BI 206 Ciara Greene: Memories Are Useful, Not Accurate

[00:00:03] Speaker A: I think one of the arguments we make in the book is that actually a lot of our memory problems aren't problems with memory itself. They're problems with what we expect our memories to do. A kind of misunderstanding of what our memories can or should do. Memories are reconstructed. And a side effect essentially of that sometimes is that you will incorporate misinformation or you'll reconstruct the memory in a way that isn't in line with the truth or, you know, so it's just part and parcel of being personal. And I think the problem there is the assumption again that the flaws and whatever in our memory are just glitches. That that's the system failing to act correctly. It's not like a little like glitch in the code in a minor error. That's. That's how our memory is fundamentally working. [00:00:58] Speaker B: This is brain inspired, powered by the transmitter. [00:01:02] Speaker C: One of my favorite memories was from when I was about 8 years old and my parents took my brother and I on a snow skiing trip. And we had skied during the day and night was upon us, and we were going to visit one of my dad's friends and we walked out the door. My dad is a very fast walker. Was a very fast walker. He was also a fairly large individual, wide, portly in some sense, but he carried his weight very well and he was a very fast walker. So my brother and I were always striving to keep up with him whenever we were walking somewhere. So my brother and I were about 10ft behind my dad as he's walking out the door. And we were from the south, so. [00:01:49] Speaker B: We don't really know how to walk. [00:01:50] Speaker C: On ice very well. And that evening, neither did my dad. So my brother and I were watching my dad trying to catch up, and all of a sudden my dad flies into the air. And just like a cartoon, his legs start going back and forth really fast as if he's trying to run in midair. But he's horizontal and he's just hanging in the air with those legs moving back and forth until he finally falls straight down onto the ground, right onto his back, onto the icy surface, and then lays there and starts grunting. And my brother and I, as good children do, immediately started laughing uncontrollably at dad's foibles. That is one of my favorite memories. The problem is it didn't happen. Well, it didn't happen exactly like that. My dad's not a cartoon. He didn't fly up into the air and stay up in the air in that horizontal fashion while his legs and feet violently swayed back and forth until he fell on the ground just like a cartoon. So why do I bring this up? Well, as you know, we are on the precipice of building AGI. [00:02:59] Speaker A: AGI. [00:03:00] Speaker C: AGI. Oh, pretty good sound effect, huh? And you know, AGI, Artificial General Intelligence is artificial intelligence that is like humans, but way better. So one of the things that we can ask ourselves is, do we want to build AI that has human like memory? Well, in this episode, Kira Green joins me to discuss many of the ins and outs of said human memory. Kira is an associate professor at the University of College Dublin School of Psychology, and she and her colleague Gillian Murphy recently wrote the book Memory Lane, the Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember. And one of the arguments they make throughout the book is that those flaws in our memories, those imperfections, as the subtitle would suggest, are features rather than bugs, that our memories have evolved to be the way that they are to help us function as we move forward in the world. So throughout this discussion, we talk about many of the different ways that memories are quote unquote imperfect and how those imperfections make sense when you think about what we need our memories for. So we discuss things like how misinformation contributes to our memories, the reconstructive nature of memories. [00:04:20] Speaker B: So every time we recall a memory, we're not just taking a little bit. [00:04:26] Speaker C: Out of our brain and presenting it. [00:04:28] Speaker B: To our subjective awareness. [00:04:29] Speaker C: We're actually reconstructing the entire memory based on the context that we're currently in, what we've experienced and learned since the events that took place formed our memory, the schema in which that memory has become consolidated, and so on. We talk about the value of forgetting, how memories can be manipulated, implanted for lack of better term. And many of these features and characteristics of memories are things that Kira has studied in her own lab and has gleaned from many other studies in many other labs. And of course, her book is filled with many more features that we don't cover in the discussion. I link to the book in the show notes@braininspired co podcast 206. Thank you for spending some time with me and Kira today. Hope you enjoy the episode. Thank you to my Patreon supporters. You guys will be hearing from me soon. I have an idea about something that we could all do if you're interested in doing. I will leave it at that. You'll be hearing from me soon in the Discord and in Patreon. [00:05:31] Speaker B: Here's Kira. So we're going to talk about your book or ideas in your book and in your extensive research on memory. And the book is called Memory Lane, the Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember. I notoriously have a bad. Well, what I would used to call a bad memory. And then after reading your book, the idea of a good memory has shifted in my mind, and now I think I have a great memory because I can't remember anything. [00:06:04] Speaker A: Well, I'm glad we had some effect on you. That's what we're hoping for. I mean, I think one of the big things that we're looking for with the book is that we want people to have a better understanding of their memory, but also just to kind of be more understanding of what your memory can and can't do and just as much what it should and shouldn't do. And that we shouldn't expect our memories to be computer programs or to be like a filing cabinet where everything is just stored. And I think one of the arguments we make in the book is that actually a lot of our memory problems aren't problems with memory itself. They're problems with what we expect our memories to do. A kind of misunderstanding of what our memories can or should do. [00:06:41] Speaker B: Yeah, so you use this phrase, perfectly imperfect. So this is just a very short quote from the book. We argue that memory is imperfect but perfectly imperfect. The flaws are the best and most interesting parts, giving us insight into how and why our memory works the way that it does. And so you were just alluding to that very concept. And. And, man, our memory seems both robust and fragile. Seems very fragile, based on your. All the work that you write about in the book. [00:07:11] Speaker A: It is. So I think what I would say is that that memory is. Is malleable, you know, so that that memory can be changed and can be altered. So it's very flexible. It's kind of maybe positive spin is to say that memory is very flexible. [00:07:23] Speaker B: And of course, mine is super flexible. That's great. [00:07:28] Speaker A: But what it means is that, like, sometimes what we're remembering might not necessarily be like a perfect, exact recreation of, you know, what. The exact thing that actually happened. But, you know, that's. That would be. That's just not the way our memories are designed to work. So, you know, if you think about, like, how our memory works, our memory is inherently reconstructive. So when we remember something, we're not retrieving it from memory storage, we're actually actively rebuilding it. So that really, I think, important idea that memory is an active process. It's not passive. You're not just the Passive recipient of information that you just store, and then you open a box and there it is, and you take it back out again. It's active. We actively engage in the process of building our memories and creating our memories. And we do that to a purpose, you know, not just in order to have a perfect encyclopedia of everything that ever happened to us. We use our memories in this very kind of active way to access things as and when we need them and for. To use them for particular purposes. And a lot of the time, that means things like creating memories that, you know, will help support our social relationships or will help us think about ourselves in a slightly more positive light. So it gives us a kind of a boost to our mental health, things like that. So, but I think it is. It is that idea of, you know, yeah, we can say memory is fragile, and we, you know, I think what gets a lot of press is the really. The kind of. The negative consequences of that, and they're very real, and I wouldn't want to take away from those in any way. So one of the. Probably the most famous example of that would be things like eyewitness memory failures, where somebody identifies the wrong person as having committed a crime. Obviously, that's catastrophic for those people and has really, really huge consequences. And I wouldn't want to suggest that that's nothing or to just kind of wave that away, but I think that we just. We need to recognize the value that memory is part and parcel of, you know, our kind of our evolved cognition. [00:09:19] Speaker B: There you used the word evolved because a moment ago you said our memory isn't designed that way, but part of what you guys argue. Yeah, sure, sure, yeah. I mean, you focus on evolution as a key way to. Key way into understanding why our memory has evolved, why we have the memory. Kinds of memories and characteristics of our memories that we. That we have. And it is this reconstructive aspect and the adaptation, the adaption to function in the world, in society, and in our social situations and so on. So you use the term reconstructive. Right. And so you guys buy into the reconstructive story that memories are reconstructions, right? That we're not retrieving files from our brains. [00:10:03] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, now it's, you know, obviously like in a. In a pop science book, you're simplifying the science, you know, but. But yes, I mean, there is. There is a lot of. There's a huge amount of, you know, behavioral evidence, but also neuroscientific evidence about this kind of reconstructive nature of Memory and the essentially the kind of, kind of shorthands and shortcuts that our brains use in order to help us build memory. So that essentially every time you encounter a new experience, you're not reinventing the wheel, you're not recording that entire memory like it's like it's being laid down on tape and like you've never experienced anything like it before. So like every time you drive to work in the morning, you get up, you go out, you lock the door, you walk down the stairs, you go out to your car, you start the car, you drive out the driveway, you turn right, you follow these exact same steps. And it would be a very inefficient use of storage, if you want to think in that computer metaphor, for us to lay down all of those things exactly the same way. Just the amount of duplication that would happen when we did that in our memories. So instead, a lot of the time, what happens when we're just in our normal day to day lives is our brains essentially recognize patterns that we have these kind of, these schemas. We kind of think of them as kind of like a framework for how we lay down memory. We recognize patterns in our day to day lives, in our experiences. And your brain, much like the way a, kind of like a JPEG type program in a computer will say, hey, these are loads of pixels that are all blue. Rather than just saying, rather than, you know, recording all of these individually as blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, why not just say these ones are all the same? Your brain essentially does something kind of similar where it will do a sort of pattern recognition, where it will say, okay, the structure of this memory is very similar to all my previous ones. So I'm going to use all those previous ones, this kind of schema as a kind of a structure that I'm going to a framework that I'm going to hang this new event on. And that what that helps us to do, apart from just being efficient, what it helps us to do is to recognize commonalities among, across all of our different experiences. So to recognize, for example, that every time you get out and go to work, that that isn't a completely unique experience, that there is a lot of overlap and that there are things that you will expect to happen and equally things that you wouldn't expect to happen and that will jump out at you. So that allows us to kind of recognize and synthesize our experiences together and to see the kind of, the common themes between them and to kind of understand our lives in a slightly different way. So we do have a good bit of understanding about how that happens in the brain. So you know, like it's, it's not, it's not really a mystery in that sense. [00:12:33] Speaker B: Well, well, now it is somewhat of a mystery. As a neuroscientist, I can, I'm comfortable with saying that. [00:12:39] Speaker A: I mean. Okay, but I suppose. Right, yeah. So look, I would never say that the, the all the answers are there. They're definitely not. And there's still a huge amount more research to be done. But I think sometimes when, when, when people kind of insist that there's, you know, oh, in this very blank way, there's no such thing as false memories or all memories are real, I'm like, well no, we have quite a lot of evidence about this reconstructive nature of memory, you know, and how this works for, for good and for ill. You know, most of that, as I say, like that that process has evolved most, mostly because I mean now drawing inferences about how, why something evolved is always. Is a notoriously tricky. But we can reach a fairly reasonable conclusion that we, that our memories, which are, you know, and our memory is a very kind of cognitively demanding and sort of energy demanding task that we wouldn't have, you know, very detailed memories unless they served us in some way. And that, you know, that there was an evolutionary benefit to having this kind of, you know, putting this level of energy and effort into creating memories in this way and that it's probably a fairly efficient use of our, of our energy. [00:13:49] Speaker B: Well, I like that you brought up schemas already because that's something that you focus on in the book and then you revisit when you're talking about emotions and their effects on memories. So the example that you gave, like driving to work is one of essentially procedural memory, although you're having. What I want to say is that what you focus on in the book is episodic memory, these event type memories. And so during your drive to work, you are having those events. But, but they fit into the schema so you don't need to cash them away. Right. And then I immediately thought of the. You, you guys write in the book about. I don't remember the term. What are the people that have the super memories? [00:14:29] Speaker A: Hsams. They're the highly superior autobiographical memory. [00:14:33] Speaker B: So what's going on with their. So there are people who do. Who can remember all the details of their drive to work, more or less. You know, that's, that's an understatement, of course. But what's going on with them in regards to the schema that you were talking about? [00:14:49] Speaker A: Well, so, so there's, there's. They're quite rare, or at least there's been relatively few of these people. These we call HSAM for short. There's been relatively few of these people identified. So the amount of research on them is relatively limited. But what. It seems to be the case, and I mean, I could be contradicted on this tomorrow. So we'll see what seems to be the case, what's going on with these people. These are people who do have these extraordinary, extraordinarily detailed and accurate episodic memories. So people who, for example, if you said to them, what was the weather like on the 27th of June, 2011? They could tell you, you know, or, you know, like, how much did you pay for your coffee? You know, Thursday, three months ago? [00:15:28] Speaker B: But is that more episodic or is that more semantic like they. [00:15:31] Speaker A: Well, it's. No, it's, it's that it's episodic. So it's very much, it's actually, it's very much about autobiographical memory specifically. So autobiographical memory falls under, of course, episodic memory, but it's a particular subset of episodic memory. And it's very much only their autobiographical memory where they see this. They basically have no other benefits that are observed in other kinds of memory. Their procedural memories, their working memory, all that stuff is the same as you and me. There's no real benefit. It's just this very specific benefit in autobiographical memory. But actually, what some of the research in this area suggests is that even though we refer to them as being highly superior, that in a way, another way of looking at it is that what's, what's really happening there is not a huge advantage to these people, but it's a failure of a really important process. It's a failure of forgetting and a failure of that sort of synthesizing process where we kind of essentially extract the gist from all of our experiences and discard the specific details as being kind of irrelevant a lot of the time that it's, you know, it's kind of a more efficient way of allowing us to get to the gist of what's happening. So, you know, this is the current, the current theoretical thinking on this. And as I say, there is, you know, they're relative because they're, they're a rare group. They're relative. They've been the end of those Individual people have learned, who have been identified, have been very heavily studied, but there's not that many of them. So, you know, so as I say, there we. We could end up finding out this is wrong. But at the moment, what seems to be the case is that it's. It's not so much an advantage as it is a disadvantage, that it's a failure of the standard process of where we should be able to forget and to be able to leave details behind. And we see that being important in kind of emotional contexts. So, for example, Hsan people will often talk about being completely unable to move on from, say, a breakup or bereavement because they're not able to put it behind them. They're not able to kind of. Not that anybody ever forgets a breakup or forgets a bereavement, but you're able to kind of. To move on and to forget every single detail and to kind of cast it in a nice rosy light. In the same way, they'll often talk about being unable to ever let a grudge go because they can never really forget. You know, you had that argument with your brother, and who doesn't argue with their siblings? And in order you have to be able to let it go, you have to be able to forget about it and recognize that that's unimportant in the scheme of things. But if you constantly remember every detail, it's very hard to do that. [00:18:02] Speaker B: You don't want to be in an argument with someone like that either, because they will remember all the details. [00:18:07] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. My brother has the memory of an elephant, and it's a po. And also. But to be honest, I think his memory is wrong sometimes. But because the rest of us are like, I'm not sure. I don't think that's right. But I don't remember it. And he's going, well, I remember it. [00:18:18] Speaker B: Oh, God. Yeah. There's the idea that time heals, and that's because forgetting heals. I mean, I've been in lots of arguments, disagreements with friends over the years, and I'm always thankful when a little time goes by. And I don't know if it's forgetting or accepting or a combination of the two, but then you can always come back together because you remember you love each other. Right? And. [00:18:39] Speaker C: But. [00:18:40] Speaker B: And maybe you kind of forget the. The real crux of your heated argument. [00:18:45] Speaker A: And you can kind of extract the gist of all of those many, many years of friendship and love and affection and all of that, and that maybe those individual details are less important in that context. [00:18:55] Speaker B: Right. [00:18:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:56] Speaker B: That's good. I'm glad I'm glad. I'm thankful that I don't have that. I'm not an H stem. [00:19:01] Speaker A: Oh, me too. And also, like, it doesn't really seem to have. For most of these people, it doesn't really seem to have done them any particular good in their lives. Like, they tend. They tend to have normal lives, normal careers, normal intelligence levels, normal, you know, earning potential. [00:19:18] Speaker B: They're also normally susceptible to misinformation. Right? Yeah. [00:19:22] Speaker A: Yes. So, and I think that's, you know, to us, that's. That's kind of not. Not a surprise. So we've been involved in some research that's worked with some people in Page Seven. Not we haven't worked with them directly, but we've been involved in research, working with those people, where that's been involved in. That's kind of been linked in with some of our research. And. Yeah, essentially what you see is that people who have these highly superior autobiographical memories are just as susceptible to being misled by misinformation as anyone else. And that's because the fundamental reconstructive nature of memory is still there. So, you know, even though. Even though they might have, you know, they might not be kind of boiling down their memories into this gist in the same way, they're still kind of retrieving memories and in these very particular ways that we all do. And we all kind of reconstruct our memories when we retrieve them, we pull all those pieces together and rebuild them. We use this metaphor in the book of the Lego Tower. So we talk about memory as being. Rather than being like a camera or being like a computer that it's like a Lego tower. So you're actively building that tower whenever you remember something. And people with HSAM are doing the same thing. They're also building that tower. So they're just as susceptible as the rest of us to somebody essentially handing them a brick and saying, hey, I think this brick fits in your tower. And then we kind of slot that in, and then we remember that particular detail that maybe wasn't in our memory, or we mix it up with something else, you know? [00:20:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Was it you that. I want to get back to forgetting in schemas, but was it you? What did you have for breakfast when you heard about 9 11? Was that you in the book? [00:21:00] Speaker A: It wasn't breakfast, but I was in Rome. Yeah. [00:21:04] Speaker B: Well, then you. That was your memories that you came down. [00:21:07] Speaker A: I came down in the morning. So my memory of 9 11, I was in Rome with my best friend. I was 18. Which tells you My age, with our first trip away with our, you know, by ourselves, without adults, you know, because we weren't now worthy adults. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Very salient. You're going to remember that as well? [00:21:24] Speaker A: Absolutely. Like it was, you know, a big deal. Like so, you know, we did all the things you do in Rome. And on the morning of September 11, we were staying in this hostel in the city center and we came downstairs and into, in the kind of the central lobby of the hostel, there was a big TV hung up on the wall, high up on the wall and everybody was kind of standing around in the lobby and looking at the tv and we said, oh, what's going on? And someone said, oh well, a plane flew into the World Trade center in New York. And we stood there and went, oh my God. And everyone stood around and talked about it and said, you know, oh God, you know, it's like somebody said like, oh, it was like it was a small plane, I think like a single engine plane. And someone else said, no, no, it was passenger liner. And we were all like, what happened? And did the pilot have a heart attack? And you know, all of that kind of thing. And then as we watched the second plane flew in and hit. So we saw that live. And it was only many, many years later that I realized that my memory was wrong. Because of course if I remember this happening in the morning, there's a six hour time difference between Rome and New York. So I remember this happening in the morning, but the attacks in fact happened at 9am in New York time, which meant it had to be 3pm in Rome. So most, most of my memory is accurate, but I had kind of subbed in the idea that I knew those attacks happened in the morning. So in my memory, my memory had become sort of contaminated by the information that I had that these attacks happened in the morning and I remembered it happening in the morning when I went out in my morning, but of course it was my afternoon. It's also worth noting that my friend who was there as well remembers this quite differently. [00:22:51] Speaker B: Oh really? [00:22:52] Speaker A: I mean, the same basic structure of us being there and watching it on tv. Yeah, yeah, but she remembers different details and what people said and she, no, no, nobody said that thing. And I'm like, yes they did. You know, so we both, we don't, we do both remember that event differently. We know, we don't argue that it happened, that we learned about this on the TV in Rome, but the different, different details of it. Right, so yeah, so like, you know that even, you know, like I study memory For a living. And I study memory reconstruction for a living. And it was many, many years after I'd been doing that before I realized that one of those kind of core flashbulb memories that, in fact, the time I realized it was wrong, when I was. I was writing up a talk, Flashbulb Memories, for a conference, and I was talking about my flashbulb memory of her home. And then I was like, wait, but. [00:23:40] Speaker B: You were talking about it, assuming it was. You were writing about it, assuming it was accurate, right, that you had this. [00:23:45] Speaker A: Not necessarily. So I was. I was talking about a study we were doing about flashbulb memories generally. So. So flashbulb memories are those memories that, you know, that are so clear and, like, vivid that they seem like looking at a photograph. Yeah, most people have them. You know, you might have them. Something personal, like being in a car crash or the birth of your child, something like that. In research terms, people often study them for, you know, big national or international events, things like 9, 11. And what we know about flashbulb memories is that they're just as susceptible to distortion and decay and everything else as normal memories. But I was introducing a study we had done on flashbulb memory, and my kind of little, like, anecdotal hook to start the talk was like, my flashbulb memory of 9 11. And why do we people have flashbulb memories of 9 11, but they don't have flashbulb memories of, like, the time the Ford Focus was released? You know, like, why does that not create a flashbulb memory for you? Like, so it was kind of an entry to talking about emotion and importance and media coverage and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But as I was writing that talk, I was like, oh, this core memory that I'm talking about here is actually wrong. So I might need to incorporate that into my discussion. [00:24:52] Speaker B: I mean, one of the many interesting tidbits that I have hopefully remember from your book is about flashbulb memories and, you know, the nature, so how they are susceptible to change. But the big change, there are some, like, core changes, core substitutions that happen in a year, and then it kind of settles down, and then you kind of remember it the same over time. [00:25:15] Speaker A: So there's this trail. There was a fantastic study done by William Hurst and his colleagues who basically followed people. There's been lots of flashback memory studies, but this one was just. Was fantastic. They followed people up, examining their memories of 9, 11 over a course of 10 years. So within a few days of September 11th in 2001, they mobilized this big team, and they got people out onto university campuses, recruiting people, asking them about their memories of the event and also, you know, kind of factual things like how many planes were there and things like that, but also their memories of their own experiences, like where they were at the time, who they told first, how they felt, a lot of that kind of thing. And they followed them up over a period, over the period of 10 years, and they examined how their memories changed. So for factual things like how many planes were there and, you know, where did they crash and so on, you can actually evaluate the accuracy of that. But for somebody saying something like, well, I was in the kitchen folding laundry, we can't evaluate the accuracy. But what you can do is evaluate the consistency. So whether people still say the same thing next week or in six months or in six years, and essentially what they found was that that kind of consistency for those flashbulb memories declined kind of quite sharply within the first year. So people's memories would kind of flex and change and adapt while there was still a huge amount coverage, of course, going on, and, you know, the incident was being talked about really extensively. But after about a year, those memories had crystallized, and then that. Then people would kind of continue to tell the same story. And it kind of is, I think, that element of it being a story. You know, things like when people get bigger and. Yeah, yeah, everyone has their story and they tell it the same way. [00:26:48] Speaker B: But there were some sort of inconsequential and surprising changes that, you know, like someone changing their memory from, like driving a car to making breakfast when they found out or something like that. That just don't have any usefulness, I feel, to the story. [00:27:05] Speaker A: Yeah, well, so we have. We have absolutely no way annoying why that individual person's memory changed. I mean, it might have been, you know, like that they encountered something else. Somebody said it might have been misinformation. So somebody said something to them in the meantime. It might have been that they kind of incorporated details from someone else's account of the day, and they might have mixed it up with later on they were driving in the car and they were hearing about it, or later on they were listening to it on the radio while they made breakfast. And then they kind of mixed up those two very similar memories together. So we don't really know how what it is that caused that particular person's memory to change, but what we do know is that those changes can and do happen, but that they will tend to happen kind of within that first year. And Then after that, you've pretty much sort of settled on your story, and then you're going to kind of keep telling that story. [00:27:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. All right, let's go back for just a second because this is related to forgetting and schemas. So we were talking about HSAM people and how they are unable to forget. And then I thought, okay, so normally when you think of forgetting, you think of something that sort of degrades or just disappears. But the way that you perhaps understand it and correct me if I'm wrong, is forgetting more of a consolidation or a compression into the schema? Like, how do you conceptualize forgetting? [00:28:24] Speaker A: It's a really good question. So traditionally, when people talk about forgetting, what they're talking about is decay. So the idea that just over time, a memory just kind of disappears, okay. And that it's literally just a. Like a. Literally a function of time. And actually, like, you'd see things like say, the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve and so on, where it's just this kind of, you know, just this kind of slow curve and that eventually bottoms out and people just forget over time. What we know now, of course, is that a big part of what happens with forgetting is not someone, not just decay. Decay happens. It does happen. People will forget things over time. And a lot of what happens, happening with decay is essentially that kind of process of deciding, you know, what's the gist and what's irrelevant and kind of boiling things down into the essential parts that will get kind of filed away and that sort of pattern completion kind of process in the hippocampus, and then things get kind of created in that way. But what's what all. Another really important part in, in forgetting is interference. And I think that's the kind of. The part that was often neglected with the kind of earlier studies of decay theory is this idea that, you know, when we think about information, any piece of information, whether it's an episodic event in your life or whether it's, you know, a list of words that you've been told to learn off, whatever it is. A lot of those earlier studies would have focused on that information in isolation. Let me just give you that information. It sits in a vacuum and then you repeat it back to me later on. But in the real world, that's not what happens ever. [00:29:45] Speaker B: Never, Never. [00:29:47] Speaker A: You're exposed to some piece of information, whether it's an experience in your life, whatever it is, and that is not on its own. That's not in a vacuum that is going to be influenced by your Existing knowledge and information. So essentially your existing schemas about the world that will affect how you literally how you process that information in the first place. So that can interfere with it in this proactive way where old information will change how you will store the new information. And then we also have this kind of retroactive interference, which is essentially misinformation, where kind of new information will come along and will kind of alter the way in which you're kind of laying down or storing or consolidating that previous piece of information. [00:30:29] Speaker B: But it doesn't have to be misinformation to alter the memory. [00:30:32] Speaker A: But misinformation would often be talked about in that context of retroactive interference. So it's a subset of retroactive interference. But of course, no, it doesn't have to be misinformation. It can be. And this is actually, I think, actually a really, really good point to note that a lot of. One of the good reasons probably why our memories are so flexible is that we can often update them with better information, with true information. [00:30:55] Speaker B: But why would you want to update a memory with true information rather than your. Just your current. [00:31:00] Speaker A: Yeah, so I suppose it depends. It comes back again to, you know, what's a memory for? [00:31:04] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, what is a memory for? Kira. [00:31:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So this. The kind of a question we're trying to grapple with in the book really is not. So we kind of talk about, like, what memory is, but also what memory is for. And we're not the first people to ask that question. And really what we would say is, you know, if we try to take this evolutionary perspective and say, well, you know, from. From an evolutionary perspective, everything is really about. About survival and reproduction. Okay, so. And we can consider that in a. In a very fairly broad way. So we can consider, you know, like, survival in terms of, like, forming stronger social networks improves your chances of survival, improves your health, it improves all kinds of things. So we could often think about that. Memories. We can update memories in order to kind of strengthen our social connections, to strengthen our sense of social identity, a variety of things like that. Yeah. Often updating your memories with more accurate information is, you know, kind of maybe a more practical use of memory. If the purpose of memory isn't to be a recording device, if the purpose of memory is to serve you in some way and to help you live your life, then maybe updating that with somebody else comes along and says, no, no, no, no. Do you not remember? We weren't in the car, we were in the kitchen, and we were listening to it on the radio. And you go, oh, oh, yeah, no, I think I remember that now. And now your memory is now updated. And then it's like a third person comes along and goes, no, I definitely remember you were in the kitchen because I rang you and you were both there. You know, so now you've got kind of a consensus saying, well, my original recollection was wrong. And now I've got a consensus saying, actually, this information is more accurate. So you might start to kind of, in this very active way, you'd start to search your memory and piece together those different elements. And now you create a memory that maybe has this piece that actually, I was in the kitchen, I wasn't in the car. And now your memory is updated. And maybe that's more in line with members of your social group, but also maybe it's more useful for you. [00:32:55] Speaker B: Okay, so in the very last chapter, you guys talk about, well, what do you do with all this information, all that we've learned from memory? And one of the things is just being humble about your own memory. But in this situation that you just described, one could react with just throwing up their hand saying, well, it doesn't matter because evolution has served this purpose for me, and I must be remembering whatever I'm remembering right or wrong for some sort of usefulness for myself moving forward. Right? So who cares? [00:33:26] Speaker A: Well, I don't. I don't. I never think that. I also, I always think, right. There's a very important distinction when we think about evolutionary stuff in particular. There's a really important distinction when we think about, like, from a scientific perspective, learning about this because it's interesting, that doesn't mean that it necessarily has any. Any value in terms of how we apply it now. So, like, for example, and this is outdated science, but, you know, for example, you might have people saying, well, you know, there's no evolutionary reason why people why homosexuality should exist, you know, because that doesn't serve reproduction. And you might, you might investigate that from a scientific perspective. Oh, you know, what. What might the scientific purpose of it be? You know, and that's really interesting as a scientific question, but it's completely divorced from the social modern question of treating all people with respect and dignity. Like, that's completely independent of whether, you know, whether or not you discover that there is a biological imperative. You know, it's. It's kind of irrelevant in that sense. And I would kind of apply the same thing when we're talking about memory, that from a scientific perspective, it's really, really interesting to think about how these things came about and why and what the purpose is. But we live in the society, and at the end of the day, we live with other people and we use our memories in a way that society has agreed that we use them. And we still have to live in that society, assuming that's what we choose to do. And we still have to engage with other people in ways where we try to be honest with them and expect them to be honest with us. It's kind of that sort of social contract. I would always kind of push back a little bit on that argument that, well, if evolution says it's okay, that means it's morally or socially okay, because those are different questions. [00:35:01] Speaker B: Yeah. That also gives evolution a normative view of evolution, that it's driving towards something in particular. [00:35:08] Speaker A: Exactly. And we, like, there's no goal to evolution. I always loved. I mean, problematic fave, but, you know, I always loved when back in the old days and Richard Dawkins used to talk about this idea of Mount Improbable, you know, and how. [00:35:22] Speaker B: Of what? [00:35:23] Speaker A: Mount Improbable. So he would use this metaphor. Yeah. Of a mountain with all of these different peaks for evolution. And how the goal in evolution is always to just keep climbing upwards, but you have absolutely no idea what's going up. So at any point, climbing up this mountain, you might reach a, you know, a split, a fork in the path, and you can either go left or right. And if you go left, you're going to end up in a dead end. But you have no way of knowing that at the time. Those are equally valid choices. Like evolution has no foresight. [00:35:51] Speaker B: Right. And the vast, vast majority of trails do lead to death of the species. [00:35:56] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, like, there's, you know, it's. [00:36:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Do not trust evolution. [00:36:02] Speaker A: You don't want to fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing evolution, you know? [00:36:05] Speaker B: Right. All right. So, I mean, there's. There's a ton more fun examples for us to talk about, but overarching all. [00:36:14] Speaker C: Of this is just. [00:36:16] Speaker B: What. I don't know how your conception of memory has changed, but now I'm somewhat confused about what the term good memory is like. What do you consider a good memory? [00:36:28] Speaker A: Well, you're gonna hate this answer, but it depends. [00:36:32] Speaker B: You scientists, you're all alike. Yeah. [00:36:35] Speaker A: I mean, it depends on the context. It depends on what it is you're trying to achieve. [00:36:39] Speaker B: But it's not so simple as A good memory is the ability to recall accurately an event that's not what you would call a good memory? [00:36:46] Speaker A: No, not necessarily. And because, you know, like, if you might. If you say you might come look back to those Hsan people and say those are people who can accurately recall an event, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's a properly functioning memory. We'd also say that when people talk about a good memory, sometimes they're talking about function and sometimes they're talking about processes, and people can use that in very different ways. So sometimes when people are talking about, oh, well, I have a good memory, sometimes they mean I can remember everything that ever happened to me. Sometimes they mean I've got a good memory for faces. Sometimes they're talking about, like, things like dementia, like I'm becoming forgetful, like, perspective memory stuff. I forget where I put where I forget. Like, you know, I plan. I had planned to go to the post office and I forgot to do it or I forgot where I put my keys. You know, like, there's a lot of different kinds of things that people mean when they talk about good memory. So I don't think it's a particularly useful term in that sense. So, like, and also, of course, as you well know, there are a huge variety of different kinds of memory, and somebody who has a fantastic working memory, so someone who's able to, you know, like, reel off a big, long list of digits and then, you know, repeat them back later on. That can be really valuable in some areas. But that doesn't necessarily mean that your autobiographical memory is good or accurate or detailed or vivid or anything else, you know, so it varies. It depends. [00:38:05] Speaker B: But how is it for you personally? How has it shaped your own thoughts of your own memory? And just, I'm going to use the word ontological. Like what, you know, what the nature of memory. Have you changed your. Are you easier on yourself now than you were 20 years ago, for example? And how has it changed? [00:38:25] Speaker A: In some ways, I definitely am. But, you know, I think the thing is, it's kind of you find yourself in a position where you second guess everything. [00:38:34] Speaker B: Yeah, right. But you're second guessing. But this goes back to my throwing up the hands. Well, you know, does it matter that I'm even second guessing? [00:38:43] Speaker A: Well, yeah, sometimes, and sometimes that's fine, but I think sometimes as well, it's kind of that. That, you know, it's kind of like a. The uncertainty principle thing, you know, like if something is observed, it's not operating in the way it would normally do. And I feel like I'm constantly observing my own memory. [00:38:56] Speaker B: And by observing It. You change it because you're. Because of the reconstructive nature. Yeah. [00:39:00] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So, like, I think I find it very difficult to not be constantly thinking about and reflecting on the nature of my own memory and whether that's memories, family, or memories of what happened last week or, you know, whatever it is. And then yet by doing that, I'm interfering with its operations. So it's very hard to know that. But, yeah, I do think I've become a lot more understanding of everybody's kind of memory foibles. And I think kind of a key thing that I think is really important is we tend to think that if our memories disagree with someone else, that that person is lying to us. [00:39:34] Speaker B: Oh, so this has to do with intentions. [00:39:37] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think. Exactly. And I think a lot of the time, it's that idea that, like, if you're applying that kind of humility to yourself or that grace to yourself, that you can apply it to other people as well and recognize that sometimes somebody, even if they're a politician or whatever, that if, you know, if somebody's memory doesn't accord with yours, they're not necessarily lying. They might be mistaken or you might be mistaken or, you know, some, you know, like, you kind of. I would just. So I would give people that grace to say, look, we shouldn't expect that everybody's memory should be perfect and we shouldn't hold them to an impossible standard. [00:40:09] Speaker B: Okay, but I agree with that. But then it's a slippery slope, because if someone is lying, then you're giving them the ability to affect you by giving them the benefit of the doubt. And so this is a fine line. [00:40:22] Speaker A: Well, it is. It is in general. And actually, it's something that Jillian and I have talked about a lot is about. So I don't want to get into this. This whole thing, but so we have a lot of. We do a lot of research in the area of false memory. So, you know, people kind of forming memories for events that didn't happen. And this is a very, very sensitive area for very good reason. And it's something that we give a lot of thought to that, like when we study things like, oh, well, how people can form a false memory of, you know, a traumatic event or something like that. Are we essentially giving solace to the. To the enemy here? You know, are we giving a get out of jail free card to somebody who might use that research to. [00:41:00] Speaker B: Yeah, you could bring any expert in. Yeah. Put any expert on the stand and say, well, just bring up Kira's Research and you will be not guilty. [00:41:09] Speaker A: Yeah, and we think about that a lot. And I think, honestly, I think all scientists who work in an area like that have an ethical obligation to think about that and to think about the consequences of how your research can be used. And on the one hand, you can say, well, look, science is science and you know, you have to. You have to ask these questions and you can't burden yourself with thinking about how someone might use them. And that's a valid way of thinking about it. But I think. And sometimes you have to take that view or else you'd never move forward. You'd just be constantly stuck with all the possible outcomes of how somebody might misuse your work. But I think sometimes we, like, you have to kind of try and take some, I don't know, some kind of steps to kind of try and, like, try and kind of remediate things a little bit as well. So, like, for example, we have an ongoing project where we're kind of looking at the tendency for when people form false memories regarding, say, sexual assault. We've been studying the idea that. So typically when people study that, they will only look at the memory of the complainant. So the putative victim. And we're also studying the memory of the kind of. Sort of the defendant there as well, the putative. The accused, really. So we're kind of studying that too. And actually what we're finding is that both parties. Memories are equally susceptible to distortion. And we think that's actually a really important corrective to say. Like, because I think it can be very, very easy to say, well, the very minute you become somebody who goes to the police or goes up, cuts up on the stand and says, someone did something to me. Now, your memory is fundamentally unreliable. And what we would say is no more unreliable than anyone else's. All our memories are unreliable. And we need to. And it's very important that when people give expert witness testimony, but it's really important to do that and to talk about, you know, mistaken identification and how people's memories can be altered in these really dramatic ways for things that happen. But I think it's also important to kind of. To correct that and say, but it's not only one person whose memory is subject to that. Everyone's memory involved in this is subject to that too, including the person who's saying, oh, well, I had total consent to engage in this activity or whatever it might be, that they may be lying. I have no way of knowing, but their memory can often be faulty. [00:43:13] Speaker B: Well, that's Right. But memory is part of that problem, but so is interpretation in that moment. Right. So if you misinterpret consent, then that is going to inform your memory. [00:43:24] Speaker A: Yeah. The context in which you experience things. Absolutely it will, yeah. I mean, so these things are obviously extremely naughty, and we're not going to. [00:43:32] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we'll come back to a less naughty example in a second. I want to talk about the mall example, but. [00:43:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but the mall example was intentionally chosen as a kind of less traumatic analog for this. [00:43:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So this has to do with how emotions affect the saliency of our memories. Right. So, yeah, it's. So this goes back to context, is everything. [00:43:55] Speaker A: Well, it does, exactly. And with the context in which you experience things. So it comes back to schemas. And again, I mean, not to bring everything back to schemas, but the, you know, and kind of a confirmation bias kind of idea more broadly, that the context in which you experience something will hugely influence how you interpret that. And then, and then the kind of. The elements of that, that you'll remember that you'll. How you'll encode that memory, all of that. So, yeah, like, to take that, that idea, somebody going into a situation convinced that they're like, genuinely convinced that there is consent that their. Their memory of that event probably will be different to somebody else's. And all of this, of course, is assuming that nobody. Nobody is lying. And of course, in a lot of the time, in various cases, people never. [00:44:33] Speaker B: Never the case. [00:44:34] Speaker A: Yeah, but that's, but, you know, we're kind of. What. We're. We. We have absolutely no insight into whether someone is telling the truth or not about something. What we can talk about is theoretically, is it possible that your memory could be distorted? [00:44:46] Speaker B: But that's all you need on a stand. On the stand. Right. [00:44:49] Speaker C: Is it possible? [00:44:50] Speaker B: That's an. So then. Then it's not beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the criteria for. [00:44:55] Speaker A: Well, that's, That's. That is for. That's for a jury to decide, you know, so. [00:44:58] Speaker C: God, that's the other. [00:44:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't want my. I don't know. This jury. [00:45:01] Speaker A: Yeah, Jesus. The jury's. I mean, like, the jury's. [00:45:04] Speaker B: Yeah, but that's a separate thing. [00:45:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a whole separate issue that we won't get into now. But. Yeah, but. Yeah, so, I mean, it is like. It's something that, honestly, we give a huge amount of thought to is, you know, answering questions that when you look at them on the one hand are really really important and even just like from a social justice perspective are really, really important. But then when you look at them sometimes from the other side, you're like, God, could that cause harm? Could that cause damage? And I think on the one hand, the only way you can do this to an extent is to say sometimes you have to ignore that question, you have to answer the science. But then I think you also have a responsibility in addition to doing that, to think about, you know, like, ways in which that can be interpreted. And part of that maybe is about guiding the interpretation of your work. So like in things like press releases or, you know, these kinds of podcasts, things like that, like talking about, you know, how the work can and should be interpreted, I think it's really important. I think we have a moral obligation, all scientists do, to think about, not to stop doing the work, but to think about how it might be applied, how it might be used. Yes. [00:46:11] Speaker B: However, so I talk about this with some of my science friends. So there's the science itself and then there's the extra step. When you publish a paper, when you go on a podcast of the interpretation, and in the end it's always a story, right? Separate from the data or built on the data and the analyses. And so you can't dictate what story people tell themselves based on your own data. But you're saying you have an obligation to tell your version of the interpretation. [00:46:42] Speaker A: Absolutely. And look, I mean, if I've learned anything as a memory scientist, it's that I know for a fact that I cannot implant directly information that I believe into someone's mind and expect it to be repeated back verbatim. That, you know, that everything that even when we do these memory implantation studies, what you're really doing is asking somebody to incorporate that into their own pre existing memories and to construct a memory around it. So like when I even so if I publish a paper and someone reads a summary of that in a newspaper or whatever, I have no control over how they will interpret that, how that will influence, how that will, you know, fit in with their pre existing beliefs, their, their own experience, you know, their, their political ideology, all of those things. I have no control over that. You know, and you think you have to kind of, you can't expect to have control over that. You have that. You know, people are allowed to make up their own minds. Even if I don't agree with them, they're allowed to make their own decisions. But what I, what I can do is to try and be as clear and transparent when we write things about what, you know, what they mean, what we mean by them. And it's something. I mean, this is, you know, kind of. Maybe we're wide ranging here, but I think it's part of it. So Gillian and I both have a kind of a strong view when it comes to writing scientific papers, that we don't go in for jargon, that we try to write things as clearly as possible in clear language, that you're not leaving things open to interpretation, that you're not saying there's some kind of shibboleth, that only scientists are allowed to read this. [00:48:05] Speaker B: How's that working for you? Because it's still. People will still do what they want with it, but they will. [00:48:10] Speaker A: They will always. I mean. And yeah, it's in. I mean, we've definitely had, like. It's like I. I even. I teach a class on it, actually, for like a thing about, like, kind of how. For how, you know, kind of public health kind of stuff. Like, I take a paper, the particular paper that we publish, and then I track how that paper got reported in the media, you know, and how the narrative shifts, you know, and you do your best, but, like, you can't control that because people like journalists or whatever will be looking, naturally enough, we'll be looking for the hook. And we might be saying, well, this is the really interesting thing. And they're going, yeah, no, this is the part we want to talk about. [00:48:41] Speaker B: Of course. Yeah. Do you ever, like, have pause with. Given the ethical implications of your research and the interpretations that people will run with, do you ever think maybe. Maybe you should have gone into a different line of work? Is it. Does it ever get to that point? Not for a minute. You like the attention? [00:49:02] Speaker A: No, I love my work and, like, I love it, you know, like, it's. I guess, like several years ago, maybe 10, 12 years ago, I was kind of getting into it of a rut, research wise, and I was kind of, you know, getting bored of what I was doing. And then we started working on a lot of this kind of memory reconstruction stuff. [00:49:19] Speaker B: It's juicy, you know. Yeah. [00:49:21] Speaker A: And it's interesting. [00:49:22] Speaker B: It's super interesting. [00:49:23] Speaker A: It's scientifically interesting, it's interesting in an applied context, you know, I love it. And also, to be honest, this is going to sound maybe a little bit. I don't know. But if I'm thinking about the ethic, the ethics of it and potential ethical quandaries, I'd rather that somebody who is thinking about that is doing it than someone who's not thinking about that. [00:49:42] Speaker B: Yeah, those people are in Silicon Valley. But I don't know that. How do I know you're not gaslighting me right now? No. [00:49:49] Speaker A: Well, you know, I mean, maybe, you know, I could be playing like 5D chess here, you know. That's right. [00:49:54] Speaker B: That's right. No, I can tell you're too simple for that. No, just, just kidding. But okay, so let's take a step back from the edge. From the cliff. So one of the things that you guys write about and I really appreciate is you did this big replication study about implanting false memories. So I guess there's a fairly famous mall based study where kids were. Where false memories were implanted in kids who didn't. [00:50:23] Speaker A: Oh, no, no, in adults. About their childhood. [00:50:25] Speaker B: About adults about their childhood. And this was originally done by Elizabeth. Elizabeth Loftus. [00:50:29] Speaker A: It was Elizabeth Loftus. And Jacqueline Pickrell did the original study in 1995. [00:50:33] Speaker B: Okay, you refer to Elizabeth Loftus a lot. And so maybe can you just take a second to say why you, you reference her so much and what her. [00:50:41] Speaker A: Yeah, so Elizabeth Beth is how she. So she's, she was just this incredibly enormously influential memory researcher. So in the 1970s, she ran some of the very first studies investigating kind of memory distortion. And so kind of, you probably have heard of some of the. I'm sure probably most people have heard of some of her earlier very famous studies where for example, you'd have people watch kind of like a reconstruction of a car crash, and then you'd ask them how fast the cars were going. And you might say, how fast was the car going when it made contact with the other car? Or how fast was it going when it smashed into the other car? And when people hear those kind of more active verbs like smash, they estimate a higher speed. And this was kind of very early work, like in 1974 or so. And this was really showing that, like that very simple kind of changing just one word in a question, like in a kind of legal setting could really quite dramatically alter people's memory. So people were estimating in that original study that the car was going about 10 miles an hour faster when they heard smack versus when they heard contacted. And of course that could have huge legal consequences. So that was kind of the beginning. And then Bethany and her colleagues did a lot of work studying all these different ways of kind of memory distortion and talking about, you know, like leading questions and like eyewitness identification and all of that kind of stuff. And it's kind of very, very, very legal kind of Context, jurisprudent kind of context. And then that all was going fine through the kind of the 70s and the 80s, and then in kind of the late 80s and into the 90s, we had, well, the Satanic panic. If you've heard of the Satanic panic. [00:52:20] Speaker B: Which is, I think so, but refresh. [00:52:22] Speaker A: My memory, is the term that's given to this kind of, this period of largely American history. But it was also in the UK and various other places where there was this kind of media driven belief that there were satanic cults operating and that they were abusing people and sex and sexual, sexually abusing children, and that people were being kind of kidnapped by satanic cults and being put through all of these really elaborate and kind of abusive rituals. And there was essentially no evidence for it, but there was this kind of big moral panic that kind of built up around it. And there were a couple of very famous cases. So there was a very famous case the McMartin Preschool was called. It was actually the biggest and most expensive trial in US history, where essentially, I don't go into incredibly long detail about it, but essentially some. Somebody had made a potential complaint about potential sexual abuse at a preschool. The police then hired some interviewers to interview all of the children and sent this really suggestive letter out to the parents saying that their children might have been abused. They were very small children. And then they used these incredibly suggestive interviewing techniques to interview all of the children and essentially kind of would say to them, like, oh, well, try again and give me the right answer, you know, and kind of push them into giving these answers. And then this trial, a lot of the accusations that ended up going to trial were things like the children, like somebody flew through the air and like the children were flown on a helicopter and forced to engage in all kinds of like animal, animal based, ritualized abuse. That there was these rituals taking place in these underground rooms beneath the school, but they excavated and there were no underground rooms. You know, there was all these really elaborate things, people flying through the air, like magical stuff happening, you know, like stuff that, like, you know, some of it was slightly more mundane, but a lot of it was just this incredibly fantastical stuff that couldn't have happened. And in the heat of the hunt, essentially there were absolutely no convictions. Even though people spent years in prison awaiting trial, there were no convictions because there was no evidence other than the witness statements from the very small children that were. Were elicited through these incredibly suggestive methods. So in the context of all of this stuff, Beth and A couple of other people had started talking about, well, you know, maybe some of the kind of recollections that people have. And they were talking a lot as well, about this idea of recovered memories, of people recovering memories of childhood abuse. [00:54:45] Speaker B: That they had repressed. [00:54:46] Speaker A: They had previously repressed. Exactly. So there was a lot of discussion then they called it the memory wars. There was a lot of discussion about how memory works, works, and Beth was one of the leaders of this. But there were other people as well who were strongly arguing that, you know, repression and so on is just not how memory works, and arguing that it was, you know, based on the work that they had done, looking at memory distortion, that some of these might be false memories. [00:55:11] Speaker B: So this is what kind of. So I think you suggest in the book that it seems that she's been fairly controversial. And is this where the controversy started? [00:55:20] Speaker A: This is where the controversy began. Prior to that, it was all fairly, you know, like, not very uncontroversial. This is kind of all where it began. So essentially, like, you know, some people kind of. Bethany. Other people had written some papers saying, you know, hey, some of these, like, of these recovered memories, we think a lot of them might not be real. They might be false memories, particularly elicited again from in therapy using, like, hypnosis and using kind of like, like truth serum type drugs like sodium amytal, things like that, that we make people very suggestible. And they said, look, we think some of these might be false memories. And other people responded and quite reasonably said, right, but the only evidence you have is about, you know, like, people's memories for, like, the speed of a car crash being distorted. Like, it's a huge leap to go from, you know, oh, well, I remember the car was going at 70km an hour versus 50km an hour. It's a big leap to go from that to, well, I remember that I was sexually abused. Like, that's a massive leap. And that they said, yeah, actually, that's a totally fair point. So they. And then some other people started doing work where they tried to see whether can you actually kind of implant essentially a memory of an event, of a childhood event that never happened into the mind of an adult. So that the way they went about doing this in the kind of the original mall study was they recruited a load of college students, essentially, and then they recruited their older relatives, mostly their parents. And they said to the parents, okay, you know, tell us some information about your child when they're about five. Give us some true stories about their, you know, things that happened to them when they were about that age. And then they also asked them things like, where did you used to go shopping when, you know, your child was young? Who would have gone along? What kind of, you know, shops would have appealed to them? Things like that. And then using that, they created a kind of a false thing of like when you were five, you were shopping with your family, you got lost, you got very upset, an old lady found you and brought you back to your family. Okay. And they confirmed that the parents that this hadn't really happened. And then over the course of a couple of interviews, they asked people about some. The true events that the parents had told them about. Things like, you know, oh, the time, you know, we went on a holiday in a caravan and it rained and my shoes got wet. You know, things like that, real events that had happened, or, you know, we went on a, on a roller coaster and I threw up, you know. And then they mixed in with that, the fake event that you got lost in the shopping center. And they would ask people to think about their memory and try and, you know, bring it back to them using these kind of slightly suggestive techniques. And what they found was by the end of this protocol, about a quarter of their participants remembered having gotten lost in the shopping centre. Lost in the mall. [00:57:47] Speaker B: Even though claim to remember anyway. [00:57:50] Speaker A: Yes, well, well, not that they claimed to remember that they, they talked about the details. So they went with these things. It's not just that someone says, yes, I remember this, it's you code the transcript. So in the interview, so that they talk about their, the details of their memory. So, so, oh yeah, I remember the old lady and she was wearing brown trousers and she had a blue coat. And I was crying and she said, my mom, I went back to my mum, my mum said, don't ever do that again, you know, like that. [00:58:11] Speaker B: So those details that were false and suggested within the context of other things that were true then became part of their memory. [00:58:19] Speaker A: Exactly. And then, And I think one of the kind of things I was mentioning there earlier on about this idea, you know, that you can't. I was talking about it in the context of, you know, a press release or something, but the same thing really applies here. But I think what's important when we think about these kinds of implanted memories is I think implantation is actually the wrong word. [00:58:36] Speaker B: It's the wrong word. Yeah. [00:58:37] Speaker A: Because it's what gets. Tends to get used. I think it's the wrong word. It tends to mean that suggests that, like, I'm literally taking A piece of information. I'm slotting it directly into your mind. And that's not how it works. It's this active process where you hear the participants start saying, oh, I didn't remember that. But then I've been thinking about it, and now I think actually I remember that shopping center. And. Yeah, you know, I think. And they'll start to kind of construct it and they'll build it in and fill in the blanks essentially with details. Details from their own experience. So that was, that was the original Lost in the Mall study. There were lots of other ones around the same time as well. Like, Ira Hyman did a really cool one where people remembered. Ira Hyman is a colleague. Is a colleague of ours. He's in the University of Western Washington. And he did a really cool one where they got people to remember, like, spilling a bowl of punch on the parents of the bride at a wedding, stuff like that, you know, or. And Kim Wade and her colleagues have done a lot of ones where they've persuaded people or gotten people to remember going on a hot air balloon ride as a child, things like that. But these are all like, because they're really, they're really time consuming. They're really hard to do. So they were kind of fairly small samples. [00:59:41] Speaker C: Okay, so. [00:59:43] Speaker B: So that's what. [00:59:44] Speaker C: Well, but. [00:59:45] Speaker B: So is that why you felt compelled to then? [00:59:47] Speaker A: Well, there were. There were a couple of reasons. Like, essentially, yeah, there were. There's been, you know, some. There's not been a huge number. There's been several of these studies, like a substantial number, but they are very, very time consuming and they're very, very, like, labor intensive. So there haven't been a huge number of them and they've all been relatively small. And that kind of leaves open various questions about the, about, about the out. About the results. The Mall study in particular, because it was kind of the first one and because it was. Because Bethel off often gives testimony and so on, that one tends to get picked apart more than the others. And because it was kind of the first effort at this methodology, like, it wasn't perfect. Like, there were lots of various flaws in the study. Like it was kind of an effort to see, hey, can we do this? And it wasn't in any way perfect. So we said, you know, like, wouldn't it be interesting if we tried to replicate that? You know, if we tried to kind of fix some of the problems, if we tried to do it with a larger sample, pre register all of our goals? So, like, there's no moving the goal Posts later, like we're really clear about what it is we're looking for. You know, how we're going to measure everything, you know, this was, was this. [01:00:47] Speaker B: During the replication crisis, the great replication crisis in psychology? [01:00:53] Speaker A: Well, it will not. Well, kind of, you know, I suppose if we're still. We're still during it, if you want to think about it. [01:00:57] Speaker B: Yeah, but you're helping fix it, which is great. [01:00:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Well also. Well, on the nature of the replication crisis, I would always say, because I always want to say this to my students as well. Like, psychology is not the only place that has a replication crisis. Psychology is just the field that's dealing with it. So, you know. [01:01:12] Speaker B: Yeah, neuroscience has it as well for sure. [01:01:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Psychology is grasping the nettle, you know, and really trying to do something about it. But yeah, no, it was a, was saying like, we should be able to replicate this. We should be able to. Honestly, we were saying like this project took us like a full year to do. And we were saying like, it'll be really interesting either way if we replicate it. We'll be like, yeah, look, it's stronger evidence for something we already had good reason to think was true. If we don't, that'll also be really interesting, you know. So yeah, so we replicated this with. We had a whole gang of master's students working on it with us across. So I'm in University College Dublin, Gillian is in University College Cork. We had our students across both universities. So we were recruiting from around Ireland and we got over, we got about 120 pairs of participants in the end. So like participants and their parent, which is a substantial number, took us like a full year. [01:02:04] Speaker B: That's big. [01:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah, a really long time because everybody, you know, you have to recruit the parents, then you recruit the participant. There's various surveys, then you keep them around a week or two gap in between. Yeah, you know, it's like, it's very, very intense. And yeah, like basically we, so we followed as closely as possible. We followed the original protocol from the Loftus and Pickerel study, but we kind of filled in holes where we thought that the methodology was a bit weak. Like we kind of improved how we coded what a memory was, things like that. And yeah, so we found like essentially in our top line analysis, when we code people's transcripts so how people are describing the event, we coded it that 35% of people were coded as having a false memory for the Getting Lost event. We also asked people, at the end, we added an extra bit where we asked them straight out, do you remember this event? For each of the four events, we asked them about, so three true and one fake. And there we found it was a smaller number. Only 14% said straight out. Yes, I remember it. But an additional 52% of people told us they believed it happened. So 2/3 of our P. Participants in total, so 66%. [01:03:18] Speaker B: So I don't remember it, but I believe it must have happened. [01:03:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:03:21] Speaker A: So they didn't, they think. And we also, we asked them all kinds of questions, like, would you testify on the basis of this? And they were saying, yeah, nine out of 10, definitely, I would testify this happened. [01:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, it's scary. It's a little scary, you know, but these are things that we already know that. [01:03:36] Speaker A: Yes, we just now know it with a little bit more certainty and a little bit. Bit. Yeah, we've got a little bit more confidence in. In the results. But, yeah, like, you know, like, it was nice, but we, like, we really. We really enjoyed running it. Like, it was just even, like, looking at all the transcripts and I mean, I really have to say, like, like an enormous thank you to all the participants who took part in this, because it asks a lot of the participants as well, you know, and of course, they don't know in advance what we're doing. [01:04:01] Speaker B: Right. [01:04:01] Speaker A: You know? [01:04:02] Speaker B: Right. They can trust you. [01:04:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, we tell them that we're studying childhood memories, but of course, they don't know in advance that we're studying false memories. [01:04:09] Speaker B: Yeah. One more thing. And then, because I want to keep on this line of thought, but going back to the courtroom, I really enjoy watching interrogations of accused people. And all of the. The interrogator, if they're good, will use these tactics to misinform or mislead a subject. And almost every interrogation I watch, and it's not like I'm just sitting watching interrogations all day, but I think about this, like, how the way that they're asking the questions, the frame, the suggestiveness of the way that they're asking totally has to affect the person's memory of what happened. And so it almost should be illegal, it seems like. [01:04:54] Speaker A: Well, in a lot of jurisdictions it is. [01:04:56] Speaker B: Well, but there are always loopholes. [01:04:59] Speaker C: Right. [01:04:59] Speaker B: And so you can push it so far, and they're going to take it to that limit. [01:05:02] Speaker A: Well, like in the U.S. for example, you are like, they're. They're explicit. Like police are explicitly allowed to lie to a suspect. [01:05:08] Speaker B: Yes, right. They are. It's crazy. [01:05:11] Speaker A: Isn't that crazy? In a lot of other places. [01:05:13] Speaker B: But, yeah, like, there are, like, instances where an investor, an interrogator will say, well, I mean, we have video, and there's no video, right, of you doing this. And these are instances of innocent people. And the person's like, great, you have the video that show me, you know, being innocent. And then you can tell they kind of get confused and start second guessing themselves stuff. It just seems awful. [01:05:34] Speaker A: And there's. I mean, this is like, where you get into, like, false confessions stuff, you know, and they're like. And there's. I mean, the fall. The false confessions literature is really interesting. Like, some of it is about. Some of it is memory stuff, you know, and, like, there was a really cool paper. Wade and Porter did this study where they. They basically got people to form false memories of having gotten in trouble with the police when they were, like, a teenager and having been arrested and questioned by the police, like, you know, really detailed, like, stuff. And as a teenager, not as a small child child. But, you know, like, I think in, like, in the real world, like, there's. With false confessions, which happen really a lot actually. There's. There's memory elements, but a lot of it as well is just like that thing of people being interviewed for, you know, 24 hours and just beaten down and then just being. Just kind of being so confused and tired and just saying anything to get out of there, you know, or genuinely coming to believe that they must be wrong, that they remember, but they must be wrong, you know, and. And that's a huge problem in itself, of course. [01:06:31] Speaker B: I just realized that these won't be problems. Moving forward with our entire lives will be captured on cell phone video and photos, right? [01:06:38] Speaker A: Well, unless you want to talk about deepfakes. [01:06:41] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Yeah, well, no, we'll come back to that because I want to get to the AI line of questioning a little bit, but. Okay. But going back to my mother, I feel like I'm in a psychotherapy now, But I personally, personally feel like when I'm telling a story from my past and trying to recall things, that I question how much of it I'm confabulating. And as I'm speaking to you right now, I don't know where these words are coming from and how they. How it gets from. Oh, did I intend to do this line of questioning? And just how the words are spilling out. And then I wonder how much I'm confabulating. And in fact, you guys quote Mark Twain in the book saying, never let the truth get in the Way of a good story. I believe it's good, which is, I. [01:07:28] Speaker A: Think it should be the Irish motto, so. [01:07:30] Speaker B: Oh, is that right? Yeah, right, right. But okay, so, but so there's the, there's that, there's the reconstructive aspect of memory. And what I want to ask about is, is the link, the possible link between memory and imagination, because some people think like, memory is, is for imagination. [01:07:50] Speaker A: There is definitely a link between memory. [01:07:51] Speaker B: And imagination, but then also confabulation. I'm wondering, are people who are high confabulators also so high creatives? You know, like, my mom's pretty creative person. She has to be pretty creative to lie as much as she. To confabulate as much as she does, right? [01:08:06] Speaker A: I don't, I can't answer that one directly. I don't know for a fact about relationships between creativity and confabulation, but there is definitely a link with creativity and memory. [01:08:17] Speaker B: Like, what's that link? So what I'm going to guess is that the worse your memory is, the more creative you are or something like that. [01:08:24] Speaker A: No, it's, no, it's not that. It's more that. It's like the same process that, like, it's the same kind of constructive process that like goes into, like, say, like if you, if you were like, you know, thinking about, you know, you went on holiday last summer and you went to, you know, Spain and you're picturing, you know, being on the beach in Spain and you're thinking about everything that happened there, or you're thinking about like, I might go on holidays next year and I might go to, you know, Rome or whatever it is, and you're imagining what that is. It's the same process involved in that kind of episodic future thinking, which is the kind of jargony name that it gets given. And as there is in kind of retrieving those or constructing those episodic memories, it's the same underlying process involved. [01:09:05] Speaker B: But I can imagine someone who is. We're talking about these things as if they're crystallized. But I can imagine someone who is, quote, unquote, more prone to misinformation, might be more prone to more creativity because then you're linking things that weren't actually linked, right? And that's a generative process. [01:09:23] Speaker A: So there is a link between kind of individual, individual differences in creativity and kind of like, like ability to kind of like create episodic memories and episodic like. So, like, there is a link there, but actually when it comes to say, different kinds of kind of false memories and stuff. So, like, there's loads of different ways you can measure kind of memory distortion. Right? Like, you can look at like, misinformation stuff, like I give you a misleading question in a, in an exam, in a, you know, an interrogation. You can look at misidentifying faces. You can look at like, memory implantation. You can look at, like, false memories for fake news. You know, there's a whole load of all these different kind. And there's also, like, ones with like, word lists, things like that, and what you see. And we have a paper on this a while ago. So there's basically no correlation between them and what. Essentially what we're saying is it's not really there a huge matter of individual differences. It's really that all of these things do rely on this kind of underlying constructive process. But that's an essential process that we all have to engage in. Like, it's, it's a requirement. [01:10:18] Speaker B: That is the process. [01:10:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's a process as opposed to an individual tendency. [01:10:23] Speaker B: I see. [01:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah. But there, there are links with, say with those individual differences, with creativity. So there's this, like, there's this nifty little test, it's called the alternative uses test, where you give people everyday objects like a newspaper, and they have to come up with as many possible uses for that as possible. So, like, you might say, like, well, you know, like a newspaper is for getting the news. Or you might say, I'm going to make. Make it into a paper hat, or I'm going to make it into a boat and sail it on the river. [01:10:48] Speaker B: Or I'm going to train my dog not to do that thing that the train. [01:10:51] Speaker A: I'm going to hit my dog over the head, or I'm going to mop up the dog's wee, or I'm going to, you know, like, wrap my fish and chips, or I'm going to cover up my windows while I'm painting or. [01:11:02] Speaker B: When I'm going to kill a snail with paper cuts. [01:11:05] Speaker A: That's very creative. [01:11:07] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you. [01:11:09] Speaker A: So, yeah, like, there's loads of things like that. And the more of those things people can come up with, they tend to be kind of better at, like, kind of episodic future thinking, like imagining stuff in the future, things like that. [01:11:20] Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. [01:11:21] Speaker A: Yeah. But, you know, I suppose the thing is, what we, like people always want to know when we talk about, you know, memory distortion and so on. Everybody wants to know about individual differences. In other words, they Want to know who are the people who are vulnerable and who are the people who aren't. And I think the underlying thing there is that people really want to hear that they are not vulnerable. [01:11:38] Speaker B: Right. [01:11:39] Speaker A: Of course, only somebody else, and we have to disappoint them. But it's like it's, It's. It's the baseline process of how you mem. How memory works. Everybody, like memories are reconstructed. And a side effect essentially of that sometimes is that you will incorporate misinformation or you'll reconstruct the memory in a way that isn't in line with the truth or, you know, so it's just part and parcel of being person. [01:12:03] Speaker B: So the silver lining here is that as you argue in the book, our memories are not for perfectly accurate recall, but for functioning in the world and reproducing. And you point to this fact over and over in the book that a lot of the misinformation that causes alterations in memories doesn't really have bearing on its usefulness to your ongoing behavior. Right. So you can misremember that the woman was wearing a red dress instead of blue, and that really doesn't affect your future mating ability or something. Right, Right. But then you have to wonder, like, how much of our memory is useful. Right, right. If there's so much of it that's not necessarily affecting our ongoing life, like, if memory is for our functioning, like, how much of our memories are actually useful? [01:12:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I can't give you a number, I can't give you a percentage. [01:12:59] Speaker B: 70%, right? [01:13:00] Speaker A: Yeah, 63.5. But yeah, no, I mean, like, I think it's probably like with a lot of things there are, you know, we. We evolve various functions physically, mentally, you know, in response to particular pressures and evolutionary pressures, but the way those end up manifesting isn't predetermined, you know, and isn't necessarily a one on one match to what it's for either. You know, so like, we can end up with lots of kind of extraneous stuff that we don't. We can't find a direct link to, you know, like evolutionary requirements, but. And yet they're there. And maybe some people, People will. Maybe cleverer people than me will find those links in the future, but. But for now, maybe we just need to be happy that we have it. [01:13:45] Speaker B: Okay, very good. All right. So, Kira, I know that our time is kind of dwindling here, but so I. This podcast is ostensibly about sort of the intersection of neuroscience and AI and explores Artificial intelligence. A lot. A lot as well. And I had mentioned to you that I. I wanted to ask you about this, and you used the phrase, I don't want to get over my skis about it. And I've heard that phrase recently and separately, I want to ask you, like, where did that originate? Because why am I hearing it all the time now? [01:14:11] Speaker A: And I mean, all I can tell you, I only went skiing once, and it was a terrible experience, and I'll never repeat it. [01:14:15] Speaker B: You got over your skis while you were skiing, huh? Okay, so. So I know that this is not your expertise, artificial intelligence, but I just. One of the reasons why I enjoyed this book so much is because there are so many examples in my notes where I thought, where I wrote down, you know, this is. This would be useless for AI. You know, there's this concept, artificial general intelligence, that we want artificial intelligence to mimic human intelligence and then supersede it. Right. And all of what you write about, the vast majority of you write about, of how memory works, seems like you wouldn't want to mimic in an artificial intelligence. [01:14:50] Speaker A: That's why you're talking about confabulation. Because, like, if you look at, say, like, chatgpt, all it does is confabulation. [01:14:55] Speaker B: Right. But we can fabulate perhaps even more. [01:14:58] Speaker C: Right. [01:14:59] Speaker B: And we complain that ChatGPT does that, and we think of it as a. [01:15:03] Speaker A: Failure, something different of it. We expect it to be a computer. [01:15:06] Speaker B: A computer. Well, this goes back to the computer metaphor. Like, you have a memory, you're going to store it in a register, and then you're going to be able to perfectly recall it, assuming you have the address for that register. Right. So do you have thoughts about this? Like, not necessarily. You know, I know that you don't have advice for a computer scientist wanting to build better AI, but do you feel like this gives us any insights into how we might want to build memory as part of the cognition of an artificial system or how to think about artificial intelligence in general? I kind of want to leave it broad since you are on your skis here. [01:15:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm actually really afraid to answer this because of the people listening, going, she has no idea what she's talking about. No, you're right. [01:15:50] Speaker B: I don't know. All right, now we have that out of the way. Yeah. [01:15:55] Speaker A: Okay. I suppose the thing is, like, again, so much as we talk, when we talk about it with human cognition, I would come back to, what's the goal? What are you trying to achieve here? And is it that you want to see what would an artificial intelligence look like. And you want to make something that is like, you're just curious from a scientific perspective and you want to know what that would look like, like, and you want to model it on human intelligence, then I think what you need to model is that generative component that. But that like, that isn't just kind of spitting back out stuff like ChatGPT is doing. Like what needs to be doing is to be actually able to create stuff. Yes, to take blocks and pull things together, but like that it's general. And maybe in that way things like ChatGPT are actually not a terrible model of what human memory does in some ways. But that probably. But if that's what your goal is, if your goal is to say, well, what would an artificial intelligence and actual intelligence look like? Like, then that's the way to do it. But if your goal is more top down, that you want it to be functional, that you want it to provide accurate information to users, then I'm not sure that that generative approach is necessarily going to do that. [01:16:59] Speaker B: So yeah, the question is, would we want an AI that misremembers things? But then that word misremember sort of loses meaning in the context of all of your studies and everything because it's like the phrase good memory. Maybe it's the wrong phrase. Right? Given the nature of how memory works, it's reconstructive process, that it's an active process, that it's always being processed. Would it be okay to allow an AI to misremember some fact? Right. It wouldn't be okay. [01:17:30] Speaker A: I don't think so. But I mean, again, like, it probably depends what you're using for. I mean, most of my encounters with it are like trying to encourage students not to use it to write their essays because they're just skipping the entire point of learning things. [01:17:42] Speaker B: Things. [01:17:43] Speaker A: But when they are, if you're trying to say like, Right, because essentially the way, the way it seems to me that people use or expect to use AI tools is to use it as a replacement for a search engine, that search engine that will actually, rather than just directing you to sources, will actually give you the information. Right? And if the information that it gives you isn't correct or has confabulations in it, then well, that, that isn't serving its purpose, right? It's not, it's not meeting its function. So like to me, no, I wouldn't want one that's misremembering. But then I'm not a computer scientist and Maybe they have, you know, loftier goals than having somebody to write their essay. [01:18:21] Speaker B: Well, I mean, another approach to this, or facet of this is us neuroscientists are always complaining that the AI people don't pay enough attention to our brain science results. Right. And if they really wanted to build. Build good AI, they would build it. They would pay more attention and use more principles from neuroscience, what we're learning in neuroscience. But then your book makes me think maybe we shouldn't. If we don't, then. Then you get that whole bag of what comes with it, which is the constructive, reconstructive process of memory, which may lead you down a road that you actually don't want. [01:18:54] Speaker A: And I think the problem there is the assumption, again, that they, you know, kind of the. The flaws and whatever in our memory are just glitches. Glitches? That's the system failing to act correctly. [01:19:05] Speaker B: It's a feature, not a bug. [01:19:07] Speaker A: Being the system in operation as it evolved, that it's not like a little glitch in the code and a minor error. That's how our memory is fundamentally working. [01:19:21] Speaker B: Yeah. So then that removes sort of the judgment of whether someone accurately recalls something. Right. Because it's. Well, it's just a process of how memory works. Jane is not at fault here. [01:19:35] Speaker A: Well, sometimes she is. Sometimes. I mean. Sometimes. I mean, honestly, one of the biggest things that will determine whether you remember something is whether you're paying attention to it. And a lot of the time when we don't remember stuff, it's not a fault of our memory at all. It's a fault of our attention. [01:19:47] Speaker B: Yeah, but we've already talked about, like, flashbulb memories that are laden with emotion and high attention are just as susceptible to misinformation. Yeah, absolutely. [01:19:56] Speaker A: Just. Yeah. So, like. Yeah. Even things that you are paying attention. Yeah, they are. Now, that's not to say. And I think you don't want to leave people with the impression that none of your memories are trustworthy and you can't trust a single thing. Like, you know, that's not. [01:20:08] Speaker B: You have to walk the fine line here. [01:20:09] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, that, like, our memory is good enough. I think if you talk about, like, memory being good, we would say it's good enough. It does the job, you know, I think it does what we want it to do most of the time. It does what? Like, it gets us through life, you know, but it's not a computer. And so then the question is, if you're designing the computer essentially to be really smart, do you Want it to be smart like a human? Or do you want it to be smart differently? [01:20:32] Speaker B: Not smart like my mom. How about that? [01:20:34] Speaker A: Not smart like your mom. Okay, I think put that one down on the list. [01:20:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, she's a smart lady, but I don't want an AI like her. [01:20:41] Speaker A: Not sure I want one like me either, to be honest. [01:20:43] Speaker B: Like, oh, I don't want one like me either. [01:20:45] Speaker A: But, like, honestly, in all seriousness, like, if you think about what you want these things to do, surely what we want them to do is to supplement our. What we're missing, not replace supplement. [01:20:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:20:54] Speaker A: You know, so, like, we all have. We have our blind spots. And, like, why? Like, you know, it's a different thing. But, like, Gillian and I often say that sometimes we're like, you know, the same brain and two bodies and that sometimes we have the same blind spots and that this is a problem because we don't have anybody saying to us, you're both thinking about this the same way, but you're missing something. [01:21:10] Speaker B: Right. [01:21:11] Speaker A: And I think of that, like, if there was a third. If there was a third person in this partnership, and that person was an AI who also thought exactly the same way and had the same blind spots, I'm not sure that's contributing anything. [01:21:20] Speaker B: Good point. Okay, I have one more question to ask you, and I. This is more of a personal interest, actually. Well, kind of. Two more, but one more major one, and this is a more of a personal one. Firstly, let me ask you. You got your PhD in neuroscience. [01:21:35] Speaker A: Yes. Cognitive neuroscience. [01:21:37] Speaker B: Cognitive neuroscience, which is one step more towards psychology. Was there any temptation to go in the brain or, you know, have you been. Or were you always set on this behavioral level, experience level, psychology? [01:21:50] Speaker A: No, I. My postdocs were all neuroimag. So, like, I was doing, like. [01:21:55] Speaker B: I mean, some of this is, like, psychology anyway. The boundaries are blurred between cognitive neuroscience, neuroscience and psychology. [01:22:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think they should be. I think that's good. You know, but, like, I don't. I think the more we silo ourselves into our disciplines and refuse to talk to each other, the less we're learning from each other. [01:22:11] Speaker B: So blind spots galore. [01:22:12] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But no, I. I'll tell you, like, my little shtick that I always tell people about this is that. So, like, my PhD was all about FMRI and neuroimaging and, like, imaging of working memory and stuff like that. And, you know, it was fun. It was interesting. And then I was doing postdocs on that, and again, they were fun. They were interesting. I did about four years postdocs in Cambridge and in London. And at the end of that, then I came back to my first faculty job, which was down in Cork, which is where I met Gillian. And I kind of, you know, it was my first faculty job, and I had no money. None. Like, I had no. I had no research funding. So I was like, okay, I don't have any money to do fmri, so what am I going to do instead? And I realized, the more I thought about it and sat with it for a while, that I realized I had gotten into this mindset of. Instead of thinking, like, what's the next question I want to ask? I was thinking, what's my next MRI study going to be? [01:23:01] Speaker B: Oh, that's great. I mean, it's not great that you were thinking that. It's great that you realized it, but. [01:23:05] Speaker A: It was kind of this thing of, like, you know, all you have is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. And then it was like I was kind of going down this thing of like, well, this is the next obvious step on this plan. And I'm like, but I hadn't taken that step back and said, but do I care about the answer to that question? Question. And then. So, like, when I actually really started thinking about that then and started thinking, like, what questions I actually wanted to answer and what was interesting. And it all mostly came out being around, like, a lot of memory stuff, some attention stuff, too, but, like, became much more applied. Like, it really. I started thinking that actually where I had been very theoretical before, and it's. I think it's great to have that foundation because I think it really helps me in keeping the more applied stuff grounded, you know, and keeping it and making sure that I'm not cutting. Of going wildly off, because I don't understand the basis, you know, and I think it's really helpful. But I started thinking that I'm. What I'm. Where my interest is, was in more kind of applied questions, things that would have kind of real world consequences. And then around that time as well, that's like, when I met Gillian, Jillian was my very first PhD student. [01:24:02] Speaker B: Okay. [01:24:04] Speaker A: And then, you know, so, like, the. [01:24:05] Speaker B: Two of us, and you're like, I'm poor, but we can. [01:24:08] Speaker A: Yeah. No, literally, like, she had been taken on by the department, and then her supervisor left before she even started. So she was wandering the halls looking for a super supervisor. [01:24:16] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. [01:24:18] Speaker A: And it was, you know, it was kiss mesh. We, you know, it's like we kind of started working together We've been working together now for, God, 12 years, something like that. And yeah, so we started realizing we had a lot of similar interests. And then I think having somebody, I saw somebody recently on Twitter, Blue sky or something, talking about this idea of like a science buddy. And I was like, I have a science buddy. And it's great. [01:24:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that is great. [01:24:40] Speaker A: Oh, like somebody to just really bounce ideas off. And like, you can call up and say like, is this mad or should we do this? And someone's saying, yeah, let's do it. And like pushing yourselves. And we push, we push each other, you know, to kind of. [01:24:50] Speaker B: But how much do you check your blind spots? Your common blind spots? [01:24:53] Speaker A: Well, we try to. So we do, we do bring in other collaborators and we do try to have other people come in and kind of check us and say like, no, you're completely off base or you've missed something really important there or, you know. But yeah, I think we tend to kind of push each other along and then to also to kind of say, like, are we bored with this question? Let's do something else. [01:25:11] Speaker B: Oh yeah, that's good. I mean, that's something I came to realize pretty early on in my graduate work. So you get into graduate school and then there are these kind of, you know, arguments in the literature between ideas. Right. And then there are these figures of principal investigators who, you know, are constantly butting heads and you think, well, they must hate each other. But it turns out the vast majority, they're so appreciative that they have someone to check them and it improves your research. And so they, they there, there's a lot of respect to your quote unquote enemies in that regard because they're checking your blind spots and. [01:25:45] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's where you get that idea of like adversarial collaborations, you know, And I, you know, it's one of those things where like, in principle I love that, but in practice I'm quite conflict averse. So I don't actually want to like spend my entire working life arguing with people. [01:26:01] Speaker B: Well, but then there's always that, the story part, the interpretation part that people are just going to argue to their death about as well. And yeah, so that's the part that's exactly. Kira, really fun book. [01:26:10] Speaker A: Thanks. [01:26:11] Speaker B: I look forward to seeing you on the witness stand in the future on some big case. And then I'll be like, I got to talk with her. Anything from the book that we didn't cover that? I mean, there's a lot that we didn't Cover. But anything that you want to mention. [01:26:24] Speaker A: In closing, I suppose we have some kind of cool stuff like in the second half kind of really about technology. I think about, you know, fake news and deepfakes and, you know, how all of these different, like, you know, we often have this, people have this idea that like new technology is almost hacking our minds, that it's like implanting, you know, like deep fakes will totally change the way we think about the world or you know, all that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of what we're saying is, yeah, these things can influence our memory, but they're not. And there's nothing, nothing new under the sun. They're not doing anything that reading about a story in the newspaper won't also do that. It's the same active processes in our mind that is responding to all this information and kind of constructing it and you know, actively building it in the same way. But yeah, I think it's like it's kind of a whole new frontier to think about how we grapple with all these kind of new, kind of new forms of evidence and new forms of information and how they influence our memories. [01:27:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you do allude to. Right. About the Plato's dialogues where Socrates is worried about the technology of writing because we're going for. [01:27:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it's going to destroy the minds of the young. Like they won't be able to have, they won't have memories anymore. [01:27:30] Speaker B: I can tell you though, it is so nerve wracking with. I have children and it's just a battle on screen time and like what trying to. Oh, they're actually. We live in a high consumer society and they're actually trying to trick you at every step and it's working, you know, so anyway, that's kids. Okay, thanks so much again and I will link to the the book in the show. Notes and continued success. [01:27:51] Speaker A: Thank. [01:27:57] Speaker B: You. Brain Inspired is powered by the Transmitter, an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advanced research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives written by journalists and scientists. If you value Brain Inspired, support it through Patreon to access full length episodes, join our Discord community and even influence who I invite to the podcast. Go to Brain Inspired Inspired Co to learn more. The music you're hearing is Little Wing performed by Kyle Donovan. Thank you for your support. See you next time.