Memory Swap

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You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Hello, we've got quite a brain-bending question today.

Have a listen to this.

Hi, my name is Adam.

I'm from Hertfordshire.

And my question is, is it possible to transfer memories between different people so that other people can experience other people's memories?

I mean, that's quite a nice idea, isn't it?

Transplanting memories from one person to another.

I mean, is the idea that you could relive a moment that you've envied somebody else having.

Maybe.

Moon landing.

Oh, okay, yeah.

So Grace's Tarkaman winning an Oscar.

Yeah.

The one memory I'd love to have, do you remember a couple of years ago at Glastonbury when the rapper Dave got somebody up to wrap the Thiago Silver story?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that would be, I think that would be...

Just the emotion of that moment would like carry you through for the rest of time, wouldn't it?

Possibly.

I mean, we've presumed that the person remembers it vividly at all, or was it a mad blur that they don't remember at all?

Because I think the point about a memory is it's not like you're watching back a videotape right it's like it's it's very

malleable yeah fuzzy I think and that is a problem with it like whatever problem with it with how far this technology can go because I can't even remember things vividly that happened to myself let alone pass them on.

There are definitely some things where I can remember what I was wearing.

I can remember I mean details about like the book that I was reading at the time.

Like, you know, like insane levels of detail.

There are some memories that just have that sort of crispness to them.

And what happened yesterday?

What did you do yesterday at 20?

Oh, gosh, you know what?

Actually, this is, I've got to the point now where I've been traveling around so much that when I arrive at the baggage carousel,

I can't remember

which city I've just been in.

I just feel like, right, what country was I in?

Somebody says to me, oh, how was your weekend?

I said, I can't remember what I did.

And I had been on the telly.

I had literally done the last leg live on channel four.

And I had, and then two days later, I totally, I don't know, I don't think I did anything at the weekend.

Just, you know, people forget things.

I know.

It's a really unreliable thing.

But here, sorry, my other question with this is because you don't want just want a snapshot.

You've seen a picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon.

You want to feel what it would like to be Neil Armstrong.

And is that in your memory?

Is it like when I remember things, do I get the same surge of adrenaline?

Do I get the same surge of oxytocin, whatever, if I think back to the birth of my children, whatever?

Do you get the same emotional charge?

Because that's what you'd want to live.

I think you would.

Imagine if you could have a museum where you go, you see pictures of the moon, whatever, and then at the end, you get to sit down and have the memory implanted into your head.

Oh my god, that'd be very good.

You'd make a fortune with that.

You would?

Yeah.

You would.

Right,

let's see if we can start a new business plan over the course of the next half an hour, shall we?

Excellent.

Joining us in the studio today, we have Professor Chris French from Goldsmiths University, where he studies anomalistic psychology.

And Amy Milton, who is a professor of behavioural neuroscience at Cambridge University.

Amy, our listener, Adam, was talking about transferring memories of specific experiences, like somebody receiving an Oscar, say.

But there are many kinds of memories, aren't there?

Yeah, absolutely.

So there are sort of broadly two categories of memory that we can think about.

There's explicit memory, because you have conscious access to the content of those memories.

Sometimes it's also called declarative memory as well, because you can declare them to the world.

And so that would be memory for events, but it would also be things like semantic memory, which is memory for facts.

The other type of memory is implicit memory and that's where you don't have conscious access to the content of that memory and that would be things like riding a bike.

So you learn to do it, you have acquired that, it is a memory, but you can't pass that on in words.

So they're also called non-declarative memories.

And there's a whole load of different types of memory that would fall under that class.

The sense of, I know who this person is, that's implicit or explicit?

The emotional content of the memory would be an implicit memory.

So yeah, the emotional content and even things like knowing what cues in your environment mean.

So the sound of the ice cream van being a good noise, that's an emotional memory that's completely implicit.

You learn it through association, but until someone draws your attention to it, you probably haven't thought about that before.

You know how people say, oh, I've got a good memory.

Like, if there are different types of memory, can you have a good memory in a different type of a way?

Like, I mean, some people are really good at quizzes, for example, right?

i guess that's semantic memory is it yeah yeah and then and then terrible at remembering events and occasions yeah absolutely i mean if you look at people who have you know particular um like brain damage or neurological disorders you can see that these things separate out entirely so you can have people who have a disorder called semantic dementia where they gradually lose what objects mean and what they are.

Facts and things.

Facts and things go, but their episodic memory stays okay.

Whereas for Alzheimer's patients, it's the other way around.

So some people forget the capital of France, but can remember what it felt like to be a 14-year-old on the swing.

Yeah.

But, but then, in, did you say dementia, it's the other way around?

In Alzheimer's, yeah, it's the other way around.

So, episodic memory, their memory for events, is lost, but they still know how to navigate through environment.

They know what keys are, for example, and they know that keys unlock a door.

Oh, how interesting.

I mean, yeah, I mean, because I'm very bad with faces, very bad with names,

but can remember everything that happened on nights out going back

all the way this grant in a in an to an irritating extent so some things brilliant on other things not as good on and as you get older presumably you also some of these skills recede anyway yeah there's an idea actually that as we get older we encode or we store episodic memories in a different way so that we become much more reliant on gist like if you've had loads of really similar experiences there's no point in storing every single detail of every single experience you can just get the gist of it and then when you recall it later, you'll just fill in the details.

Sorry, it's not gist.

It's just a scientific term.

Gist is a scientific term, yeah.

I mean, we can talk about schemas if you would prefer, but gist is basically what it is.

It feels self-fulfilling because gist is the only word that's defined by itself.

Gist is the gist of something.

Yeah, it's great.

It's vague both in definition and use.

By the way, how accurate are the movies Inside Out and Inside Out?

Is that genuinely based on anything?

100%.

We all have those little characters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But

an element of core memories, there's a lot of things discussed in that, like, whatever.

Did they make a lot of that up?

I think one of the things that

is a shame they didn't quite get in Inside Out, but they're great films.

I'm not having a go at Inside Out.

But the idea that the memory is stored in like a complete form and the whole experience is kept in that little ball and you can recall it as it happened.

That's not how memory works at all.

Like, it turns out we actually make up a lot of stuff when we're recalling memories.

We store like the key things that you need to just think about the gist and the key details that would be like weird in that experience, but we don't have the whole of that memory stored in one go.

Like the example I often use with students is like if you think back to like the first time you ever walked into college, like what shoes were you wearing?

Like no one remembers that unless you were wearing like particular fancy shoes.

But when you remember it, you don't remember it with no shoes on, right?

You just make something plausible up.

So we do that with a lot of stuff and we're just not necessarily aware of it.

There is something interesting in that actually because Dara was saying about how he couldn't remember what he did at the weekend and it turns out that he had appeared live on the last leg.

I imagine that for most people in the world that would be quite a memorable event.

But for Dara I guess it's actually not that unusual.

The thing that you're saying is like

it's the kind of how how weird moments are.

Yeah, how distinctive is this?

How much of a

sort of shift from my normal experience is this?

That's the stuff that's worth remembering.

Alright, well okay so so Chris then we introduced you as a professor of anomalistic psychology.

What on earth is that?

I thought you might ask that.

It's basically seeing if we could come up with psychological explanations for experiences that many people would label as paranormal.

It's everything from kind of alien abduction claims to people who think they've got psychic powers or ghostly encounters, past life memories, the whole anything that's weird, we're interested in it.

And can we come up with explanations, non-paranormal explanations, and where possible, can we actually produce some evidence to support our explanations for these phenomena?

Okay, if we are just remembering these sparse details then, the gist of it as it were, does that mean that we can kind of influence each other in the way that we fill in the gaps?

I mean, we're talking about transferring memories here.

If two or more people have a collective experience, do they sort of influence each other's memories?

Well, they certainly can, yeah, and that's the thing.

I mean, if you've got a situation where a group of people have witnessed something unusual, like a crime or a possible sighting of the Lott Ness monster or a UFO, they're going to discuss it before anybody formally interviews them to

collect their account.

And if you've got one person there who is very, very confident and gives their account first, but maybe includes some inaccuracies, that can contaminate other people's memories.

And this is a definite thing.

It's called the memory conformity effect.

We've looked at it in an anomalistic context.

This was a study where

I'm sure you both remember Uri Geller.

Of course.

I remember when he first appeared because I used to believe in all this stuff.

And one of the things that Geller became famous for was apparently being able to bend metal just by gently rubbing it.

I've now got lots of friends who are conjurers.

And basically, they can do this and they say, it's a trick.

It's sleight of hand.

It doesn't involve anything paranormal.

And if Uri's doing it using paranormal powers, he's doing it the hard way because it looks exactly the same when you do it as a trick.

But other people came back and said, Oh, no, it can't be because I've seen him do it, and the spoon carried on bending after he put it down.

So it can't just be sleight of hand.

Now,

Richard Wiseman, who you may have heard, I was a

name.

Richard is a member of the inner magic circle and he knows all about the power of suggestion.

So he did a neat little study where he had one group of volunteers who watched this video of an alleged psychic who was in fact a conjurer using sleight of hand, hand who in this case it was a key bent the key using sleight of hand puts the key down there's a nice close-up shot and you hear him say it's still bending you have another group who get exactly the same but they don't get that suggestion of those who get the suggestion 40% report they think the key carries on bending it's a really simple manipulation and virtually nobody in the other group does

so we borrowed that Richard published his results we borrowed his video but we put a memory conformity twist on it where people watched the video in pairs.

And one of the pair

was a genuine participant, the other one was a Confederate working with us.

The idea was you watch this video, you discuss what you've seen, and then you report back to us independently what you've seen.

And the Confederate was instructed to either say during the discussion, yes, it did carry on bending, or no, it didn't.

And that then has an additive effect.

So if you're in the condition in our study where you get the suggestion from the psychic and you get the reinforcement from the co-witness, we got to levels of 60% of people reporting they thought the key carried on bending.

It absolutely doesn't.

So it's not just what happens when you're witnessing an event, it's also what happens afterwards can influence.

We're a mess.

That's what I'm getting at.

A complete mess.

Okay, I want to know, Amy, though, when you're experiencing something, when an episodic memory is actually being formed, so let's say you're, you know, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, for instance, what's actually happening in the brain?

Because this is, I mean, at the heart of it, this is a physical process that's happening, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So

best theories at the moment suggest that what happens is memory trace form so you're having that experience that's going to activate lots of different brain regions

and that's going to if for an episodic memory that's going to activate this region called the hippocampus which is kind of tied up to all of these different regions that are getting all that sensory experience.

What will happen then is that you'll have cells within the hippocampus that are all becoming activated together and those cells will then undergo a process that we call consolidation That basically means that they undergo kind of a structural change in the brain cells themselves that allow them to signal more efficiently to each other if part of that memory trace becomes activated again.

So, once that consolidation process has happened, that's thought to take somewhere around like four to six hours to finish.

If you then present part of that memory again, you give like a retrieval cue, that should then, because the signaling is now more efficient, that should allow most of that trace trace to become active again.

And that will then be the process of recall.

So then, okay, if this is, as you're describing it, right, you, you, I mean, at the cellular level, right, and you've actually got something physically changing, then doesn't that mean in theory that you could sort of implant a memory?

Well, that assumes that we're all wired up in exactly the same way, right?

Because

our brains form through experience.

So we're, you know, we're born with way more connections between brain cells than we need.

We actually lose a load of those in the first few years of life, the ones that we don't need.

So we're not necessarily all wired up in exactly the same way.

So the idea that you could take one,

even if we could image it, which you can't in humans, if you could take that whole memory trace and then put it into somebody else's brain, it wouldn't necessarily give the same sensory experience in that new brain because it's not been wired up in exactly the same way.

Okay, you said there for a second, we can't do that in humans yet.

Yeah, we can't do that in humans.

Does that imply?

It has been done in mice.

Yeah, it has been done in mice in a very, very selective, specific context.

So this is work done by Paul Franklin and Sheena Jocelyn's lab in Toronto.

So the way that we perceive smells is really, really predictable.

So within the olfactory bulb in the nose, and mice have massive olfactory bulbs, they're very, very kind of based on smell.

There are, you can predict how certain odours will activate certain certain cells within the bulb so if you present almond odour for example you know this one cell is the one that lights up ashes too but in any case you can predict which ones are gonna gonna light up which means if you can then switch those on and off you can make the mouse think that it has perceived almonds when actually it hasn't so what they did was they paired the the fake almond odour with either good or bad outcome so they were dealing with male mice so the good outcome was access to to a lady mouse, and the bad outcome was an electric shock.

And then they put the mice into.

Brutal dichotomy that wasn't.

Two different groups.

You want to be in the lady mouse group.

And then they just put them on a, you know, in gave them a choice.

It's like, do you want to go to the almond odour or do you want to go to this other odour?

So wait, they hadn't smelled

aloud.

They'd never smell almond.

Yeah.

But you know that in another mouse, when it smells almond, a switch goes on in the brain.

So then you get these other mice who've never had the smell, turn the switch on and then say, which way do you want to go?

Here's a lady mouse.

Learn that this smell predicts the lady mouse or learn that this smell predicts shock.

And then when you actually give them the real smell, they will go towards it if they think it means lady mouse and they will go away from it if they think it means shock.

They remember smelling something they never smell.

And they took it one step further as well.

So this is like the first fully artificial memory.

They also took another group of mice, did the stimulation, say the fake almond odour, stimulating the nose, and then they switched on parts of the brain that are associated with punishment or with reward, and then did the same test.

Here's the almond odour.

They've never had any real experience of lady mice or shock or anything,

but they still went towards the almond odour if they thought if it had been paired with rewarding stimulation in the brain and away from it if it had been paired with punishing.

So in the first one, they remembered a smell that they'd never smelt, and then in the second one, they remembered a smell and an emotion with something they'd never experienced.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Wow.

Okay, that's okay.

I'm going to get my header on that.

And also, the poor mice.

Do they all find time with the lady mouse?

At the end of the day, I don't, I don't.

They bought you a nice farm where there's just lots of lady mice.

We're mostly looking around for a lady mouse.

No more lady mice for you.

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So that's an example of a simple artificially implanted memory in a mouse.

But it turns out that we humans are all susceptible to having rich meaningful memories that are actually false.

Have a listen to this.

My name's Al Hopwood.

I'm an artist, writer and curator.

And between 2012 to 2016, I gathered an archive of false and non-believed memories from the public.

There's one particular one where someone had a memory of seeing their dad in a play, in like an amateur dramatics play, and they can remember what it felt like.

They can remember feeling slightly embarrassed, and there was their dad doing this slightly hammy performance up on stage, and they remember it as having aunts and uncles all around them, kind of like the whole family was in

this small theatre where they grew up.

And then much, much later, they were at a family gathering and started talking about this amusing recollection, only to be told by their mum that there's no way that that could have happened because they weren't born at the time.

And so it was obviously a kind of family anecdote that had been told over and over again and then had been imagined.

and then somehow lodged as a recollection.

And this idea of transferring memories between different people is quite interesting because it kind of happens anyway.

There's a really funny one where a brother and sister can remember really vividly their mum trying to resuscitate their pet goldfish with a straw.

So it so it died.

It was floating on the top of the tank, which of course isn't funny.

Took the goldfish out and then with a straw was trying to trying to blow air into it to resuscitate it.

And then many, many years later, they were chatting to their cousins about this memory.

And they turned and said, no, no, no, no.

That was our mum who did that.

That was your aunt.

And we have the recollection of our mum having done that to our goldfish.

I mean, where the truth lies in that, I've got absolutely no idea, but it's absolutely fascinating.

I'm fascinated creatively in what has now really become quite an established cognitive link between memory and imagination, and that a memory is a process of storytelling.

Chris, first, why is our brain not better at stopping this?

Well it's a it's a byproduct of the way that our brains have evolved which is basically to kind of be the most efficient in terms of we don't need to take every single detail in.

So we remember the important stuff, we remember the gist.

But that means, well that means that sometimes we fill in those gaps unintentionally, unconsciously with what we think must have happened.

But there's also the fact that we can imagine things, okay, very, very vividly.

And we know that if you get people to imagine something that didn't happen and imagine it repeatedly, then in some people, especially those with very good imaginations, they can later confuse the imaginary, what they've imagined, for something that really did happen.

Can you use this to your advantage?

Can you, knowing that people have this like messy, messy memory system, can you like deliberately implant false memories in

can yeah I mean there's a range of techniques now uh it was Elizabeth Loftus who was the kind of queen of false memory research that I'll get I'll describe one of her initial studies basically you get people to come in and you say we're interested in autobiographical memory so episodic memory for things that actually happened to you and we've spoken to other family members they've told us about these things that happened before you were 10 years old and they give you four examples.

Three of them actually really did happen.

You really have been in touch with their family to find out, but one of them is made up.

In the original study, it was getting lost in a shopping mall about the age of five, being very upset, and then eventually being reunited with your parents.

Now, people often will obviously say that they don't remember that, but especially it didn't happen.

But you get them to go away and think about it and see if any more details come back, and we'll interview you again in a week's time.

And then you do that a couple of times.

And

it varies from study to study, but you'll find that around about 25 to 30 percent of people that you put through this this process will then come up with false memories of this event that didn't happen, sometimes even kind of elaborating on it, introducing extra details that you didn't give them and so on and so forth.

There are all kinds of different scenarios that people have used.

I mean knocking over a punch bowl on the parents of the bride at a wedding reception when you were a kid.

Bruce.

One really kind of interesting study was implanting false memories for having been involved in a serious crime where which involved the police where you were the perpetrator.

And people started off saying, No, no, I don't remember that.

By the end of it, I say a sizable minority are saying, Yes, I remember that.

Now it did happen.

These are all quite negative things.

I mean, I was just thinking about, can you do the opposite?

Can you trick people into being confident, like, you know, self-assured, like capable humans by telling them about something great that happened to them in the past?

I mean, again, in some of Elizabeth Loftus's more recent research, they've convinced people that either during childhood they there were certain foods that they hated or there were certain foods that they loved and the idea is that potentially this could be used to kind of stop you eating unhealthy stuff and get you to really eat more healthy stuff which you know is is a kind of good outcome but is it justified basically you're you know you're playing around with people's pasts.

You're kind of convincing them something happened that didn't, you know.

And so it raises a whole host of of really interesting issues.

If you could come up with kind of reliable ways for kind of editing out really traumatic memories, then

that might be something that's worth doing.

That's something you're involved with, Amy, isn't it?

Editing real memories?

Yeah, that's right.

So the research that my group's really interested in is

understanding the contribution of those emotional memories that we were talking about earlier to mental health disorders.

So we're really interested in disorders like addiction and alcoholism.

We're interested in post-traumatic stress disorder.

And then other groups have also been interested in this as well and looking at other disorders like phobia for example.

So if you have a fear of dogs because you were bitten by a dog as a child or you'd mention that always if you can somehow edit out that memory?

Yeah that's right.

So as Chris was saying earlier there's this idea that what we've actually evolved is this much more kind of dynamic flexible memory system.

So memories can be updated.

You just have to get them in the right conditions to update.

If what you expect to happen and what actually happens happens is not the same, that suggests your memory needs updating.

And so we can get the memory back into this mode where it becomes editable.

While the memory is in that editable state, normally you would then introduce new information, you would update it, and then it would go through this process where it kind of re-stabilizes, the memory trace restabilizes in the brain.

If you get the memory though, while it's in that editable state and you stop that reconsolidation process from happening, which you could do with drugs, you could do with other kind of behavioural manipulations, then you can stop that restorage from happening.

And so you should be able to stop, you know, stop that memory being restored in the brain and therefore stop it from having an impact on behaviour in the long term.

Okay, okay, okay.

I mean, this is crazy.

Like what you're doing is extraordinary.

Okay, so let me make sure I understand this then.

So I hadn't quite, it hadn't quite landed with me when you said earlier memory is about looking forwards.

But is what you're saying that the whole whole point of memory is not so that you can

think back wistfully about

the nice days that you spent on a bicycle when you were 16.

It's all about predicting your environment to keep you safe and sort of

prosperous in future.

Exactly.

So memory has evolved, we think, for predicting the future, not for looking back at the past.

Wow.

Okay, so then this idea of like, okay, a dog bites you and it's horrible and you don't like it.

And so therefore you're scared of dogs in future, you're saying now you can take that memory and then as you're recalling it, change your association with it.

Yeah, that's the idea.

How do you get it into an editable state as you describe it?

Yeah, so you have to have a mismatch between what people are expecting and what actually happened.

So there's a really nice study that Meryl Kint did at the University of Amsterdam where she was looking at spider phobics.

So she was getting people to come into the lab.

and she told them that she was going to get them to go and pick up a tarantula sitting at the other end of the room.

And, you know, she's bringing them, and she's got videos of this that I've seen.

And she's bringing them like to the door of the room.

And people are really, really panicking because they do not want to go near this spider.

And then she pulls them away from it.

So they've geared themselves up.

They're going to have to go and handle this tarantula.

And then she pulls them away.

And then she gives them a pharmacological treatment.

So she gives them a drug called propranol,

which is a beta blocker.

It calms your heart down, basically.

It calms your heart down, but also has effects in the brain as well.

Then what she she did, they have this treatment where, yeah, they have this one session where they're told they're going to have to handle the tarantula and then they get propanolol or placebo, depending on which group they're in.

Next day, of course, the placebo group came in, she handled the tarantula, like, I'm not going near it.

The group that had the propanolol not only go up to the cage, not only open the cage, they actually allow the tarantula to crawl up there.

Wow.

And this effect lasted for at least a year.

She followed up for at least a year.

And they were, in fact, if anything, approaching the spider.

So they didn't need the propanol.

Again, it was just a one-oh my gosh, this is so.

Okay, so you basically retrained their brain.

Exactly.

You've prevented that fear of spider memory from being there.

Really interesting, though, it took them about a year to stop describing themselves as spider phobic.

They had to have enough experience of not being afraid of spiders in the real world for that kind of...

autobiographical semantic memory to update and say, I'm no longer spider phobic.

But the fear was gone within a single session.

Can we very quickly ask you the specific question we said?

Could we transfer our memories of specific experiences?

Do you think that that will happen ever?

Specific experiences, I think, very, very unlikely.

I mean, I'm always happy to be proved wrong, but I think the idea of being able to take a memory trace from one person and implant it in another just seems really unlikely to me because, you know, brains are different.

We all are, you know, and brains evolve across time, right?

Like

our experiences change who we are as we get older as well.

So I I just think to take a memory from one set point in time, even for the same brain, and implant it

in another point in time.

I think that so we couldn't even use it on our own memories to

unfortunately.

I think that seems unlikely.

So, you can't go, you can't go into the same river twice as they say.

You know, it's changed, it's not the same river, it's not the same brain.

Exactly.

Do you want to know the really shocking thing?

I've never been on the last leg.

Nice try, they're still not inviting you in.

Thank you to both of our guests, Amy Milton and Chris French.

So, Dora, do you remember what we just talked about?

Look,

there was something about lady mice and how if you want to woo a lady mouse, buy her some hands.

That's really what I was my takeaway.

You got the gist of it.

That's it.

That's the whole game, isn't it?

Yeah.

Oh, good.

Thank heavens.

The pressure's off.

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Hello, Greg Jenner here.

I am the host of You're Dead to Me from BBC Radio 4.

We are the comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.

And we're back for a brand new series, Series 9, where we're covering all sorts of things from Aristotle to the legends of King Arthur to the history of coffee to the reign of Catherine of Medici of France.

We are looking at the arts and craft movement and the life of Sojourna Truth and how cuneiform writing systems worked in the Bronze Age.

Loads of different stuff.

It's a fantastic series.

It's funny.

We get great historians.

We get great comedians.

So if you want to listen to your dead to me, listen first on BBC Sounds.

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Sups!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be heard.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.