Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Your Brain Might Be Lying. The Scientific Explanation for Cellular Memory, Why Universal Intelligence Can Be Found In Nature and How Past Memory Is Actually Changeable | Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Are Your Memories Lying to You? Neuroscientist Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin—NYU clinical associate professor, research fellow, and author of One Hand Clapping—joins Mayim Bialik's Breakdown to BREAK OPEN everything we thought we knew about memory, consciousness, evolution, and the future of humanity. Dr. Kukushkin might be the first to scientifically prove that “the body keeps the score," and he's here to share his groundbreaking research revealing that every cell in the body may have the potential to store memory. What this means for trauma, healing, and everyday life will blow your mind! We explore how human memory evolved, why we remember the way we do, and the hidden purpose memory plays in meaning-making, identity, and human experience. You’ll learn how memory is stored, changed, and distorted, why memory is NOT reality, what makes the human experience truly special, and what sea slugs can teach us about being human. We also discuss whether it’s more accurate (or useful) to view reality through a materialist vs spiritual lens, how natural selection is far more creative and intelligent than we ever imagined, and whether Artificial Intelligence is humanity’s evolutionary path. Dr. Kukushkin reveals what we've been getting wrong about dopamine: its real evolutionary purpose, how to harness this new science to boost motivation, productivity, and well-being, and why social media “dopamine hits” are so addictive - and so damaging. Dr. Kukushkin also breaks down: - Overlooked implications of being a carbon-based species - Sinister effects of sleep deprivation - Can the human brain ever reach its memory capacity? - What happens when we’re downloading too much information from our environment - What happens when we outsource our language abilities to technology? - What are the consequences of forming human-like emotional connections with chatbots? - Is there hope that we will return to using our brain’s full cognitive power? PLUS...the spiritual experiences technology can never replicate, and why real life will always give us what machines can’t! If you care about human potential, the future of consciousness, or understanding the truth about your own mind, this is the episode of MBB you CANNOT miss. Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin’s book, One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind: https://www.nikolaykukushkin.com/press-1 Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We think of evolution as canceling God. God was creative and God's, this infinite imagination. Darwin didn't cancel creativity. Darwin magnified it. He injected it into every part of the natural world. It's the ocean that decides that seals need to be gray and their skin needs to be smooth. That is the pattern of the world that shapes biological reality. That's true for any cell.

We've shown that kidney cells grown in a petri dish also form memories. and they use the same tools, the same molecules, the same genes, as brain cells do. Did you just prove that the body keeps the score? Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin is a Harvard and Oxford-trained neuroscientist specializing in cell biology and memory processing. His description of our existence will change the way you look at the world forever. We tend to think of memory as the snapshot of reality, but memory is not a reflection of reality. You are creating your own impression of what you experienced,

and you're storing that impression, changing the brain for the future. That's nuts. But humans need a very, very deep level, belonging to something that's bigger than you. We know enough to make an origin story that would give our life meaning. Patterns of the world unfolding through our consciousness. You're speaking to an intelligence across every aspect of life.

That gives your life. meaning. Hi, I'm I'm Biallic. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. You usually keep talking. Oh, okay. Today we're going to be talking about many aspects of what makes us special as humans.

And in particular, have the things that we have evolved to create actually led to a decrease in our ability to do the things that actually make us uniquely human. There's a very exciting outro to this episode. And you may get there, but one thing I forgot to add to the outro is the idea of evolving our consciousness outside of our brain to be augmented by technology. Now, that's not the whole episode by any means, but it is this very interesting idea that as we gain more technology, whether it be learning to write, having television, radio, now with social media, and artificial intelligence, what is the trade-off that we're going through, the loss of memory, and what are the benefits that we get, more access to information, more connection to other people, but can they be weaponized against us?

Is an really fascinating part of this conversation. That is, as Jonathan said, just a part of what we're going to talk about today. We're also going to talk about some of the building blocks of what makes us even able to process that we exist and how even the smallest molecules in atoms actually. hold information about some of the largest questions we have about our purpose here, our existence, and how we can literally thrive as humans. We're talking with Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin. He's a Russian-born neuroscientist.

He's an associate professor at NYU. And he was trained at St. Petersburg State University in Russia as well as Oxford University. He did his postdoc at Harvard. And he has a book that is loosely based on a course that. he taught at NYU called Life Science. The book is called One Hand Clapping, Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind. And the way that I describe this book, and we're going to talk about certain elements of it, it is the greatest description of our existence on a scientifically based planet for people who may not necessarily be scientists. So it's a terrific book if you're a scientist,

but all of the things that we talk about here on Miami-Biallics breakdown, we talk about DNA in passing, we talk about chemistry, we talk about electrophysiology, we talk about evolution and how consciousness evolves. It is all included and detailed in one-hand clapping. It's a terrific and really, really beautiful book. He has so much research he's going to talk to us about regarding memory. Does the body keep the score? How did memory evolve? What is its purpose and how do we use it to make better decisions and have a better understanding of why we're here and who we are. Miam asks specifically, how do we trust memory? Because he talks about how our memory is actually the perception of the event, not the event itself. And he talks about how we

store memory, how we change our memories, really fascinating implication to how we should live. We go deep into cellular and molecular biology. And we also go deep into conversations about consciousness, reality, perception, and the philosophy of our existence. A pleasure to welcome Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin to the breakdown. Break it down. Thank you. It was great to be here. There's so many things that we want to talk to you about. We have a particular interest in one-hand clapping, which is really, really fantastic. but before we get started and before we dive into some of the fascinating memory kind of perspectives that we can gain from also your research, I wonder if we can start with this question.

What is special about the human experience? Well, it is a fundamental question of our life, right? Because we always experience this tension between myself and the rest of the world. And I think most people would say it's a problem of consciousness. but I think it's a broader problem than that. Yes, we're puzzled by this fact that my experience, what I see from my eyes, is different from what I see in other people.

I look at all the people around me. I know that they have the same brain. They have the same brain cells, same molecules happening. Everything is the same. But it's a completely different thing, looking at someone else versus experiencing something on your own. So that's one part of the puzzle.

But I think it goes deeper than that because it's the same exact puzzle that we have when we look at our species compared to the rest of the rest of the living nature. We are special, but it's very hard to put your finger in exactly what makes the human species special? Is it the brain? Is it the number of brain cells? It's the size of the brain. Once you start looking for it, it sort of all disappears, dissolves. You can't really draw a lion.

And I think the same tension exists when we look at life versus non-life. people have very strong opinions about this process of life appearing from non-life because it feels like if that's possible, it somehow dilutes this specialness. We feel special being alive, different from rocks. And it's very important for us to hold on to that specialness. So anytime you zoom in on it, it dissolves, it disappears. Science tells us that it's all a continuous process, that life and non-life and humans and non-humans and my consciousness,

versus other people's consciousness. It's all one thing. And yet, we experience it differently. We experience myself as something fundamentally different. So what is special about it? I think that what makes us special is the very ability to recognize that. It's the variability to see yourself as being distinct

from other people, from other species, from non-life, being able to understand it and the fact that we can hold in our brain, in the configuration of those neurons, that conceptualization of that distinction, that is what makes it special. Spoken like a true neuroscientist. And whenever people would ask me why I chose to study neuroscience as opposed to biology, psychology, theater, right?

What I would say was that the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that we're engaging in any interaction of my consciousness and yours, that's the level that I want to study. That's what neuroscience is for, right? So I really, I love that response and I resonate with it deeply. We talk a lot here about the difference between a materialist worldview and whatever another worldview would be. I don't really want to call it a spiritual worldview. You know, there's so many things we could call it. And many people say it's religious or, it's mystical or it's transcendental, given what's unique about the human experience, does it help to view it from a non-materialist standpoint and how do we view things from a

non-materialist standpoint while still acknowledging the scientific and physical basis of our reality? I'll be honest with you. I am a cell biologist and biochemist, and whenever I step into all the isms of philosophy, I feel really out of my comfort zone. I feel lost. in them. I understand, I think, what materialism, but once we get into those other things that are not materialism, I start getting lost. You know, I've watched Bernardo Castro's interview on your podcast, and I think we overlap in many different ways, but I also don't understand some of the things that he is saying. So, for instance, the idea that consciousness might tap into this universal informational resolution, that consciousness is not generated by the brain, but the brain

taps into it. That really reminds me of the relationship between genes and DNA. It seems to me that it's equivalent to saying that, well, DNA doesn't really exist. It's only genes exist because, well, it's the genes that are the information and they're organizing all the atoms in DNA to conform to that informational pattern over generations and generations and generations atoms change and genes stay. That's completely true. I just think it's strange to say that DNA doesn't exist

because of that. I think it's the same thing with consciousness. Yes, we can look at it from the informational point of view, not the stuff, but how the stuff is arranged. I think that's how we should look at it. I think it is a process that's happening with information, rather than with matter. But to me, it doesn't seem to disagree with a materialist point of view.

It's just another way of looking at it. It's not that or this. It's just what are you paying attention to this stuff or how it's arranged? My MBLX breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water.

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all the way through evolution, all the way through sort of also a social evolution. But the fact is the appreciation for our experience cannot be separated from the appreciation for the carbon molecule, right? and the way that you describe it is that a kind of artistic way would be to say everything's fractals. You talk about the metroshka, you know, we're a Russian stacking doll, right? We're this stacking doll of experience. And the smallest thing is the same as the biggest thing, right? Which is also a religious concept, but that's just a coincidence for now. But the notion that, for example, carbon gives and oxygen takes away, that's actually a description of properties of physics,

of properties of molecules and electrons and all of these incredible things. But you're also saying that inherent in the structure of the universe itself is a metabolic relationship. Can you talk a little bit about this beautiful framework that is incredibly scientific but also beautifully mystical? Yeah, that's where the book starts because you're right. It is the foundation for everything. This is as elemental as it gets when we're talking about chemical elements.

It's sort of both, even in the language, we call them chemical elements because they are so elemental. And, you know, when people say, well, surely life is not just atoms and molecules, surely consciousness is not just neurons and circuits. What I think they're missing is that those just atoms and just molecules, they're a lot more than you imagine. They're not just bricks. They have inherent in them these fundamental ideas or, what I call in the book Essences, nature's ideas, not ideas that we humans come up with,

but ideas that are inherent in the patterns of the world. And so, carbon, for example, why are we made of carbon? Really, our body is carbon with a few things stuck to it. Why carbon? Well, because it is a unique element in how cooperative it is and in how many chemical bonds it can form

for, it's a lot, and also in the fact that it can bond, with other carbons. That's also pretty unusual. That carbon can link with another carbon and then the next carbon and then the next end pretty much to infinity. You can make scaffolds, rings and chains and circles and helices. It's stable, right? When we talk about stability. Stability, yes, absolutely. But it's not too stable because it were too stable, like a noble gas. Well, it would be useless for biology. It wouldn't cooperate with other atoms. So it's just right there with the right stability, with a right cooperativity.

It has a, you know, you could say it has a character. You could go as far and say it has a soul, if you want to use that word. Not in any additional metaphysical meaning. Not that there's some human-like ghost sitting inside of that carbon atom, determining what it does. No, just a very chemical nature of that atom gives it a particular superpower. Call it whatever you want. You can use any word you want.

Oxygen is very different. Oxygen is almost the opposite of that. Oxygen in its nature is to rip everything apart. It's this greedy element that sucks in electron clouds from other atoms, breaks apart molecules and releases energy. And that's also important for life because for anything to be created, whatever carbon does, it requires a supply of energy. And that means that something needs to be destroyed.

And that's what oxygen can bring into the picture. So the cycle of carbon and oxygen taking and giving, that is the foundation for everything that grows out of it, and our entire metabolism, which is a very, very complicated system. It's made out of these hundreds of complex enzymes, these large molecules that are tuned to specific nutrients and balanced with each other so that we can put anything in our mouth so that we can digest and somehow have our bodies work on that. It's really a miraculous thing that our bodies do. But really, at its core, it's the same dichotomy of taking and giving, of taking and giving, these elemental essences of carbon and oxygen. And I think every element of our body, every chapter of our evolution, is a development of these essences, of these nature's ideas.

Everything that we are means something from the point of view of nature, regardless of what we think about it. There is a pattern in what we are, in how we evolved, and where we came from a pattern that distinguishes us from all the other ways to be alive and even not alive. You keep bringing me back to consciousness. I'm not doing it. You are. But also this notion of kind of purpose and, you know, awareness, right?

And it's interesting because, you know, Jonathan and I have so many conversations that do kind of dive into the philosophical, the neuropsychological, right? What's the difference, right, between awareness and consciousness? And what does it mean to have like a conscious experience? You know, you give this example of a snake. I can't remember which kind of snake it is. But this snake, this particular snake, has what looks like, you know, eyes on the back of its head, right?

That, right? So describe, describe the specialness of this snake. and the question that you propose is, does the snake know that it has eyes on the back of its head? I use this example in class when I start talking about Darwinian evolution, when I start talking about the creative power

that natural selection brings into the picture. I don't think biology classes talk about that enough. What you learn in the biology class is that evolution is blind. It's just stumbles into the future. future, there's no rationality, no thought. If you think that there's any thought, then you are unscientific. But the example that I use is this example of the snake, the spectacle cobra, that's the specific snake.

It has, like you said, the eyes, what very much looks like eyes on the back. It's very clear what this is for. It's a very obvious strategy. There's very little vertical symmetry in the natural world. If you go to a forest, there's basically nothing that is vertically simegetically. We don't think about this because we have bridges, we have buildings, we have lots and lots of symmetrical things in our built environment. But in nature, it's very rare, really in the forest. The only thing that's symmetrical like that is an animal that looks straight at you.

And usually that means that it's about to eat you. So great evolutionary idea. The snake gets up in the grass where it was lurking from behind is startled and runs away. But does the snake know that it has eyes in the back? And the answer to that is pretty clearly no. The snake has never seen that. It can't look in the mirror, and even if it did, you kind of need two mirrors, I guess.

Or if you need to meet another snake, it can't discuss that with another snake. It doesn't know what a species is. It could discuss it. It's a very complicated idea to look at another thing and decide, you know, we are the same biological species, and therefore, whatever I'm seeing, in the back of this animal's head is the same thing that I must have in the...

No, no way. There is no way that a snake knows about this. But then the next question is, if you, once you've established that, then, well, surely someone must. Right? It's such a great idea that it's just unbelievable that it would come from nowhere, from this blind nature. And the solution to that is nature is not blind. Nature knows very well what works and what doesn't work. And that is what natural selection is.

We think of evolution as canceling God. God was creative and God had this infinite imagination. And once we've established that it's actually all evolution, well, okay, now there's no imagination. Now it's all just boring and mechanical. But no, it's not mechanical. It's not boring. It's just as creative.

It's just that creativity is not in the mind of one being, but is distributed through the structure, the patterns of the world. It's the water, the ocean, that decides that fish need to be a blon, and that seals need to be gray, and their skin needs to be smooth. That is the pattern of the world that shapes biological reality into particular form. I think Darwin didn't cancel creativity. Darwin magnified it. He injected it into every part of the natural world.

And I think it makes the world not more dull, but more interesting, more beautiful, more easy to understand. You're speaking, though, or alluding to an intelligence across every aspect of life. Sure, you could put it that way. It hinges on the definition of the word intelligence. If we define intelligence as a process that leads to rational results, Well, why not call nature intelligent? If we define it as the thing that I, a human, have in my mind when I close my eyes and think of a math problem, well, then it's a different kind of intelligence.

But I don't think that we need to define intelligence from this top down. That's really my tension with, I think, much of neuroscience and psychology. And it's because I come from a different perspective. I think that most neuroscientists start from the top down. It's natural. You start with yourself. And then you start thinking, okay, this thought or this emotion or this memory, where does it live?

How does it work? What is it at the level of brain and neurons and cells and molecules? You go from the top, you go down. But I come from the other side. I am a biochemist. I started with molecules. And I moved on to studying sea slugs, very, very, very, simple. And then from there, I started thinking about, well, how will you extend this trajectory?

How do you go from, from a molecule to a cell, to a simple brain, to a more complex brain, to a human brain? So I approach these questions of consciousness and mind and intelligence from first principles. For me, if you can't define what these words mean from first principles, well, maybe there isn't anything else. I learned a lot about, sea slugs in my undergrad and also my graduate work. And whenever you would mention to people something about a sea slug, they'd be like, what, ew, that's not a thing, it's not important.

And I learned to really love the sea slug. And there is so much information that we've gathered from the really elaborate and intricate beauty that is the sea slug. I would like to give you the opportunity to wax poetic about what is it about the sea slug that makes it such a significant, important, captivating, and valuable resource and also one that does inspire really a beautiful reflection on our experience. There's several answers to this question, and I've practiced them all because, like you said, usually when you say you study C slugs, that ends the conversation.

So I've learned to start with I study memory, and then maybe a few minutes later bring in the C slug. There's a simple way to answer it. There's a very simple way to answer. Sea slugs are cool. They are just beautiful animals and it's fun to look at them. That's a very simple answer. Simple answer is that they are simpler than mice, than even fruit flies, definitely than humans or monkeys.

And so, well, if you want a simple system, if you want a memory that's handled by just a handful of neurons that you can understand deep at the level of individual molecules, moving around, that's your go-to animal. The simpler it gets, the better your understanding would be. It's one of the simplest ways to get from molecules to behavior. This path, the number of steps that you need to pass, the number of levels that you need to get through

in order to get from the molecular makeup to actual situation that this animal would experience in real life. This gap is much shorter. It's much smaller than for, other model systems. But I think there is a more nuanced answer to this question, and that's what I really think about what makes slugs special. It's not that they're simpler animals, even though they are, but that's not the most important thing. The important thing is that they are abstract animals. What I mean by that is we tend to think that a mouse is halfway between

us and bacteria, that it's so simple that, you know, you can, that you can be able to, you can basically break it down into molecules and understand it. But that's not true. Mice are 99% humans. They're practically the same animal with a few modifications. Sea slugs, though, sea slugs, though, they are much further away. And if you compare sea slugs versus us, mammals, mice, humans, what kind of animal is more normal in the animal kingdom?

It's the sea slug. The sea slug is a much more standard animal. A typical animal is cold-blooded. Our warm-bloodness is a crazy evolutionary idea. That's just absolutely insane from the perspective of a sea slug. A normal animal is cold-blooded. Normal animals about that size, maybe even smaller. We are giant.

We don't perceive that, but vertebrates are the largest animals in the world. We are much faster than a normal animal. I've learned that by analyzing hours and hours of sea slug videos, even if you speed them up 20 times. Still a pretty boring experiment. But if you speed them up 20 times, it starts to make sense. They, you know, they wave their head

and you sort of understand what they're trying to do. They move. They have some goal-directed behavior. If you watch them, you know, just with your eyes without any speeding up, it looks like a plant. Nothing is happening. It's just kind of aimlessly waving around.

But that's because we are so fast. It's not because of them being so slow. So really our perspective of what an animal brain is and what life is and how processes work in a body is really skewed by us being these extremely unusual animals. If you want to understand specifically a human, then a mouse is a good research model because it's so close to a human. But if you want to understand brains or animals or animals, For memory, in general, as a concept, as a biological process, as an evolutionary trajectory, then sea slugs are much better because they represent the animal kingdom much more faithfully than mammals.

How many different kinds of aplegia are there? Like, which ones do you work with? Aplegia Californica is what our lab, Tom Carouse, lab works on. I was lucky enough to be mentored by, you know, one of the pioneers in the field of Applesia. I consider myself, you know, the third in line from Eric Kandel, who is, of course, the founder of all the Applesia science. And Tom Caru, my mentor, he was mentored by Eric Kandell himself. So I'm a third generation aplezia scientists. So Applesia Californica is what we work on.

There's also Pleasia Kouradai in Japan. Some Japanese scientists work on that. the fornica is the standard. But, you know, there's lots of gastropod mollusks around, and there's nudibranch mollusks that are structured very similar to Apleasia, and we care about all of them. We have, you know, we have a chat in the lab where all slug-related jokes and images and anything snail-related goes there.

We are unapologetically snail people. When I was a student and we were studying Candell, when we were studying all of this, Eplegia, you know, research, you know, what was astounding was how much you can learn and infer about the human experience from a sea slug. And, you know, I think it's really easy to say, oh, well, look at primates. Look how much we're like them. Or even if you expand it out, I mean, Jonathan's eyes near fell out of his head when you said that we're mostly mice. Because, you know, we don't want to think of ourselves like that, right? When people would ask me, what did the sheep brain look like?

when you dissected it, I said it looked like a human brain just smaller. Like it's this, right? Among kind of mammals, right? So when you think about us versus a sea slug, right, you feel like it's got to be so far away from our experience. What do we know about the human experience based on what you have studied in sea slugs? I think that what you're saying is that's exactly right. But I don't see it as a constraint. I see it as something that liberates you from the confusion brought about by us being so unusual.

Let me give you an example. So we work on C-Slog memory and even these days we work on memory in non-brain cells. So for example, we've shown that kidney cells. kidney cells grown in a petri dish also form memories and they use the same tools, the same molecules, the same genes as brain cells do. For any cell, experience is a pattern of chemicals in time. That's true for a brain cell. All that any neuron in the brain knows about what's going on is which other neuron sent it a neurotransmitter from what side, at what time point. that's all that any cell knows

and from that our brain this combination of brain cells calculates everything that we know everything that we remember everything that we experience so really it's all time patterns time patterns of chemicals landing on the cell at different times

but that's true for any cell any cell has chemicals landing on it at different times they might be not neurotransmitters they could be called hormones or paracron factors if they're sent from a neighboring cell. It could be nutrients floating through a cell. Salts, liquids, mechanical pressure.

It's different experiences, cellular experiences in time. So what is memory in the brain from a perspective of a neuron? A neuron experiences these neurotransmitters at different times. Some of those patterns it ignores, but some of those patterns make it change, make it adjust some connections, make it reconfigure its genes, make it produce long-term changes.

And that is what we experience as our mental memory. So what we have shown is that other cells in the body, we use kidney cells and nerve-lostoma cells, but we believe that you can use any kind of cell, I accept bets on anybody's favorite cell line to work the same way. What we've shown is that if you create experiences for these cells, any cells that you grow in a pet tradition, what do I mean by create experiences, giving them chemicals at different times, chemicals that stimulate within those cells, what we know is stimulated in a neuron when we learn. So we know how brain memory works to some extent, in part fromoplesia. we can look at the same exact molecules in a non-brain cell and ask,

does activating those molecules at different times produce changes in those cells that would also distinguish some patterns from others? And turns out that that is true. So, for example, what we used was the so-called mass-spaced effect. It's a well-known property of memory, of any memory, in any animal, If you study for a given amount of time, let's say you study for an hour, if you do it all in one go, you will produce a worse memory than if you split the studying into four sessions. And this is something every parent tells their kid.

Don't cram for the exam, space it out, start a couple days before. That's actually not just like an old wife's tale. Like the brain actually prefers repetition, consistency, and it needs breaks to consolidate information. Turns out that the same is true for any other cell. Turns out that if you give a kidney cell an experience that lasts 12 minutes, you stimulate in that cell a particular molecule, that a neurotransmitter would have stimulated in a neuron.

We artificially turn it on in that cell for 12 minutes. And then 24 hours later, so we remove that stimulus, we leave that cell B, we let it rest for 24 hours, and then 24 hours later we see that it's changed. How do we know it's changed? Well, we have this particular report or protein. We have engineered this glowing protein, actually taken from a firefly, which I think is so cool,

that is produced anytime the cell activates its memory genes. And what are memory genes? Well, we also know them from neurons. We know what genes are activated in the brain when you learn. So we look for those genes. We put this glowing protein under the control of those genes. and anytime the memory genes are activated, you also get this glowing protein. So what happens is we treat cells with those pulses of chemicals for a few minutes.

We wait 24 hours and then we measure the glow, how much of the glowing protein we get. And so it turns out that if you do these four spaced trials of three minutes, separated by 10 minutes, so if you give that chemical four times, very, very short periods of time, versus you give it at one in one go over 12 minutes. So the spaced repetition creates a stronger memory, more of that glow of that memory gene protein, than if you cram it all in one goal. So that proves that these cells can distinguish between minute-scale patterns. The difference between those two patterns is just a few minutes.

Everything else is the same. The total duration of stimulation is the same. The only difference is those 10 minutes of gap between sessions. And nobody expected that a cell like that. a kidney cell, non-brain-cell, would parse patterns on such short time scales. We usually think of non-brain cells as slow operating on maybe hours, timescales, days maybe. But minutes, that seems like something that's more neuronal. But it turns out that it's not necessarily.

First of all, this is a very, very significant finding, very, very elegant. It's a beautiful finding. but the first thing that Jonathan would think of and that many of our listeners are probably thinking of, did you just prove that the body keeps the score? Which is a very common notion in trauma research in particular, which implicates things like immune functioning, recall, you know, it has implications for post-traumatic stress disorder, for complex PTSD. what you're proposing, in theory, could extrapolate out to say when people say, I feel this in my body.

And doctors tell you, I don't know what you're talking about, you're fine. Or the work of Peter Levine and somatic experiencing, that if the body had a desire to run from a predator, from a threat, from an abuser, that your legs will hold the memory of I need to get away if they couldn't. that you will have chronic pain, inflammation, right? Is that where we can take this? I have to say that this was exactly the first comment to this paper that immediately was asked by everybody, and that took me by complete surprise. That's not how I thought about this at all.

But it really made me think. And my first reaction to this was, no, that's not what we're talking about. No, surely the psychological, trauma is contained within the brain and that has nothing to do with what your organs would be storing and the fact that you feel that something is in your body does not mean it is actually in your body because you're feeling your body with your brain. So that was my first thought. But then, as I thought about it more, I think I started softening up on this idea.

maybe it's not as woo-woo as it sounds at first, because we know that there is an impact of the brain on the body. That's an established fact. No, no question. Cortisol, for example, stress hormone can affect peripheral tissues, can affect your metabolism. That's just one example. So we know that's true.

For thousands of years, alternative practitioners, yogis, mystics, have said this. And it wasn't until science, quote, proved it that we could acknowledge that the, the mind can have that power over the body. Whenever people say to me, like, I don't know about that, what's mind-body syndrome? I say, if you've ever lost the contents of your stomach before a big date and exam or your wedding, that's the mind having an effect on your body. So just wanted to give a nod to thousands of years of, yeah. Well, you know, that was also part of the conversation. And while I have deepest respect for tradition, it is also a tricky part to gain scientific knowledge from because, well, a lot of traditions were wrong. But in this particular case, I'm not sure that

that is wrong. I think it is very reasonable. So one part of it is brain acting on the body. Another part of it is body acting on the brain, which we also know to be true. Like the gut brain access, for example, and exercise, another example, that affects your well-being and your anxiety. So we know that that works as well. And now we know that the body

can store patterns of experiences that are happening to these body cells. So if you put one, two, and three together, it doesn't seem that unreasonable that the body would keep some score, if,

whether that is what people are reporting, when they're saying that I feel that my body stores this trauma? I don't know. We don't know enough yet to say that that's true. But I think at the very least, it opens the theoretical possibility that that is not science fiction and not pseudoscience, but might actually have real biological mechanism. The few things that came to mind were, if you're going to experience trauma,

it's likely better to experience it all at once versus repeated and continued experiences. if the cell is adapting in that way? Well, I think that that is probably true regardless of whether it's stored in the brain or the body, because, well, the spacing effect is true for any kind of memory that we know about and any kind of animal, and now we know it's a property not of a brain, but of a cell.

So wherever it would be stored, yes, I think that a repeated trauma would probably have a worse effect than a single time trauma. Not to say that something that happens once cannot bring about PTSD. Of course. Caviots all across the board, because one intense experience is going to be intense and it can have its impact. It's in my thesis, so I have to jump in. Potentiation of trauma is a thing, and there's very significant and important research that we know. Trauma builds on trauma.

So yes, one salient, highly emotional experience. can absolutely create trauma. That's usually capital T. But other kinds of traumas are potentiated in the memory system and in the body so that one person who is experiencing small traumas, I mean, we all know those people. I'm one of them. It's like, why does everything seem to keep building in like an asymptotic curve? I just wanted to say asymptotic curve.

I always want to say asymptotic curve. I'm also thinking about how this can apply for people's benefit. right? So obviously we know studying in micro increments. I'm thinking about myself who likes to eat all the time, right? Maybe I shouldn't be doing that because I'm actually training the cell to constantly be in digestion versus resting and having a little break. I'm thinking about exercise. Is it better to have little micro doses of exercise so the body adapts versus working out for

four hours a day? The question is, what does the a pleasure do? How does it eat? How does it move and metabolize? That's what Jonathan's goal is. Okay, well, let me address the, what's the practical benefit first. Yeah, so, I mean, I think there's a reality in which we do learn all the patterns and their effects and what part of the body parses what pattern.

And then we start exercising at precise intervals and consuming carbohydrates and proteins and lipids at the specifically designated time patterns and then take medicine, not once a day, but at a given time and the day and then space it in a specific way. I just think that that would ruin our lives to such an extent that it would be unlivable. That's what my life is like. He just told me my life is unlivable. It sounds great to me. Well, in that case, give us another three to four years and we'll give you a list of patterns to to internalize and recreate in your life. Six times a day. I'm I tell you you're doing a great job.

But I think personally, I think that what our research really shows is that patterns matter. That's the main message. We may not know what those patterns are, but patterns matter. And everything you do on a schedule might have a lasting effect on your body. I don't think that anybody is going to be a better judge of that effect than you yourself. So I guess my advice to people would be not assume that that's fiction and just listen. to your body. It does recognize patterns and it can store them and you are the best judge of what it stores. I wonder if we can dive a little bit more into some of the human implications of

what we know about memory and something that comes up a tremendous amount on our podcast and I think in many people's lives. If anyone's ever been in therapy or has been asked about their childhood, some really interesting things come up regarding memory. So one of them is a about perception, and you talk about this a little bit in one hand clapping. We don't always remember things accurately. And we had Amir Raz, Dr. Raz talks about the misremembering people do. And also the kind of social contagion components of memory and remembering. But something that comes up a lot with trauma is people do often report memories that surface,

memories that come back to them. Obviously, there's a lot of controversy when I was an undergrad about repressed memories, and it was kind of the beginnings of these conversations. What's admissible in court, right? A new memory that has surfaced. How do we decide which memories get to be valued, right? How do they matter? I wonder if you can talk really more from kind of a molecular and cellular perspective, what do we know about what the human experience of memory can do to certain kinds of memories? And are they just hanging around waiting to be plucked? How are we finding memories? And I've had this happen where it's not that I'm told something. It's that I reembody a memory that I can also verify happened, but was not in my conscious experience. Talk a

a little bit about memory and trauma in this way? I think that what limits us in this conversation is, again, we are rubbing against this tension between the top-down view and the bottom-up view on memory. Because I think we tend to think of memory as some, maybe distorted, maybe incomplete, but a reflection of reality. We think that somehow we're taking the snapshot of reality and putting it somewhere in the brain, and then we can access it or we can modify it or we can distort it, but somehow it is there,

and maybe it will surface, or maybe it won't surface, but it's there. But I don't think that's the right way to think about memory. So what we're thinking about when we're talking about this kind of memory, is just one type of memory. It's episodic memory. Skills, for example, work from a perspective of a neuron very, very similarly. They are wired differently,

but a neuron doesn't know exactly how it's wired. Those cells that are responsible for skills get modified as a result of us learning that skill and then they perform that skill better. So in this case, that's the recollection. You're not really recreating some state of reality before. You're doing something different. You've modified your brain and now it's doing something new.

That's how we need to think about memory. Memory is not a reflection of reality. I think the simplest definition of memory that I can think of from first principles is memory is a change that outlasts its cause. anytime you're experiencing something, there's some change happening to your brain, and that change persists after you've stopped learning. That is what memory is.

Sometimes, sometimes the changes that are produced in the brain, they reflect some aspects of reality, and that's what we experience as episodic memory. But that's not necessarily true. What is in common across all types of memory is that something changes and the brain starts working differently. and it's really unpredictable how the brain will change. Maybe what we memorize is different,

maybe what we're outputting is different, maybe multiple memories combined into a third memory. That really depends on every individual experience that a human has. But I think if you think of memory as not bringing you back to a moment and time, but the past changing the brain for the future, that I think the tension disappears. Memory is from the past, but it is for the future. That is, I think, what we need to understand about memory to resolve this tension.

Why is my memory not the same as it was before? It's never meant to be the same as it was before. It's a totally different thing. You are creating your own impression of what you experienced, and you're storing that impression. You're not storing the actual thing that happened in the world. if we're not remembering, let's say, something that happened, but more the impression of it, first of all, how do we trust any memory? And secondly, if we're not talking about episodic memory,

but if we're talking about, you know, more procedural memory, yeah, like I think of muscle memory. You know, I play the piano, right? And if you ask me to play the chorus of a particular song that I play, I usually have to start at the beginning to get there, right? Or if I, if I, I'm fumbling with a song and I haven't played it in a while, all of a sudden something clicks and then the whole piece is there. And I'm like, right, that memory comes from elsewhere. So what does that also mean, especially when we think about emotional memory, when we think about these complicated memories, is that its own kind of procedural memory as well? I behaved this way when I was a child. So when I'm with my parent, even as an adult, I'm still behaving like that child, right?

Can we look at memory also in terms of what we're possessing as we function in psychological terms? Yes, of course. I think that our brains are constantly being modified by every experience and of course by childhood experiences. And yeah, so the way that skills would be formed of the piano skill is first you control each motion, if you're playing a piano, each finger consciously using your cortex. You have to drive each muscle to a particular location. You are trying to achieve a goal, and you have to guide each muscle to do that. But if you do that successfully, you get a jolt of dopamine.

Dopamine gets sprayed on those basal ganglia, and it tells them, whatever the brain just did, whatever it just happened, remember that, store that. And those cells preserve whatever passed through them, whatever motions were just executed, they preserve those motions in a strengthened configuration of synapses between them. So next time, you would be trying to execute that task. If you have that goal in your mind, that combination of motions would just unfold more easily.

You do that multiple times, you get the jolt of dopamine every time it's successful, and this combination just becomes a unit, a chunk. And then all you need to do is, like you said, just invoke the goal, the melody, a part of of a song and it just unpacks itself. We call it muscle memory because it feels like muscles remember it itself, but actually it's basal ganglia memory. It's not really stored in the muscles.

So, I mean, the same could be true longer term for for habits, for preferences. You know, I always end up choosing the same lunch spot to go to even though there's like a hundred more around it and it's not like they wouldn't be

maybe even better. But I don't know that. because my behavioral pattern has been optimized by this one successful spot that I go to, and my brain just naturally leads me there. It's very hard for me to get out of that pattern. Extend that to many years and to other more deep habits. And yeah, I think it's the same thing. I not only always go to the same restaurant.

I order the same thing every time I go to like, there's one thing that I always get at this place. I'm just a creature of habit. We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with Dr. Kukushkin. There's so much more in part two. We get deep into a conversation about AI. Is it part of our evolutionary trajectory? Should we see the outsourcing of creativity and organic thought as just the next step in our evolution? And what does technology do that real life experiences can't? And what does real life present the technology will never be able to match? We also discuss the danger and potential implications of forming relationships with synthetic robots or chatbots.

That is on the rise lately. There are people following in love with their artificial intelligence systems and it has a huge implication. We also talk about the very human need for connection and belonging and how an absence of that in the world today is driving an enormous amount of people to seek it elsewhere. This episode also has a spectacularly fleshed out outro. So please stay tuned for part two. We can't wait for you to listen to it. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

It's MyN. B.R. X breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down.