Steve Ramirez

What that change is, is exactly what we study in the lab and what thousands of researchers are studying today, because those changes can happen at the level of a brain cell all the way up to an entire brain, all the way up to the conversation that me and you are having and how we're altering each other's brains as well.

Yeah, I think memory is such a flexible, silly, putty kind of thing that exists in the brain that it's certainly not like a video recording of the past.

If anything, for instance, we might, the both of us might

have gone to some ball game for instance and we could have been sitting next to each other having the same exact experience eating the same hot dogs watching the same team even rooting for the same team and give it some time and the way that we recount that day to all of our friends or loved ones is almost certainly not going to match up to each other's detail by detail and it's almost certainly not going to match up to you know if we if we happen to be on the

the fan video, for instance, and we happen to have a recording of us for the nine innings of the ball game, that reality doesn't always have to match up with our internal subjective reality.

And our subjective realities don't always have to match up with each other's too.

So on the one hand, that can be, it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.

It just means that we all have our own personal records of the past that we

combine and recombine with new detail every time we recall them.

It can be a little bit bad when we need to use that memory as an objective account of what happened because we know that memory isn't at all an objective account of what happened since it's biased by all of our personal subjective histories that we bring to the table.

This is the exact style of question that actually keeps me up at night because I'm convinced that we don't yet have an answer as to how the brain does that.

We know that it does it.

We know that you could be taking a stroll down the street and you randomly remember your prom, for example,

Or you randomly remember something from when you were five years old and maybe a memory that you have with a sibling or a parent.

So for all intents and purposes, those memories didn't have any real evidence of existing in the brain in the decades since they were made, since you hadn't recalled them before.

And we had no reason to believe that they were even there.

But give it the right cue or the right trigger in the world, or maybe even the right thought that happens to spark that dormant memory back to life.

then that decades-old memory can come back and seemingly feel like it's full of pretty vivid detail as well.

So this is just my hot take on this, but I think that the brain actually stores a remarkable amount of information more than we give it credit for.

It's not necessarily that we're storing every bit of detail of every second of every day,