Something You Should Know
The Science of Memory Manipulation & Why Wildlife is Invading Neighborhoods
18 Dec 2025
Christmas tree fires are frightening, but they’re not the leading cause of house fires in the U.S. What’s surprising is how many fires start from everyday habits and household choices most people never think twice about. This episode begins with a look at several common yet overlooked causes of home fires. Source: https://www.bobvila.com/articles/fire-safety/#.Viz3ILerTIU We alter our own memories far more than we realize. We forget details, highlight the good parts, and unintentionally distort events over time. Now scientists are exploring how to deliberately modify specific memories — softening painful recollections and strengthening positive ones. Steve Ramirez explains how memory really works and where this groundbreaking research is headed. He is an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, a TED speaker, and author of How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past (https://amzn.to/3KFiLJp). Wildlife encounters seem to be increasing — bears on porches, coyotes in yards, bobcats strolling down suburban streets. Are these animals getting more comfortable with humans? Are we building into their territory? And what should you actually do during a close encounter? Randi Minetor, author of more than 90 books including The Bear at the Bird Feeder: Why We're Seeing More Wild Animals in Our Neighborhoods and How We Can Live in Harmony with Them (https://amzn.to/4pHy5UM), offers insight and practical advice. Seeing flashing police lights in your rearview mirror is enough to make anyone nervous. Once you’re pulled over, what should you do — and just as important, what should you not do — when the officer approaches your window? We wrap up with key tips to help keep the encounter calm and trouble-free. Source: https://www.aamva.org/law-enforcement/what-to-do-when-stopped-by-law-enforcement PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! AURA FRAMES: Visit https://AuraFrames.com and get $45 off Aura's best selling Carver Mat frames by using promo code SOMETHING at checkout. INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! QUINCE: Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! DELL: Your new Dell PC with Intel Core Ultra helps you handle a lotwhen your holiday to-dos get to be…a lot.Shop now at: https://Dell.com/deals AG1: Head to https://DrinkAG1.com/SYSK to get a FREE Welcome Kit with an AG1 Flavor Sampler and a bottle of Vitamin D3 plus K2, when you first subscribe! NOTION: Notion brings all your notes, docs, and projects into one connected space that just works . It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and actually fun to use! Try Notion, now with Notion Agent, at: https://notion.com/something PLANET VISIONARIES: In partnership with Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative, this… is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. SHOPIFY: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial and start selling today at https://Shopify.com/sysk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the leading causes of house fires?
Today on Something You Should Know, what's the leading cause of house fires? It's not your Christmas tree. Then, understanding memory and the new science of memory manipulation.
Memory manipulation means to either spark that memory back to life, or turning down the emotional volume of a particularly traumatic experience, or turning up the emotional volume of a particular positive experience that may have lost its luster over time.
Also, what to do and not do if the police pull you over? And why does it see more and more wild animals are moving into residential areas?
They're not really moving into our areas, we're moving into theirs. So we get more and more of these animals who are trying to figure out how they're going to continue to make a living with all of these houses and people and manicured lawns.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Ah, the Regency era.
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Chapter 2: How can we manipulate our memories?
You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or as the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts.
Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
You know, around the holidays, I think most of us are conscious of and careful about our Christmas trees. We want to keep them well watered because we don't want a Christmas tree fire. But Christmas tree fires are not the leading cause of house fires in the U.S. And that's what we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi and welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers.
So as dramatic and tragic as Christmas tree fires are, they are not the leading cause of house fires. You know what is? Cooking. Leaving pots and pans on the stove unattended. But there are other causes of fires you may not even be aware of, but you probably should be.
Chapter 3: Why would someone want to change a memory?
For example, wrong wattage light bulbs. If you've ever thought to yourself, it's probably okay to use this 60-watt bulb in a 40-watt socket, you're not alone. A lot of people do. However, installing a light bulb with a wattage that is too high for the lamp or light fixture is a leading cause of electrical fires. Batteries.
If you store 9-volt batteries in your kitchen junk drawer, you could be putting your home at risk. When loose batteries roll around with other metals, like screws or paper clips, the two terminals on the battery could short out and generate enough heat to start a fire. It's best to put a piece of electrical tape over the terminals or store the battery in its original package.
Dust, believe it or not. Built-up dust can be a fire hazard if it collects in and around things like electronics, electrical sockets, and even floor heaters. And chimneys. Dead birds, raccoon nests, crack mortar, and built-up creosote are all common causes of chimney fires. If you use your fireplace, you should have your chimney swept out once a year. And that is something you should know.
What is a memory, really? And what would it mean if you could change a memory? Imagine taking a painful memory and softening it, or enhancing a wonderful memory and make it even better. But if you can change a memory, is it still a memory, or is it something closer to fiction?
What's fascinating is that scientists are getting closer to doing exactly this, and it raises big questions about how memory actually works. We already know that our recollections are not perfect.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of memory manipulation research?
Memories fade, distort, and lose detail. In a sense, we rewrite our memories all the time. But now, at least in lab animals, researchers can alter very specific memories with surprising precision. Here to explore what this means and where the science is headed is Steve Ramirez. He is an award-winning neuroscientist known for his TED Talks on memory manipulation.
He's an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University and author of the book, How to Change a Memory, One Neuroscientist's Quest to Alter the Past. Hey Steve, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much for having me today.
So before we get into the details of how memory manipulation works, I think the big first question is, why would you want to do that? Why change a memory?
Chapter 5: Why are wild animals increasingly entering residential areas?
We learn from our past. Our past is important to our future self. If we change our past...
Well, why? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's at least two reasons why we would want to manipulate a memory. The first is to understand how does memory work? I mean, we can think of this as if you were to have a car at an auto shop, right? And you are trying to figure out what's wrong. You can hotwire the car or you can hit the accelerator.
You can listen to the carburetor, hear what happens to the engine. You're tinkering with bits and pieces of the car so that it can tell on itself and let you know what could potentially be funky here. It's the same thing with manipulating memories, where when we turn them on or off, for example, we can begin listening in on what the rest of the brain and what the organism is doing.
And that lets us know a bit of what's working, like how does memory work for that matter? The second reason is because we can turn on memories or turn off memories with the goal of restoring health to the brain. And I think that's really the real reason why we're doing all of what we're doing, because we can imagine being able to turn on
A positive memory, for example, to try to alleviate symptoms associated with a given psychiatric disorder or to turn off a memory for the same reason as well. So the goal here is to understand how does memory work and then can we use that knowledge to figure out how to restore health and well-being back to the brain that those memories exist in.
And so ultimately you would do what with this?
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Chapter 6: What should you do during a wildlife encounter?
I mean, is this something for everyday people or is this something for psychiatric patients and scientists in a laboratory?
It's a little bit of both. I think that the ideas that we're coming to terms with now about what memory is and what memory isn't, that is an everyday knowledge thing that I think is important for all of us. So for example, we've known for a while that memories aren't,
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.
So when I hear the phrase, the term, memory manipulation, which I've never really heard much before, when I hear it, I think of, okay, so you had a bad experience, and the memory of that experience is, is causing you not to sleep and not to eat. I mean, it's a horrible memory. That you could manipulate that memory to make it less horrible or make it go away or something.
But I don't think that's what you're talking about, right? No.
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,
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Chapter 7: How should you behave if pulled over by the police?
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.
So what exactly is memory, and how well do we understand it? I mean, do we really think, science really think, yeah, we've got this pretty well understood, or is this still a big mystery? And it's interesting, because we use... the term memory in a couple of different ways. We'll talk about, say, a person who remembers everything. Oh, he has a good memory.
But we also use the word to refer to a specific memory. That's a great memory I have. So what is memory?
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.
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.
And so when you remember something, when you activate your memory, you're remembering what? Because, for example, when you remember that you got married, your memory probably, if we had a video of that, probably doesn't necessarily match the video. Like, your memory changes over time.
And I remember hearing that when you remember something, you're not so much remembering the event as you're remembering the last time you remembered it. I don't know if that's true or not, but memory is very... inaccurate a lot of the time.
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Chapter 8: What are the best practices for a calm police encounter?
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.
We're discussing memory and memory manipulation, and my guest is Steve Ramirez. He is author of the book How to Change a Memory, One Neuroscientist's Quest to Alter the Past.
Hi, I'm Adam Gidwitz, host of Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest. On every episode, we tell a grim fairy tale. Not the cute, sweet versions of the fairy tales that your children have heard so many times. No, we tell the real grim fairy tales. They're funny, they're weird, sometimes they're a little bit scary.
But don't worry, we rate every episode grim, grimmer, or grimmest, so you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right level of scary for you. Tune in to Grim Grimmer Grimmest and our new season, available now.
When they were young, the five members of an elite commando group nicknamed the Stone Wolves raged against the oppressive rule of the Karatarakian Empire, which occupies and dominates most of the galaxy's inhabited planets. The wolves fought for freedom, but they failed, leaving countless corpses in their wake.
Defeated and disillusioned, they hung up their guns and went their separate ways, all hoping to find some small bit of peace amidst a universe thick with violence and oppression. Four decades after their heyday, they each try to stay alive and eke out a living. But a friend from the past won't let them move on, and neither will their bitterest enemy.
The Stonewolves is Season 11 of the Galactic Football League Science Fiction Series by author Scott Sigler. Enjoy it as a standalone story or listen to the entire GFL series beginning with Season 1, The Rookie. Search for Scott Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R, wherever you get your podcasts.
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