people, places or events
in their lives, but they can sing and hit every
(05:59):
note of a song from the sixties that they really loved.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Right. And then in the hope of current research and
future research is that you can you can use that
connection in some way to make even further connections.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Right, exactly, spot on. And here's the thing. This is
the reason why I really appreciate you using the word
hope there matts because as amazing as memories are, we
still do not understand everything about them. We know, for example,
that memories can be as as you said earlier, surprisingly treacherous,
(06:35):
and memories of the same event can change drastically over time.
That's why, especially in the days before widespread video and
audio capturing ability existed, that's why so many people would
swear they were at these big historical events after the fact,
they didn't think they were lying, you know what I mean,
(06:57):
the hundreds of thousands of people people who claimed they
were watching you know, like the Hindenburg disaster. Well, that
would probably be more in the millions or people who
claimed that they were in or around Tombstone at the
time of the so called wild West, right and during
the titular shootouts and stuff. Those people don't feel like
(07:21):
they're lying. They genuinely think they remember it. And now
we find ourselves inexorably drawn into the world of philosophy.
If a person's thoughts, their experiences, and their beliefs are
indeed the basis for the reality in which they exist,
then were they there.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, that's a tough one. And we're also going to
get into realms here with memories of something like trauma.
And you know, we're talking everything we've been talking about
right now, or memories that we would probably want to
retain or at least a hone or to have the
best version of, or we think we have the best
version of.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
But when you're speaking with memories of trauma or something
like that is there, you know, perhaps there is reason,
and rightly so, for us to want to alter those
memories or maybe even change them. Sure, and some people
have attempted in the past to do this.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Right, we know that people can, through accident or intention,
alter memories in various ways. One of the big debates
regarding this would be the technique known as hypnotic regression.
There are people who will swear up and down that
hypnotic regression has been used as a psychotherapeutic tool to
(08:45):
help people remember things that they had suppressed due to trauma. However,
and this is not to say that doesn't occur. However,
the evidence also shows us that people can be guided, steered,
pushed toward remembering things that did not happen, or remembering
(09:09):
things that happened in a different way in the objective reality.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, and there are techniques in psychological ways to try
and alter your own memories, either for good or for bad,
or those of other people. But some of the kind
of self changed things, or like memory palaces, constructing it
within your mind and then altering the way you view
this certain time or event. There's a lot of fascinating
(09:36):
stuff there.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
It's true, and we will inevitably hit different aspects of
this and along the way today we will show you
a little bit about how to hack your own memory.
But this is again for information purposes only. Yes, Paul
Matt and myself are not doctors. And even if we
(09:57):
were taking medical vice from a podcast is a terrible idea, uniport,
no caveat, terrible idea.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Even basic psychological advice. We don't take it from me
at least.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
I wouldn't even follow any of our film recommendations of
being honest, at least none of mine. So I'll also
share in the course of this episode a very odd
personal memory. And I would love some help or answers
about this because I still have questions. But okay, we
(10:33):
know that we can alter our own memories and other
people can alter our memories. We know that we don't
understand everything about memories. But what if we could take
it a step further? What if we could actually erase
a person's memory, a specific memory. In other words, what
if we can take the plot of Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind from the big screen to reality. That
(10:57):
is what we were exploring today, and to do so,
we need to first understand what exactly human memory is.
So here are the facts.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Let's begin with a summation of this idea of what
is a memory by a gentleman named Richard C. Moe's Mohs.
He wrote how human memory works for our friends over
at HowStuffWorks dot com. I was gonna say something that is,
like we remember thee or something like that, like we're
no longer officially with them, but they will always be
(11:30):
with us. Memory itself just describes the process by which
our minds store and then recall information. And again, it's
kind of connections, both literally and physically and metaphorically.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Mm hmm exactly. So for most of us Moe's writes,
we talk about memory as though it is another part
of our body, a thing we possess, like our organs
or our fingers. But the tricky part here is that
memory does not exist in quite the same way. We
(12:04):
can't touch it. It's more of a concept for most people,
or at least this was the case for the majority
of human history, and it may be tempting for us
to think of every single memory that we've ever had
as a single, discrete, specific thing. Imagine your first day
(12:25):
at school, right, or one of your first days That
memory probably exists distinct for a lot of people. Or
remember the first time you told a romantic partner you
love them and so on. You can put yourself back
in that moment.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, just your meet cute, even the first time you
saw your current partner.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Right exactly. When we think of these things on the offset,
we think of them as a single point, a snap
in this huge tapestry of experience that never ends until
we die and maybe continues a little bit after that.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
But the problem is that all things are interconnected here,
and memories no different. Your first day of school also
conjures up the idea of like your trapper keeper, your backpack,
what you have for lunch. That's sleepless night before the
first day of school.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
It's also being colored by your subsequent experiences with school
and how you feel about, you know, high school. Let's
say you're let's say you're in college. Right now, when
you're thinking about your first day of school, those memories
are hitting because of the way memory functions. As we're
going to get into here, it's hitting all of these
different parts of your your memories.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah right, because each of these things is really the
product of some incredibly, incredibly complex Rube Goldberg esque cognitive processing.
Every time you or my or anyone recalls a memory,
our brain is reassembling these very different impressions from a picture.
(14:03):
A spider web of cells scattered all throughout your brain
in different areas each memory that you have, and the
larger concept of what we call memory is a group
of different systems or webs interacting and playing a role
in creating, storing, and recalling experiences. Mose has a great
(14:24):
example of this. He talks about a pen. He says,
you know, if you think of an object like a pen,
your brain achieves the object's name, okay, pen, It's shape, cylindrical,
often right, overwhelmingly, its function okay.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Rites stuff, disperses in.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
The sound it makes when it scratches across a page.
For a lot of us, we would probably be more
familiar with a click sounds. So each part of the
memory of what a pen is exists in a different
part of your brain, and then all you need is
to think or hear the word pen, and boom, it
(15:03):
all comes together so fast, so quickly. You're not buffering.
There's no speed, there's no moment where you're totally lost,
and you're thinking, well, that sounds a sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Well for some of us, myself included, recalling specifics of
things is becoming more and more difficult again as myself,
as I get older. It's odd, it's like the connections
there aren't quite as steadfast as they once were.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So neurologists are still only at the
beginning of understanding how all these different little mental processes
come together to form what we call memory and to
create what we call remembering. We do know a little
(15:57):
bit about how memories form. When everything goes right.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah exactly. So the first thing that happens is your
senses are interacting with something in the world generally, and
these things, these sensations that your senses are picking up,
travel to this place in your brain called your hippocampus,
which then integrates various separate sensations into a single cohesive experience.
(16:22):
So again, kind of what we were talking about earlier, Ben,
let's go back to that love of your life, and
in this way, let's say it's your meat cutes. The
first time you turn a corner, there's the person you
end up being with for the rest of your life.
You think about the way they looked, perhaps what they're wearing,
the way their hair was. You heard their voice for
(16:43):
the first time, or at least what you're imagining now,
remembering the way their voice sounded. The first time you
smelled whatever cologne or whatever you smell they had going
on the deodorant, maybe it was just their natural smell.
This all gets rolled up into this single experience that
we consider to be the memory. Right, And according to
(17:05):
Moe's he actually goes into this into the actual occurrence
in your brain.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Right. He walks through how the hippocampus along with the
frontal cortex analyzes these sensory inputs. This, this is the
process of encoding. So if essentially think of your hippocampus
(17:33):
and the frontal cortex as the bouncers at the bar
of your recollection. Oh right, they're at the door. And
what they will do is they and we're totally anthropomorphizing
them here, but they will say, let's say you're walking
by and you smell an amazing eero stand right, yeah,
(17:54):
and walking by a whole all guys or whatever, and
you smell this and it's a great it's a great smell.
Or you see something distinct there, someone's making shwarma or whatever,
and this goes to your brain. These sensory inputs, the
visual input of watching that scene, the olfactory input of
smelling that food, and then your hippocampus your frontal cortex
(18:18):
are the they're the entities that say this is or
is not important, This does or does not make the pass.
As we indicated earlier, if they make it through, if
your long term memory, even your short term really, if
they make it through and become a short term memory.
They exist in a small chunk for no more than
(18:38):
twenty to thirty seconds for most people, and then someone
can ask you like, hey, what was happening there, you know,
twenty five seconds ago, and you'll be like, oh, there's
this guy's making sharma. It was great, you know, not
life changing, but yeah, you want some shwarma. That's how
that will work. But let's step back for a second.
So as these bits of infration get collected in short
(19:02):
term memory, they're stored in different parts of the brain.
We still don't know how our brains identify all these
things and know what to match to which events. Right,
so we know that we do know the physiological or
i should say the neurochemical process. Here. We all have
(19:22):
nerve cells in our brains. They connected things called synapsis, right.
A sygn apse is a connection there, and these cells
fire electrical pulses across the space between your nerves. And
when they fire, these electrical pulses. It triggers the release
of these neurotransmitters. Think of them like chemical corriers. The
(19:44):
neurotransmitters spread the information they carry across the spaces between
the cells. Each single brain cell can form thousands and
thousands of these links, creating all these the connections, these
webs that we mentioned earlier. The typical brain has about
typical human brain I should say, has about one hundred
(20:06):
trillion synapses. But these connections are not set in stone.
They constantly change as your brain cells organize themselves into
different groups to process information in different ways. And here's
where long term comes in. Every time that your brain
cells send these messages to one another, the synaptic connection
(20:29):
between them grows stronger. We can't emphasize this enough. This
is real mind over matter. Your thought processes, the things
that you choose to think about with no ostensible physical
action of your own, these things will change the physical
composition of your brain. I believe we may have mentioned
(20:50):
it on previous episodes, but we can see this effect
over time and it becomes quite profound. London taxi drivers right,
the area of the brain associated with spatial reasoning in
taxi drivers who have been driving for decades is physically
noticeably significantly larger than that of the ordinary driver. Same
(21:15):
thing with the parts of the brain responsible for empathy
in Buddhist monks who have meditated for quite.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
A while, as well as professional magic the gathering players
who've been playing for long enough time like, it's crazy
how many cards they have to remember and all the
different actions.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
I mean, you've done some real Twilight Zone stuff. I'm
gonna be honest with you. We also know that filtering
occurs during this encoding process. Most people don't remember most things, right,
But we still don't know exactly how this works. We're
going to pause just for a second. Let's all try
to remember what we examined here, and then we'll be
(21:55):
back to explore short and long term memory after a
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
And we're back now. As we were discussing before, not
all memories are created equally, and not all of our
senses are stored in the same way. Because really, if
you think about how much stuff we interact with every day,
how many things we see and smell and touch, if
we kept all of that, it would be it would
be nearly impossible to sort through, even with the processing
(22:28):
power of our brains. So a lot of experts actually
believe that memory exists in three stages. A lot of
times you'll hear short term versus long term memory, So
let's jump in here. The first type is the immediate
sensory memory. That's just what is occurring right now, the
way this table feels when I touch it. Then there's
short term memory, which is again about that twenty seconds
(22:51):
or a little bit, you know, give or take a
certain period of time. I remember how that table felt
when I touched it. And then finally long term men
and then that is just me when I'm walking around
at the house thinking about what that table felt like
when I touched it, right or I'm remembering it for
the next time. So each memory has to successfully pass
(23:11):
the filtration to get to the next tier to go
from sensory to short term to long.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Term and long term memory can store as far as
we can tell, an unlimited amount of data for an
infinite amount of time. But yes or sorry, an indefinite
amount of time. There's not a hard limit on it
the way short term memory is. We should also make
a slight detour here to say yes. So called total
(23:39):
recall memory edetic memory does exist, but it is very
very rare. That's the ability to recall something in near
totality after having only seen it once briefly. And there
are people who really can do this. There are people
who have the ability to look at a photograph and
(24:02):
then draw it really accurately from memory. There are people
who can tell you what they had for breakfast on
you know, June fifteenth, nineteen ninety eight, and they can
tell you what time it was when they had breakfast.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
You know. Yeah, but like you said, extremely rare, extremely
extremely rare. For me, I couldn't tell you what I
ate for breakfast yesterday.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Right, And true photographic memory, as far as we know,
like the actual facts, true photographic memory has not been
universally proven. There are compelling things, right. But then this
ties into the idea of the so called savant syndrome. Right,
(24:52):
So that's a story for another day. But the rules
we are describing for memory applied to easily ninety eight percent,
if not more, of the human population. Matt, You're absolutely right.
Long term memory is something that you have to earn.
If you're a little lingering scent of jasmine or lavender,
(25:13):
you start off in sensory memory, and you have to
crew up with other sensory with other sensations right to
progress through that hierarchy and hit the you know, hit
the big win, the immortality of a long term memory.
Most people have a pretty good memory. So the brutal
(25:34):
truth of this is any of your friends, any of
our friends who say, ah, I'm terrible with names, or
I just say a goat such a terrible memory. The
fact of the matter is, I'm not gonna say they're
lying to you, but they're not really trying to encode memories.
Most people are pretty good at this sort of stuff.
(25:56):
Various factors affect our memory at different junctures, and like
a lot of other physical faculties, memory does seem to
degrade with age, but we all typically start out with
a pretty sharp ability to recall things. One thing that's
interesting about how memory can be affected. Every time this
(26:17):
great computer cult your brain retrieves, it goes into I'm
thinking about the best way to put this. Okay, So
we have all probably heard the idea of set and setting,
or seen in setting for people who do hallucinogens. Right,
if you are already feeling anxious and you ingest a
(26:40):
hallucinogenic substance in a place that is a very stressful environment,
you know, or like sirens randomly go off, and there
are four hundred strangers you don't know, right, and they
all want to get in line for the bathroom. Essentially
every outdoor concert ever, whatever. Yeah, then you're going to
have a weird time. Memory is also vulnerable to the
(27:03):
present physical surroundings that you are in when you generate
a memory. So if you are having if you are
having a great time, you're super relaxed. Let's picture it.
You're on a hot tub on the shore of a
beautiful island. It's a nice, cool ocean breeze, the sun's setting,
(27:27):
You're hanging with people you like or whatever. You're at peace,
get a cold, frosty beverage, sitting on the rim of
the hot tub, whatever, and you remember something that was
sad or painful or hurtful. The fact that you are
in a nice, relaxed, secure, comfortable setting when you recall
(27:48):
this is going to study show, or studies seem to
indicate strongly, it's going to help mitigate the psychic trauma
of that earlier thing. The stuff that surrounds us in
the present affects the way we see our past.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, no, that I can totally see that. I mean
that's why if you're going to see a therapist or something,
it is in that type of set and setting that
is meant to be serene right as you're working through
some memories that are perhaps painful. It makes a lot
of sense. Now I'm now thinking all therapists should just
have hot tubs. Yeah, frosty beverages.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
I mean, you've been saying that for years.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Sunset and it good to go.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Only at sunset night therapy. That sounds like a strange show,
maybe on cinematic.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, late night HBO something
like that.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
So, so these long term memories differ from our short
term memories. Our short term memories are actually going to
be They're going to have a higher chance of being accurate,
just because our long term memories are based on the
repetitive intrusion of our present scene while we're remembering something, right,
(29:04):
So they get a little diluted. We play that game
of telephone. But there we have it as a very
very brief look at what human memory is and how
it works so far as we know. Now, why are
we talking about this because for hundreds of years, people
have been trying to alter memory in one way or another,
(29:27):
whether through the propagation of differing historical narratives aka burn
all the books, h censorship, let's get rid of anything
in that picture at Tianneman Square, right, hypnosis, hypnotic regression,
brainwashing like that old scene in Star Trek The Next
Generation where someone is torturing Picard and telling them to
(29:50):
see a different number of lights.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, or a pledge of allegiance that you have to
say every day when you're at school.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Right, which I bet is encoded in your memory too,
and also with a little bit of cadence, right, Like
you can probably recite the entire alphabet in your native language,
but if you have a native language that teaches children
the alphabet in the form of a song, it's kind
of it's really difficult to do it backwards, right.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
I still can't because.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
We don't know all you know, we don't know all
the letters independently we know the song. Yeah, it's like, oh,
which number is H. I'll get to it, just give
me a second. But yeah, So we've we've had this
history of people attempting to tweak modify revised memory, and
(30:40):
we've had mixed results. In fact, for most of human history,
the idea of purposely, surgically and precisely deleting a memory
seemed relegated to the world of science fiction. But what
if we could turn it into science fact. Here's where
it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Man. We're already deleting memories, and at least we figured
out how to do it right. That doesn't mean we're
doing it effectively necessarily, but some people have been figuring
out the means, and there are multiple studies, current and
very recent studies that confirm that it is indeed possible
(31:22):
to remove a specific memory or memories from an individual's brain.
That sounds crazy. That sounds like eternal sunshine.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
But it's real, and it is crazy. Be real? Does
it make it not crazy?
Speaker 2 (31:37):
I know, I know, I agree.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
With you there, like okay, So there's a twenty seventeen
study from the Columbia University Medical Center on snails.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Oh okay, all.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Right, And so they found that different types of memories
stored in the same neuron of marine snails can be
selectively erased here's the important part, without removing the other memory.
So they can just snip the one out. Here's how
they did it and those as reported by Science Daily.
(32:08):
They stimulated two sensory neurons connected to a single motor
neuron of the marine snail. One neuron, one sensory neuron
was stimulated to induce an associative memory, something that brings
up other experiences. Another was stimulated to induce a non
(32:29):
associative memory. And they found that they could measure the
strength of each connection. And by measuring the strength of
each of these snaptic connections, they could find the increase
in the strength of each connection produced by a different
stimuli was maintained by a different form of a protein
(32:51):
called protein kinase m PKM. And they have a couple.
There are two versions of this right side and a
b side associative memory, non associative. And they found that
if they blocked the specific type of PKM molecule involved,
(33:11):
they could block and erase the memory that needed that
that needed that enzyme in order to hit the conscious mind.
So it's all just chemistry.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
See this to me, just the fact that it's being
that snails are our subjects to try and figure out
if a memory can be you know, changed or deleted.
It definitely brings up questions for me, more philosophical questions
about the snail. But we do know neurologically those neurons,
those the way they're at least if you think about
(33:48):
it mechanically, how it's functioning is very similar to human neurons.
There's a you know, there's a thing that that remembers
a connection that then goes to a motor neuron which
will cause you to actually do something to physically make
a physical change in your body. And then these two
other pieces that they're messing with are just the thing
(34:09):
that actually holds the connection to the memory.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
So yeah, so they found that not only could you
block that recollection, but you could erase it by blocking
not PKM itself, but you could erase the memory by
blocking other molecules that help produce PKM the enzyme or
(34:34):
protect it from breaking down. So you can they not
only found the switch, they found the stuff that removes
or installs the switch. Whoa again, justin snails, because you
have to start small so you don't freak people out.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Right, Yeah, I guess so, I mean I get it. Well,
the good thing here is that this isn't some kind
of diabolical there's no diabolical behind wanting to figure out
what this is, or at least that's not stated. According
to our understanding is that these researchers are doing this
study to try and find some way to remove non
(35:13):
associative memories that end up triggering PTSD in people. Also
any kind of anxiety like either in general or otherwise
within humans. I very much like this. I think many
of us listening would would could do with this. We
would appreciate this. But again, the researchers also are very
(35:34):
very careful, at least according to the sources that we're using.
They're very careful to say that this is kind of
a proof of concept, right, a proof of principle, if
you will, And it's not absolute proof that we can
do this within humans, right.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
We're more showing the relationship the cause and effect between
these molecules. But there are other studies in body by
researchers at the University of California from back in twenty fourteen.
They found that light can be used to erase specific
memories from mice using a technique called optogenetics.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah, and this is where it's feeling closer and closer
to the eternal sunshine. Stuff actually using a physical medium
to change memories.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Right, and it's not as cool as the memory erasing
flashlight and men in black. Not yet, not yet, not yet.
So the scientists in this study used genetically modified mice
as their experiment and their control groups. The genetically modified
mice had nerve cells that would literally glow green and
(36:43):
express a protein allowing the cells to be switched off
by light. Light being the mechanism, and so this allowed
the scientists to trace the path of more or less
a memory from nerve cell in the cortex and hippocampus,
and they could see which cells were activated in learning
(37:05):
something new. They could also see which cells turned on
when the mouse was remembering something, and then they could
use a fiber optic cable to switch those cells off
using light.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah, whoa, it sounds so sci fi, but this is
how they summarize it.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
They train the mice by placing them in a cage
where they got a mild electrical shock. Now, normally mice
placed in a new environment will nose around and explore,
but when placed in a cage where they have previously
received a shock, they freeze in place because it's a
fear response.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Right, Yeah, you could see. You can see why it
would be illegal to do this with human subjects because
they first showed that they could label the cells involved
in learning and later in recollection. Then they were able
to switch those cells off, so that and then put
(38:02):
the mice back in the place where they got shocked,
and the mice had no idea because they they their
memory had been erased.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
So they just nose around like they would if it
was just another cage.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
And then they did their homework, you know, Methodologically speaking,
they kept it hygienic because they were able to show
that turning off different cells didn't mess with the memory
at all.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Right, So so they did find they were able to
hunt down the physical manifestation of a memory, which is
mind blowing. But this is just the beginning. We've talked
about erasing memories in animals, but what about creating memories?
(38:47):
What about the memories of human beings like you listening
along or Matt or Paul or so on. We'll explore
that after a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
And we're back. Now this is where we get into
the real, possibly creepy territory, because we're talking about making
memories that aren't real, or at least aren't exactly the
same as they could be altered too because science, as
it turns out, they're learning that some of the same
(39:28):
processes that we used or that we can manipulate to
erase memories can also be used to insert new recollections
that we haven't actually ever collected. It won't be a recollection,
it will be a new collection.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, let's just be a collection. Yeah, this is interesting.
This came out just a few days ago, I think
August twenty seventh, twenty nineteen, in the magazine Nature, scientists
published a report proving that they've been able to create
new memories by reverse engineering natural existing memories. And this
(40:06):
is even weirder than it sounds. Okay, so what they
did is they took they took one brain, one animal brain,
and they got a natural memory from it, right, something
that it would want to avoid because as you can see,
(40:27):
they're teaching on very primal levels pain response usually. And
then after they had mapped out the brain circuits involved
the switches, the patterns they had traced the web essentially
for this specific memory, they quote unquote trained another animal
by stimulating the brain cells of that animal in the
(40:48):
pattern of that first memory. This created an artificial memory
that behaved in the exact same way as the naturally
occurring one, the same a recollection pattern, the same retention everything.
So the quote from Nature reads this way. And these
were mice, I should say. In the recent study, the
(41:10):
natural memory was formed by training mice to associate a
specific odor, in this case cherry blossoms with a foot shock,
which they learned to avoid by passing down a rectangular
test chamber to another end that was infused with a
different odor, Carraway. The Careway scent came from a chemical
called carbone, while the cherry blossom scent came from another
(41:32):
chemical acedophenoe. The researchers found that this cherry blossom scented
chemical activated a specific type of receptor on a discrete
type of olfactory sensory nerve cell. Again, just like proost,
smell is a primary a primary medium for the encoding
(41:55):
of memory, and.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it
makes total sense as most animals over time use that
the scent, the sense of scent to find.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Their way, the sense of sense to hunt.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
To know their mate, to know like.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Everything and that still happens now, right, So, like that
earlier study, these scientists used optogenetics to activate those olfactory
nerve cells and what they found, of course, this is
surgically implanted fiber optic cable in their heads. It's not
(42:32):
like they're waving a flashlight out.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
The whole thing sounds barbaric when you think about all
the shocking and the inserted cables, but let's continue.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
But it's for science, that's right. So what they found
is that they could replicate this memory pattern in another mouse,
and that mouse would behave as though it had personally
experienced this earlier foot shock just from the sense, just
from the scent would help trigger the memory. Right, So
(43:04):
they have a little bit of insurance here because it
would you know, technically, theoretically it would be possible just
to use that experience of pain of shock to make
a transferable memory, but doubling down by activating olfactory sensations.
(43:24):
You know, that's pretty much what they're studying there. That
implies a lot of stuff, potentially not all of it good.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
I know.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
We're supposed to be very positive and extol the benefits
that this could pose for people suffering from very real
very torturous conditions like PTSD or generalized anxiety. But that's
not where it's not like fire can fire can warm you,
it can also burn down your house. Technology has never
(43:57):
come with any sort of inherent and ethical mandate. I
don't I don't know. You know why I'm I'm so
boxing a little bit about this, Matt is because, of
course DARPA has entered the game.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Of course, of course they were in this game before
they even announced it. I'm telling you, really, that's going
ton't surprise any of us that DARPA was like raising
their hand, going, well, we'd like to be involved, because
researchers associated with DARPA created this thing. It's a prosthetic
to allow for better memory.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Recall, Yeah, the march towards super soldierdom continues. This is incredible.
They're describing it as a prosthetic, and in the trial
they conducted, they showed a thirty five percent improvement in
both short and long term retention of visual information. Couple
this with the drugs that mean people don't have to sleep.
(44:56):
Couple this with you know, the genetic research going going
into the idea of giving people, you know, unbreakable bones.
Incredible BMI naturally that kind of stuff we're building potentially
super people. Of course, you know, I'm being a little
(45:17):
bit alarmist because all of these things are kind of siloed,
like the I think most of the people who are
working with DARPA money are just trying to prove they're
one very specific thing.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, but once you vulture on that stuff, the future
looks bright for very few.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
So we also know, since we're speaking about humans, we
know tale as old as times. Certain drugs can impair
or hinder memory. Right, if someone drinks too much, they
may not remember the entirety of what they did while
they were drinking. If someone is using certain narcos or
(46:00):
something that will also impair their memory, or some herbal supplements, yes,
some herbal supplements cough cough, but what about how far
does that go? Are there any drugs that are specifically
designed to erase entire experiences while and this is the
tricky part. Yeah, this is the part that herbal substances
(46:22):
cough cough. Narcotics and alcohol don't do. When they remove memories,
they remove like entire periods of memories. Yes, what if
there was a way to reach into the jenga tower
of human memory and steal entire floors without toppling the tower.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
That would be getting us into fully eternal sunshine territory, right,
like removing a single person from your memory inside the
Jenga tower that is all of your memories.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Right yeah, yeah, a real life eternal sunshine.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
And we have another report here, this time it's from
Scientific American and quote. Neuroscientists at McGill University and collaborators
have just reported in Molecular Pain.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Which is a scientific journal, not a really great name
for like an early two thousand zip up.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Well, it certainly sounds like both. But they've stated that
the chemical with the evocative acronym zip ZIP.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
That's ZIP, not Ziprecruider.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Nope, but do use them if you need to hire
ZIP can selectively wipe out the nervous system's memory of
the chronic aches and pains that plague about one in
four North Americans, apparently leaving other memories intact. Now that's incredible,
removing the memory of chronic pain. It makes you wonder
(48:01):
because again I've said this before, my back hurts. It
always hurts if I if I don't remember that it hurts.
Is that what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
It'll just be a brand new day of pain, like.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Oh, that that does hurt. That's weird. Why is my
back hurt?
Speaker 1 (48:17):
It will be your first time, every every time.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
It's what I've always wanted.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
You've always wanted, brand new back pain. I'm tired of
the same old back pain. Yeah. ZIP is the street
name for something called zeta inhibitory peptide. This inhibits the
memory preserving enzymes we mentioned before, pkms, right, so this
is pkm zeta. We don't know enough to determine exactly
(48:45):
where this stuff should be applied. We do know that
it definitely works. So this puts us a very strange,
very strange crossroads. Here's what would happen if you applied
it now. It would have to be injected directly into
your spinal cord. Is done over the counter tablet and
(49:06):
probably never will be. And if someone did that today,
injected some of this ZIP up into your spine, we
don't know. We know it would erase some stuff. We
just don't know what you might say. Oh okay, eternal
sunshine style, I no longer have to remember this breakup
(49:30):
that has riddled my life with regrets which you know
not to get too personal. I'm sure everybody has personally
experienced that or knows someone who has. You can see
why you would want that to go away. But you're
rolling the dice in a game that no one knows
the rules for. You might you might remove that breakup. Sure,
you might also remove the memory of your parents and
(49:52):
your entire family along with it.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
You'd begin mistaking your wife for a hat.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yes, yes, exactly. And I think I mentioned earlier the
idea of talking about an inexplicable memory. I want to
share this and see if we all have things like this,
and you know, you might surprise yourself when you find
that you have a similar thing. I have memories that
(50:22):
I know logically could not have well, I don't understand
how they would have occurred. So one of my earliest
memories is being on the second floor of a church
window or something like that, looking down and there's very
bright green grass. There is a police car with the
(50:45):
sirens on, parked on the grass, and there is a
white bed by the window with handcuffs and like blood
on the bed sheets. I've had this memory ever since
I was a kid, so whole leeh right, So it's
got to be. It's surely the logic glance would be,
this is something I saw on television right when I
(51:07):
was a we tyke, maybe before words something like that.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Maybe.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
But I think we all have those sensations or those
those sort of tableaus, right that we we think like
this is a very vivid image for me, Yeah, but
I don't know where it's where it's from.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
I have one like that, similarly, in a church with
a tornado warning of some sort or a sirens going
off and having to duck down and hide in a
darkened room while the sounds of a train go by.
But when I've recalled this to my mother, because it's
such a vivid memory of mine, sure she doesn't. She's
(51:42):
not exactly sure where when that would have occurred, or
which church or anything like that. And it's kind of
similar in the way that I don't know if it
actually happened.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Did we get mind wiped?
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
That's the problem with this. Let us know about your
your strange memories too, because for the first time in
human history, at least that we can recall, we are
on the verge of artificially controlling the individual perception of
the past. We have been making attempts as a species
to control the collective perception of the past. But now
(52:18):
we can open up the hood of every individual mind
and start to tinker with it. We're close to doing that.
And here's where the conversation gets sticky, because yes, as
you said, Matt, the obvious hope is this can be
used to remove painful traumatic experiences that trigger anxiety panic PTSD.
But also the same technology could possibly be used to
(52:41):
non consensually remove memories.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
That's the MiB style, right right.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Or whatever happened to us at that church. That's crazy.
I had no idea that you had a similar memory.
But like, what are some examples beyond PTSD about how
this stuff could be used.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Well, imagine that you're living in a country with some
kind of authoritarian rule. Right, Maybe you don't agree with
those people who are running the country, so you'd be
considered a dissident. Now imagine that within this country, you
end up being detained and you don't really recall exactly
what happens. But let's say you black out for one
reason or another, and you wake up hours later and
(53:21):
you can't remember all of the things that your government,
this authoritarian regime doesn't want you to remember. You remember
your family, you remember that you have a job that
you're going to every day. But for some reason, you
just feel calm, like everything's okay mm hmmm.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Or maybe you even have a different memory implanted, and
your memory is about how good it felt to you know,
say the pledge. Whoa, wow, which sounds like sci fi territory,
but you know, it wasn't so long ago that the
idea of erasing memories sounded like sci fi.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
And then imagine that occurring in mass right, not just
one person.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
Yeah, and here's another one. Imagine this is a little
bit less less sinister, maybe because this could be legal
at some point. Imagine you work with an organization, whether
state or private, that requires you to handle proprietary information,
sensitive documents, top secret, compartmentalized, your eyes only stuff. Whoa,
(54:29):
And then part of your contract says that when you retire,
you leave your job, that set of memories gets wiped.
Speaker 2 (54:39):
Dude, Imagine if it's just a short term contractor position
with something like Groom Lake or Area fifty one where
you only work for six months and then you get wiped.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
And then you wake up with you know, hundreds of
thousands of dollars in your bank account and a very
vague letter thanking you and warning you.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
From some front company. You'd certainly prevent the next Bobblasar.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yeah, quite possibly. And also again to be completely fair,
this is this is spitballing in speculation. We there.
Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah, but again I don't think any of these are
that much of a stretch.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
Yeah, but there's just so much more that would have
to happen with the science of it. Very true, We're
still unless the technology already exists and as somehow been
successfully suppressed, We're still very far away from these things.
But now they are possible, if that plausible.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Yeah, I mean it's very much a black mirror style,
like we can kind of see this occurring, or these
would be how it would These are a lot of
the things we can imagine it being used for.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
And here's another one. This one I think will be
exciting to some of the entrepreneurs in our audience today.
Imagine a world where you can pay to recreationally experience
the memories of other people.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (56:01):
So let's say it's another thing Disney gets evolved in.
They map out the memories of historic moments as experienced
by firsthand witnesses. They get like someone who's landed on
the moon.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Oh, they get doctor rendezvous memories.
Speaker 1 (56:19):
Yeah, they get doctor buzz rendezvous memory of landing on
the moon. They map it out, and now you can
pay whomever for them to implant that memory in your
head so that you get the first hand experience of
doing that. You can also live vicariously and do you know, philosophically,
(56:39):
it's almost the same as doing it yourself, right to
have the first hand memory, so you could participate in
crimes that you're not legally culpable for it because they
already happened.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
That's what it feels like to rob a bank.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
That's what Yeah, exactly, that's what it feels like to
rob a bank or something.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Oh. Oh, they would do terrible things for other stuff too.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
Right, And then if the memory becomes inconvenient, just have
it removed. And given that we would be talking about
a private entity selling this stuff, I bet there would
be a lot of money spent on figuring out how
to make the memory implant temporary. Yeah, because you want
to sell a service now, right, not a product, so
it would eventually degrade. But then also to end on
(57:22):
a positive note, is one I'm personally excited about. Imagine
the potential for learning. One day we might be able
to encode knowledge sets. Right.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
That's that's full on matrix stuff right there, exactly.
Speaker 1 (57:36):
It's not that far from neo. Right. You can wake
up being able to play a piano, speak.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
A new language, or say, I know kung fu.
Speaker 1 (57:45):
Maybe you're in a plane that's going down and you're
you're talking to the air traffic control and they say, okay,
break open the glass door by the by the cockpit
hallway and inject yourself with this, and then you know,
just lacause now you know how to land the plane.
(58:05):
You know, we're we're very far away from that, and
we don't know whether we'll ever reach that level of sophistication.
But the truth is this is potentially an enormous tool
for people who have stuff they don't want you to know.
They may be able to use it sooner than you think.
Speaker 2 (58:25):
Wow, it's really intense. And just to for my own
for my own happiness here, I can imagine if you
combined a bit of a controversial technique which would be
hypnotic regression, but maybe even take regression out if you
combined some kind of therapeutic counseling session with some of
(58:47):
these peptides, with some of the drugs and the enzymes
that we're talking about with ZIP and these things, and
to affect PKM. Imagine if you were given a dose
of something that was going to erase the things that
you think about for the next ten minutes to thirty minutes.
Then you have a guided counseling session that walks you
(59:09):
through the first time you saw your current partner the
first like the way they smell it, walks you through
all of that stuff as this enzyme or whatever it
is is actually degrading all of those connections. Then you
do it like three, you know, to ten times in
a row, and then eventually it's just gone.
Speaker 1 (59:28):
I don't know, I see what you're saying. There's also
this question, though, and of course this changes person to person,
but there's always this question what makes us us? A
lot of people who are maybe less on the spiritual
side will say you are, we are, or every person
(59:50):
is the sum of their own experiences and their own
synthesis and understanding of those experiences. Right, what I'm getting
at here and I need to find more articulate way
to think of this getting at is the question of threshold.
How many unsavory or unwanted memories can we remove before
(01:00:12):
it begins to affect core components like personality.
Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
It's a great question. I'm gonna say, around fifty.
Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Let's go you know what, Let's go for it. Let's
let's get past the mice, get straight to the people.
Let's do some experiments.
Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
But in all seriousness, if any of the technologies and
the experiments happening right now, if any of it comes
to full fruition, and this is only projecting just from
my own experience, but I can only imagine a lot
of service men and women, people who've served in militaries,
people who have been through traumatic experiences, would really appreciate
(01:00:55):
it and stand to benefit from a lot of this
stuff if you could do it in a safe way. True,
I really like this could be incredible.
Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
And memories are you know, as they say, memories are
one of the most important things a person has. Memories
at least up until now, or one of the only
things a person could possess that could never be taken
away from them.
Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
That's right, Memories and loose.
Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Diamonds memories and bags of loose diamonds. Thank you so
much for tuning in, folks. We hope that you found
this as fascinating as we did, and we hope that
you find the possible ethical concerns and possible consequences as
thought provoking and potentially disturbing as we have found them today.
(01:01:49):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think you can reach to. They have a
Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook X and YouTube
on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
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If you got more to say than can fit in
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Speaker 1 (01:02:21):
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