Steve Ramirez

like a tape recorder of the past or like a carbon copy of the past, but they're a reconstructive process in that every time we recall a memory, we're constantly scribbling in new information and hues and tones and so on and contours of that memory change.

So it's a dynamic process.

And I think that's important for us to at least know or appreciate because it really begins then kind of scratching the surface of what does memory mean to us as individuals?

And what does that say about our own memories and our own even sense of identity, which is threaded over time by memory?

The second thing here would be

that the more we know about our own memories, or memories in general, then the better equipped we are to predict what happens when it breaks down.

And that, of course, affects, that process affects millions of people as well, and ideally lead to treatments as well.

Right, I'm probably not gonna wanna erase a memory of my own from a high school breakup that I couldn't get over for a few weeks because life taught me how to get over it and how to move on and grow as an individual.

But when we start talking about it from the perspective of any disorder, then that's a different story because that does require some kind of outside intervention for us to be able to try to restore health back to the brain.

So when we think about memory manipulation,

I think that if we have that goal of nourishing health in any capacity to a person, then we're in business, because then the idea of manipulating memories has a larger goal in sight, which is our own well-being.

I think we understand a little bit more than the tip of the iceberg, but we certainly don't understand the entire iceberg of what memory is.

I like to think of it like this, that memory is what happens when an experience leaves some kind of lasting change in the brain.

And we can somehow revisit that change to make that memory pop back up to life.

And we know that this can happen on the time scale of hours.

I had a sandwich today for breakfast.

Or on the time scale of years.

I got married about 15 months ago to decades.

I remember my Pokemon card collection from when I was a kid, and I remember them in pretty vivid detail.

So at some point, whether it was looking at my Pokemon card collection or seeing my wife walk down the aisle or putting my sandwich together this morning, all three of those left some kind of change in the brain that had to exist over the span of days to years to decades that I can now revisit and tap into or pull the book out of the library, so to speak, so that I can revisit that memory.