Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Charan Ranganath (on memory)

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Charan Ranganath (Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters) is a neuroscientist. Charan joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the mechanics of memory, how AI learning is different than human learning, and the influence that present context has on memories. Charan and Dax talk about the relationship of imagination to memory, the problems with hypnosis, and repressed memories. Charan explains how sleep can conceptualize memories, the ways photos can influence memories, and how traumatic memories affect the brain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert, I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Mrs. Mouse. Hi. Hello. Today we have, what a unique guest. We don't interview a lot of neuroscientists who are in a neuroscientist punk band. I think we're only the one.

I think this is our first, Charan Ranganath, who is a professor at UC Davis in cognitive neuroscience, where he leads the dynamic memory lab. So Charan is one of the foremost experts in the world about memory. We're all obsessed with memory, I think. We are. Obsessed slash concerned.

I think generally when people are talking about their memory, they're worried. Well, because we know and he says in here, basically not if you have dementia, but you essentially keep 20%. Yeah. We interviewed him and then I went and brought the girls up to set. And then we went to Gold Burger and we ate outside.

And then we got home that night and I was thinking about this episode. And then I was thinking like, oh yeah, I can picture when we were in front of Gold Burger and there was three tables and the middle table was three people eating and I can see them. And how fucking weird is that, that your brain can do that? There's probably something that was novel about it

that made you remember it though. What a mystery. That happened, but yet I can look at it right now. It's just so weird. It's very cool. Anyways, his new book is out now, it's called Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters. So that's what's great about this,

it's not just an explanation of how the memory works, but some prescriptive ideas on how to remember what you want to and be thoughtful and mindful about it, so it was very cool. Please enjoy Charin Ranganath. with his card and he's done it! Oh, clicky click, magic trick! The click heard around the room! You guys just about finished? Sorry, we got excited. Thanks for snagging those tickets.

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Happy Tastes Good. He's an object man. He's an object man. He's an object man. He's an object man. He's an object man. He's an object man. He's an object man.

He's an object man. Okay, I brought you guys a swag bag. Oh my goodness! So nice! I play in a neuroscience cover band called Pavlov's Dog. I love it! A neuroscience cover band. Snickers are you guys? And then this is my actual band where I played original music.

It was a shoegaze band. That genre is called shoegaze? Yeah. What does that mean? You look. That genre's called shoegaze? Yeah. What does that mean? You look down at your shoes while you're performing? Well you have like a whole bunch of effects pedals, like box boxes and laws, and so for people who do that,

cause there's just like all sorts of sound effects and things, and so people will often just look like where am I gonna? Oh. That's amazing. Do you need to use the restroom or anything before we start? You do?

Oh yeah, yeah, let's do that. We don't have a door so we step out. Yes, we're going to do a quick step out. Alright, you can come in. That's not my job. I think it's maybe your job to tell or two. Probably. I have a hard time delegating.

I'm going to ask new people to do... Yeah, I'm going to be robbing you. I'm just sitting there waiting for her protective nature to take over. No, that's not fair. She cares more about animals than I do. I know, but it's your dog. You can't just sit there and do nothing. I'm going to have to do something.

I'm going to have to do something. I'm going to have to do something. I'm going to have to do something. I'm going to have to do something. I'm going to have to do something. I'm going to have to do something. I'm going to have to do something. I'm going to have to do something. I'm just sitting there waiting for her protective nature to take over. No, that's not fair. She cares more about animals than I do. I know, but it's your dog.

You can be a boss. You can say, Hey, do you think you could take Whiskey to the vet? He keeps crying all day. My sister works for the family. She's wonderful. She's incredible. But because she's my little sister, I really can't ask her to do anything. You know? Yeah.

No. We're on year 10 of this. It's like my daughter, I wanted to pay her to edit my book and just do like copy editing. She's just like, hell no. I'm like, I can deduct it for my taxes. You don't understand. No, no, no, no, no. It's actually kind of funny because we were talking about my daughter.

After finishing my book, I came to terms with the fact that I have ADHD and when I say this I mean my teachers said it when I was a kid Yeah, my school and so might have been diagnosed but it was the 70s and nobody gave a shit sure and how skilled were these Diagnosers, I don't know. Let's think it was the 70s because like what would they have done give me speed Maybe I don't even know if Ritalin was a thing yet. So they basically told my parents that I have bad hand-eye coordination and that I had ADHD. Is that even a symptom of ADHD? I don't know.

I think actually, I think it is. Oh, okay. It kinda makes sense that it would be, cause it's a focus. The brain's working too fast to slow it down to operate the hands. Well, it's definitely affecting me now cause I fell off a skateboard a few weeks ago, broke my arms.

Oh no. And did you have surgery? I had surgery, yeah. You busted the humerus? Yeah. And did you have to get a rod? Broke it in half. Clean break.

Clean break, yeah. Fuck. Were you on a ramp? I wish. It was the most unsexy. Were you 13 feet above the coping? What was going on? The most incompetent thing.

I could basically say bad shoes, bad pavement, long work day. Were you using the skateboard at that time for transportation. Yeah. Interesting. Just to get a little bit of adrenaline after work. There's supposed to be a small amount, a safe amount. Yeah. Wow.

That has got to be a very painful break. Oh, I went into shock afterwards. I bet. Was that the second biggest bone in your body behind, I think the femur? Yeah, maybe like this thing. I don't have pretty long arms and long legs. I don't know which one is it. Yeah. And so how many days out of surgery? Is that the second biggest bone in your body behind I think the femur? Yeah, maybe like this thing. I have pretty long arms and long legs.

I don't know which one is it. Yeah, and so how many days out of surgery? It's about two weeks. I had the stitches removed yesterday. And how does it feel? It's sore, but I'm off of painkillers. I didn't stay on painkillers for that long and I've got mobility thanks to the plate.

That's a big scar. It would be bad ass were it not for the scary strips, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was gonna say, I need your advice on getting a good tattoo because I wanna get something that would maybe either complement the badass scar or cover it. I'm gonna go another direction. That in itself is its own tattoo.

So if you want a tattoo, get it on the other arm and keep that on display. I kind of agree, I think it'll look cool. Yeah, what's my company I want to start with Charlie? Scars and Veins, Scars and Veins. Yeah. Speaking of ADHD, if I get back to what I was telling you, so after I finished my book, my daughter started saying,

dad, you totally have ADHD. I'm like, oh, you can say this about everybody. And I all of a sudden remembered this thing that just had been buried in my mind that my mom put me on a special diet with no artificial colors and flavors, and they bought me an Atari. That was what they could do. So then I've started seeing a coach and talking more to my daughter about it. And so she was like saying one thing that I guess people with ADHD do is body

doubling, which is this thing where you find someone around you to help you focus and get motivated. And so for me, I realized whether it's music or whether it's science, I need to have people around me to feel energized. You look like David Bowie and he managed to be creative throughout so many years because he surrounded himself with these amazing people.

And of course he's brilliant, I'm not brilliant, but it's like I've surrounded myself with all these amazing people and it just keeps me going. How does that differ from just being an extrovert and getting energy from social interaction? It differs in the sense that I could be very easily a blob, but with people I feel accountability and with people I get ideas.

Sometimes it's even just if I'm writing in a cafe, having people around somehow makes things flow better. I'm not really linear in my thinking about things. My children are in elementary school and of course many of the kids now have diagnoses. So they give the kids with ADHD fidget toys, spinners. That seems to help a lot. I wonder if you need a certain level of distraction. I think everybody does. The key is giving people controlled distraction. I don't want to say anything about people saying they have ADHD now, because I don't know enough about it.

But I will say that we live in a time where people's habits create a real difficulty in focusing because when I got my iPhone for the first time, I remember all of a sudden feeling like anytime there's nothing happening I have to check email, right? Sure. Sure. Sure. Pause in the conversation I got to check email and for someone like me, this is really hard But everybody does this and they talk about this in the book that that moment when you think about checking email You've already lost the ball. So just to get back to this conversation, I have to now shift back and reset. And there's a little bit of a switch cost there.

If you actually scan people's brains, you know, in the prefrontal cortex, there would be a little blip of activity and it takes about maybe 30 seconds to get back on track. And so people will go, oh, I'm multitasking. I'll be at conferences and I'll do this too. People will be checking email and responding to things while an academic is giving a deep scientific talk. Yeah. That at best case you will be hanging on by a thread to understand with full focus.

Exactly. Then what happens is people leave and go, oh yeah, I knew all that, but they weren't really paying attention. I'm not sure what was actually said. Well, you say in the book too, that act of emailing the phone, even grabbing a camera to take a picture, it takes you out of the moment in this way that impacts how you create a memory.

Absolutely. First of all, we don't see the entire world. Our brain is always economizing. You might feel like you're seeing everything here, but really your eyes have just moved around a little bit and you're using memory to fill in. So there's a very limited amount of information that you can actually apprehend at a given moment. Things can grab your attention or it can be a goal-focused attention.

And one of the things that we found in our research is that actually memory encoding, the little birth of a memory, doesn't happen continuously like a movie. It tends to happen more at these points where we shift gears or we're surprised or something new is going on. And that's what we would call an event boundary. And at these event boundaries, you're kind of switching, let's say between the conversation and, oh, I got this interesting text message. Let me go back to Dax now. Right. And so what happens is when you switch, you get these little fragmented

memories because I've got a little bit of low quality Meaning I haven't integrated across a long period of time to get a deep sense of what we're talking about Right, so I got a little bit and every time I switch I'm behind schedule So I'm cognitively trying to catch up people who study tasks switching They've got a whole vocabulary of switch costs and mixing costs. There's this costs it's bad. Right. And so what happens is I'm behind schedule. I'm trying to catch up and I've got a lot of fragments of memories. And so then later on I try to remember it.

And what do I remember? Well, I remember coming in and having a conversation, but I don't remember what I talked about. I don't remember what you're wearing. I don't have any of the details that give me that sense of mental time travel. The details that give me the sense of I can recollect this. And so for me right now I'm on

because I want to remember this experience. I'm in one of my zones of hyper-focus right now. That process you just described, doesn't that nullify the entire point of a memory? When we think about how a memory serves us evolutionarily or how it helps us exist, which is it helps us understand the present and potentially predict the future. And so if the memory you're drawing on,

oh right, I was in a room like this talking to another person, but I was like, I was on 15 different text messages, there's really nothing to glean from that memory. Wouldn't help you understand the present and or predict what's coming next. on 15 different text messages, there's really nothing to glean from that memory. Wouldn't help you understand the present and or predict what's coming next. Well, this is where there's some really interesting

filtration that happens in the brain. So there's a lot of work in molecular neuroscience about plasticity. We think that there's actual changes in the connections between neurons, the basic computational unit in the brain, and that's what allows us to learn. Because if I can reactivate some sequence of neural activity that is similar to what's happening here, I can have a conscious re-experience of that.

But the key to that is being able to grease the wheels so that that sequence of neural activity can be reopened again. So you change the connections between neurons to make that happen. And so when you do that, these changes, the connections between neurons can be very transient, but it's like you got a bunch of neurons that are coactive and they're firing, especially when there's moments of surprise. But what's really cool is there are certain chemicals in the brain like dopamine, noradrenaline, cortisol, serotonin.

I think you are probably really familiar with these terms and many people are nowadays, especially now that there's so many psychiatric drugs that are involved treating these things and so these are called neuromodulators They don't just cause neurons to fire willy-nilly. They actually focus your attention, but they also Stabilize those changes in the connections between neurons So when you look at what drives these neural responses that result in dopamine release or noradrenaline release or cortisol, serotonin, are things like surprise, novelty, attachment, fear, disgust, things that are evolutionarily more relevant. They'd all be under the umbrella of survival.

Novelty is exciting because it could mean a new food source, it could mean a dangerous predator. We don't know what it is, and it would be very important for us to assess what that is quick. That's the beautiful thing, because if I'm seeing something that's similar enough to what I already know, I already have the memory for it before it even happened. So why would I tweak all of these neural connections

just to get this one little bit? It's more or less the same. Oh, that's interesting. It's like you're not gonna release any of that that's familiar, because you don't need to. Unless it's familiar But at the same time I get a reward out of it or there's a knife being pulled even if it's familiar It's like oh, it's that familiar that I but is this why marriages over time get less exciting. Oh

Something there you're not creating the same level of dopamine You know long time relationship because it's like your brain doesn't need to. I feel like this is a fact with anything in life. So I wanted to say first of all, just to my wife, that our marriage is exciting. Is it as exciting as it was in the first two weeks? Well, you're trading, this is well known, you're trading here and now chemicals

for dopamine chemicals. You are losing a big bit of your chemical excitement, but you're gaining different chemicals than the here and now chemicals. Attachment, actually, serotonin, all these other ones that you hear about, oxytocin. So what I would say though is you do need to kind of find the novelty.

And I talk about curiosity. It's something that you can cultivate, but we, based on our research, suggest that it's associated with a release of dopamine or activity in dopamine producing areas in the brain. And it produces the state in the brain where you can actually build memories, even for things that you weren't curious about. And I especially love the fact that when I listened to your show, it's so infused with the joy of curiosity because that really is what keeps you going.

It's a matter of kind of finding new things, reinventing yourself. I have a colleague who I talked to and I said, what's the most exciting thing you're working on right now? Because that's what I want to know about. If you're excited about it, I think I will be too. And he said, yeah, nothing's really new. Everybody's redoing the same things over and over again. I feel like I have to keep reinventing myself so I don't become that person. Is there a physiological component to that? Do we decline in the ways that we decline every way of having less dopamine, of having less go explore, go find, we must be battling some

physiological imperative in this. I think we do. I don't like talking about it as decline. And the reason I don't is there are factors that happen as we get older. Of course, our ability to remember details are proactive ability to control information. It does go down on average over time, but I also feel like humans live way beyond reproductive years. Yeah.

It's a very confusing species to study because in some cases, 65% of our life reproducing is not relevant. Yeah. In my field, the narrative has often been you have this period of time as a kid where your episodic memory, your memory for events is not very good and it's kind of random. And then you become a young adult and everything's great. And then you pass 30 and you start to decline. Episodic memory goes down. And it got me thinking about this idea of life stages. When you're an older person, you have still preserved semantic memory, which is your knowledge about the world.

It's basically your wisdom. And if you look in most cultures throughout human history, older people are the source of the wisdom and they're often teaching the children, they're passing on the traditions, the language. It's not about you, it's about this broader community. And one of the things I found fascinating in looking at this stuff is, if you look at other species that live past menopause,

they tend to have this intense social culture like orcas. And orcas are led by post menopausal females. Whoa. And they're the ones that pass on the tradition of saying, Hey, I want you to kill this great white shark and just grab its liver or something. And they're teaching all of these cultural traditions. At least that's my understanding. I did go down a little rabbit hole of curiosity for this.

I wrote the book. Orcas are so fascinating. It's crazy. We could do three hours on it. I think they had the only ones that have a larger neocortex body mass index than humans is that right I think so I learned that at one point in college that's been debunked okay but I've been meaning to go back for 12 minutes now sorry no no can we start with what are the mechanics of a memory how did they actually exist in our

brain is a recipe of chemicals? Is it a series of switches turned on and off? Are we making any physical impression on any material like a record? Like what are the mechanistic properties of a memory? Do we even know? We know a lot, but there's a lot of arguments. So the standard view is what's called synaptic plasticity. So imagine you have a neuron, there's a little gap between them called a synapse. And so imagine you have a big web of these neurons that are connected to each other. So one neuron is active, meaning that there's these little pulses of electrical activity called spikes. When a spike happens, you get a release

of chemicals. Usually it's glutamate is the big one, and that's an excitatory transmitter, meaning it can excite other neurons start firing. So what happens is there's little receptors for these chemicals on the other side, on the neurons on the receiving end. So the synapse is where one neuron can influence other neurons. When there are more receptors, a neuron can be more likely to be activated by another neuron. So the standard synaptic plasticity about this would be in the long term, you're getting more receptors that happen through learning through these genes that express themselves. As an aside, people often talk about nature and nurture, and I find this thing to be so tedious

because for learning to take place in almost any theory, gene expression has to happen. Yeah, I don't know if you read Behave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love Sapolsky. What I loved most about his book was this is such an erroneous division. There is no division between nature and nurture. It is one thing happening at all times. Yeah, it's all connected by definition. Learning is based on your experience, but genes regulate that learning.

My colleague friend, Sam Gershman has shown that you can get learning in single-celled organisms. So they don't have neurons. They don't even have synapses. So there's another idea which is learning can actually be encoded in DNA. David Glansman at UCLA actually has done some work on this too, and that club is kind of smaller than the synaptic plasticity club. I wish I knew more about this. I just need more time to read to be honest, but there's all this parts of our DNA that are called junk DNA

that's not thought to be encoding any gene. And I think one of the ideas is, is that the junk DNA can be passed back and forth between cells. You should probably fact check this. Yeah. Oh my God, good luck. I'll write an email after this.

Yes, exactly. Just make sure, please cut this out. But that's an idea. There's also an idea about what's called dendritic spines, which is just more synapses that can be created. But the simplest version of this is that you're changing the efficiency by which one neuron can activate another neuron.

Collectively now, there's an assembly of cells that we like to activate when we get a particular memory. So that's the cell assembly theory that there's not one neuron that is the memory, but a bunch of them. Is it the combination that produces a new thing? Yeah, that's right. But it's also overlapping. So there's an ecosystem of memories with overlapping cell assemblies

that are supporting these memories. So there is this kind of infinite-ness to it, but at the same time, you're constantly recombining and reshuffling elements of other cell assemblies. And is that all with the goal of efficiency? It's super efficient. If you think about it, Chatchie PT has sort of a photographic memory. Think of the carbon footprint. I don't even think they disclose this information.

And it's like estimates of the human brain is 12 to 20 watts. Super efficient. So you don't get that by just encoding everything over and over and over again. You use, you reuse. And one of the arguments that we've made in some of our computational models is that you actually don't even just connect everything from every neuron that's active at the same time. You just tweak the synapses that are the most important. You make the important ones stronger and you make the less important ones. So you have a part of the cell assembly that's not carrying its weight, some willy-nilly neuron, you just shut down that part of the cell assembly. This process of prioritizing in that moment, so your brain sees something and it's got a million different options to draw on,

right, and then now it's making a million different options to draw on, right? And then now it's making some high probability prediction. We're unconscious of that, right? I don't know that I've experienced that selection process where we're trying to find the right memory or the most useful comp. So what governs that process? This is again, one of those things that you could debate,

but the general idea would be is that there's inhibitory neurons that are keeping the peace, basically, because if you don't have enough inhibitory activity, you just get seizures. I get seizures. Oh my God, okay, so we should talk about this. Yeah, I'm curious. I'd be very interested in knowing about

your memory experiences from this. We should talk about deja vu too. Yeah, we were just talking about deja vu. We just talked deja vu the other day. I feel like you've talked about this before. I find Deja vu scary. Yeah. Yeah.

She's afraid she's going to get trapped. Let's come back. Okay. Okay. Yeah, Tim. So what happens is there's only so many neurons in a network that are going to be active at a given time, because you have this competition that's being mediated by the inhibitory neurons.

And I hope I'm not losing many of your listeners, but basically the idea is that- Sometimes you gotta go, who cares? Okay, so basically it's like you got these neurons and they're kind of in this cage match of, I wanna be activated, I wanna be activated. And those are the principle cells that would be thought to carry the information of a memory. And then there's these interneurons saying,

well, this one's a little bit more active than this, so I'm gonna shut down this weaker one. And so that's what creates this thing where one memory can pop up, at least in a computer simulation, one memory can pop up and the others get squashed. Something evaluates the relevancy of the one that popped up. You do have some control over searching for the right memory. And so this is where you jump from this level of the neurons to brain regions. And so an area that I've really been fascinated with is called the prefrontal cortex. Basically it's about one third of our neocortex.

And the newest part of our brain. Yeah. If you look at, for instance, dogs and cats, they have a very small prefrontal cortex. Primates big, humans really big. And so it allows us to say, Hey, here's my goal, but it's going to happen about five minutes from now. Let me shut down the neurons that are not relevant and activate the ones that are, based on what I need to get done, but it's not in front of me.

It's an idea. You can create a model of the future in your head. And it's based on a goal. So somebody who has no prefrontal cortex can be very abstract. They can have an understanding of the world, but they don't use. Phineas Gage. Exactly, they don't use, exactly.

They don't use that information. It's like this deficit in being able to use what they know. And so you can see this. I think this is really relevant in addiction because I think people don't get the nature of addiction. And part of it is that you know what you don't want to do and what you want to do. And that's a high level knowledge,

but there's often a disconnect between that and action. And especially depending on the dynamics of what's happening in the brain, you can actually kind of lead to a shutdown of these frontal functions that would say, here's what I really want in the future. But your brain's also trying to say, hey, I got something in front of me. I don't need to plan for the future. My explanation of addiction also is that when the amygdala is firing, it has a priority. It can hijack everything else that's happening, right? If the amygdala is firing, it has a priority. It can hijack everything else that's happening, right? If the amygdala fires in a manner, it will shut down your executive function in the prefrontal cortex. You're going to be reacting much more out of instinct and other

things. So if the amygdala is driving the boat or another area of the brain, the hippocampus or whatever, you're actually can't even access that prefrontal cortex. I mean, that's my explanation of it, right? Like I said, once you're in that reward cycle and dopamine deficit, the part of your brain that's driving can't access the part that's thinking about tomorrow in long-term goals. Is that flawed?

No, I don't think it's flawed, but maybe I'll offer some helpful context to this. So I want to be careful not to be the neuroscience guy to say, Hey, this is addiction. It's your amygdala taking over. I think sometimes you could just put labels on these things without really going to get to get to the nuances, but there's actually an interesting interplay between the prefrontal cortex, which is again using goals, the amygdala and the hippocampus, which is important for saying this event happened

in this particular context, this place and time. And so there's actually ways in which the hippocampus and amygdala can teach the prefrontal cortex and say, hey, look, this is relevant in this context. Here's where I get the reward in this context, or here's a threat, let me avoid this. And so in fact, sometimes what happens, you can see this a lot in fear conditioning research. So imagine you have a phobia, let's say of rats, right? So you see rats and you just freak out, you get into amygdala big threat response, you have a big phobic reaction. Now what happens is I'm doing therapy with you, you habituate to now you've got the rat right in front of you, right? And you're actually calm. Now you go out on the street and you see a rat and you freak out again.

So what's happening is when you're actually getting used to the rat, you're not actually unlearning the fear association, you're learning to suppress the fear association. And so the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are thought to be working together to say, in this context, it's safe, it's okay here. But when you go out there, it's different. You never know. And so I talk about in the books, how context is such a driver of

addictive behavior. In some cases, there's a whole model of this in the animal literature called condition place preference is one of those things where you can give an animal a drug in a particular part in a room. And then the animal starts hanging out and that part of the room. And so it's thought to be that what happens is the context now all of a sudden brings up this whole mindset of I got to get this drug. I used to see this when I did my clinical training, which is that I had patients who were really motivated. They wanted to be off drugs and they were doing great.

I had one guy we worked for like months together Vietnam vet and he just got everything together off of crack off of alcohol in a really difficult Situation, but he lived in a house where his brother was dealing drugs So if you can't get out of that context, you're with the same people you're in the same places Maybe this resonates with you as someone in recovery But I feel like you have to change the context because those are reminders they activate I'm gonna go deeper than that. The person that's witnessing what we would say is a trigger, which is a context thing. It's not just that they're observing it.

The body starts releasing dopamine. You start actually getting a bit high from the trigger. It's not just, oh, this is my memory. Your brain chemistry changes. You get that dopamine anticipation of novelties around the corner, so you're already a little bit high. Now, once you're a little bit high,

we all know how addicts make decisions once they're a little bit high. They wanna stay all the way high. But I'm curious, have they ever hooked up? Certainly they have. Put someone in an fMRI who was smoking crack? Is the pre-funeral cortex even online? Do we have brain imagery of people?

I mean, I'm talking about an addict three days later. I'm talking about someone currently smoking crack. I would hope not. Yeah, they probably couldn't do that. But they do studies of people, for instance, looking at drug cues. So people who are suffering from addictions who look at drug cues, a picture of a crack pipe.

And that's enough to activate the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain. Now I cannot say for sure. Dopaminergic. I read dopamine nation and the other one and that word I find to be the hardest word to pronounce. Oh, well, you know. Dopaminegetic, it's so hard.

Dopamergetic. Dopaminergic. Dopaminergic. Fucker. Arrgic. Just think like a pirate. I wish they could do it with. It's not unethical.

The dude's already smoking crack anyways. I mean, a lot of people would say it is. I think for alcohol, a little less unethical, if you did a brain scan of someone who is, maybe not full addict, but someone who's struggled with alcohol. Have we looked at people's fMRIs when they're intoxicated, like drunk?

Somebody must have done that. So let me get back to content. No, no, no. I mean, this is relevant to your question. A lot of memory studies have been done where you give people drugs or you give people alcohol. This was done in the seventies. Now it's harder to do this kind of research, but they would give people

things like barbiturates, LSD. They would give people weed, half a bottle of vodka, you name it. I mean, some serious hardcore stuff sometimes. And one of the weird things that they would find is if you learn something in that state, you would find it easier to remember it when you're in that state. Again, there's a particular context, but it's a mental context. It's a state of mind and it's a feeling that you have. And so what happens is your prefrontal cortex, I would argue you're activating a mental context, a frame of mind that says, okay, in this context, here's my goals and that's part of what activates this window of memories.

And so I would argue it's not just addicts. You know, I can be like, I want to be in a diet and I go into a pizza place. And all of a sudden my prefrontal cortex, my whole brain is basically in this context, here's the reward that I get. There's a whole thing called the empathy gap where people have this inability to empathize with their future self. I heard this beautiful interview on the hidden brain podcast with this woman who, when she was younger, she was raised in this family where they're like, you can have sex, but

just take birth control. And then she gets with this one guy who's like, I'm not going to use, you know, condom or whatever. And she just doesn't in the heat of the moment. She does not. And the thing is, is that she couldn't anticipate what the feeling would be like and how the state of mind changes. So we tend to think of the prefrontal cortex as being my logical Mr. Spock saying, don't

do this. It's really about saying, here's my goals in this context and here's what I want to do. But as I was saying, it's a competition. If I've really reinforced a particular goal, which is getting drugs, you don't need much to activate biologically relevant goals like avoiding threats, getting rewards, which drugs hijack the reward system or getting sex, sex, drugs, rock and roll, you know. You don't need much of a learning mechanism for that. And that's going to produce this competition that suppresses these more distant kinds of

things where it's like, well, I might get something down the road out of this, but look what I got right now. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. Here come the carrots making their way upfield, followed by the whole wheat bread over to the two dozen eggs. Sir, do you do this every time? If you dare. Pay, sir. Credit, please. Make every purchase a win with the BMO Toronto FC Cashback Mastercard with up to 5% cashback on your purchases in your first three months. Terms and conditions apply.

That's the sound of fried chicken with a spicy history. Thornton Prince was a ladies' man. To get revenge, his girlfriend hid spices in his fried chicken. He loved it so much, he opened Prince's Hot Chicken. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at TNVacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. At Real Canadian Superstore, our colleagues collectively speak over

a hundred different languages and counting. We pride ourselves on items from different parts of the world. From hard to find specialties to tastes that'll remind you of childhood. So welcome everyone. Come shop the world right here in our aisles with more ways to save at the super welcome store, real Canadian superstore. Well, back to the context memory.

This reminds me of hearing that people who study using Adderall in college, the mistake they make is that they don't then do Adderall for the test. Because weirdly, they would remember better because they memorize all this stuff in this Adderall state, and they would be better at retrieving it also in the Adderall state. Well, it's even worse too, because unless you've really mastered the material, being in this high arousal state, especially if you've got high cortisol released too, it can actually hurt your retrieval of information because you're in this high arousal. So if you were taking Adderall, that could produce a problem too, because now you're too wired. Actually that kind of shuts down the

prefrontal cortex. So it's kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't, because it is context dependent. But at the same time, if you're too jacked up, you can't remember anything. And so there's kind of this optimal level. Back to the question of the mechanics of a memory, is it electrical or chemical? Yes. That was my hunch. So part of it is ions, right? And so these ions move and that's producing these voltage changes.

But the chemical part is at the synapse. The electrical part is within the cell. And what we record when I record an EEG or do intracranial recordings of people with epilepsy, we're actually recording electrical activity. That's reflecting these large scale movements of gobs and gobs of neurons, exchanging neurotransmitters. We're seeing these big field potentials. It's like a broadcast almost of neural activity.

What do most people have wrong about memory? I would say that we're supposed to remember everything and that memory is about a replay of the past. Neither of those are true. Anyone who's been studying most of the details of their experience will be forgotten. Okay. So A, our memory is not nearly as good as we think it should be.

And then what was the second part? Oh, that it should be a literal replay. Oh, right, like you're watching a recording of it. That's right. What is our capacity as humans memory-wise relative to A, other species, and then B, machines? I love this question. What I would say first of all is

I try to avoid good and bad memory, because again, the implication is somehow if I'm hoarding a bunch of my memories, that's good, right? But it's not necessarily good. You want to be more selective. I come in here, I could go like, Dax, Monica, what are you doing?

You have all this empty space. Why aren't you just putting a bunch of stuff in here? Right? And it's like, you're probably asking, there's probably a little bit too much stuff in here. I don't think anyone would suggest there's. I think you got plates in the bathroom or something like that. This is the proverbial 80 pounds of shit

in a 10 pound bag, this attic. But nonetheless, you've got all this open space. Why not hoard, right? Right, right. And of course that's the wrong answer. We know that the frontal cortex is very well developed in humans and because of language and because of just

in general the long developmental period of the neocortex where it's like it's just taking years and years to mature. The way humans remember is going to be very different. We're going to be very conceptually driven. We're going to be very goal-focused much more. We're going to have a longer timeline on which we can remember. So that's humans.

But one of the things about machines, which I just love, is people will go, okay, well, you know, it's chat GPT. It's so smart. It's really not in the sense that we have semantic memory, which is very much like chat GPT. It's basically getting the average in this context. Here's what I can expect, or here's my knowledge about Los Angeles. I know in Highland park Villa's tacos is this great place to go to, but that's

different than remembering, oh my God, this is a blue corn tortilla that was handmade and tasting it and time traveling to that big event. That's semantic versus episodic. Those are our two options in memory. Okay, so semantic is like dates, times, places, geography, all those things, the concrete. Yeah, so let's say I went to that same place

and now there's a different taco stand and I get food poisoning from it. Maybe not food poisoning because that gives a different kind of learning. Let's just say I had a bad taco. So now I'm going to have to use episodic memory to say, hey, I don't want to go back to that place again because they've changed this taco stand.

But Chat GPT is going to take forever to learn this because it already learned that this is a good place to go to. And so it doesn't have that episodic memory that can allow it to stop on a dime and flip. And so what episodic memory allows us to do is to learn the rules, but also to learn the exceptions to the rules. And that's what makes humans so uniquely intelligent. Now, sometimes we overfit to that and we say, hey, I remember hearing a story about this murder that happened in Los Feliz. And so Los Feliz must be a sketchy neighborhood.

Sometimes we overfit to that and we create these weird kinds of things in our head that aren't true. But on average, it gives us a particular kind of intelligence that machines don't have right now. Yeah, I was recently reading A Brief History of Intelligence, which is a great book, and it was talking about the breakthroughs with AI competing in both chess and Go. And what they had to do is completely change how they were

deploying that computer, because originally they thought, well, shit, this computer has the power to actually model out every single move and tell specifically what is the highest probability of success. But it said in fact there's more potential moves in a chess game than there are atoms in the universe. Which is almost incomprehensible. And in fact no computer can actually model out every single move and then it had to teach it to do what human brains already do, which is go to this really

quick thin slicing high probabilistic way. So then it had to basically tone it down, like just look at 10,000, then see what pattern emerges for that. And this is like all stuff the brain just already does naturally. And then you got to get like fascinated all over again with what this thing can do. They use deep reinforcement learning for a lot of the stuff. My friend Demis Hassibus at DeepMind has done a lot of cool stuff. Part of the reason why AlphaGo beat the best Go player is because it was doing something

a little different than the Go players were doing. Otherwise it would have a lot of trouble. So it is doing something a little different, but you're right that you can't get everything. And so you have to analyze the problem from a lot of ways. One of the cool things about episodic memory is that you have a lived experience. Maybe you just saw this game once by some people on the street playing chess in New York. And you can uniquely go into that lived experience that happened

from you going into the world. You had a roommate who was doing something and that influenced you in some way. Chess is a bad example of this. I like to think of it more in creativity and imagination that you have these unique lived experiences that Dali does not have or these other generative AI things don't have. And that's what allows you, you're playing a part on a play and you can channel this one person who lived in your dorm floor when you're at UCLA and bring that in. And that is the beauty of episodic memory that just injects it into problem solving, creativity, and gives us this uniqueness

that makes you different from me. Yeah. Sorry, I have a really quick question because you were talking about hoarding. There was a revisionist history episode once about hoarders and how strong their memory is. Do you know about this? Oh. Like the reason their hoarders and how strong their memory is. Do you know about this? Oh.

Like the reason their hoarders is actually connected to memory, that they have like a very big capacity for memory. Does that add up? There's some links to this. So there's a thing called highly superior autobiographical memory that was studied by researchers at UC Irvine and now in other places. And so Mary Lou Henner. They over index on OCD as well.

That's right. They can just remember some detail from like 10 years ago. Yeah, what was the weather like Tuesday, March 5th? Yeah. And then their closet is insanely organized. Yeah. That's the opposite of hoarding. OCD sometimes manifests in hoarding too.

You can also see in certain realms of the autism spectrum, there's a thing called memory savants. This is the original Rain Man in Utah. That's one example, yeah. And there's people like Steven Wiltshire, who can like go in a helicopter over city and then paint this incredibly detailed, almost photorealistic painting of it, right?

And so there's kind of this overlap with OCD related symptoms there that have to do with these kind of obsessions and sometimes anxiety and control. What's happening with their memories that isn't happening in ours? We don't know about how different people are. Ours, I don't even know what hours means, right?

Yeah, you're right. It's just such a fascinating topic. But I can't paint a city after looking at, you know, I don't have that ability. Just in general, you have an area of expertise, let's say. You're looking at different things that's why he's not an expert. And so you can subdivide the world in so many beautiful ways. And so as a result, your memory for the stuff that you're an expert in will be amazing. Chess experts can remember entire matches. Think about again, how many pieces are on a board, how many

infinite possibilities of moves they have. A chess grandmaster can remember an entire game. Now you look at someone like LeBron James and you look at LeBron's ability to call back entire sequences of events and basketball games. And you look at YouTube videos, it's just phenomenal. Another fun one is they put headphones on these Formula One drivers and they play 20 seconds of the engine noise. And they'll go, that's Imola turn six and seven.

Wow. They know what the engine sounds like on every track in every turn and they have every track memorized to that detail, half shift up, okay, that's the hill going up, spa. What's even more insane is they see that pattern happening in real time. They also make them drive the course blindfolded and they drive the course perfectly.

That's who we should study. That's what we got to get into. You should. They can not only see what's happening now, but they're seeing into the future. They're like five steps ahead. And that's this beauty of this expertise that it gives you is not only being able to memorize, but really able to project into the future and have this just unbelievable sequences that you unfold in your head. Is it also helpful to them that because the experience is

quite heightened with adrenaline and every other great neurotransmitter, does our memory record better in those situations? Yeah, it records a little bit. In neuroscience, people will often say better. I would say slightly differently. If you imagine like a TV, right, you turn up the brightness on the TV, everything just gets brighter. And that would be like the equivalent of saying, well, memory is just getting stronger. But really emotional arousal ratchets up the contrast. So the things that are the most important, salient, emotionally relevant get jacked up and everything else kind of stays the same.

So that emotional arousal will definitely heighten whatever is most surprising, whatever is most urgent, and the other stuff kind of goes in the background. Okay, this is incredible. This is seven years in the making. I've had this theory forever. I've launched it on a couple of people that we've had in that were neuroscientists.

Uh-oh. But I've never had the perfect guest to ask this. So really quick, perfunctory knowledge. Do you know how slow motion works in cameras in film and television? I will say no because I probably would think I do, but I don't. Okay, so the camera's normally taking a picture

24 frames per second. And when you wanna create slow motion in a movie, you actually record at 24 frames per second and when you want to create slow motion in a movie you actually Record at a hundred frames per second, but then you play it back at 24 frames per second and that creates this illusion of slow motion So my explanation for why everyone who thinks the car accident they were in was like three minutes long is that in that? Super heightened state, you are so aroused, you take in so much more data, more smells, more sounds, more everything.

Your brain is hardwired to run at 24 frames a second, but you've basically compacted about four minutes worth of data into this sliver of time, so that when you're going through your memory, there's all this data you're going through, which makes it feel like it was slow motion. Huh. That's interesting.

Now this negates the whole watching back of video premise that you stated already, but I'm so curious what this phenomena of thinking time was moving very slow in an accident is explained by. And I feel like that's the comp. What you're talking about is a phenomenon called time dilation, where essentially it's like time feels bigger than it actually is when you're just in an aroused state, literally your heart's beating fast. Right. And so it's a lot like what you're talking about, which is that essentially you're getting more frames per second.

And so as a result, I can imagine that gives you a different sense of time. I just feel like we play it back at the same frame rate no matter what, because that's how we play back memories. But we probably are not playing it in the sense of playing a recording. Right. We're still getting bits and pieces.

Ah, okay, here. But there's too much stuff there. Ah, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it. Okay, okay. This is total speculation. Yeah, I love that. Probably some time researcher is gonna call it, it's gonna, ah, Dax, this is completely wrong.

But I think what may be happening is that you've got a lot of this information and now you get little bits and pieces of that information when you're trying to remember it and you're assembling it into a story. You got lots of bits and pieces, more than normal, and you're assembling a longer story out of it. And at the same time, you've got some of the physiology

and it's making your heart race, but it's taking you a long time to reconstruct this emotionally relevant memory because you got so much to say. Yeah, you gotta go through all these pieces and then I saw the seatbelt and then I saw the airbag. There's just so much stuff. And so you are imagining it in slow motion.

Right. And that is what memory is. It's imagining how the past could have been. Okay, great, because that's one of my questions. imagining it in slow motion. And that is what memory is. It's imagining how the past could have been. Okay, great, because that's one of my questions. So explain the relationship between imagination and memory. I feel like this will be disheartening for some people. I think it should be heartening for people

because it's so cool, right? So remember saying this idea of why encode something into memory if you already have it. Why encode something in a memory? Evolutionarily, why would you use space for it if it's already there? That's right. Think of how many times you've probably gone through airport security, how many times you've gone to get a coffee at Starbucks, and you probably walk out and have no memory of anything other than the fact that you went there. There's this

general economy that we have in the brain of just grabbing the most important or novel stuff. So as a result, what happens is you get those bits and pieces from memory and that's a little bit of data that you have. You get some context. But then what we do is we fill in the blanks with our knowledge about what happens. If you remember the last time you got a cup of coffee, I can remember it because I was just at a coffee place before I came here. When I do this, I'm using a lot of my general knowledge about what happens at a coffee place. I don't have to I do this, I'm using a lot of my general knowledge about what happens at a coffee place. I don't have to form an entirely new memory of, oh my God, I gave a credit

card and I tapped it on machine because I knew that stuff already. I know it had to have happened. And so we do that in memory and we do it very quickly and very efficiently. We have these knowledge structures called schemas for different kinds of events. And so you could think of it as you go to a housing track, right? So I grew up in San Jose where it's like one out of every three houses look alike. Yeah. Yeah.

The floor plans the same generally, but every house has a different paint color, maybe carpeting versus flooring wallpaper. So they all have this different surface, but they have a similar structure. And that's how we think events work. So you have this structure of the schema, which is knowledge about events, but then you have this episodic memory, which gives you some color for the paint and the carpeting and all this little decoration that you have on it.

So once you have all that, the structure is what allows you to just unfold it into a story. That's the human readable part that you can translate. And so that's the connective tissue of a memory is the knowledge that you build a model out of. You build a narrative or a story out of it, and that's imagination. And that's something that you do even when you navigate in space.

So if I ask you, okay, I came from coffee bean and tea leaf. If you're going to go back there, you can simulate that path that you have based on your knowledge. And so you might be thinking, well, I'm remembering where it is, but you're really inferring a lot of those gaps because there's a whole block that you need to simulate yourself walking along the entire block. You've got that block in your head and you know, it's one segment. So when we remember, we get little bits and pieces, and then we use imagination to make it meaningful, to build a story out of it. Now, what that means is sometimes we imagine it wrong.

Sometimes there are bits and pieces that we didn't catch, or we imagine it from a particular perspective. This didn't happen, but I look now at a relationship that I had in the past, and I know how badly it ended. Well, actually, I can think of a musical relationship where this happened. I know how badly it ended. And now when I remember all of these experiences,

I'm now all of a sudden remembering, oh yeah, I remember this person would just talk really negatively about their friends. And that comes into my stories about my experience in this band because that's how I'm imagining this person talked about me. And so these beliefs that we have in the present are being used to fill in the blanks and fill in our imagination. And so that's why I say memory is so much about the present, because who we are now, that's the lens through which we're searching through and reconstructing these memories. Then of course it really begs the question,

and I think a lot of people are often questioning this about themselves, which is how much of it is real? Or one thing I like, you gave this example of, there was this study where they had people read the description of a house house and they asked one group to read it from the perspective of a home buyer. And then they quizzed them about different details and they had a specific set of details that was consistent. And then they had another group read it as robbers and then they had to recall the details of the story. And then what's really interesting, so at first it proves like, oh, you pick up different things if your perspective's different, but then they asked them to flip into the other

perspective and now all of a sudden they remember details that they didn't previously with the other perspective. The details were there, but they weren't accessible through this specific perspective. That's right. It's deeply troubling, right? It shows this is like polarization at its core. Like we're seeing stuff through a very specific perspective. If only we could switch, we would pick up on details we aren't picking up on. Yeah, people don't have that as a modus operandi

and they should. I know. It is troubling. But back to, and you talk about it in the book, our memories are really responsible for our sense of identity. And as you say say our identity is on shifting sand, quicksand, something like that, which is fascinating. And it's a little bit scary because you don't know which you should trust. I mean I guess

there's some freedom in that which is at any time you could probably use your imagination to recall these memories in a different way and find new inspiration. But at the same time it is scary. As someone who's writing a memoir, I'm really conscious of this. I'll call my brother, this couldn't have been a more traumatic event, we were both there. And he's like, no, we weren't even in that house. We don't even agree on that house, that's substantial.

It scares me to think how subjective these memories are. They are subjective, and it's what I really want people to take away because there's a lot of work on errors in memory, and there's what I really want people to take away because there's a lot of work on errors in memory and there's no Question in any scientists mind who thinks reasonably about the stuff that memory is literal and photographically accurate It's just not but that doesn't mean it's all mush This is really important because there's a lot of work that's being done in the forensic field about ways in which Eyewitnesses can have their memories corrupted.

But that doesn't mean everyone who's been sexually assaulted is just making it up from their memories. So it's a very real and dangerous perspective. Just say memories completely made up because it's not. It's very fallible. And most of the important stuff we do get, I like to say memories like a painting. It's not like a photograph.

So you have that painting over there, both of you. And it's like this painting captures some elements of who you are. You can see there's a context there. There's features of you that are moderately accurate. And then there's some stuff that's clearly inaccurate. And there's some stuff that's neither accurate nor inaccurate in the scheme of things. It's just the perspective. And that's what memory is all about.

And like a painting, you go back to those old Renaissance paintings where they didn't have enough money for canvas. So they just the perspective. And that's what memory is all about. And like a painting, you go back to those old Renaissance paintings where they didn't have enough money for canvas. So they just reuse stuff. You can go back to that painting and you can change it and it go, Oh, Nax now has a beard. Let me put a longer beard on him. And that's what we do with memory too, is we revisit and we repaint those creations in our head.

Now that doesn't mean there's no data there. So as a scientist, I also like say memory is data and we have theories that we use to explain that data. And the problem comes when we confuse the theories with the data. The data is the sensory details that really bring us back to this place in time. The thoughts, the imagined stuff. The conclusion.

Yeah, yeah. The lesson. The judgment. The theme. That stuff is the theory. How does the mood we That stuff is the theory. How does the mood we are in affect the memory we retrieve in that state?

So when we are in a particular mood, that's part of our mindset, and that's part of the context, it's part of the lens through which we're searching for memory. You have this particular kind of filter that you're using when you're searching for information in memory.

You find the stuff that happened when you were in a sad mood, you tend to find the negative stuff. And so what I used to find in my work in the clinic was that this is one of the reasons why depression was so hard to pull out of because what happens when you're feeling negative, something bad has happened to you.

You pull up more negative memories. Listen to sadder music. Yeah, then you pull up negative memories, you feel worse and then you pull up more. And so it turns out to be this kind of filter for your memories when you are in a particular mood. This also gives a little bit of a scientific backing for the power of positive thinking, I'd imagine too.

It makes it a little less, you know. Whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, that's the word I'm looking for. Yeah, well actually the funny thing is, on average, people who are not depressed have a positive bias in memory. They tend to remember more positive events from the past and they tend to reconstruct the event more positively

than it really happened. Oh really? And as we get older, people tend to get more of an optimism bias. On average again, everybody's different. That's a blessing. That's exactly your question. It is, it really is.

Okay, how are memories different from the feelings we have about them? The feelings that we have, these emotions, are related to survival system, the parts of our brain that help us respond to stress or threats in the environment, uncertainty, novelty. And so those will give us a pattern of activation in our brain, also peripheral nervous system changes

that interact with our brain. People go, oh, well, trauma's in the body, but the brain's a body part. Activation in our brain also peripheral nervous system changes that interact with our brain people go Traumas in the body, but brains a body part one of these other erroneous Compartmentalized ways of looking at things those feelings are part of the memory But the thing is is that our memory for the context and the details Can be split apart from those feelings that give us the vividness of memory So if you look at people who don't have an amygdala, they don't get that emotional arousal with memories. They don't have an effect of emotional arousal and memory in the same way that somebody does.

But they can often remember a lot of the details of an event. And somebody without a hippocampus might still have that emotional arousal, but not remember the details. And what we've found in some of our MRI research and others have found this too, is that when you give people emotionally arousing things to remember, people will report that as being more vivid when they remember it later on, like a picture of a car crash. But they don't remember any more details than for something like a picture of a mom holding a baby. So it feels more vivid, but it's not in fact more vivid. Exactly. So when you get activation of both the peripheral nervous system, but also kind of the survival systems that are kind of making you feel aroused, that becomes part of this immediacy that you get, but that is dissociable.

And the reason why I say this is because you can change the way that you frame an event and that knowledge is separate from that feeling that you sometimes the feeling people get will give people a sense that this is exactly how it happened. And that is not the same as your actual understanding of what happened and the details of what happened. I suffer from this. I really trust my memory and conclusion.

But it is interesting, I guess the way I could find purchase in a lot of these things that you're talking about in the book is Let's say two months after I broke up with Brie, my girlfriend of nine years. If I had to Tell you why we broke up. I would select all these memories that confirmed it was entirely her fault and over time And with some growth and some recognition of my own character defects and failings when I look back and review it now I weirdly see way more of the stuff I did. My overall perception of the breakup has altered as I've gained new knowledge. And I guess that's a way in which it's potentially good and healthy.

In a weird way, it feels wrong to update memories. In theory, that's what happened. They shouldn't be reinterpreted or rewritten. But if the only purpose of the memory is to serve you in the present and in your future, then of course that's what should happen. That's exactly right. Let's say 20 years from now, we get together for a beer. You would probably look at me and you'd go like, okay, well, he's aged so much,

or not a beer, sorry, coffee or something like that. I knew that was going to stumble you up. Ron, can you edit this out? It's like, I just like. Let's get together for some lines. Okay, sorry, okay. I just am so horrified. He's been 20 years, don't even worry.

Please kill me. People always, it's so funny, someone will go like, oh, we did that and then, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Well, some people, it would bother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I used to work in the alcohol treatment program at the VA center. Well, he has a NA beer. So you guys could, there it is right there.

Yeah, we could bang back since we had Seegers. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. I will do it, okay. I'll wear your band shirt and you drink my beer. It will be symbiotic. So let's say we get together for non-alcoholic beers, then another year later it goes by and you see me, you'd probably go like,

ah, he's way older than I remember. Now, if you updated your memory perfectly, I wouldn't be that much older because it would only be a year since the last time you saw me. So if you updated your memory, ideally, then you would actually have less of a sense of, hey, something's new here, but we don't update our memories enough sometimes. And so that's why we have this experience of relatives that we haven't seen in a while.

But really quickly, that seems like a function of prioritizing which impression is more important. Because if I were to now permanently make my image of you at 62, it feels more relevant that I remember my initial, for my survival. I can see why the brain prioritizes the initial and cements the initial summation of you, because we're evaluating whether you're good or bad for us or safe

or you're a threat. And so, I don't know, it feels like, why wouldn't my image of you be at 62 if that's what you are? Why do we hold onto these earlier images we form of people? The strategy is to split the difference. There's a thing in machine learning called overfitting,

where if you have some thing that you're trying to learn and you learn too much about it. It actually is bad because you can't generalize in a good way. So there's a general strategy that you want to have, or you want to learn just enough. I mean, imagine if I just got this perfect memory of you right now. And the next time I see you, if you shaved and I'd be like, I have no idea who this guy is. Right.

That nose looks familiar. Exactly. You know, it's like, oh, that tattoo. I've seen that somewhere before. So you don't want to overfit like that. And so I think that the brain is updating, but it's not updating completely. And then there's also all sorts of interesting, weird things where sometimes you just form a new memory

of remembering. And so there's separate memories, but it's like I'm remembering that time, I remember that time. Okay, so that's great. That brings me to now, this is not in your book, but this is something that has plagued me, like the car accident time shift.

I have on numerous occasions, which generally I'm at my mom's house, I'm flipping through a photo album, and I believe I have a memory of standing on my porch at four years old in this house we lived in. And I can see it perfectly and I know it's my memory. And I'm flipping through the pages and I go, oh my God, that's the exact image I have in my mind.

And then I have to admit to myself, I don't think I actually have a memory of that time. I have a memory of this photo. And I have come to realize so much of my memory is really my memory of these photographs. What's happening there? Well, so, and I get this, by the way, from people who go,

I remember when I was like six months old. And it's like the data says that you do not remember when you were six months old, but you might remember seeing pictures of yourself and hearing stories about when you were six months old. And it's like the data says that you do not remember when you're six months old, but you might remember seeing pictures of yourself and hearing stories about when you're six months old. And then the imagination kicks in. You just lose the ability to tell the difference in things that you thought about or seeing a picture and things that actually happened because they're all just mental experiences when you just activate a memory. And so in your head, thinking about something and remembering something are not all that different. But getting back to your question about why is it that it doesn't feel like you have that sense of mental

time travel, you don't feel like you're going back in time, it's just sort of like something you read about. What happens, at least in our computer models of the brain, is that when we recall a memory, we're recalling it in a new context. And so the hippocampus might be saying time travel back to this particular time and place. But then you have this disconnect between the thing that you're pulling up and the context you're in now. And so what happens is you tweak the memory so that it's less tied to that place in time.

Now what happens is they keep recalling this thing over and over and it's not locked into this hyper specific place and time, it's not overfitted to a context. So it's easier to pull up. You pull up now the edited version you last made. That's right. And it becomes more general and more flexible, more accessible.

But at the same time, it doesn't give you that sense of traveling back. It's not like you didn't even realize you had this memory and then all of a sudden you go back to your childhood school and boom, it pops into your head. Again, this isn't in your book or on my questions, but now you've said this and it made me think of this. What is your overall belief in like hypnosis

and being able to actually go back in a way that you normally couldn't consciously? I think that hypnosis is problematic because hypnosis is a very deep state of relaxation from what I understand. And the problem with hypnosis is a very deep state of relaxation from what I understand. And the problem with hypnosis is basically you're turning off the prefrontal resources, the executive functions that you need to monitor the accuracy of your memory. So we can be accurate, but it takes time and it takes a little bit of executive function.

So we tend to remember things badly when we're stressed out or tired, not getting enough sleep kind of like I am now, except for this. I'm super right now. So it's a good mental place right now. But those are the times that we tend to struggle. So hypnosis kind of is also taking those executive functions out of the picture. And the difference in imagination and memory kind of goes out the window at that point. And you start to think about things that could have happened and you're getting suggestions

and being asked to say, well, you know, remember some other time this happened, maybe could this have happened? And it seems plausible because you're not able to counteract these suggestions and you're being encouraged to elaborate on them. And those then can also become edited memories that you would recall as if they were the same as any other. Theoretically, you can form, I mean, it's happened, that you can form a new memory. About something 30 years ago.

About something that never happened. A false memory. Right, right, right. But in theory, yeah, it happened at eight years old. But it's just an assembled set of bits of like, I saw this movie, I recalled this family interaction, you just put it all together into some crazy thing. And people who are more susceptible to hypnosis are more likely to do this. When you're in a hypnotic state, does it prevent you from doing crazy thing. And people who are more susceptible to hypnosis are more likely to do this.

When you're in a hypnotic state, does it prevent you from doing the thing you just described, which is, you can't go back to that place and time, so you adjust that memory to fit into your current context. Under a state of hypnosis, would you perhaps just plop back into the old memory without that ability to update it

and make it fit your current context? That's a really good question. We don't know. I have to say, I don't know. This is something I like to say a lot is I don't know or we don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's like you don't hear

scientists say that enough. No, it's good. That's like a big part of the science. But what I would say is you can pull up a lot of context, but then free associate and glom together a bunch of stuff that becomes associated. And so I think, yeah, you might end up creating something context, but then free associate and glom together a bunch of stuff that becomes associated. And so I think, yeah, you might end up creating something that's so new, you create this memory

of imagining or this memory of remembering and imagining that's separate from the original event. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. This NHL season, get more excitement out of every slap shot with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on everything from the money line to over-unders to which player will net the first goal. Make your picks and assemble a same game parlay with FanDuel Sportsbook, home of the SGP.

Plus with FanDuel's quick payouts, you can get paid faster than a breakaway. Make every moment more with FanDuel, official partner of the NHL. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. The brain is good at delineating between memories of dreams. Like I find it's kind of shockingly good. It's only once in a while where I go. Sometimes I am like, did I dream that?

Yeah, sometimes. Occasionally I'm like, I don't know if I dreamt this or this happened, but again, once every two months that happens to me. And you're creating a story every single night that's super detailed and really you're not confused for the most part. But they're so bizarre that it's kind of hard to make it real.

You know that it's fake because you flew or I had one the other day where there was a moving photograph. You can hopefully know that that's- Discern the difference. Yeah. This is something I think about a lot. So there's all sorts of interesting work being done on dreams right now in memory. And one of the things that people are finding is that dreams aren't just associated with REM sleep,

they're associated with other phases of sleep. And there may be dreams throughout a night of sleep. And a dream is a big part of how we create memories, no? File memory. The file cabinet analogy we've heard. Well, I don't like that one. So. I like that you don't like it.

I guess I'm sort of a punk neuroscientist because in neuroscience there's a view of memory as being very literal and these kind of like traces and so forth and you strengthen the traces. But the problem is that works in an animal that has very few memories in its life like a lab animal. But humans have so many memories. It's a big ecosystem. One of the things that many sleep researchers have found, and we found it in one study, is that sleep is this time really to combine information across different kinds of events because of our episodic memories are tied to a particular context. You can really restrict yourself from building some kind of a general schema.

You're siloed, right? So it's like connecting silos at night. Exactly. So if I walked into your garage and I saw that you had like a bunch of Costco packages of Cheetos, then the next time I come and I see like a bunch of Costco things of Oreos, at some point during sleep, I can build this larger concept, which is Dax stores junk food in his garage. And so that is a kind of magic that comes out of sleep. And what you see after sleep is often people are more fluent in producing the information.

Like if you're learning a new language, the people are better at producing that information or trying to learn a new piece of music and you're better at producing that later. I hate to flip the script on you both, but I've been dying to ask a proper actor and you're both proper actors, how do you memorize lines? And do you find that over time your memory changes

and does it change over sleep and does it change after you watch yourself in a performance? That's a good question. I feel like it depends. When I was doing theater school, I could memorize a whole part in a play and that didn't feel crazy.

Now that would kind of feel crazy. Like I'm surprised I was able to do that because I'm not in that mode, but I just would read it. I don't think I had any major techniques. But you can improve on it at a staggering pace. So I had done movies for six years in a row, then I got on a TV show.

In a movie, you shoot 120 pages in four months. On a TV show, you shoot 60 pages in six days. So over the course of nine months, you're shooting 10 movies. While it was always hard to memorize long monologues and movies, year two of the TV show, you could hand me a four page scene while I was sitting in the makeup trailer. I could read it one time and go out and do it.

And I remember just being shocked with how easy and good it got. But I also want to add that I changed how I memorized the lines. I think I inadvertently stumbled upon something that probably would have helped in the movies, which is if you try to get every word of the sentence down, I get overwhelmed like I did when I had dyslexia. Like, well, this is not possible. When I tried to remember the point of everything I was saying, and I literally just memorized 13 points, lo and behold, all those words were attached to that. Is that very well known and demonstrated? Well, yeah, you hit upon a few things.

One is you developed a skill, but the other is the importance of meaning. What I tell people, if you want to improve your memory, in other words, you want to remember something that you need and be able to pull it out when you need it, plant cues. So there has to be something that you don't have to engage in all sorts of executive functions, search around something right there in front of you can pull it up. So if you're thinking about the intentions of your character and you're

thinking of the goal and the point, it's actually in some sense, from a memory research perspective, you're adding load to what you need to remember, but you're locking it in to all of this stuff that you already have. You're locking this new information that's kind of arbitrary and made up to this information that's well locked into your head. So now when you think of the character, the words just kind of come out because it's a cue for the dialogue.

If I'm trying to memorize a name, it really helps. If I have listened to your podcast and now I see your face, I go, ah, that's Monica, because I have this knowledge that I can lock that name into. Is that the mental castle idea when people are trying to remember a long list of, let's say groceries or something, you can build a- One word story.

No, no, it's like you would go to this attic in your head and I would put bread at the lamp and bananas at my purse. So then I'm walking around the attic in my head and I can remember it. Like from memory games. Yeah, it's called the memory palace. Memory palace. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Castle palace. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I like castle better, we should go with that. This is her further running from her Indian roots. Palace? Yeah, because there was a lot of palaces when we were just in India. Not a lot of castles.

I like it. But you know, that's also Harold and Kamara went to White Castle. Oh, you're right. Castle, I guess you're right. That kind of counteracts my point. Culpin, Culpin, you know. I have two things that plague me

in the way that you're plagued. They might be the same, but one is repressed memories. Do you believe in them? Yeah, so the standard view, which I subscribe to is that repression is this idea that Kim's from Freudian psychology, these urges that are so unacceptable that you purge them from the conscious mind and it's just an automatic defense mechanism. Freud once proposed that memories can be repressed by that mechanism of

something traumatic that's happened to you later on. From what I understand, he even distanced himself from it, but there's a school of thought that that happened. There's no evidence of any kind that suggests that there's this automatic mechanism that suppresses memory. Now that said, there's a bunch of things that can happen. One thing that can happen is people try to suppress the memory consciously,

because they don't want to think about it. And my friend Mike Anderson has done research to show that that can make the memory less accessible. It can make it a little blurrier again, through this updating mechanism. So that can be part of it. But also sometimes people just aren't in the right context. And when you're in that context, this memory just pops up that you didn't have

before. Sometimes it's the people remembered it, but then they forgot that they remembered it. It was accessible to them, but then they kind of went, okay, well, that was the past, it's not now. And then later on, it pops into their head and it has this new immediacy. So there's all sorts of things that can happen

in the world of memory. We kind of worship Paul Bloom and he said, he doesn't believe in them. And so we kind of, we're like, okay, then we don't either. This is a little more flexible. He's not a memory guy, so this is important. A trick I heard on set from a camera operator, Scipio Africana, a camera operator has to know

people's names more than most. He has to know the stand-ins names, he has to know all the guest actors names because he's gonna be constantly asking them to stand in different positions. And he said his trick was to stand at craft service in the morning, in loiter there, and as new people would arrive,

he had learned if you need something from somebody, it helps you remember their name. So a stand-in would be at the thing, and he would say, what's your name? Oh, I'm Gail. Gail, could you hand me a creamer? And I wonder if there's any validity to that technique. I find it kind of fascinating.

He certainly was great at names. I like that. What I have noticed, and this is shameful, but this is so true, I say I'm bad at remembering names. I am not bad at remembering high status names that are in charge of my future. I don't have any trouble remembering the boss's name or the director's name or the producer's.

I need something from them, and somehow I'm great at remembering names. Well, there's a bunch of things. So one thing is motivation and motivational circuitry, that like the dopaminergic parts of the brain, for instance, in promoting memory. So that makes sense. The idea of linking it to a goal,

to the extent that there's a social reward there, is something that probably would make the event more memorable. I think what's missing from it is, it's not linking the creamer to the facial features. Cause people will say often that they don't remember a name, but usually it's that they don't remember which name went with which face.

Monica is a great name. There's nothing that links your face to that name other than the fact that people say that name every time I see you're around. There's nothing inherent. That's right. It could be Courtney Cox's association. She was Monica and friends. So that name, there's all this competition there, but the creamer gives you a distinctive

thing to lock into that makes it unique and makes this moment different. So you've got meaning, you got goals and motivation, and it also just is focusing your attention on those factors. Just the commitment to do it is halfway there. Probably. This is something that I say a lot, which is if you know that 80% of the details in your life or more are gonna just vanish,

what is the 20% that you wanna hang on to? And I don't think we actually have the bandwidth in most of our daily life to think about what we wanna hold on to. I lose names before I even have a chance to think that I need to memorize this name. Totally. I never thought about it this way, but it's sort of like the memory palace. People who study rats will say, well, it's because our brains are spatial

and we put everything in space. Really what it is, it's, it's a structure in your mind of organizing information. And so if you imagine for instance, we do take the file cabinet analogy and we have different files for different memories, then they're not competing with each other. It's not as if they're in the same folder or in the same cabinet. So there's less competition. So if you know a role for each person on the set,

that gives them a unique slot. It's almost like a room in your memory palace. All the great mnemonics like songs have a structure to them, but social information, all this stuff. That's what I wanted to ask about. Why music is a full-time travel, I feel. We've talked about that before. How if you hear a song,

you can immediately transport back to an old memory. Why is that? There's a number of factors. Number one is music tends to be on as a soundtrack to our experiences. So it's part of the context that we talk about that uniquely tells us about a time and place. So I went through a metal phase in late junior high

to early high school. So a lot of metal links up uniquely to that period because it's part of that context. Now, if there's a song you've listened to every day for 20 years, it's not going to give you that quality, but if there's a unique period of time that helps, then you form your musical taste during this period of time where you're forming your sense of who you are. And that's this period of time that we often look back upon.

They call it the reminiscence bump. It's this period from about 14 to 30. I have you call it as 10 to 30. 10 to 30. Okay. Yeah, that's probably the more accurate. The reminiscence bump. It's this period from about 14 to 30. I have you call it as 10 to 30. 10 to 30, okay, yeah, that's probably the more accurate one. The reminiscence bump. I'm not good with remembering details, but yeah. So that period of time that we tend to call back upon very often.

Well, and in that reminiscence bump, that's where most of your favorite movies, your favorite books, your favorite music, they all live in that period. And it's so true for myself. I think of all of my favorites, very few of them exist outside in that period. And it's so true for myself. I think of all of my favorites, very few of them exist outside of that window. Cause that's when the identity is being formed.

That's when you're really getting a sense of who I am. Another part of it is music tends to be emotionally arousing, evocative, and it's social. We listen to music with other people. And it has a structure to it too, where that naturally links up different things. But I really feel like the emotion, the social nature of it and the time limited part of it. So I have a colleague, a friend, Peter Gennada, who studies music and

autobiography memory. And so he gets biographies of people by playing songs that were popular on the billboard charts during particular years of their life. Oh, he uses that to cue up an era. Yeah. I thought you were that to cue up an era. Wow. I thought you were gonna talk about these Alzheimer's. Oh, that too.

People, yeah, who can just play everything they ever learn musically. Yeah. Victims of trauma. This is something we talk endlessly on this show about. And I think this is something conceptually I wrestle with daily. As someone who's in therapy

and regularly talking about the past, there is some voice in my head that says it is time to let that be the past and to not let the first nine years of my life dictate the remaining 90. There's almost a motive to forget. And I'm curious what your thoughts on that are. Well, remembering traumatic experiences is painful. I hear from people, I get emails from people, there's always people in my audience who say, how can I get rid of traumatic memories?

And with the sensitivity to the fact that I get it. But it's like, you don't want to erase the memory, you want to change your relationship with the memory. And that's very hard when you're trapped in your own head and trapped in your own perspective. That was another one of my questions, but you're kind of incorporating into it, which is how memories that are formed

with another person are different and how forming memories together, it's its own thing as well. I used a statistic that I got from an analysis in the book. I think it was something like 30% of human language is spent basically communicating memories with others. And I would argue that's probably why we evolved language because I don't have to make mistakes to learn from them.

I can learn from your mistakes. And that is this enormous capability that we have language. So memory is so intertwined with that social language function that we have of communication. And there's many parts of it, but one big part of it is, you have this memory updating capability, which is if I share a memory,

now you give it back to me. Again, you've got a memory of my memory, because I've shared it with you, but now I'm seeing that memory from your, even just telling you, making a story that you can understand and trying to use theory of mind to say, Hey, let me explain this in a way that Dax will be interested in. Let me put this thought

that's in my mind into your mind. And that is creating a narrative that wasn't necessarily there before. And that's now a new memory. That's a new part of your life story. And so these social interactions that we have reshape our memories constantly. And then you think about things that are shared experiences, like we all live through the COVID lockdowns, and maybe I had my experience, you had your experience. We talk about that. It's a collective memory. And so, so much of human memory, we're so intricately social, that our memories of our experiences, you'd be hard pressed to pull out a lot of memories from your life that don't have a social component to them.

Right. Well, it did make me think, often when I tell my brother about a memory that we both should have, we rarely agree. And then I have my childhood best friend Aaron weekly, this happens all the time on this show. I think these fucking five ninjas jumped out and that can't be possibly what happened

when we left this bar. And then we'll call Aaron and I'll go, what happened when we got thrown out of that bar in New York? He's like, you're like five ninjas jumped out and that can't be possibly what happened when we left this bar. And then we'll call Aaron and I'll go, what happened when we got thrown out of that bar in New York? He's like, yeah, like five ninjas and Adidas jumpsuits jumped out of nowhere. He and I are always in lockstep, which I find to be very rare. Even married, our memories are much different.

But I'm just curious if there's something to the fact that he and I are so similar and our perspectives are so similar that there's rarely any disjointedness in our shared memory. Whereas other people that I have a much different perspective of just baseline, rarely did those match up. I think that's true. And not just that, but you're communicating during these shared experiences.

Exactly. And you're communicating with this beautiful understanding of each other. This is actually a fascinating thing about the brain is in this context, we're creating this shared, I'm trying to get into your head and understand your goals and your understanding of the world. You're trying to understand mine. And so who I am in this context is different than who I am in other contexts because I'm engaging in a different kind of

shared narrative that we're creating. We tend to think of the brain as a bunch of localized areas that do their own thing. But brain areas interact with one another in a sense that's parallel to people and the function of a brain area actually can change. We can computationally show this in models based on these interactions, but getting back to your point, if you're very good at creating this kind of a shared mental space, who we are in this moment and communicating so beautifully to each other. You can just look at each other.

You're communicating just through a look. Your perspectives are gonna be very similar because it's a collective experience and so much of your experience of that event is your partner. They've told that story together before and so even the word ninja, like you guys did that in a telling at some point.

Sure, probably the morning after it happened. Exactly, so you guys are creating the story together, so it's gonna match up. We co-author all these memories. Yeah. So you do have prescriptions in this book. The goal of it being to make mindful and intentional choices to maximize the positive effect of memory

on well-being and adaptive function. So I think people will wanna know what kind of things can they do to make better choices, memory on well-being and adaptive function. So I think people will wanna know what kind of things can they do to make better choices, given that as you say, most of everything we witness, we're not gonna remember. So if we're only gonna remember 20%, how do we focus and become intentional upon that?

I think we need to allow ourselves time. Executive functions take effort and it takes time. And I think that's a big part of making these mindful choices, just giving ourselves the time to say, what is my goal here? What do I want to remember? And then there's another part of it, which is what are my goals in general? And so if I'm planning for the future, I might plan a vacation.

And I know full well that a vacation involves me sitting around and just obsessing about Airbnbs and trying to find the perfect place, trying to find the perfect price, sitting in line at airport security. But later on, when I think about what happened over the course of the year, that's what I will remember is spending time with my wife and my daughter and going out to some restaurant laughing and those things. Those are the moments that I want to remember. But on the other hand, sitting watching TikTok videos, I mean, no offense, that's not something I want to remember a year from now. It's about being mindful of what are the memories that I want to plant

and curating those future memories for your future self. Again, that makes me think of a condiment in the experiential self versus the narrative self. It sounds like you're prioritizing the narrative self. That's the self that calls the shots, and that's the only self that lasts. This moment is already gone, it's memory. Right. This has to be addressed because it's probably the thing

that's most present when you leave your house, which is you go to a concert and everyone is filming the entire thing as if they're a videographer and as if they're gonna watch this thing, which no one ever will watch this video. How are you obscuring your memory by doing that? How are you tainting it?

I love this, because I'm noticing this. I was at a Descendants concert, and it's like this older punk band, but there are all these young people there with their phones up, and I was like, people would be stage diving into these phones. Shoo, shoo, shoo, swatting them out of hands. Exactly.

The interesting thing is, this relates to people's idea that if I document what happens, I will remember it. out of hands. Exactly. The interesting thing is this relates to people's idea that if I document what happens, I will remember it. Because of their spurious association with the memory working like a video camera. Exactly. And I think there's two things wrong with that. One is you're no longer actually in the moment.

You are thinking about recording. You're not actually experiencing this anymore. I'm actually experiencing the recording of this event. But then on top of it, if I'm doing that, I'm focusing on what happened. So if I go to a show and I'm seeing a musician, it's not about the music. It's about the connection, the experience of feeling that music, being with my friends, being in this place, the physical punch of the bass drum into your chest. And you're losing all that when you focus on your phone.

I might even remember what happened. I remember, yeah, they played this particular song, but I don't re-experience it because I wasn't attending to that conscious experience. And this is partly why I focus people on the details that will put you back in this place in time and the emotions are part of it. Because that's what you want to remember. I can go on YouTube now and pull up any video

that someone else recorded. And also you're so right to say you're making the mistake to think that the priority of a show is the band playing the music. That seems very obvious in the thing that should be filmed. But I went to a thousand shows as a kid in Detroit and I can tell you there was a girl in a green sweater standing by the music. That seems very obvious in the thing that should be filmed. But I went to a thousand shows as a kid in Detroit, and I can tell you, there was a girl in a green sweater standing by the speaker,

and that's really what I watched that show. And then there was a guy that I thought was too aggressive in the moss pit that I wanted to go fucking sheriff on. And then there was a drink I wanted. Like really, the experience was all the other things that were happening in the context of the band playing. This is the mistake that people make is they think memory is about what happened. Episodic memory is about the experience, not just the content. What is only a small part of it?

There's the feeling, there's the place that context is such a big part of it, which is not content. And you lose that when you don't attend to the context and you get something different and you're absolutely right. It's like, when I do remember the show itself, it's about what I felt when I looked into them and they're just totally immersed in the music and I'm feeling what they're communicating to me. It's not the content. It's not like, Oh yeah, I remember they played this song at 160 beats per minute.

That's not it. It's like letting in the vibe of this bizarre optimism and this notion of youth and we're gonna do whatever the fuck we want and this isn't school. That's the thing you're there for. Oh yeah. Wow, wow, wow. What a fascinating topic.

It is. I gotta imagine it's one of the harder things to tackle because like I'm saying, you've said it to me and I still am like, I would want to hear, no, you create a memory and it builds a new cell. And in that cell is the data. But this is just so much more. So much more complex.

It is and it's so much more nuanced. It's a very hard thing to track down. Yeah, even I was like, oh, it's the hippocampus. We learned that in ninth grade. No, no help. No, not really, kind of. It's definitely a big part of it. Oh, let me was like, oh, it's the hippocampus. We learned that in ninth grade. I'm like, nope, not really, kind of. It's definitely a big part of it. Oh, let me just say one thing about the photographs

that I'll come back to this other point, which is you can use the camera in ways to enhance the memory. You can say, I'm going to take a picture of this moment because this means a lot to me right now. I'm gonna take 10 seconds of video of them playing my favorite song because I have this feeling in my heart at this moment that I want to have a cue to pull up.

Or you can say, my daughter is just loving this pasta that we got. I'm going to take a picture of her. She's not going to want me to do it. I'm not going to show it to anybody else, but it's forcing me to attend to this moment and it's planting a little cue in my head so that I think of that restaurant. Well, you said on vacations you now take candid pictures, which I thought was a great distinction

and it made me think immediately, Monica liked this picture a lot the other day that I posted and I remember the picture very well because Aaron and I were supposed to be posing for a picture but then we both started laughing at how embarrassing it was that we were posing for a picture and in the picture I'm kind of doubled over

laughing with embarrassment of what we're doing. It's in the sand dunes. And Monica was like, oh my God, I love that picture of you and Erin, because it's really you and Erin. Us posing is not Erin and I. Me laughing with embarrassment that we're posing is Erin and I.

That's so funny, I just yelled at my dad for doing this like three days ago. In Arizona? Yeah, he was just standing up taking random pictures and I was like, dad, what are you doing? We're not gonna use any of these pictures or look at them again because no one's looking, no one's paying any attention

and I guess that was the wrong thing to say. I'm not gonna tell him. I feel like because you're both Indy and I wanna explore this fun thing, which is like. Oh, dads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your own story is present in the book, which is lovely. And even when you're talking about dealing with your memories

and constructing your identity and having been this kid who was hiding his Indianism outside of the house and very much practicing the Indianness inside the house, allowed to eat meat at friend's house, not eating meat at home, racism, where do I fit in school, ADHD, cut to you're being interviewed by the New York Times. These are incongruous.

You can't have both identities working at the same time. One is like, I'm a total outcast, I'm so unique, I don't fit into anything, and then no, I'm also worthy of being, so you have to like, marry these things. Yeah, and depending on what context I'm in, this gets into this complexity thing, because I think for a lot of memory researchers,

I don't think we would be able to figure out in our heads what this is, but it's like this code switching thing that happens. I'm around certain people, and I could just get into this mindset. I can even pull up memories that I wouldn't necessarily pull up otherwise, and I get into a different group.

I can be very confident when I'm talking to a big group of people, and I'm performing, and and I've got something to say and I've got a role. And then you could put me in a group of people where I'm supposed to be social and I'm just like, oh, back then it was really true. I'd be the only brown person on stage playing a guitar or the only brown person in this room full of really nice, but you know, all white dudes. The Indian parent thing. I will try to make peace with how my family acted and how Monica's family acted, the priority placed on safety and economic security and the lack of indulgent I love yous and you're so perfect. You know, these cultural differences that clearly exist.

The flip side of that coin is Monica will be so hard on her parents. And I'm like, this is kind of great. It's like a two-way street. All of it culturally is so fascinating to me. Monica, you want to tell me about your childhood? I don't think it's better though. I'm not looking at this very affectionate white culture. Now I'm not anyway, looking at it and thinking like,

oh man, I wish I had that. I'm happy with what I had. I think it served me very well. It's different, but I don't think better or worse. I don't either. I am endlessly fascinated by the power of culture. I just love it. I wish it too.

It's all functioning with the same outcome in essence. You're like bringing these little creatures that can't fend for themselves out into the world and turning them over. And there's like all these different approaches there's pros and cons of it all and it's interesting. When I read your story I thought this is kind of mirrors Monica's in a way where a lot of guests we have that are Indian they were very immersed in it and were expected to act that way outside of the

house whereas Monica's parents are I guess we say, very liberal in the conventional immigrant story. They weren't telling her she has to be a lawyer or a this or a that. So it's like there was a lot of flexibility that seemed kind of novel. But yours sounded very novel too in that, yeah, when you're out of the house, blend in, eat meat.

We really had this immigrant mentality of keep your head down. Assimilate. And assimilate because it's not necessarily dangerous. Yeah. My parents, I feel like I had a lot more dissonance with that experience than they did in some way, or at least then they'll talk about. But for me anyway, that was very much the sense that I got is on the one hand, this very strong belief that you have a culture that you need to preserve. This is who you are, but you

also need to keep your head down and just blend in in the outside world. And that was just a really difficult thing for me to be able to do, because I just do me for better or for worse, but it was hard and it really did mess with my way of thinking about things in certain ways. This relates back to the traumatic memory thing. I could look at a bunch of people who came from my background at the same time, but didn't seem to come out of it the same way that I did and don't, you know, come back and they've got a hangover or something and

they're like thinking about all these crappy things that happened to them 30 years ago. I do. I don't know what makes us different but there's something. We come up with these narratives in these stories, right? But the fact is the majority of people who experience trauma do not develop post-traumatic stress disorder. The majority of people who take cocaine do not become cocaine addicts. There are people who can smoke crack fairly often and do not become addicted. So there are these differences that are there. And it doesn't mean that the person who becomes an addict is weak. It doesn't mean that the person who gets PTSD is weak. If anything, it's like our brains are just optimized for different checks and

balances, different competing goals that we have survival of getting rewards. Yeah. There's some parallel between memory and story and memory and identity. They're kind of linked. Any human is, I think, attempting to pressure test their story. I find it very hard to do. And I think this is where memory can be either limiting or liberating. Often it's limiting because it feeds into our beliefs.

And you remember that one time that you embarrassed yourself in front of everybody and that shaped your belief that you mess up in public. You can't speak in public. There's something wrong with you. And so that's your prediction going into the event that's shaping your attention. And then that's filtering your memories. Confirmation bias. Exactly. But you can do the opposite.

You can see this in people's things with visualizing the positive outcome. You can remember times in your life where you violated that expectation. You can remember exceptions to this belief. People have done this in experiments, dense Schachter's labs does some cool stuff where you imagine yourself or you remember an event where you're altruistic and people will feel more altruistic in the present. You can remember a time when you were happy and you will feel happier in the present. Memory can give you options if you do that little mental effort to pull out the memory that's not easy.

But it can constrain your options if you let the context dictate what's going to pull things out. Okay, the last thing I want to say, I am not educated enough on it to make this observation, but here we are. I've read a third of a Buddhist book, every single concept I'm so attracted to. And I'm reading your book and I'm like, this is all Buddhism. The core tenet of Buddhism is there's no self

because consciousness arises from a context. And context is constantly changing, so consciousness is constantly changing. And the idea of a self is an illusion because you're a different self in every context. And so when I look at how malleable the memories are and how we access them and what mood we're in, it's all about context.

And I just feel like it overlaps so beautifully with what limited amount I'm learning about Buddhism. I've been thinking a lot about Buddhism as I was writing the book. Are you versed in it a bit? Not enough. I was raised Hindu and Buddhism is really an offshoot of Hinduism.

A really important and interesting, fascinating offshoot. But there's a lot of similarity. I actually think a lot about the parallels between the Bhagavad Gita and the Tenants of Buddhism because one's about renunciation and another is about not renouncing everything, but renouncing the fruits of your action, renouncing the outcome and embracing the reason for doing it, not for the outcome.

But getting back to your question, I had done mindfulness based stress reduction at one point. What I got from this was that I was a miserable failure at mindfulness. Sure. I think most people feel that way. Feeling like completely low self-esteem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was talking to Amishi Jha, who's been on your show and you're reading her book and

thinking about things I was writing to Amishi Ja, who's been on your show and you're reading her book and thinking about things I was writing in my book and I realized this is exactly what it's supposed to be because I'm entering the world of memory All the time and remembering things imagining things anticipating things Mindfulness was really being aware of that observing it when it's happening and that's error-driven learning right there You're learning this habit And so people will say mindfulness changes the brain. Well, everything changes the brain. So that's stupid. Yeah, candy bar does exactly, right? So but the interesting part of it is you're learning a new habit Which is to observe from the third person changing the perspective and you're observing this thing that's coming in and that

Meta level of observation, I think is a hugely important thing in terms of being able to distance yourself from the effect of an intrusive memory, to distance yourself and see the predictions that you're making about the future. This is the basis of CBT, right? CBT is relevant, but it's more about challenging people's beliefs by giving them counter examples. And then the behavior part is just having them repeatedly do things that they're afraid of.

But this is why mindfulness has really gone into the therapy world and really balances well with CBT is part of it is you have to see the belief in action. You have to recognize it when it's happening, because the problem is this goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning is once you get into that mindset, you're off to the races. But if you can see it flipping and you can distance yourself from it, that's what you want. Because you can't remember it if you didn't observe it. Basically, it's like you can't control that shift in context if you don't see it happening in the first place, right? If you don't have this intention of a goal that you're keeping in mind,

or if you just don't have a habit of stepping goal that you're keeping in mind, or if you just don't have a habit of stepping backwards and saying, I'm feeling something, what is this I'm feeling? Let's be curious about it. Another thing that I got from Buddhism is also just this fact that I love memory. You don't want to be remembering all the time. You want it to be a resource, and then a lot of the time you want to be in the moment. There is a very philosophical question about everyone would want a better memory.

And even there is talk in these people who think we're going to ultimately augment our memory with some kind of offshore database. And that appeals to people. But I almost wonder if it almost ends up living your entire life filming the concert. You don't want that accurate of a memory because you're then destined to live in the past and we should be living today and forward. So there is this weird paradox to it all, I think. So you want to form memories in an intentional way as best you can and you don't want to

be pulling up memories all the time. It's a resource that you say, hey, I'm struggling right now. And this is our computational models of memories. We're saying if we were remembering all the time, you'd almost be hallucinating. It's actually relevant to theories of psychosis. But you want to be able to use it at moments when you're struggling and you need to call back on your past to figure things out. So it should be intermittent. It shouldn't be this whole world that you go into and disappear in unless that's what you want. Yeah, because people would probably just end up living in the 10 to 30 zone that they created

all their favorite everythings. Yeah. Oh, well this is wonderful. I really appreciate it. Everyone should check out why we remember unlocking memories power to hold on to what matters. And if you're lucky enough to attend UC Davis, you should definitely take a class.

Enjoy this punk rock neuroscientist. I wanna take a class. So great having you, thank you so much. Thank you for having me, this has take a class. Enjoy this punk rock neuroscientist. I wanna take a class. So great having you, thank you so much. Thank you for having me, this has been a blast. We'll go take a couple pictures in our punk rock shirts. Stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong. Okay, I don't know if this is the right foot to start on,

but I do need to make a correction. When you asked me for Monday's fact check if there was any blowback about the sunscreen, I actually now realize I hadn't looked. But there was certainly, they came. The sunscreen police came. They descended on me. Big sunscreen? Yeah, big sunscreen.

But someone sent me an article and now I feel inclined to add some details. What do you think about that? Defensive? Let it go. Probably. Well, there's just tons of interesting information in this article.

About why we shouldn't wear sunscreen. That really supports what I was saying. No, I'm not, I wanna be dead clear. I have no advice for somebody on sunscreen. But the fact that I'm saying I wear it very selectively and people are saying I'm stupid because of it, I'm inclined to say that, you know, minimally you should know there is an alternative argument

that is from scientists, not just me. But skip it. I think we skip it. And I think whoever's saying you're stupid because of it, maybe this is why you don't read comments. Because somebody's gonna say you're stupid about fucking everything.

Yeah, but the one really important thing that did come out of the air call I wanna say is that melanoma's super common. One in five is now the number of people, it is the most common cancer in the world, and one in five people will have it, or maybe it was one in seven, but it's enormously high. The kind that can kill you

is actually a very, very low percentage, and then the people who have that kind, people who were indoors and unhealthy were eight times more likely to die of it. So there's this really ironic association with people who were actually had massive skin exposure to the sun, have a survival rate from the very low percentage

that's lethal at eight times the rate survival. Okay. Okay. I won't read you the article. It was my opportunity though to do Taylor's commencement speech because it was way too long. But it is a real, real, just straight up legit fact. Sun is not good for the texture of your skin. Yeah, makes you look older and wrinkly and worn out.

Speaking of update, I went to the dermatologist, I did not get kybella. Oh, I gotta say, I was a little disappointed. That flip-taunt, first you were nervous I was gonna tell you not to do it. Right. And then I was really neutral. And then you came over on Saturday

to play cards with who? Aaron. Hi. Ah, I didn't even know he was sitting there. That was a pop-out. Surprise. A friendly pop-out though. There's scary pop-outs. There's Liz, not Liz Plank, Liz Dateline pop-outs, and then. A friendly pop out though. There's scary pop outs.

There's Liz, not Liz Plank, Liz Dateline pop outs and then there's Erin pop outs. Yeah. Different. BFAW pop outs. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, you came over to play Spades. You obliterated Erin and I.

I wouldn't say obliterated, but we, Kristen and I won. Wasn't it a thrashing I think? Well, we came back from the thrashing. Oh we did. It definitely was a thrashing until thought? Well, we came back from the thrashing. Oh we did. It definitely was a thrashing until. Oh yeah. And then you made a big comeback.

We gave it a run. But then we did win. You shellacked us and you had just come and you said I didn't get it. And then I felt myself a little bit go like, no. Why? Because you were excited to get it. And it would have kind of shown the side of you,

I always try to encourage, was kind of a little more reckless because you're very, you reckless because you're very responsible. I am and I still am. Yeah. I didn't get it for a couple reasons. Bring Aaron up to speed. Okay, go ahead.

No, I was listening Saturday. Yeah. I think I'm up to speed. Oh, okay, great. You would know that I wanted to get Kybella. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you were very hesitant Saturday. Yeah.

And it sounded like Dax Saturday, at least to me, sounded like he wanted you to get it. Now his feels worse than the other. I can't win, yeah. Before I was like, don't fuck with yourself, you're a 10, what are we doing? And then I came around, I was like, whatever makes you feel good,

I want you to do what makes you feel good. Then I was happy with that. That's the right answer. Okay, great. And then when you didn't get it, I should have been happy for you didn't get it. It's like whatever you want. Yeah, what it's saying.

Same thing, whatever you want, whatever you're feeling, great. Cause remember the one part that we all recognize would be horrible is if I said, I'm thinking about getting Kybella. And then the person said, yeah, about time. Yeah, that was the worst. Yeah, that's what he's saying now.

Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. But this all stems from which Aaron is not up to speed on. I hold firm on this position. Fucking Monica was considering getting veneers, fake teeth up front. And I was like, what on earth are you talking about? I'm confused about that part. See how big these are?

No. I don't. What errand I see is instead of teeth, we would kill the half. They're white as hell, they're straight as an arrow. I almost thought you would only be doing it as a joke, like to get big teeth or something. No, no, just even, even at all, Al.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm not getting them probably. And I don't want to commit, but I'm probably not getting them. Also because I don't like the permanence of shaving them down. That's why I'm not getting them. Oh, you can't go back.

It's like electrolysis. It's more permanent than Kybella. Because you could regain your neck fat? Yeah. Okay, so when I went there, the reason I didn't get it, I was gonna get it. Don't spare me any details. You wake up that morning, you know you have the appointment.

Are you excited about the new you? Or are you already nervous about it? I'm nervous and excited and telling myself I can make the decision when I'm there. I don't need to think too much about it, it's okay, and then I went in there and she has me fill out paperwork. So on the paperwork, it asked me about my medications and stuff, so I have to put my anti-seizure medication

on there, and she starts asking about that, the seizures and stuff, then she starts asking about my face, she says, what are your concerns? So then I start telling her about all my skin, like my skin issues from being a kid. And I mean, she's a dermatologist. I know, but I doubt that's what she was asking. Well, okay, so I'm telling her all the-

Let me start from the beginning. Let me show you a picture of me as a baby. In a field of grass. Yeah, and then I- I want that skin. No, I would say, look, she has a neck problem even then. This is her story. Yeah. Okay, so I tell her about all my hormonal acne

and all this stuff, and then I say- You're dating his tree. Basically, like I can't, no one likes me, right? Oh, an ugly duck. Let me tell you about this Dairy Queen situation. So I'm saying all this and then I was like, okay, but like I kind of like snap back into it. And I was So I'm saying all this and then I was like, okay, but like I kind of like snap back into it.

And I was like, so really. Cause you thought she was yawning or she had gone to sleep. No, I just realized like that's not why I'm here. Cause I have a witch for that. Yes, you're here for some cosmetic adjustments. Right. But maybe you were even wanting to justify why you were, like that was your way of feeling like you weren't there

for cosmetic reasons. No, but weren't there for cosmetic reasons? No, but everyone's there for cosmetic reasons. I know, but then why tell her all about it? Exactly, I don't know, I think I was nervous. So then I say, but really I just like, I hate my neck, I hate the way it looks, let me show you this video, I mean I know you can see me in person, but let me show you this video,

and this is what I don't like. And she was like, okay, and then she kind of like feels around. Was she squeezing it and stuff? like, okay. And then she kind of like feels around. Was she squeezing it and stuff? Well, yeah. Yeah. And she said, I guess what I would recommend is Kybella and it's a non-surgical, it's an injection.

What it does is it melts the fat and it tightens. She said, but actually you actually don't have fat there. You have a very small chin. Okay. Yeah, we could build that out a little bit. Yeah, so then she was like, so we could do some filler in the chin, and then I started panicking.

I was like, oh god, this is getting out of hand quick. Oh, and she said something like, or you could do a full, something crazy, right? Some big surgery, but you shouldn't do that. She was just saying a lot, and the panic was starting to increase. You were starting to feel peer pressure, which is your trigger.

But then she said, but first let's start with your skin. So then she did address my skin issues and my long history, and actually that was the majority of the appointment. What options did she have? Because she put me on a new regimen. And then I was like, fuck, I wasn't here for this, but now I'm buying all these products. Oh, god.

I know, and then I didn't even get the Kybella. I should have gone with you. I'm like, fuck all that shit, give her the Kybella, we're getting out of here. No, but actually, I think I'm gonna love the regimen. Oh. So hard to know. It's really hard for me to support you.

Like you were zigging and zagging like you're running from a crocodile. Anywho, she wanted me to check with my neurologist. She wanted me to double check with the neurologist before doing anything. So she said check. That seems so crazy. Check about the laser and check about the, the laser makes sense, definitely.

Okay. And she's like, oh, probably be fine, but I just want you to triple check. Yeah, they're trying to offlay any liability at all costs. Which is smart, and I liked that she said that because she could have had it done. I'd be so annoyed if I were a neurologist, though. I keep getting all these calls from my patients,

like, hey, I'm thinking about buying a convertible. Is that okay with my epilepsy? Like, Jesus Christ, what are you talking about? That's their job. I'm thinking about getting a laser treatment. What does that have to do with it? It's near your brain. The laser's not shooting into your brain.

Light affects seizures often. Flickering light on your eyes triggers seizures. Okay, I'm not gonna get in a conversation with you. Heaven forbid I know. It is the flickering. It's the flickering and the strobing that sets off seizures. It can also, whatever, okay. Anyway, so.

Next topic. One other thing she said about it really turned me off. I was like, what are the downsides of Kybella? And she was like, well, you know, there could always be stuff. She was like, but there's really nothing. But what happens is the fat basically, she says like kind of like pockets,

so she was like, you might feel bumps, and I was like, oh my God, this is exactly the thing I was worried about, and this is the thing that can go bad, is if those bumps don't dissolve. So then I was like, I gotta get out of here, give me my new acne skincare routine and I'm gone. Give me everything on the shelf.

Ha ha ha, I'll take A to Z on the product. So are you completely off Kaibala now? That's it. I'm gonna wait. I'm not off of it completely, but I'm waiting. Okay. That's the update, so I don't have it. Okay.

So no need for anyone to comment on my neck. It didn't happen. I didn't get it. Yeah, what if all the posts in the future were like, your neck looks great? Because by the way, this is what I was telling Monica Erin, and I'm not to it. Yeah, what if all the posts in the future were like, your neck looks great. Because by the way, this is what I was telling Monica Erin and I'm not to lead the witness, but I said, do it, do whatever makes you happy.

But I am here to tell you, no one has looked at your neck and said, oh boy. Well, I haven't, but yeah, nor have I. But thank you for- I have seen people's necks and said, oh boy. Sure, some necks you say oh boy when you see them. Well. That's not you. Yeah, they probably have more than just a small chin.

It's more a men though, would you agree, Aaron? Like I'll be talking to a man, I'll go wow, his chin goes directly down into his chest. It's just a huge plate of like. Oh definitely. Yeah, as people get older and heavier. Yeah, and like skin sagginess. Yeah. But as people get older and heavier. Yeah. And like skin sagginess. Yeah.

See, at least you had the courage to walk out, even though you bought a bunch of stuff. It's kind of impressive. I would have gotten everything. I would have fell for every, or I would have just said, fuck it. Get it all. Get everything. Erin and I have a lot of the same patterns. And so that situation, yes, agreed.

I would have done everything. And it's motivated by a couple things, I think. One is like, and this is why we've invented a coffee called Mike's Coffee, which we'll tell you about. But one of them is like, I never wanna do the thing I'm doing again. Like I wanna get anything done I can get permanently forever. Oh, but nothing's really like that.

Well, obviously, this is why it's, this is a defective character. This isn't like, this isn't a virtue of ours. Okay. But there's, I think both of us have this thing that's like, just do the whole fucking thing I don't ever want to do. Get it over with.

Right. Because we've invented a, now we don't have it yet, but we've invented a coffee. Coffee, right. Coming soon. Mike's Coffee. Okay. And it's for men who hate buying coffee.

So first of all, you have to own a truck to buy our coffee because you have to come and we sell it in a 55 gallon drum. You need a couple friends as well. Yeah, and if you have a work, we'd be much happier if you showed up in a work truck to get the coffee. And the coffee works the same as coffee that tastes good. What do you mean?

Well, I mean, it doesn't taste very good, but you'll never have to buy coffee again. And I think that's gonna be very appealing to a lot of men. Is it pre-brewed? No, it's a 55 gallon grum of ground coffee. And you're gonna go one time for the rest of your life. It's like 500 pounds of coffee.

Yeah, and then you put that in your kitchen. Okay, so they're also gonna need like a big garage or something. A big kitchen. Yeah, a big corner. Oh my God, they can gonna need like a big garage or something. A big kitchen. Yeah, a big corner. Oh my God, they can't be married. Big closet.

This is for single men with a big kitchen. Maybe keep it outside, right outside the door. Does coffee get like a rancid? Coffee is... Nah. I think it has a lot of properties. No, it's good. Maybe you'll sprinkle some anti-rancid stuff in there.

It would be a funniest business like four years later, we start getting people returning the coffee. It's like we sold it four years ago and they finally got a third of the way through and then it went bad somehow. We're gonna have to think of that legally. Well, you do have to, the recommended way to drink it is boiling.

So. Yeah, it's best boiled. And when you pour it. Oh, so to get out all the bad stuff. Well, I think any rancidness would be boiled away. Yeah. You would remember this from Michigan. What?

I think you'd remember, because I think you were annoyed by it, everyone else was. Erin and I's obsession with hot coffee. Remember we were at Dairy Queen. Oh, I do, oh my god. And we were laughing so hard that the person would have to hand you the coffee

with like a welding mitt on. Because we want you to boil the coffee and then immediately to the microwave for seven minutes. Next to seven after boiling. Yes, the coffee cannot be hot enough. When you brew it, it's gonna- What's going on? You guys don't have taste buds or something?

Like, what do you mean? I don't even get this. Yeah, not shocked. No, but I'm asking. And even the weirdest thing is I'm super sensitive to hot stuff. That's what I'm saying. I don't think you guys are like not capable

of getting salted. There's just something about it being so piping hot that seems really appealing. But that's how a coffee should come. Masculine, you know that. And, yes, and same with like buying coffee in a 55 gallon jug. You know what's not masculine? Let me tell you.

Some man taking a sip of coffee and like practically dying because they can't swallow it because it's so hot and scalding their mouth. But he'd never let you know. No, you are so stupid if you think that we can't see what is going on and then we have to act like we don't notice. No, Erin and I would both,

we'd have our glove on our mitt, our flame retardant mitt in our coffee and we would take a sip and we would look at each other and it would be burning for sure. But we would never acknowledge it and we would just get it down because that's some good hot coffee. So is Mike's coffee supposed to be scalding too?

You don't need the microwave cycle. Yeah, you do have to boil it. You have to boil it. You do have to get it at 212. Yes, at least. I mean, I guess to be fair, my tea is at 212. Is it? Because that's how you're supposed to brew tea,

that tea, black tea. Also Mike's coffee isn't the cleanest coffee, so the more you can boil it and get some, there's some bugs in it, it's a 55 gallon drum of coffee. Stuff happens when you take that humongous lid off. Yes, it's gonna be hard. Why can't you make a good product? This is a good product.

It is because every man in the country will buy one can. And that's it. It's also a weird business strategy, because every man in the country will buy one can. And that's it. It's also a weird business strategy because once we sell one to each man, that's it. The company's over, because it's a lifetime worth of coffee. But the best is the tagline, is that it works the same as coffee that tastes good.

Monica's against it. If you happen to be listening and this appeals to you, just let us know in the comments that we're on the right path. We have a second product that you're gonna understand even less. What is it? You wanna hear about it?

I'm not sure. Bob's Paper Towel. Oh, you've already, we've done this. We can't, we cannot revisit Bob's Paper Towel. Have you done this already? Yes, the two of you have talked done this. We can't, we cannot revisit Bob's paper towel. Have you done this already? Yes, the two of you have talked about this. Oh my God. Thank God the actual product that you guys made,

I'm shocked is good. I know, it's phenomenal. Thank God. We're more shocked than you to be honest, cause we would drink anything if it was in something created. But I wanna defend ourselves and say, it's a little different Monica than just straight masculinity.

What it is is it's about the working man. It's way more about a work truck in your tools, in your coffee, in your paper towel. It's about an honest day's work, and it's about sweating for a living. And it's about most working men at our age have a little blood in their urine, have a lot of- So it's like you lean into that.

Well, yeah, you gotta clean up some messes, you know? Not your average paper towel isn't gonna soak all that up. We have to pee too often. So you're constantly in your work truck and you can't find a bathroom and you don't wanna pee in public because now that would be hypermasculine, toxic masculine. Just get out and pee anywhere, no.

Yeah, you wanna pee in your vehicle. Sure. And just line your little can or cup full of Mike's mouth paper towel. As hard as it gets confusing. Yeah, you guys are such mixed messages. It's like you're gonna go into my dermatologist and get every single facial surgery possible.

Come out new man. Yet you're about the working man. We are. That's who we are at our core. I would be so embarrassed by the surgeries. Well, one thing that is serious, John hit you with one serious thing. So those are two fake products,

but we have a real product, Ted Seacrest. Yes. And we have a community pledge that will be written up and it'll be on that website. But I wouldn't mind saying it here verbally, which is we have a community pledge and a customer pledge that we are going to dedicate 10% of all profits to a race boat team and fuel costs.

For face. Tax. What? That's true. You could actually, that's really bad. You cannot do that. Yeah, we're gonna, we commit, we pledge that 10% of all province will go to fund

a future Ted Seeger's race boat team. And fuel. And fuel costs. And transportation costs, because you gotta get those boats to the races. He just lost a customer. Anywho. You lost a customer. I think you lost a few, but you definitely lost one. Well, if we lost three and gained one, that's a win for us.

We'll make it up in our coffee and paper, though. Can I send you a picture of the race boat? I think you should. It is pretty amazing. We'll make it up in our coffee and paper towel. Can I send you a picture of the race boat? I think you showed me. It is pretty amazing. I showed you already. Oh no, you showed me the blimp or something. The blimp, no, the seaplane. Oh, oh, sorry.

That's another commitment we have to our community. First of all, there is no money. Let's just start there. This endeavor is losing money, so there's no money, okay? I think it started with we're not turning a profit, so we can at least say it right now. But in the future, when we do turn a profit, which is gonna happen, at that point when we're profitable,

we are going to, for our community, invest in a race boat team. Look at your phone, if you will. And then ultimately, you're right, the long-term goal is to have a seaplane, which you already know. But which is really funny, because it has us very committed to waterways,

both by the water racing, and we can only travel to places that have a big river or a lake to land on. We don't have anything that doesn't involve a. Terrestrial. Nothing on terra firma. How sexy is that boat though, did you look at it? It's nice. Oh, okay, thank you. Nothing on terra firma. How sexy is that boat though? Did you look at it?

It's nice. Oh, okay, thank you. Yeah, it's nice. It looks pretty. Yeah, it's hard to argue that it's a good look. It's a hydroplane. It does look really nice. How much did it cost to get this mocked up?

Well, this is a great story because people do think we have a bunch of money. The company Ted Seegers does not have a bunch of money and we spend more than we take in. Yeah. So anyways, Erin, well, Erin, you got the email, so take it away. Yeah, well, it boils down to people want us to advertise and spend money with them, of course.

Now people have gotten to the point where they're mocking things up for us. So that boat, I can't, first of all, Dax and I can't even imagine making it more perfect than what they did. It does look really, like. I know. It looks really nice. What the fuck?

Yeah, they're good. When I saw this. So I was telling him though, in the email, it said, here's what we can do for you, fantastic. Yep, stick her up the whole boat, Paynet. Yeah. I just wanna say too, it's a hydroplane boat, the kind with the jet engine.

Right. Highest form of racing. The catch is for us to stick her up that boat for a race. A race, Monica. It's 400 grand. Oh my God. And we were, so this led us to start talking because as cool as that is, we're like, wait a second, how do we make our money back?

Like who's watching this? We're not on TV. Who's buying Dead Seekers because of this? I mean, I don't know how many people are on the shore of those races. Like I don't know, maybe 5,000, cause you can't see it. And the boats going about 700 miles an hour. You can't, uh. Yes.

So you're really paying at 400 grand for five, you're paying like several hundred dollars per person who saw it. Yeah, I don't think that's the smartest way to go about it. Well, we're gonna go for it anyways. But we just decided it'd be much cheaper. You're gonna go for it? Well, we're not gonna, we don't have any money.

So literally we can't do that. But instead of us spending 400 grand to race to sponsor someone else's boat, we will take 10% of the profit as committed and as pledged, and we will buy our own race boat. Why don't you just sticker up your house? Okay, you got it. Your already built house. That is it. You're already built house.

That is true. So my wagon that's almost done being built is gonna be the very first vehicle in the race fleet for Ted Segers. So my 1980 Mercury Zephyr station wagon is already, I got it painted white the same color as the can. And then on the hood,

I'm gonna have the Ted head put on the hood. And then on the back, it's gonna say in red, Ted Seeker's Racing. That'll be our first vehicle. That's cool. And you're right, that'll have been my money. Do you want me to put a bumper sticker on my Prius? Oh, yeah, that would be great.

I'll do that. Well, we already have the cute little round stickers. Maybe you can start there. I'll start there. And put it on your window, because I don't want you to have to scrape it off at any point and ruin your paint. Just put maybe on your window.

Well, I'm not gonna put on my Mercedes. No, that's fine, yeah. It's not a match. That's just very, exactly. Branding-wise, it doesn't really go. I mean, the Prius isn't a great match either, but we'll live with that. I have it on the Durango.

That's perfect. That's a good match. But yeah, I wouldn't put it on the Mercedes. It's just so pretty, you know? Also, the Mercedes is very, very high brow. Exactly. And 10 Seekers is for a man or a woman, well no, a man or a woman who puts in an honest day's work.

Yeah, no. At a construction zone. Okay, what are you considering an honest day's work? Do you consider what we do an honest day's work? Absolutely, I don't think anyone in America would consider what we do as an honest day's work. Because it's time consuming as all hell. It is, but do you think anyone in America,

if you asked anyone in America what we do, is that an honest day's work? You couldn't find one person that would say yes. I think it is, it's very honest, we're very honest on here. Yeah, it gets confusing. It's actually literally an honest day's work. That's fair, when you explain it to people,

maybe they would change their mind, but just the notion of sitting on a couch and shooting the shit, is that an honest day's work? Why is that? Yeah. You mad about that? Yeah. Look, if I was shingling all day long,

12 hours a day, and I have bundles on my shoulder, and I was climbing a ladder, and you said to me, I hang on this couch in the air conditioning, I chat for a few hours, is that an honest day's work? And then I do a lot more. You gotta have some. Then we've never had someone on here who's had an honest day's work,

or who does an honest day's work, and probably none of our listeners do. True, but I think a lot of the people that were on here did previously have an honest day state work, as did you. You've had lots of honest state work. What's how about this? Can we do a hierarchy of the most honest state work? Which is like you're sweating and you're using your body

as much as you can to exert force on this object. Manual labor. Manual labor, that's gotta be the most honest. Like farming is the most honest. But that's so gendered. It's like, it's very problematic, actually. To say that that's the idea of real work, because women don't do that.

They do. They've always been in the farming fields. I would say that's probably the most honest day's work, is farming. I'm talking about, well you're talking about currently, or probably not talking about farming. Well I'm telling you, I do think farming is like the most honest day's work someone could do.

Like they're like. I say we leave the honest day's work to the paper towel and the coffee. Drinkers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Ted Segers is actually not for. Yeah, better not be. I feel like most people who, yeah, okay. Talk to me.

All right, no, I was gonna say most people who do what you're saying is an honest day's work are not gonna be drinking any beer. Yeah, that's interesting. They're gonna be drinking beer with alcohol. Well, there's a lot of sober people that are doing honest day's work that are in AA. Like they've had to go to AA.

Like in your meeting? Not in, oh man. That's what I'm saying, we don't know anyone who's doing this. Go to Log Cabin, yes, not the meeting in my friend's living room. Right. You're asking of whether people who do

honest days of works are sober or not, for sure. I'm sure there are. I would say most likely they're probably drinking beer with alcohol. Well, when I was doing honest days work, there was nobody sober. Right, thank you, yeah. We were doing some really good drinking back

when we were doing honest days work. That's my whole point. The drinking is real rewarding. It lends itself to an Honest Day's work. Well, that is the reward of an Honest Day's work is that drink tastes so much better. Like when I would get off of filming and have a drink in New Zealand,

it wasn't the same as when we'd get done fucking cleaning out the slaughterhouse. Yeah, it's the reward for the shitty. Those M.G.DDs were just yeah, those Wonder yeah, but you did call me One of us called each other when we first got some Ted Seeger's made you did something I think building the little pavilion with link. Yes, you built something You had a real good sweaty day and then you crack the cold seagulls so it can be done with any beer.

Yeah, it tastes six times better than when I've had it just to have it around the house. Like it really goes up exponentially when you've been sweating. No, I think that's right. Yeah. Or barbecuing. I just had one because I was playing pickleball with Perfect 10 Charlie. Oh, you were? How was it?

Fantastic. I really wanna learn. Unlike Dax who does not wanna learn, I do wanna learn. I'm there. Oh, now he wants to learn. Yeah, I'm in. In fact, if we can find a minute, I'm gonna play with Aaron while he's here.

Yeah, I brought a couple paddles with me because I thought dad's gonna play, it's gonna be with me. There's a win for both parties in this. So one is Aaron and Charlie just played. Charlie's just barely ever played. I think he's only played. He said he played six times.

Six times, yeah. And Aaron can see that he's already gonna be great at it. Oh really? He is a college level athlete. Sure. Yeah, so that's a win for Charlie. Now what I also like is that Aaron mopped him up. Because Aaron is a tremendous pickleball player.

Oh yeah. He said, he has not to mention it, but I'll mention it. Yeah, he kicked his asshole fucking apart. But you're an athlete as well. A crazy athlete. He played pickleball non-stop. And he played, yeah. No, he would, if we played for a week together,

he'd probably fucking cream me. I don't know about that. But it's really funny, because I have a type, like the man I hang out with most frequently in life probably is Charlie. And he too is just athletically so superior to me. It's interesting, I like that dynamic.

I like to feel unathletic around my good friends. Yeah, I don't know how that works for you. Yeah. Doesn't make much sense. You know what it probably is, is because I grew up with a brother five years older than me that was infinitely better at everything than me, and I don't know, maybe something feels familiar about it.

Yeah, maybe. But what's really fun is when I get to be on either of their teams, like playing volleyball with Charlie on the same team or Aaron, it's really fun is when I get to be on either of their teams, like playing volleyball with Charlie on the same team or Aaron, it's really fun. Yeah. Okay, should we do a couple of facts? Listen, you too, Monica.

First, you have elite muscle mass. Thank you, yes. And you're a state champion. I am. You have much greater accolades than me. But you've never seen it. I've watched videos. Well, yeah, I know, but it's not that I'm like,

you know, showing you up. Taunting me. I'm not. Yeah, but again, it is the pattern. It's true, you're right. Yeah. This is a good time for you to be here, Aaron, because this is a memory episode.

Oh God. Oh right, we talked about us. You guys have memories together. Yeah. And we did bring it up. Yeah. How you guys have shared. We always have the same memory, which is.

You repeat the memory in a similar way. Right, right. Yeah, because with my family, it's not that. It's almost consistently my family and I all remember things differently. Right. Which I think is the most common. Most people's memories do not match up,

but what is really weird, I think, about your and I's memory. And then Monica had a theory, which is probably right. Is we have told these stories so many times together, it really helps the same version. You just finesse the story together. That's a lot of friendships. And friendships, when you have shared memories,

it's about the telling of it so it's the same. Unless it's something you guys both have never talked about, then you're revisiting. But there is this curious aspect of most relationships, which in general, if you hear a husband and wife tell a story, they're constantly going, no, no, we left the day before.

Like, couples correct each other nonstop. Yeah. Don't you think that's the pattern? They do, but I think couples, and maybe this is sad, but I think couples do less of a combined story. You and Kristen do actually a lot of combined storytelling, but most people don't. Like I don't really notice some of our other friends

as a couple presenting a story and they're like back and forth telling it like you do with the friend thing. That's curious, yeah. Most often I hear couples though going like, no, they're always correcting each other. Yeah, I can see that too. I know people do that.

Yeah, that's interesting, I don't know. Anywho, okay, so was Ritalin a thing in the 70s? It was FDA approved in 1955. 55. Yeah. This was the heyday of pharmaceutical amphetamines because this is when dexedrine and all these quote housewife drugs were invented.

Yeah, but it says the explosion of Ritalin happened in 1991. I became aware of it in probably 97 or eight. Oh, it says actually Prozac, they believe Prozac sort of paved the way for it. Oh really? Yeah. Cause that's not a-

Said it became more acceptable and easier to take a psychiatric drug, Prozac. So then- Shifted the- Mm-hmm. Mindset. But then super-riddling came out, Adderall. And I think most people are prescribed Adderall now,

which is like- Yeah, or like Viabans or whatever people are prescribed Adderall now, which is like infinitely stronger. Yeah, or like Viabans or whatever. Or Viavans. Viavans. Viavans. Yeah. Yeah, people like that. Don't learn about it.

Okay. Viavans sounds like it would be a Benzo, though, but whatever. Wait, hold on, Viavans. Is it a Benzo? I think it's like Adderall, right? No, it is a Benzo, you're right. Oh, because a girl on my-

Most ans are benzos. Oh, prescription medicine used for treating ADHD. Well then it probably is a stimulant. It's amphetamine. Oh, you're talking about Ritalin. I thought you were just like- No, Vyvanse. Oh, Vyvanse. Oh, okay, all right.

I can see like a benzo Attic rifling through someone's cabinets in their bathroom and seeing that like at a van, like at a van as a Benzo and thinking like, oh great. And then get all jacked up. Yeah, why did I think it was Zan-Bex? Probably because of Ativan. But yeah, anyway. I was prescribed Ativan.

Yeah, and it worked for you. Yeah, I mean, I would take it very sporadically. I don't really like it though. Well, it's almost hard to evaluate because you're taking it when you're really struggling. Like a panic attack. Yes, exactly, so it's probably a weird associate. I was taking it when I wanted to have a good time.

Not Benzo's stimulants. Oh, right. Well, I've never taken that. I've never taken Adderall or anything. I think that would make me feel so bad. Like it took me a while to get used to caffeine. I don't think I would do well on that. Okay, oh can ADHD affect hand to eye coordination?

Poor motor coordination or motor performance is another common coexisting difficulty in children with ADHD. Though it has received less attention and research, children with ADHD who experience motor difficulties often display deficits in tasks requiring coordination of complex movements such as handwriting. Well, I have shitty ass handwriting, that's for sure.

But you don't have a hand-eye coordination problem. I don't think so. It's not like Aaron's or Charlie's, that's what I'm saying. But I don't think it's under-indexing or. No, yours is fine, except for maybe your eyes are affecting it. Now.

Lately. Yeah, Aaron and I were bonding over our declining eyes. Welcome to the club. Right? It's kind of fun. Well, you've had it long enough that you're like total acceptance mode. I'm still like where is this going?

Am I gonna be blind in two years? Because it's just like it feels like it's falling off a cliff and why would it ever stop? Sure, but as we learned in this episode, you can choose how you perceive the world and you can choose to see it as everything's just a little. Novel. Like a little cloudy in a great way.

Oh. When things are too sharp, when I first got my glasses, I hated it, I was like, everyone looks a little uglier. Yeah, I look uglier and everyone else does a little bit too. It's like the proverbial lights going on in the bar. Yeah. Oh man. I'm so glad I never have to experience that again.

It's cruel. But I guess people just won't leave unless they do that. But they should let everyone leave in the dark. Yeah, then people still don't leave. They don't leave, even with those lights on. Yeah. That was my experience. Would you do that when you owned a bar? Would you turn the lights on? Oh yeah. Yeah, music off, lights lights on. You're the truly committed. That was my experience. Would you do that when you owned a bar?

Would you turn the lights on? Oh yeah. Yeah, music off, lights all on. Oh fuck. Tell everyone to get the fuck out of there. Terrible feeling just hearing that. Yeah, that's rough. PTSD.

Okay, so he broke his arm before he came. Broke in half, broke his humerus, had to get a rod. Yeah, and you said you thought that was the second biggest bone in the body. I do, I expand by that. It goes the femur, the tibia, and the fibula. No kidding. I wonder if we're going length or girth.

Length makes sense. The largest three bones of the body are the long bones of the thigh, the shin, and the lower leg. I accept that, I accept. Shout out while you're looking at your next fact to MotoGP. Aaron, who's not even interested in it, I forced him to watch two races this weekend.

We were screaming last night watching the race. Oh, exciting. I love that. I wish I could just watch them with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe we should FaceTime each other. Yeah. Okay, so I mentioned that there was an episode

of Malcolm Gladwell's show about hoarding and memory, and that is called Dragon Psychology 101. Ooh. It's a revisionist history episode. So feel free to listen to that and learn about hoarding. It was a really good episode. That's it. That's all. That's all.

I really liked him a lot, just siding out. Me too. He was so fun. And smart, and memory's so fascinating. He was a professor at UC Davis, and he's in a punk band. Yeah. And he broke his arm skateboarding, and he's my age. And he's in a punk band. And he broke his arm skateboarding and he's my age. And he's in a neuroscience punk band called Pavlov's Dog.

Neuroscience punk band. Everyone in the band's a neuroscience. Oh my God, I love that. Yeah, he's phenomenal. Can't wait to listen. Yeah, it's a kind of heady episode. When I was listening back, I was like, it's a bit heady, but it's really interesting.

It was a dense one. It was one of the most dense ones we've done in a while. There's a lot heady episode. When I was listening to that, I was like, it's a bit heady, but it's really interesting. It was a dense one. It was one of the most dense ones we've done in a while. There's a lot to learn about. Can I send you one more picture? Speaking of punk rock, Aaron just sent this to me. This is a picture of Dax at a punk show. Yeah.

Wow, how old are you here? 17. Wow. Now, can I tell you, here's what I told Dex about it. I was like, I thought he looked so cool. And I was like, it looks like there's like a lot of Brill cream maybe like oil in his hair. But it's like super shiny and blonde and it's bleach white.

Really fucking cool looking. And then look at the little guy next to him. Doesn't he look like Michael J. Fox? Or is that just me? Yeah. He does. I can see that, yeah. I remember that kid. You remember him?

I kind of remember him too. He was at all the shows. Yeah. The one behind him with the cowboy hat also looks like somebody. Oh, do you know who that is? That's Go Watch. That's Aaron Go Watch. Have you met him over here?

He's a good, he's still our friend. I don't know if I've met him. He's so cute. But Aaron, you're not in this picture, right? No, that's my baseball hat. Behind the cobble hat, there's a white baseball hat. But yeah, no I'm not. How fun.

And then Tyrell is just behind me. With the glasses. With the half face picture, with the glasses sticking out. Oh my God, fun. Future founders of Ted Segers with a commitment to our community. Wow, how cute.

Very fun, good old days. Fun blast from the past, yeah. All right. All right, well it was lovely to have you per year. Hell yes, I'm so happy to be here. Bye. Night night. Bye. Bye!