September 13, 2019 • 63 mins
It sounds like a quandary 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.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Matt Noel is on
an audio adventure. They call me Ben. We are joined
as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decond.
Most importantly, you are you. 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
(00:47):
your suggestions. Go ahead, at any point 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,
that's right. Also speak your untruth whatever you wish, give
us a call. One eight three three s T d
(01:08):
W y t K now. Speaking of truth is an untruth. Ben.
We've spoken many times on this show about the the
memory that you have or an image in your mind
is just the last time you thought about something. Right.
That's true, that's true. Long time listeners will well remember
(01:33):
this because it's a very handy thing to point out
whenever we dive into any number of topics, and that
is take for instance, well, we'll talk about memories a
lot today. Take for instance, uh, the memory of the
first time you ate spaghetti. Right, Okay, got it. That's
a that's a good that's a good example because it
(01:56):
ties into taste, smell, texture, all these other sensory things
that play a huge role in encoding memory. But and
it's also probably not the first time you ate spaghetti.
It is almost definitely not. It may not even be
a real time that you ate spaghetti. You're just remembering
the sensations that you associate with spaghetti. So we just
(02:21):
may have helped you make up a memory that never happened.
And today's show is about memories. Think about it that
memories are humanity's earliest version of time travel. You can
hear a snatch of song, of 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.
(02:44):
In some cases, this is amazing and beautiful. Think about
smelling a cookie, a specific kind of cookie. Sure, I mean,
it really is time traveling. A fresh baked cinnamon cookie
or a Christmas cook icing on it. The This has
been the launching ground for so many crucial parts of
(03:09):
human existence, and a lot of literature and art as
well remembrance of things passed by proost. Essentially, it all
starts because this guy dips a Madeline into I think
tea or some sort of beverage and he tasted it,
and he goes, wow, I should write hundreds of pages
about cookie. Correct, yes, yeah, biscuit, Oh my gosh, yeah,
(03:33):
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
(03:54):
can sing and hit every note of uh, you know,
a song from the sixties that they really loved, Right.
And then 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, right, exactly, spot on.
And here's the thing. This is the reason why I
(04:16):
really appreciate you using the word hope they're Matt's 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, and memories
of the same event can change drastically over time. That's why,
(04:37):
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.
The hundreds of thousands of people who claimed they were watching,
(05:01):
you know, like the Hindenburg disaster, well that would probably
be more than millions or people who claimed that they
were in or around Tombstone at the time of the
so called wild West, right uh, and during the titular
shootouts and stuff. Those people don't feel like they're lying.
They genuinely think they remember it. And now we we
(05:23):
find ourselves inexorably drawn into the world of philosophy. If
a person's thoughts, their experiences, their beliefs are indeed the
basis for the reality in which they exist, then were
they there. Yeah, that's a that's a tough one. And
we're we're also going to get into realms here with
(05:46):
memories of something like trauma, and you know, we're talking
everything we've been talking about right now, are 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. Right, But when you're
speaking with memories of trauma or something like that, is
there you know, perhaps there is reason, and rightly so,
(06:09):
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. 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
(06:31):
known as hypnotic regression. There are people who will swear
up and down that hypnotic regression has been used as
a psychotherapeutic tool to 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
(06:55):
us that people can be guided, steered up, pushed towards
remembering things that did not happen or remembering things that
happened in a different way in the objective reality. Yeah,
and there are techniques and in psychological ways to try
(07:17):
and alter your own memories, either for good or for bad,
or those of of other people, but some of the
kind of self change things or like memory palaces, constructing
it within your mind and then altering the way you
view this certain time or event. Um, there's a lot
of fascinating stuff there, It's true, and we will we
will inevitably hit different aspects of this and along the
(07:39):
way today we will show you a little bit about
how to hack your own memory. But this is again
for information purposes only. Paul, Matt and myself are not doctors.
Uh And even if we were taking medical advice from
a podcast is a terrible idea, uniformly no caveat, terrible idea,
(08:04):
even basic psychological advice. For me, at least, I wouldn't
even follow any of our film recommendations, and being honest,
at least none of mine. Uh So I'll also share
in the course of this episode a very odd personal memory.
(08:24):
Uh And I would love some helper answers about this
because I still have questions. But Okay, we 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,
(08:45):
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 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. Let's begin with a summation of this idea
(09:09):
of what is a memory by a gentleman named Richard C.
Mos m o h s. He wrote how human memory
works for our friends over at how stuff works dot com.
Um I was gonna say something that are like we
remember thee or something like that, like we're no longer
officially with them, but they will always be with us.
Memory itself just describes the process by which our minds
(09:32):
store and then recall information. And again it's kind of connections,
both literally and physically and metaphorically exactly so for most
of us, most rights, we talk about memory as though
it is another part of our body, a thing we possess,
(09:52):
like our organs or our fingers. But the tricky part
here is that memory does not exist in quite the
same way. We 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
(10:15):
that we've ever had as a single, discrete, specific thing.
Imagine your first day at school, right or one of
your first days that memory, uh 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, just your
(10:37):
meat cute, even the first time you saw your current
partner right exactly when we when we think of these
things on the offset, we think of them as a
single point, a snap in in this huge tapestry of
experience that never ends until we die and maybe continues
a little bit after that. But the problem is that
(11:00):
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 sleepless night before the first day of school.
It's also being colored by your subsequent experiences with school
and how you feel about, you know, high school. Let's
(11:21):
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
gonna get into here, it's hitting all of these different
parts of your your memories, yeah right, because each of
these things is really the product of some incredibly, incredibly
(11:43):
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 uh picture, a spider
web of cells scattered all throughout your brain in different areas.
(12:06):
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 story
and recalling experiences. Mose has a great example of this.
He talks about a pen. He says, you know, if
(12:26):
you think of an object like a pen, your brain
achieves the object's name, okay, pen, it's shape, cylindrical, often right, overwhelmingly,
it's function, okay, writes stuff. Uh, the sound it makes
when it scratches across the page. For a lot of us,
we would probably be more familiar with a click sounds.
(12:48):
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 all comes together so fast,
so quickly. You're not buffering. There's no speed there, there's
no moment where you're totally lost and you're thinking that
(13:09):
sounds a sounds familiar. Um 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 uh steadfast
(13:30):
as they once were. 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
(13:53):
do know a little bit about how memories form. When
everything goes right, yeah exactly. Uh 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
(14:17):
into a single cohesive experience. Uh So again, kind of
what we were talking about earlier. Then 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. Um. You you
think about the way they looked, perhaps what they're wearing,
(14:38):
the way their hair was. You heard their voice for
the first time, or at least what you're imagining now,
remembering the way their voice sounded. The first time you
smelled whatever whatever cologne or whatever you know, smell they
had going on the deodorant. Maybe it was just their
natural smell. Uh. This all gets rolled up into this
single experience that we can it or to be the memory. Right,
(15:02):
And according to mosh he he actually goes into this
into the actual occurrence in your brain. Right. He walks
through how the hippocampus along with the frontal cortex analyzes
the sensory inputs. This this is the process of encoding.
(15:26):
So if essentially think of your hippocampus and the frontal
cortex as the bouncers at the bar of your recollection
right there at the door. And what they will do
is they and we're totally anthropomorphizing them here but but
but they will say, let's say you're walking by and
(15:47):
you smell an amazing hero stand right and wlcome by
a holala guys or whatever, and you smell this and
it's a great it's a great smell, or you see
something distinct there, or someone's making schwarma or whatever, and
your this goes to your brain. These sensory inputs, the
visual input of watching that scene, uh, the olfactory input
(16:10):
of smelling that food, and then your hippocampus, your frontal
cortex 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, just your even your short term,
(16:31):
if they make it through and become a short term memory.
They exist in a small chunk for no more than
seconds for most people, and then someone can ask you like, hey,
what was happening there, you know, seconds ago, and I'll
be like, oh, there was this guy's making schwarma. It
was great, you know, not life changing, but yeah you
want some schwarma. That's how that will work. But uh,
(16:52):
let's let's step back for a second. So as these
bits of information get collected in short 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 event. Right, so we know
(17:13):
that we do know the physiological or i should say,
the neurochemical process. Here. We all have nerve cells in
our brains. They connected things called synapsis, right. A synapse
is a connection there, and these cells fire electrical pulses
across the space between your nerves. And when they fire
(17:34):
these electrical pulses, it triggers the release of these neurotransmitters.
Think of them like chemical corriers. The neurotransmitters spread the
information they carry across the spaces between the cells. Each
single brain cell can form thousands and thousands of these links,
(17:54):
creating all these other connections, these webs that we mentioned earlier.
The typical brain has about typical human brain I should say,
has about a hundred trillion synapsis. But these connections are
not set in stone. They constantly change as your brain
cells organize themselves into different groups to process information in
(18:15):
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 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
(18:39):
ostensible physical action of your own, these things will change
the physical composition of your brain. I believe we may
have mentioned 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 rain associated with
(19:01):
spatial reasoning in taxi drivers who have been driving for
decades is physically noticeably significantly larger than that of the
ordinary driver. Uh. Same thing with the parts of the
brain responsible for empathy in Buddhist Buddhist monks who have
meditated for quite a while, as well as professional magic.
(19:22):
The gathering players have been playing for long enough time,
Like it's crazy how many cards they have to remember
and all the different actions. I mean, you've done some
real Twilight Zone stuff. I'm gonna be honest with you.
We 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
(19:47):
just for a second. Let's all try to remember what
what we examined here, and then we'll be back to
explore short and long term memory after a word from
our sponsor, and we're back now. As we were discussing before,
not all memories are created equally, and not all of
(20:10):
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 power of our brains. So a lot of experts
actually believe that memory exists in three stages. A lot
(20:32):
of times you'll hear short term versus long term memory,
So let's 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
their short term memory, which is again about that twenty
seconds or a little bit, you know, give or take
a certain period of time, I remember how that table
(20:54):
felt when I touched it. And then finally long term memory,
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
the filtration to get to the next tier to go
from sensory to short term to long term, and long
(21:15):
term memory can store as far as we can tell
an unlimited amount of data for an infinite amount of time.
We but yes, I'm 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 recall memory adetic
(21:38):
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 then draw it
(22:02):
really accurately from memory. There are people who can tell
you what they have for breakfast on you know, June nine,
and they can tell you what time it was when
they add breakfast. You know. Yeah, but like you said,
extremely rare, extremely extremely rare. Uh for for me, I
(22:25):
couldn't tell you what I ate for breakfast yesterday? Right?
And true photographic memory as far as we know, like
the the actual facts, true photographic memory has not been
universally proven. There are there are compelling things. Right. But
then this ties into the idea of the so called
(22:47):
savant syndrome. Right, So that's a story for another day.
But the rules we are describing for memory applied to easily,
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,
(23:10):
you start off in sensory memory and you have to
you have to crew up with other sensory with other sensations.
Right two, 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
(23:31):
truth of this is any of your friends, any of
our friends, who say I'm terrible with names, or I've
just said I've got such a terrible memory. The fact
of the matter is, I'm not going to 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.
(23:53):
Various factors affect our memory at different junctures, and like
a lot of other physical faculty tease, memory does seem
to degrade with age, but we all typically start out
with a with a pretty sharp ability to recall things.
If one think that's interesting about how how memory can
be affected. Every time this great computer called your brain retrieves,
(24:17):
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 ingested a hallucinogenic substance in a place
(24:40):
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,
then you're going to have a weird time. Memory is
also vulnerable to the you present physical surroundings that you
(25:04):
are in when you generate a memory. So if you
are having a if you are having a great time,
you're super relaxed. Let's picture it. Um, You're on a
hot tub and the shore of a beautiful island. It's
a nice cool ocean breeze, the sun's setting, you're hanging
(25:25):
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 this
(25:47):
is going to study show or studies seem to indicate
strongly it's going to help mitigate the psychic trauma of
that earlier thing. Uh, the stuff that surrounds us in
the present affects the way we see our past. Yeah, no,
that I can totally see that. I mean that's why
(26:09):
if you're going to see a therapist or something, it
is in that type of setence, 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 I'm thinking all therapists should just have hot tubs. Yeah,
frosty beverages. I mean, you've been saying that for years.
Sunset and good to go only sunset night therapy. That
(26:33):
sounds like a strange show. Maybe on cinemat late night
HBO or something like that. So so these long term
memories differ from our short term memories. Are short term
memories are actually going to be They're going to have
a higher chance of being accurate, just because our long
(26:53):
term memories are based on the repetitive intrusion of our
present scene while we're remembering something. Right, So they get
a little deluded. We played 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
(27:17):
this because four hundreds of years people have been trying
to alter memory in one way or another, whether through
the propagation of differing historical narratives a k a. Burn
all the books, uh, censorship, let's get rid of anything
in that picture at tianamen square right, hypnosis, hypnotic regression,
(27:39):
brainwashing like that old singing in Star Trek the Next
Generation where someone is torturing Picard and telling them to,
you know, see a different number of lights yeah, or
a pledge of allegiance that you have to say every
day when you're at school, right, which I bet is
encoded in your memory too, And also with a little
bit of cadence, right, Like, like, you can probably site
(28:00):
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. I still can't because
we don't know all you know, we don't know all
the letters independently we know the song. It's like, oh,
(28:22):
which numbers. 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 we've
had mixed results. In fact, for most of human history,
the idea of purposely, surgically and precisely deleting a memory
(28:46):
seemed relegated to the world of science fiction. But what
if we could turn it into science fact. Here's where
it gets crazy. Man. We're all ready delete memories, and
at least we figured out how to do it. Right.
That doesn't mean we're we're we're doing it effectively necessarily,
(29:08):
but some people have been figuring out the means and um.
There are multiple studies, current and and very recent studies
that confirm that it is indeed possible to remove a
specific memory or memories from an individual's brain. That sounds crazy,
That sounds like eternal sunshine. But it's real, and it
(29:31):
is crazy. Being real doesn't make it not crazy. I
agree with you. They're like, Okay, So there's a twenty
seventeen study from the Columbia University Medical Center on snails. Okay,
all right, And so they found that different types of
memories stored in the same neuron of marine snails can
(29:52):
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. They stimulated two sensory neurons connected to a
single motor neuron of the marine snail. One neuron one
(30:15):
sensory neuron was stimulated to induce an associative memory, something
that brings up other experiences. Another was stimulated to induce
a non 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
(30:38):
the increase in the strength of each connection produced by
a different stimuli was maintained by a different form of
a protein called protein kinase m p k M, and
they have they have a couple. There are two versions
of this right A side and B side associative memory
(31:00):
non associative. And they found that if they blocked the
specific type of p k M molecule involved, they could
block and erase the memory that needed that that needed
that enzyme in order to hit the conscious mind. So
(31:20):
it's all just chemistry. 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 uh, at least if
(31:45):
you think about a mechanically how it's functioning, it's very
similar to a humans neurons. There's a you know, there's
a thing that that remembers a connection that then goes
to a motor neuron which then will cause you to
actually do something to pasically change make a physical change
in your body. And then these two other pieces that
they're messing with are just the thing that actually holds
(32:08):
the connection to the memory. So yeah, so they they
found that not only could you block that recollection, but
you could erase it by blocking not PKM itself, but
you could you could erase the memory by blocking other
molecules that helped produce PKM the enzyme or protect it
(32:32):
from breaking down, So you can you 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 right, Yeah,
I guess so, I mean, I get it. The good
(32:52):
thing here is that this isn't some kind of diabolical
There's no diabolical reason behind wanting to figure out this is,
or at least that's not stated UM. According to you know,
our understanding is that these researchers are doing this study
to try and find some way to remove non associative
memories that end up triggering PTSD in people, also any
(33:15):
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, UM.
But again, the researchers also are very very careful, at
least according to the sources that we're using. They're very
(33:37):
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, We're more showing the relationship to cause
an effect between these molecules. But there are other studies.
In a study by researchers at the University of California
(34:00):
from back in they found that light can be used
to erase specific memories from mice using a technique called optogenetics. Yeah,
and this is where it's feeling closer and closer to
the eternal sunshine stuff. Actually using a physical medium to
change memories, right, And it's not as cool as the
(34:21):
memory erasing flashlight men in black. Not yet, not yet,
not yet. So the scientists in this study used genetically
modified mice as their experiment. In their control groups. Uh,
the genetically modified mice had nerve cells that would literally
glow green and express a protein allowing the cells to
(34:43):
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 cells in the
cortex and hippocampus, and they could see which cells were
activated in learning something new. They could also see which
(35:04):
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. Yeah, whoa, it sounds so
sci fi, but this is how they summarize it. Quote.
They trained the mice by placing them in a cage
where they got a mild electrical shock. Now, normally mice
(35:26):
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. Right. Yeah, you can see. You can see
why it would be illegal to do this with human subjects.
(35:47):
Because they first showed that they could label the cells
involved in learning and and later in recollection. Then they
were able to switch those cells off. So and that,
and then at the mice back in the place where
they got shocked, and the mice had no idea because
they they their memory had been a race, so they
just knows around like they would if it was just
(36:09):
another cage. 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. Right, So so they did find
they were able to hunt down the physical manifestation of
(36:30):
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? What about the memories of human
beings like you listening along or Matt or Paul or
(36:50):
so on. Will explore that after a word from our sponsors,
and we're back. Now this is where we get into
the real, possibly creepy territory, because we're talking about making
(37:13):
memories that aren't real, or at least aren't exactly the
same as they could be altered too. Because sciences, it
turns out, uh, they're learning that some of the same
processes that we used or that we can manipulate to
erase memories can also be used to insert new recollections
(37:35):
that we haven't actually ever collected. It won't be a recollection,
it will be a new collection. Let's be a collection. Yeah,
this is interesting. This came out just a few days ago,
I think August seven, in the magazine Nature. Scientists published
a report proving that they have been able to create
(37:58):
new memories by reverse engineering natural existing memories. And this
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
(38:21):
that it would want to avoid, because as you can see,
they're 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
(38:45):
the pattern of that first memory. This created an artificial
memory that behaved in the exact same way as the
naturally occurring one, the same recollection pattern, the same ret mention, everything.
So the quote from Nature reads this way. And these
were mice, I should say. In the recent study, the
(39:07):
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, caraway. The caraway scent came from a chemical
called carbone, while the cherry blossom scent came from another chemical,
(39:30):
a CD phino. 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 Proust,
smell is a primary um primary medium for the encoding
(39:52):
of memory. If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective,
it makes total sense, as most animals over time used
the scent, the sense of scent to to find their way,
the sense of sense to their mate, to know like everything,
and that still happens now, right, So like that earlier study,
(40:16):
these scientists used optogenetics to activate those old factory nerve cells.
And what they found, of course, this is surgically implanted
fiber optic cable in in their heads. It's not like
they're waving a flashlight up. The whole thing sounds barbaric
when you think about all the shocking and the inserted cables,
(40:37):
but let's continue. But it's for science, that's right. So,
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 scent, just from the scent would help
(40:58):
trigger the memory. Uh So they have a little bit
of insurance here because it would you know it, 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. You know, that's pretty much
(41:22):
what they're studying there. That implies a lot of stuff,
potentially not all of it good. I know, I know,
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
(41:47):
not where It's not like fire can fire can warm you,
it can also burn down your house. Technology has never
come with any sort of inherent ethical mandate. I U,
I don't know. You know why I'm I'm so boxing
a little bit about this matter is because, of course
DARPA has entered the game. Of course, of course they
(42:09):
were in this game before they even announced it. I'm
telling you, um, really that shouldn't surprise any of us.
The DARPA was like raising their hand going will we'd
like to be involved because researchers associated with DARPA created
this thing. It's a prosthetic to allow for better memory. Recall, Yeah,
(42:31):
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 pc improvement in both short
and long term retention of visual information. Couple this with
the drugs that mean people don't have to sleep. Couple
(42:54):
this with you know, the genetic research going going into
the idea of giving people, you know, unbreakable bones, incredible
b m I naturally that kind of stuff we're we're building, uh,
potentially super people. Of course, you know, I'm being a
(43:14):
little 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 their one very specific thing. Yeah, but once you
vulture on that stuff, the future looks bright for very few.
(43:34):
Uh So we also know, since we're speaking about humans,
we know tal as old as times, certain drugs can
and 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 uh,
(43:56):
certain narcotics or something that will also impair their memory,
or some herbal supplements, yes, some herbal supplements cough cough coff,
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, This is the
(44:17):
part that herbal substances cough cough, narcotics and alcohol don't do.
When they remove memories, they remove like entire periods of memories.
What if there was a way to reach into the
Jenga Tower of human memory and steal entire floors without
(44:37):
toppling the tower. 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 your memories, right,
uh yeah, yeah, a real life eternal sunshine. And we
(45:03):
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, of which is a scientific journal
not a really great name for like an early two
thousand tip up. It certainly sounds like both, but they've
(45:26):
stated that the chemical with the evocative acronym ZIP ZILP.
That's z I P, not ZIP recruiter, 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
(45:52):
memory of chronic pain. It makes you wonder 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? It'll just be a
brand new day of pain. Like oh that that does hurt.
(46:14):
That's weird. It will be your first time every every time.
That's what I've always wanted, as 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. Who mentioned before, p
(46:36):
k M's right, So this is p k M Zeta.
We don't know enough to determine exactly 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
(46:59):
would have to be in je did directly into your
spinal cord. Is done over the counter tablet and probably
never will be. Uh. 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
(47:22):
sunshine style. I no longer have to remember this breakup
that has riddled my life with regrets which you know
not to get too personal. I'm sure everybody has personally
experienced that or know 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
(47:42):
the rules for you. Might you might remove that break up. Sure,
you might also remove the memories of your parents and
your entire family along with it. You'd begin mistaking your
wife for a hat. Yes, yes, exactly. And I think
I mentioned earlier the idea of talking about an inexplicable memory.
(48:04):
I want to share this and see if we all
have things like this, um, and you know, you might
surprise yourself when you find that that you have a
similar thing. I have memories that I know logically could
not have well, I don't understand how they would have occurred.
(48:26):
So one of my earliest memories is being on the
second floor of a church window or something like that,
looking down, uh, and there's very bright green grass. There
is a police car with the sirens on, parked on
the grass, and there is a white bed by the
(48:48):
window with handcuffs and like blood on the bedsheets. HAVE
had this memory ever since I was a kid, So holy, right,
so it's got to be it's surely the logic lance
would be, this is something I saw on television right
when I was a wee tyke, maybe before words something
like that. Maybe, But I think we all have those
(49:09):
sensations or those those sort of tableaus, right that we
we think like this is a very vivid image for me,
but I don't know where it's where it's from. 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
(49:29):
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 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.
(49:50):
Did we get mindwiped? I don't know. 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
(50:13):
perception of the past, but now 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
(50:36):
the same technology could possibly be used to non consensually
remove memories. That's the m I style rights right or whatever.
Happened to us at that church. That's crazy. I had
no idea that you had a similar memory. But like, what,
what are some examples beyond PTSD about how this stuff
could be used? Well, imagine that you're living in a
(50:58):
country with some kind of author terryan rule. Right, maybe
you don't agree with those people who are running the country,
so you'd be considered a dissident um. 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 you can't remember all of the
(51:21):
things that your government, this authoritarian regime doesn't want you
to remember. You remember your family, 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. Or
maybe you even have a different memory implanted. Uh, and
your memory is about how good it felt to you know,
(51:45):
say the pledge, which sounds like sci fi territory, but
you know, it wasn't so long ago that the idea
of a racing memories sounded like sci fi. And then
imagine that process occurring in mass right, not just one person. Yeah,
and you know, here's another one. Imagine this is a
little bit less less sinister, maybe because this this could
(52:08):
be legal at some point. Imagine you work with an organization,
whether state or private, that requires you to handle proprietary information,
uh sensitive documents, top secret, compartmentalized, your eyes only stuff,
and then part of your contract says that when you retire,
(52:30):
you leave your job, that set of memories gets wiped. Dude,
Imagine if it's just a short term contractor position with
something like groom Lake or where you only work for
six months and then you get wiped, and then you
wake up with you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of
(52:50):
dollars in your bank account and a very vague letter
thanking you, a warning you from some front company. You'd
certainly prevent the next babbos are Yeah, quite possibly. And
also again to be completely fair, this is this is
spitballing and speculation. We there, Yeah, but again I don't
(53:13):
think any of these are that much of a stretch. 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 existed, as some of them successfully suppressed.
We're still very far away from these things, but now
they are possible, if not plausible. Yeah, I mean it's
(53:34):
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. 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.
(53:58):
M So, let's say it's other thing Disney gets involved in.
They map out the memories of historic moments as as
experienced by firsthand witnesses. They get like someone who's landed
on the moon, the doctor Rendezvous memories. Yeah, they get
doctor buzz Rendezvous memory of landing on the moon. They
(54:20):
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, it's
it's almost the same as doing it yourself, right to
have the first hand memory, so you could participate in
(54:43):
crimes that you are not legally culpable for it because
they already happened. That's what it feels like to a bank,
That's what yeah, exactly, that's what it feels like to
rob a bank or something terrible things for other stuff too, right,
And then if the memory becomes inconvenient, just have it removed.
And given that we would be talking about a private
(55:03):
entity selling this stuff, I bet there would be a
lot of money spent on figuring out how to make
the memory implant temporary, because you want to sell a
service now, right, not a product, so it would eventually degrade.
But then also to end on a positive note, is
one I am personally excited about. Imagine the potential for learning.
(55:25):
One day we might be able to encode knowledge sets. Right.
That's that's full on matrix stuff right there, exactly. It's
not that far from neo. Right. You can wake up
being able to play a piano, speak a new language,
kung fu. Maybe you're in a plane that's going down
(55:45):
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 thing.
And then you know, just lay out to play because
now you know how to land the plane. Uh, you know,
we're we're very far away from that and we don't
(56:06):
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
that they may be able to use it sooner than
you think. Wow, it's really intense and just too for
my own uh for my own happiness. Here, I can
(56:29):
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 these peptides, with some of the drugs and
the enzymes that we're talking about with ZIP and these things,
(56:50):
and to affect p k M. 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 through the first time you saw
your current partner, the first like the way they smell,
(57:13):
walks you through all of that stuff. As this enzyme
or whatever it is, is actually degrading all of those
connections that you do it like three, you know, to
ten times in a row, and then eventually it's just gone.
I don't know. There's there's the I see what you're saying.
There's also this question though, and of course, uh, this
changes person to person, but there's always this question what
(57:37):
makes us us? A lot of people who are maybe
less on the spiritual side will say you are, we are,
or every person is the some 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
(57:58):
more articulate ways to think of this. I'm getting at
is the question of threshold. How many unsavory or unwanted
memories can we remove before it begins to affect core
components like personality. It's a great question. I'm gonna say,
around fifty let's go you know what, Let's go for it.
(58:20):
Let's let's get past the mice, get straight to the people.
Let's do some experiments. But in all seriousness, if if
any of the the technologies and the experiments happening right now,
if any of it comes to full fruition. UM, And
this is only projecting just from my own experience, but
I can only imagine a lot of service men and women,
(58:43):
people who have served in militaries, people who have been
through traumatic experiences. UM, would really appreciate it, instand to
benefit from a lot of this stuff if you could
do it in a safe way. I really feel like
this could be incredible. And memorys are you know? As
as they say, memories are one of the most important
(59:06):
things a person has. Memories, at least up until now,
where one of the only things a person could possess
that could never be taken away from them. Memories and
loose diamonds. Memories and bags of loose diamonds. Thank you
so much for tuning in, folks. We hope that you've
(59:27):
found 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. We want to hear what you think.
Should we live in a world where people can sell
(59:49):
the memories of others directly into someone's brain. Should we
live in a world where you can take away the
pain that a particular memory gives you. And if we
live in a world where that technology is possible, what
is to stop other groups, organizations, institutions, or entities from
(01:00:10):
non consensually removing or implanting memories that jibe with their
with their desired pattern of the world. Wow, right to us.
You can find us on social We're at conspiracy stuff
in most places, at conspiracy stuff on Instagram. Yeah, Ben,
what is your personal Instagram? You can find me getting
(01:00:33):
kicked into and out of all sorts of places on
my Instagram named in a burst of creativity at Ben Bolan.
Most definitely in Japan. There's some Japan stuff in there,
a lot of it. I did erase some of it,
some of it is still around. Yeah, there are memories
of Japan floating out there in the in the ether. Alright,
(01:00:55):
so uh check that stuff out. You can find us
on Facebook, join our group. Here's where it gets crazy,
where you can talk with all of the conspiracy realists
out there who have been listening to this. You can
have discussions with them and with us. Sometimes it just depends.
You can see me insisting that Matt Frederick is the
Tom Hanks of how stuff works did you see that threat? No?
I did not. He's also the I don't even know
(01:01:19):
if you I don't know what the equivalent is, the
guy that's never there. He's always around, but he's never
there on the socials at least. Oh okay, okay, he's like, wow,
do you have an absentee Tom Hanks? Yeah, that's exactly
what it is. Like. I love Tom Hanks, but he's
never physically there for me. Yeah. I mean they never
check your backyard for bodies, all right, so you can
(01:01:41):
also find us. Um well, one of the best things
to do is give us a call. We are one
eight three three st d w y t K. Your
voice may end up on an episode. Let us know
if you don't want it to, but otherwise, just let
us know what you're thinking. And please support my good
(01:02:02):
friend writer dive Matt Frederick as he literally is the
person who goes through those voicemails. Thank you so much, Matt.
I have got to do a better job. This is
like the fifth time on air that me or ghost
Nol has said, look, we'll help you out. I really
need it. I just need that log in. But you
(01:02:22):
may be saying to yourself, I hate the phone. I
don't like social media. We of all people get that completely.
We're on board with you, and that's why we always
have one last way you can contact us. The rumors
are true, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. H
(01:03:04):
Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is a production
of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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 I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Matt Noel is on
an audio adventure. They call me Ben. We are joined
as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decond.
Most importantly, you are you. 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
(00:47):
your suggestions. Go ahead, at any point 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,
that's right. Also speak your untruth whatever you wish, give
us a call. One eight three three s T d
(01:08):
W y t K now. Speaking of truth is an untruth. Ben.
We've spoken many times on this show about the the
memory that you have or an image in your mind
is just the last time you thought about something. Right.
That's true, that's true. Long time listeners will well remember
(01:33):
this because it's a very handy thing to point out
whenever we dive into any number of topics, and that
is take for instance, well, we'll talk about memories a
lot today. Take for instance, uh, the memory of the
first time you ate spaghetti. Right, Okay, got it. That's
a that's a good that's a good example because it
(01:56):
ties into taste, smell, texture, all these other sensory things
that play a huge role in encoding memory. But and
it's also probably not the first time you ate spaghetti.
It is almost definitely not. It may not even be
a real time that you ate spaghetti. You're just remembering
the sensations that you associate with spaghetti. So we just
(02:21):
may have helped you make up a memory that never happened.
And today's show is about memories. Think about it that
memories are humanity's earliest version of time travel. You can
hear a snatch of song, of 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.
(02:44):
In some cases, this is amazing and beautiful. Think about
smelling a cookie, a specific kind of cookie. Sure, I mean,
it really is time traveling. A fresh baked cinnamon cookie
or a Christmas cook icing on it. The This has
been the launching ground for so many crucial parts of
(03:09):
human existence, and a lot of literature and art as
well remembrance of things passed by proost. Essentially, it all
starts because this guy dips a Madeline into I think
tea or some sort of beverage and he tasted it,
and he goes, wow, I should write hundreds of pages
about cookie. Correct, yes, yeah, biscuit, Oh my gosh, yeah,
(03:33):
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
(03:54):
can sing and hit every note of uh, you know,
a song from the sixties that they really loved, Right.
And then 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, right, exactly, spot on.
And here's the thing. This is the reason why I
(04:16):
really appreciate you using the word hope they're Matt's 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, and memories
of the same event can change drastically over time. That's why,
(04:37):
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.
The hundreds of thousands of people who claimed they were watching,
(05:01):
you know, like the Hindenburg disaster, well that would probably
be more than millions or people who claimed that they
were in or around Tombstone at the time of the
so called wild West, right uh, and during the titular
shootouts and stuff. Those people don't feel like they're lying.
They genuinely think they remember it. And now we we
(05:23):
find ourselves inexorably drawn into the world of philosophy. If
a person's thoughts, their experiences, their beliefs are indeed the
basis for the reality in which they exist, then were
they there. Yeah, that's a that's a tough one. And
we're we're also going to get into realms here with
(05:46):
memories of something like trauma, and you know, we're talking
everything we've been talking about right now, are 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. Right, But when you're
speaking with memories of trauma or something like that, is
there you know, perhaps there is reason, and rightly so,
(06:09):
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. 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
(06:31):
known as hypnotic regression. There are people who will swear
up and down that hypnotic regression has been used as
a psychotherapeutic tool to 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
(06:55):
us that people can be guided, steered up, pushed towards
remembering things that did not happen or remembering things that
happened in a different way in the objective reality. Yeah,
and there are techniques and in psychological ways to try
(07:17):
and alter your own memories, either for good or for bad,
or those of of other people, but some of the
kind of self change things or like memory palaces, constructing
it within your mind and then altering the way you
view this certain time or event. Um, there's a lot
of fascinating stuff there, It's true, and we will we
will inevitably hit different aspects of this and along the
(07:39):
way today we will show you a little bit about
how to hack your own memory. But this is again
for information purposes only. Paul, Matt and myself are not doctors.
Uh And even if we were taking medical advice from
a podcast is a terrible idea, uniformly no caveat, terrible idea,
(08:04):
even basic psychological advice. For me, at least, I wouldn't
even follow any of our film recommendations, and being honest,
at least none of mine. Uh So I'll also share
in the course of this episode a very odd personal memory.
(08:24):
Uh And I would love some helper answers about this
because I still have questions. But Okay, we 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,
(08:45):
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 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. Let's begin with a summation of this idea
(09:09):
of what is a memory by a gentleman named Richard C.
Mos m o h s. He wrote how human memory
works for our friends over at how stuff works dot com.
Um I was gonna say something that are like we
remember thee or something like that, like we're no longer
officially with them, but they will always be with us.
Memory itself just describes the process by which our minds
(09:32):
store and then recall information. And again it's kind of connections,
both literally and physically and metaphorically exactly so for most
of us, most rights, we talk about memory as though
it is another part of our body, a thing we possess,
(09:52):
like our organs or our fingers. But the tricky part
here is that memory does not exist in quite the
same way. We 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
(10:15):
that we've ever had as a single, discrete, specific thing.
Imagine your first day at school, right or one of
your first days that memory, uh 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, just your
(10:37):
meat cute, even the first time you saw your current
partner right exactly when we when we think of these
things on the offset, we think of them as a
single point, a snap in in this huge tapestry of
experience that never ends until we die and maybe continues
a little bit after that. But the problem is that
(11:00):
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 sleepless night before the first day of school.
It's also being colored by your subsequent experiences with school
and how you feel about, you know, high school. Let's
(11:21):
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
gonna get into here, it's hitting all of these different
parts of your your memories, yeah right, because each of
these things is really the product of some incredibly, incredibly
(11:43):
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 uh picture, a spider
web of cells scattered all throughout your brain in different areas.
(12:06):
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 story
and recalling experiences. Mose has a great example of this.
He talks about a pen. He says, you know, if
(12:26):
you think of an object like a pen, your brain
achieves the object's name, okay, pen, it's shape, cylindrical, often right, overwhelmingly,
it's function, okay, writes stuff. Uh, the sound it makes
when it scratches across the page. For a lot of us,
we would probably be more familiar with a click sounds.
(12:48):
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 all comes together so fast,
so quickly. You're not buffering. There's no speed there, there's
no moment where you're totally lost and you're thinking that
(13:09):
sounds a sounds familiar. Um 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 uh steadfast
(13:30):
as they once were. 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
(13:53):
do know a little bit about how memories form. When
everything goes right, yeah exactly. Uh 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
(14:17):
into a single cohesive experience. Uh So again, kind of
what we were talking about earlier. Then 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. Um. You you
think about the way they looked, perhaps what they're wearing,
(14:38):
the way their hair was. You heard their voice for
the first time, or at least what you're imagining now,
remembering the way their voice sounded. The first time you
smelled whatever whatever cologne or whatever you know, smell they
had going on the deodorant. Maybe it was just their
natural smell. Uh. This all gets rolled up into this
single experience that we can it or to be the memory. Right,
(15:02):
And according to mosh he he actually goes into this
into the actual occurrence in your brain. Right. He walks
through how the hippocampus along with the frontal cortex analyzes
the sensory inputs. This this is the process of encoding.
(15:26):
So if essentially think of your hippocampus and the frontal
cortex as the bouncers at the bar of your recollection
right there at the door. And what they will do
is they and we're totally anthropomorphizing them here but but
but they will say, let's say you're walking by and
(15:47):
you smell an amazing hero stand right and wlcome by
a holala guys or whatever, and you smell this and
it's a great it's a great smell, or you see
something distinct there, or someone's making schwarma or whatever, and
your this goes to your brain. These sensory inputs, the
visual input of watching that scene, uh, the olfactory input
(16:10):
of smelling that food, and then your hippocampus, your frontal
cortex 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, just your even your short term,
(16:31):
if they make it through and become a short term memory.
They exist in a small chunk for no more than
seconds for most people, and then someone can ask you like, hey,
what was happening there, you know, seconds ago, and I'll
be like, oh, there was this guy's making schwarma. It
was great, you know, not life changing, but yeah you
want some schwarma. That's how that will work. But uh,
(16:52):
let's let's step back for a second. So as these
bits of information get collected in short 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 event. Right, so we know
(17:13):
that we do know the physiological or i should say,
the neurochemical process. Here. We all have nerve cells in
our brains. They connected things called synapsis, right. A synapse
is a connection there, and these cells fire electrical pulses
across the space between your nerves. And when they fire
(17:34):
these electrical pulses, it triggers the release of these neurotransmitters.
Think of them like chemical corriers. The neurotransmitters spread the
information they carry across the spaces between the cells. Each
single brain cell can form thousands and thousands of these links,
(17:54):
creating all these other connections, these webs that we mentioned earlier.
The typical brain has about typical human brain I should say,
has about a hundred trillion synapsis. But these connections are
not set in stone. They constantly change as your brain
cells organize themselves into different groups to process information in
(18:15):
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 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
(18:39):
ostensible physical action of your own, these things will change
the physical composition of your brain. I believe we may
have mentioned 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 rain associated with
(19:01):
spatial reasoning in taxi drivers who have been driving for
decades is physically noticeably significantly larger than that of the
ordinary driver. Uh. Same thing with the parts of the
brain responsible for empathy in Buddhist Buddhist monks who have
meditated for quite a while, as well as professional magic.
(19:22):
The gathering players have been playing for long enough time,
Like it's crazy how many cards they have to remember
and all the different actions. I mean, you've done some
real Twilight Zone stuff. I'm gonna be honest with you.
We 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
(19:47):
just for a second. Let's all try to remember what
what we examined here, and then we'll be back to
explore short and long term memory after a word from
our sponsor, and we're back now. As we were discussing before,
not all memories are created equally, and not all of
(20:10):
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 power of our brains. So a lot of experts
actually believe that memory exists in three stages. A lot
(20:32):
of times you'll hear short term versus long term memory,
So let's 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
their short term memory, which is again about that twenty
seconds or a little bit, you know, give or take
a certain period of time, I remember how that table
(20:54):
felt when I touched it. And then finally long term memory,
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
the filtration to get to the next tier to go
from sensory to short term to long term, and long
(21:15):
term memory can store as far as we can tell
an unlimited amount of data for an infinite amount of time.
We but yes, I'm 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 recall memory adetic
(21:38):
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 then draw it
(22:02):
really accurately from memory. There are people who can tell
you what they have for breakfast on you know, June nine,
and they can tell you what time it was when
they add breakfast. You know. Yeah, but like you said,
extremely rare, extremely extremely rare. Uh for for me, I
(22:25):
couldn't tell you what I ate for breakfast yesterday? Right?
And true photographic memory as far as we know, like
the the actual facts, true photographic memory has not been
universally proven. There are there are compelling things. Right. But
then this ties into the idea of the so called
(22:47):
savant syndrome. Right, So that's a story for another day.
But the rules we are describing for memory applied to easily,
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,
(23:10):
you start off in sensory memory and you have to
you have to crew up with other sensory with other sensations.
Right two, 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
(23:31):
truth of this is any of your friends, any of
our friends, who say I'm terrible with names, or I've
just said I've got such a terrible memory. The fact
of the matter is, I'm not going to 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.
(23:53):
Various factors affect our memory at different junctures, and like
a lot of other physical faculty tease, memory does seem
to degrade with age, but we all typically start out
with a with a pretty sharp ability to recall things.
If one think that's interesting about how how memory can
be affected. Every time this great computer called your brain retrieves,
(24:17):
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 ingested a hallucinogenic substance in a place
(24:40):
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,
then you're going to have a weird time. Memory is
also vulnerable to the you present physical surroundings that you
(25:04):
are in when you generate a memory. So if you
are having a if you are having a great time,
you're super relaxed. Let's picture it. Um, You're on a
hot tub and the shore of a beautiful island. It's
a nice cool ocean breeze, the sun's setting, you're hanging
(25:25):
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 this
(25:47):
is going to study show or studies seem to indicate
strongly it's going to help mitigate the psychic trauma of
that earlier thing. Uh, the stuff that surrounds us in
the present affects the way we see our past. Yeah, no,
that I can totally see that. I mean that's why
(26:09):
if you're going to see a therapist or something, it
is in that type of setence, 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 I'm thinking all therapists should just have hot tubs. Yeah,
frosty beverages. I mean, you've been saying that for years.
Sunset and good to go only sunset night therapy. That
(26:33):
sounds like a strange show. Maybe on cinemat late night
HBO or something like that. So so these long term
memories differ from our short term memories. Are short term
memories are actually going to be They're going to have
a higher chance of being accurate, just because our long
(26:53):
term memories are based on the repetitive intrusion of our
present scene while we're remembering something. Right, So they get
a little deluded. We played 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
(27:17):
this because four hundreds of years people have been trying
to alter memory in one way or another, whether through
the propagation of differing historical narratives a k a. Burn
all the books, uh, censorship, let's get rid of anything
in that picture at tianamen square right, hypnosis, hypnotic regression,
(27:39):
brainwashing like that old singing in Star Trek the Next
Generation where someone is torturing Picard and telling them to,
you know, see a different number of lights yeah, or
a pledge of allegiance that you have to say every
day when you're at school, right, which I bet is
encoded in your memory too, And also with a little
bit of cadence, right, Like, like, you can probably site
(28:00):
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. I still can't because
we don't know all you know, we don't know all
the letters independently we know the song. It's like, oh,
(28:22):
which numbers. 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 we've
had mixed results. In fact, for most of human history,
the idea of purposely, surgically and precisely deleting a memory
(28:46):
seemed relegated to the world of science fiction. But what
if we could turn it into science fact. Here's where
it gets crazy. Man. We're all ready delete memories, and
at least we figured out how to do it. Right.
That doesn't mean we're we're we're doing it effectively necessarily,
(29:08):
but some people have been figuring out the means and um.
There are multiple studies, current and and very recent studies
that confirm that it is indeed possible to remove a
specific memory or memories from an individual's brain. That sounds crazy,
That sounds like eternal sunshine. But it's real, and it
(29:31):
is crazy. Being real doesn't make it not crazy. I
agree with you. They're like, Okay, So there's a twenty
seventeen study from the Columbia University Medical Center on snails. Okay,
all right, And so they found that different types of
memories stored in the same neuron of marine snails can
(29:52):
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. They stimulated two sensory neurons connected to a
single motor neuron of the marine snail. One neuron one
(30:15):
sensory neuron was stimulated to induce an associative memory, something
that brings up other experiences. Another was stimulated to induce
a non 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
(30:38):
the increase in the strength of each connection produced by
a different stimuli was maintained by a different form of
a protein called protein kinase m p k M, and
they have they have a couple. There are two versions
of this right A side and B side associative memory
(31:00):
non associative. And they found that if they blocked the
specific type of p k M molecule involved, they could
block and erase the memory that needed that that needed
that enzyme in order to hit the conscious mind. So
(31:20):
it's all just chemistry. 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 uh, at least if
(31:45):
you think about a mechanically how it's functioning, it's very
similar to a humans neurons. There's a you know, there's
a thing that that remembers a connection that then goes
to a motor neuron which then will cause you to
actually do something to pasically change make a physical change
in your body. And then these two other pieces that
they're messing with are just the thing that actually holds
(32:08):
the connection to the memory. So yeah, so they they
found that not only could you block that recollection, but
you could erase it by blocking not PKM itself, but
you could you could erase the memory by blocking other
molecules that helped produce PKM the enzyme or protect it
(32:32):
from breaking down, So you can you 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 right, Yeah,
I guess so, I mean, I get it. The good
(32:52):
thing here is that this isn't some kind of diabolical
There's no diabolical reason behind wanting to figure out this is,
or at least that's not stated UM. According to you know,
our understanding is that these researchers are doing this study
to try and find some way to remove non associative
memories that end up triggering PTSD in people, also any
(33:15):
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, UM.
But again, the researchers also are very very careful, at
least according to the sources that we're using. They're very
(33:37):
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, We're more showing the relationship to cause
an effect between these molecules. But there are other studies.
In a study by researchers at the University of California
(34:00):
from back in they found that light can be used
to erase specific memories from mice using a technique called optogenetics. Yeah,
and this is where it's feeling closer and closer to
the eternal sunshine stuff. Actually using a physical medium to
change memories, right, And it's not as cool as the
(34:21):
memory erasing flashlight men in black. Not yet, not yet,
not yet. So the scientists in this study used genetically
modified mice as their experiment. In their control groups. Uh,
the genetically modified mice had nerve cells that would literally
glow green and express a protein allowing the cells to
(34:43):
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 cells in the
cortex and hippocampus, and they could see which cells were
activated in learning something new. They could also see which
(35:04):
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. Yeah, whoa, it sounds so
sci fi, but this is how they summarize it. Quote.
They trained the mice by placing them in a cage
where they got a mild electrical shock. Now, normally mice
(35:26):
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. Right. Yeah, you can see. You can see
why it would be illegal to do this with human subjects.
(35:47):
Because they first showed that they could label the cells
involved in learning and and later in recollection. Then they
were able to switch those cells off. So and that,
and then at the mice back in the place where
they got shocked, and the mice had no idea because
they they their memory had been a race, so they
just knows around like they would if it was just
(36:09):
another cage. 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. Right, So so they did find
they were able to hunt down the physical manifestation of
(36:30):
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? What about the memories of human
beings like you listening along or Matt or Paul or
(36:50):
so on. Will explore that after a word from our sponsors,
and we're back. Now this is where we get into
the real, possibly creepy territory, because we're talking about making
(37:13):
memories that aren't real, or at least aren't exactly the
same as they could be altered too. Because sciences, it
turns out, uh, they're learning that some of the same
processes that we used or that we can manipulate to
erase memories can also be used to insert new recollections
(37:35):
that we haven't actually ever collected. It won't be a recollection,
it will be a new collection. Let's be a collection. Yeah,
this is interesting. This came out just a few days ago,
I think August seven, in the magazine Nature. Scientists published
a report proving that they have been able to create
(37:58):
new memories by reverse engineering natural existing memories. And this
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
(38:21):
that it would want to avoid, because as you can see,
they're 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
(38:45):
the pattern of that first memory. This created an artificial
memory that behaved in the exact same way as the
naturally occurring one, the same recollection pattern, the same ret mention, everything.
So the quote from Nature reads this way. And these
were mice, I should say. In the recent study, the
(39:07):
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, caraway. The caraway scent came from a chemical
called carbone, while the cherry blossom scent came from another chemical,
(39:30):
a CD phino. 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 Proust,
smell is a primary um primary medium for the encoding
(39:52):
of memory. If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective,
it makes total sense, as most animals over time used
the scent, the sense of scent to to find their way,
the sense of sense to their mate, to know like everything,
and that still happens now, right, So like that earlier study,
(40:16):
these scientists used optogenetics to activate those old factory nerve cells.
And what they found, of course, this is surgically implanted
fiber optic cable in in their heads. It's not like
they're waving a flashlight up. The whole thing sounds barbaric
when you think about all the shocking and the inserted cables,
(40:37):
but let's continue. But it's for science, that's right. So,
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 scent, just from the scent would help
(40:58):
trigger the memory. Uh So they have a little bit
of insurance here because it would you know it, 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. You know, that's pretty much
(41:22):
what they're studying there. That implies a lot of stuff,
potentially not all of it good. I know, I know,
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
(41:47):
not where It's not like fire can fire can warm you,
it can also burn down your house. Technology has never
come with any sort of inherent ethical mandate. I U,
I don't know. You know why I'm I'm so boxing
a little bit about this matter is because, of course
DARPA has entered the game. Of course, of course they
(42:09):
were in this game before they even announced it. I'm
telling you, um, really that shouldn't surprise any of us.
The DARPA was like raising their hand going will we'd
like to be involved because researchers associated with DARPA created
this thing. It's a prosthetic to allow for better memory. Recall, Yeah,
(42:31):
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 pc improvement in both short
and long term retention of visual information. Couple this with
the drugs that mean people don't have to sleep. Couple
(42:54):
this with you know, the genetic research going going into
the idea of giving people, you know, unbreakable bones, incredible
b m I naturally that kind of stuff we're we're building, uh,
potentially super people. Of course, you know, I'm being a
(43:14):
little 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 their one very specific thing. Yeah, but once you
vulture on that stuff, the future looks bright for very few.
(43:34):
Uh So we also know, since we're speaking about humans,
we know tal as old as times, certain drugs can
and 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 uh,
(43:56):
certain narcotics or something that will also impair their memory,
or some herbal supplements, yes, some herbal supplements cough cough coff,
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, This is the
(44:17):
part that herbal substances cough cough, narcotics and alcohol don't do.
When they remove memories, they remove like entire periods of memories.
What if there was a way to reach into the
Jenga Tower of human memory and steal entire floors without
(44:37):
toppling the tower. 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 your memories, right,
uh yeah, yeah, a real life eternal sunshine. And we
(45:03):
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, of which is a scientific journal
not a really great name for like an early two
thousand tip up. It certainly sounds like both, but they've
(45:26):
stated that the chemical with the evocative acronym ZIP ZILP.
That's z I P, not ZIP recruiter, 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
(45:52):
memory of chronic pain. It makes you wonder 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? It'll just be a
brand new day of pain. Like oh that that does hurt.
(46:14):
That's weird. It will be your first time every every time.
That's what I've always wanted, as 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. Who mentioned before, p
(46:36):
k M's right, So this is p k M Zeta.
We don't know enough to determine exactly 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
(46:59):
would have to be in je did directly into your
spinal cord. Is done over the counter tablet and probably
never will be. Uh. 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
(47:22):
sunshine style. I no longer have to remember this breakup
that has riddled my life with regrets which you know
not to get too personal. I'm sure everybody has personally
experienced that or know 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
(47:42):
the rules for you. Might you might remove that break up. Sure,
you might also remove the memories of your parents and
your entire family along with it. You'd begin mistaking your
wife for a hat. Yes, yes, exactly. And I think
I mentioned earlier the idea of talking about an inexplicable memory.
(48:04):
I want to share this and see if we all
have things like this, um, and you know, you might
surprise yourself when you find that that you have a
similar thing. I have memories that I know logically could
not have well, I don't understand how they would have occurred.
(48:26):
So one of my earliest memories is being on the
second floor of a church window or something like that,
looking down, uh, and there's very bright green grass. There
is a police car with the sirens on, parked on
the grass, and there is a white bed by the
(48:48):
window with handcuffs and like blood on the bedsheets. HAVE
had this memory ever since I was a kid, So holy, right,
so it's got to be it's surely the logic lance
would be, this is something I saw on television right
when I was a wee tyke, maybe before words something
like that. Maybe, But I think we all have those
(49:09):
sensations or those those sort of tableaus, right that we
we think like this is a very vivid image for me,
but I don't know where it's where it's from. 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
(49:29):
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 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.
(49:50):
Did we get mindwiped? I don't know. 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
(50:13):
perception of the past, but now 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
(50:36):
the same technology could possibly be used to non consensually
remove memories. That's the m I style rights right or whatever.
Happened to us at that church. That's crazy. I had
no idea that you had a similar memory. But like, what,
what are some examples beyond PTSD about how this stuff
could be used? Well, imagine that you're living in a
(50:58):
country with some kind of author terryan rule. Right, maybe
you don't agree with those people who are running the country,
so you'd be considered a dissident um. 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 you can't remember all of the
(51:21):
things that your government, this authoritarian regime doesn't want you
to remember. You remember your family, 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. Or
maybe you even have a different memory implanted. Uh, and
your memory is about how good it felt to you know,
(51:45):
say the pledge, which sounds like sci fi territory, but
you know, it wasn't so long ago that the idea
of a racing memories sounded like sci fi. And then
imagine that process occurring in mass right, not just one person. Yeah,
and you know, here's another one. Imagine this is a
little bit less less sinister, maybe because this this could
(52:08):
be legal at some point. Imagine you work with an organization,
whether state or private, that requires you to handle proprietary information,
uh sensitive documents, top secret, compartmentalized, your eyes only stuff,
and then part of your contract says that when you retire,
(52:30):
you leave your job, that set of memories gets wiped. Dude,
Imagine if it's just a short term contractor position with
something like groom Lake or where you only work for
six months and then you get wiped, and then you
wake up with you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of
(52:50):
dollars in your bank account and a very vague letter
thanking you, a warning you from some front company. You'd
certainly prevent the next babbos are Yeah, quite possibly. And
also again to be completely fair, this is this is
spitballing and speculation. We there, Yeah, but again I don't
(53:13):
think any of these are that much of a stretch. 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 existed, as some of them successfully suppressed.
We're still very far away from these things, but now
they are possible, if not plausible. Yeah, I mean it's
(53:34):
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. 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.
(53:58):
M So, let's say it's other thing Disney gets involved in.
They map out the memories of historic moments as as
experienced by firsthand witnesses. They get like someone who's landed
on the moon, the doctor Rendezvous memories. Yeah, they get
doctor buzz Rendezvous memory of landing on the moon. They
(54:20):
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, it's
it's almost the same as doing it yourself, right to
have the first hand memory, so you could participate in
(54:43):
crimes that you are not legally culpable for it because
they already happened. That's what it feels like to a bank,
That's what yeah, exactly, that's what it feels like to
rob a bank or something terrible things for other stuff too, right,
And then if the memory becomes inconvenient, just have it removed.
And given that we would be talking about a private
(55:03):
entity selling this stuff, I bet there would be a
lot of money spent on figuring out how to make
the memory implant temporary, because you want to sell a
service now, right, not a product, so it would eventually degrade.
But then also to end on a positive note, is
one I am personally excited about. Imagine the potential for learning.
(55:25):
One day we might be able to encode knowledge sets. Right.
That's that's full on matrix stuff right there, exactly. It's
not that far from neo. Right. You can wake up
being able to play a piano, speak a new language,
kung fu. Maybe you're in a plane that's going down
(55:45):
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 thing.
And then you know, just lay out to play because
now you know how to land the plane. Uh, you know,
we're we're very far away from that and we don't
(56:06):
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
that they may be able to use it sooner than
you think. Wow, it's really intense and just too for
my own uh for my own happiness. Here, I can
(56:29):
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 these peptides, with some of the drugs and
the enzymes that we're talking about with ZIP and these things,
(56:50):
and to affect p k M. 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 through the first time you saw
your current partner, the first like the way they smell,
(57:13):
walks you through all of that stuff. As this enzyme
or whatever it is, is actually degrading all of those
connections that you do it like three, you know, to
ten times in a row, and then eventually it's just gone.
I don't know. There's there's the I see what you're saying.
There's also this question though, and of course, uh, this
changes person to person, but there's always this question what
(57:37):
makes us us? A lot of people who are maybe
less on the spiritual side will say you are, we are,
or every person is the some 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
(57:58):
more articulate ways to think of this. I'm getting at
is the question of threshold. How many unsavory or unwanted
memories can we remove before it begins to affect core
components like personality. It's a great question. I'm gonna say,
around fifty let's go you know what, Let's go for it.
(58:20):
Let's let's get past the mice, get straight to the people.
Let's do some experiments. But in all seriousness, if if
any of the the technologies and the experiments happening right now,
if any of it comes to full fruition. UM, And
this is only projecting just from my own experience, but
I can only imagine a lot of service men and women,
(58:43):
people who have served in militaries, people who have been
through traumatic experiences. UM, would really appreciate it, instand to
benefit from a lot of this stuff if you could
do it in a safe way. I really feel like
this could be incredible. And memorys are you know? As
as they say, memories are one of the most important
(59:06):
things a person has. Memories, at least up until now,
where one of the only things a person could possess
that could never be taken away from them. Memories and
loose diamonds. Memories and bags of loose diamonds. Thank you
so much for tuning in, folks. We hope that you've
(59:27):
found 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. We want to hear what you think.
Should we live in a world where people can sell
(59:49):
the memories of others directly into someone's brain. Should we
live in a world where you can take away the
pain that a particular memory gives you. And if we
live in a world where that technology is possible, what
is to stop other groups, organizations, institutions, or entities from
(01:00:10):
non consensually removing or implanting memories that jibe with their
with their desired pattern of the world. Wow, right to us.
You can find us on social We're at conspiracy stuff
in most places, at conspiracy stuff on Instagram. Yeah, Ben,
what is your personal Instagram? You can find me getting
(01:00:33):
kicked into and out of all sorts of places on
my Instagram named in a burst of creativity at Ben Bolan.
Most definitely in Japan. There's some Japan stuff in there,
a lot of it. I did erase some of it,
some of it is still around. Yeah, there are memories
of Japan floating out there in the in the ether. Alright,
(01:00:55):
so uh check that stuff out. You can find us
on Facebook, join our group. Here's where it gets crazy,
where you can talk with all of the conspiracy realists
out there who have been listening to this. You can
have discussions with them and with us. Sometimes it just depends.
You can see me insisting that Matt Frederick is the
Tom Hanks of how stuff works did you see that threat? No?
I did not. He's also the I don't even know
(01:01:19):
if you I don't know what the equivalent is, the
guy that's never there. He's always around, but he's never
there on the socials at least. Oh okay, okay, he's like, wow,
do you have an absentee Tom Hanks? Yeah, that's exactly
what it is. Like. I love Tom Hanks, but he's
never physically there for me. Yeah. I mean they never
check your backyard for bodies, all right, so you can
(01:01:41):
also find us. Um well, one of the best things
to do is give us a call. We are one
eight three three st d w y t K. Your
voice may end up on an episode. Let us know
if you don't want it to, but otherwise, just let
us know what you're thinking. And please support my good
(01:02:02):
friend writer dive Matt Frederick as he literally is the
person who goes through those voicemails. Thank you so much, Matt.
I have got to do a better job. This is
like the fifth time on air that me or ghost
Nol has said, look, we'll help you out. I really
need it. I just need that log in. But you
(01:02:22):
may be saying to yourself, I hate the phone. I
don't like social media. We of all people get that completely.
We're on board with you, and that's why we always
have one last way you can contact us. The rumors
are true, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. H
(01:03:04):
Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is a production
of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.