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Why You Can’t Remember Being a Baby · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: So I want you to just pot wuz whatever you
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: were doing right now, just for a second, hold.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: On, yeah, just take a quick breath.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Exactly, And I want you to close your eyes, well
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: unless you are driving or operating heavy machinery, in which
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: case please keep them open, right, safety first, yeah, But otherwise,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I really want you to vividly visualize your very first
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: childhood memory. And I don't mean just you know, a
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: vague sense of a house you lived in.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: You mean a specific, anchored event.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Yes, the very first specific event you can actually recall.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Really go there in your mind, like, how old are
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: you in this memory? Are you two? Are you three?
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: Try to look around the room in your head exactly?
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: What are the colors? Are the walls painted that weird
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: nineteen nineties beige or covered in some loud floral.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Wallpaper or wood paneling?
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that wood paneling. And what are the sounds?
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Is it the muffled static hum of a television in
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the next room or maybe just the bright, sharp sunlight
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: hitting the carpet where you're sitting.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Focus on the physical sensations too.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Right, Are you scared? Are you laughing? Do you feel
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: the scratchy texture of a specific blanket, or you know,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: the cold, hard plastic of a toy in your hand.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Walk it in, hold that image in your mind, really
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: feel how real it is, how fundamental it feels to
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: the foundational story of you. Okay, now open your eyes,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: because here is where the reality we all take for
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: granted gets incredibly weird and honestly a little bit terrifying.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Statistically speaking, based on my own observations and everything I've
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: been obsessively digging into lately, m hm, there is a
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: staggering forty percent chance that the vivid, deeply personal marry
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: you just pictured is completely fictional.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: That's total fabrication, an.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Event that never ever actually happened to you.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: It is honestly one of the most phenomenal, unsettling illusions
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: of the human mind, because the brain is such a
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: schester counterfeitter that it can mint a fake memory so flawless,
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: with such high definition sensory detail that you would swear
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: your life on it in a court of law.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: And the trick is you wouldn't technically.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Be lying, right, You genuinely, at a biological level, believe
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: it to be the absolute truth.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: It just shatters your sense of reality a little bit,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: doesn't it. Well, Welcome to Beyond Infographics. I am beyond
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: excited to get into this today too.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: This is such a wild topic.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Our mission for today's exploration is to unravel the incredible
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: paradox of our earliest years. We are going to figure
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: out why our brains systematically delete our infancy.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: The great wipe.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we're going to explore how our entire sense
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: of self, you know, the very core of who we
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: believe we are, gets built on a foundation of forgotten
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: or entirely fabricated years.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Which is a lot to process, it is.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: And perhaps most chillingly, we're going to look at how
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: terrifyingly easy it is to unknowingly implant a completely fake
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: memory into someone else's mind. We're basically going to deconstruct
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: the architecture of your life story today.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: We're tearing down the house we really are.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: And hey, just a bit of quick housekeeping before we
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: permanently alter how you view your own past. If you
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: enjoy having your mind playfully blown, and if you value
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: these deep explorations, please take a second to drop a
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: five star rating on the show.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: It really does help.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: It genuinely helps us keep the lights on and keep
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: bringing you these conversations here on beyond infographics. Okay, so
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: we have to start at the very beginning of the timeline,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: the absolute blank slate of infancy, because before.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: We can even begin to understand why almost half of
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: our first memories are pure fiction, we have to grapple
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: with why we have almost no real memories from that
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: time in the first place.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: We really do have to look at the void before
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: we can look at the mirage. And this is something
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: everyone experiences, right, It's a universal phenomenon.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: It is across the entire higher human species. Yet for
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: decades it has stood as one of the most profound
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: mysteries in human cognition.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: And it doesn't just happen all at once, does it.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: No, not at all. The forgetting of our early lives
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: is categorized into two very distinct, kind of overlapping periods
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: of memory loss.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Right, So, from my understanding of the developmental timeline, the
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: first phase is what we call infantile amnesia. And this
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: isn't just a period where things are.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: A little hazy, No, it's a blackout.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: It's a dense, almost total blackout of memories from the
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: exact day you are born up to about two years
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: of age. It is a complete void. You get absolutely nothing,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: nothing at all. You don't remember your first steps, you
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: don't remember your first words, you don't remember the hundreds
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: of hours you spent just staring at your parents' faces.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: And then, transitioning out of that total blackout, you enter
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: childhood amnesia.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: Which is slightly less dense.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the fog lifts a tiny bit, but memories are
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: still incredibly scarce, highly patchy, and mostly fragmented. And this
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: lasts until you are about five to seven years.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: Old, and then after age seven, the autobiographical memory machine
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: seems to finally boot up and run somewhat normally.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: That maps the timeline perfectly, But the truly fascinating part
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: is the psychological mechanism behind why this happens.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: Because babies are definitely learning during that time.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Exactly For a long time people were baffled. Babies are
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: clearly learning language, they learn physics like the fact that
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: if you drop a cup from a high chair, it
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: falls and makes a loud noise.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: And they learn complex social cues like how to manipulate
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: us into picking them up right.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: So the memory system is working on some fundamental level,
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: but autobiographical memory, the memory of our own specific lives,
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: hinges entirely on a developmental milestone that happens right around
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: the end of that first blackout period.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Between eighteen to twenty four months.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: At age usually, yes, somewhere right in that window. That
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: is when humans develop what we call the cognitive self.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: The cognitive self. Okay, I've always sounded fascinating when I
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: read about this in relation to the mirror test.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: Oh, the rouge test, Yeah, right, where.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: They put a small mudge of rouge or makeup on
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: a toddler's nose and sit them in front of a mirror,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: and before a certain age, the baby tries to wipe
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: the smudge off the other baby in the mirror.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: They think it's a completely different person.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: But suddenly, around eighteen months, it just clicks. They see
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: the mirror, they realize the reflection is actually them, and
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: they reach up to wipe their own nose.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: That is the exact behavioral marker of the cognitive self
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: coming online.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: So before that point, what's happening, Well.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Before that point, an infant is experiencing the world intensely.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: They're feeling pain, joy, hunger, they're learning complex motor skills like.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Walking, and they're forming deep emotional attachments to their caregivers.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, but they do not possess a stable, continuous internal
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: concept of me. And here is the fundamental, unbreakable rule
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: of autobiographical memory. You cannot have a memory about yourself
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: if yourself does not exist yet as an internal psychological concept.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, So the self acts as the cognitive glue exactly.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: It is the framework that binds all the disparate sensory
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: elements of an experience together.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Cites the sounds, the emotion, right.
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: The timeline, everything. It binds it into a personal, durable
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: memory trace. It anchors the event to a specific protagonist.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: Without the protagonist, the story just dissipates into thin air.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: I want to make sure I'm visualizing this correctly. This this
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: basically like trying to save a really complace word document
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: on a computer before the operating system is even fully installed.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: I love that analogy, Like the data is technically being generated.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: You know, you were typing on the keyboard. The processor
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: is recognizing the keystrokes and monitors displaying the letters, but
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: there is no central user profile to save that document to. Yes,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: So the moment the power flashes, or the moment the
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: baby goes to sleep that specific document has just gone forever.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: That analogy holds up incredibly well. The data is happening,
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: the sensory hardware is running flawlessly, but there is no
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: file directory, no overarching narrative structure to organize it into
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: a reprievable story. Is pretty much because we know that
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: the benefits of self referencing and self generation are absolutely
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: crucial for memory retention across the entire human lifespan, not
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: just in childhood.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Right as adults, we remember things way better if they
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: relate to us personally exactly.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: We remember information significantly better if we can relate it
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: to our goals, our hobbies, or our past experiences. Without
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: that early operating system of the self, the infant is
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: entirely capable of rudimentary memory, but not personal history.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: That explains why a one year old knows how to
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: stack blocks or knows that crying brings a parent.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Yes, that is semantic memory and procedural memory. They are
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: learning facts about the world and how to move their bodies,
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: but they cannot form complex episodic narratives.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: They can't remember this specific Tuesday afternoon. They learned to
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: stack the blocks.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Or how the sunlight looked in the room when they
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: did it exactly.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Okay, I follow the psychological argument there, but this raises
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: a massive biological question for me. If the data is
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: happening and the experiences are occurring in real time before
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: this operating system is fully online, what physically happens to
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: those early experiences?
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: That is the big question.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Because the brain is a physical organ Are those memories
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: locked away in some hidden, inaccessible vault deep in the
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: neural tissue just waiting for a key, or are they
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: literally physically destroyed.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: It's the latter, and it's a violent process.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: Because I was exploring this concept recently, the neurogenetic hypothesis,
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: and it absolutely blew my mind. It completely moves the
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: conversation away from just psychology and looks at the actual
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: biological mechanism of how the brain physically remodels itself.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: The neurogenic hypothesis is a massive paradigm shift in how
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: we understand memory. For a long time, everyone just treated
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: infantile amnesia purely as a software.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Problem, right like baby didn't have language, so the software
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: couldn't run Exactly.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: The infant lacked language or they lack the self concept
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: like we just discussed, so the software couldn't run the
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: memory program. But the neurogeneic hypop emphasis shows us it
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: is very much a hardware issue.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, so talk to me about the hardware.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: To understand this, we have to look at the hippocampus.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: This is a seahorse shaped structure deep in the temporal lobe,
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: and it is essentially the brain's primary memory center.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: It's where the magic happens.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: It is the region responsible for forming, organizing, and consolidating
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: new episotic memories. And in a developing infant, this region
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: is not just growing, it is in absolute chaotic overdrive.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Right from my own deep dives into this topic, it's
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: churning out new hardware at a rate we never see
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: again for the rest of our lives.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: It is an unprecedented biological event. There is a massive
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: surge of neurogenesis happening. Neurogenesis is the literal birth and
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: integration of brand new neurons.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Which sounds like a good thing right Intuitively, you might
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: think fantastic. More neurons mean a bigger hard drive, which
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: means more memory capacity.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: You would think so, but the developing infant brain uses
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: these high levels of neurogenesis differently. It actually acts as
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: a neural regularizer.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: A neural regularizer.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, the infant brain is rapidly growing and desperately trying
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: to optimize its circuits for survival in a complex world.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: This massive continuous influx of new neurons actually degrades or
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: completely overwrites the existing fragile memory traces that were just
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: laid down days or weeks prior.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: I am picturing this like laying down brand new high
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: speed train tracks while a train is currently running on
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: the old ones.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: That's a great visual, Like you.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Are building a stronger, faster, more robust network for the future,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: but you are aggressively tearing up the old footprints and
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: the old narrow gage tracks to do it. The construction
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: process itself destroys the history of the site.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: The physical reality of it is almost exactly like that.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: Think about the physical architecture of a memory in the brain.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: A memory isn't a physical object you can put in
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: a box.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: It's not a polaroid picture.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: No, it's a highly specific pattern of electrical and chemical
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: activity across a network of synapses. When a memory is formed,
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: certain synaptic connections between existing neurons are strengthened. Okay, but
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: the infant hippocampus is a relentless construction zone. It is
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: generating thousands of new neurons. And these new neurons don't
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: just sit politely on the sidelines. They have to physically
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: integrate into the existing circuitry.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: They're pushing their way in.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Exactly, they reach out with dendrites and axons, essentially shoving
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: their way into established networks. The physical insertion of these
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: new cells disrupts the delicate existing synaptic bonds that held
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: that early memory together.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: So the circuitry is remodeled so dramatically that the original
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: pattern is just scrambled.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: Scrambled beyond recognition, or erased entirely.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Which honestly, on an emotional level, feels incredibly tragic. It does.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, as parents or as family members, we spend
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: so much time curating these perfect early moments for our babies.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: We take them to the zoo, we buy them special toys,
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: we throw these elaborate first birthday parties, and their own
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: biology is just acting like an automatic hard drive wiper,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: aggressively deleting the whole thing.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: I completely understand the sentimental tragedy of it. But we
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: really cannot look at this through the lens of sentimentality.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: We have to look at it through the lens of
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: evolution and survival. Oh so well, this aggressive wiping process
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: is a massive evolutionary advantage. Infantile amnesia is not a
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: bug in the human system. It is a highly evolved feature.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: It reflects a critical developmental period where the brain is
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: literally learning how to learn.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna have to push back on that slightly,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: go ahead, because I struggle to buy the idea that
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: wiping data is a purely evolutionary advantage. If I am
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: an eighteen month old toddler and I touch a hot stove,
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: I absolutely need to remember that at age three so
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: I don't burn my hand off again. How is wiping
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: that data an advantage? It seems incredibly dangerous to just
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: delete threats.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: That is a brilliant point, but it requires us to
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: separate semantic memory from episodic memory.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Ah, right, the fact versus the story exactly.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: If the toddler touches a hot stove, they will absolutely
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: retain the semantic association stove equals pain. That is crucial
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: for survival. They learn the.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Rule, but they lose the context right.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: What they lose is the episodic memory, the narrative of
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: it was a Tuesday. Mom was cooking pasta, I was
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: wearing a blue shirt, and I touched the left burner.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Retaining the specific episodic details of infancy is actually detrimental.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Because it's useless information.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly. A baby's world is incredibly narrow, highly specific, and
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: constantly changing. The associations they make in a crib are
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: not universally applicable to adult survival. Holding onto outdated, highly
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: context specific infant memories, like the exact layout of a
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: specific playpen, takes up valuable neural real estate.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: It's just clutter, total clutter.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: It is far more adaptive to build a highly plastic,
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: incredibly efficient brain that can generalize rules rather than horde
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: specific outdated episodes. The brain prioritizes future your capacity and
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: adaptability over.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Past archiving, So it is sacrificing the memories of the
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: crib to build a brain capable of navigating the complex
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: social and physical landscapes of adulthood.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: So, if we go back to the computer analogy, it
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: is actively clearing the cash and deleting old, bloated files
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: to make the process or run faster for the really
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: complex software that is going to be installed a few
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: years later.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: That's spot on.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Okay, that makes a lot of sense from a biological
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: efficiency standpoint. Yeah, but this brings up a massive glaring
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: contradiction for me. Well, if our biology acts as this
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: automatic hard drive wiper, physically destroying the circuits, and the
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: cognitive self isn't even online to save the files in
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: the first place, why do so many adults swear up
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: and down that they have real memories from when they
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: were one or two years old.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: You hear it all the time.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: They really do. People will say to me, oh, I
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: distinctly remember looking through the wooden bars of my crib
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: at the yellow wallpaper, or I remember my first steps.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: The discrepancy between what biology allows and what people claim
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: to remmber brings us to a psychological phenomenon that is
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: incredibly pervasive. It is so common that almost everyone does it,
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: yet we are completely unaware of it. Misdating, Yes, misdating.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: The simple, uncomfortable fact is that human beings are notoriously
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: terrible at attaching accurate calendar dates or specific ages to
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: our own memories.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: This totally makes sense to me because, from my understanding,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: our memory does not come with timestamp.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: No, not at all.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: It is not like a digital photograph on your phone
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: where you can just swipe up, look at the metadata
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: and see, oh, created October fourth, nineteen ninety eight at
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: two fourteen pm.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: That metadata simply does not exist in the human brain.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: Because we lack an internal timestamp, we have to infer
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: dates rather than objectively retrieving them.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: We're basically just guessing based on context, right.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: We use contextual clues to guess how old we were
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: when an event happened. We might retrieve a memory and think, well,
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: I remember being very short in this memory, and we
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: lived in the house with the yellow door, and we
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: moved out of that house when I was three, so
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: I must have been two when this happened.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: But those inferences are highly prone to logical errors and contamination.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: A genuine, verified memory that actually occurred when a child
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: was four or five, well after the amnesia period ends,
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: might be mistakenly tagged in their mind as happening at
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: age two, so.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: They just drag the memory backward in time.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: Yes, this often happens simply because they conflated it with
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: other family stories, or mismatched the timeline of a house move,
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: or honestly just felt small in the memory.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: So the memory itself might be a perfectly real event,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: but the timestamp we slapped onto it is entirely fabricated,
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: pulling the event further back into the blackout period than.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: It actually belongs precisely. Or rather, let's take that a
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: step further. Even if a memory did somehow survive the
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: neurogenesis wiping process, there is another massive, almost insurmountable hurdle
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: to retrieving it.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Okay, what's the hurdle.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: It is a fundamental concept in cognitive psychology called encoding specificity.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: I have read a bit about encoding specificity, but let's
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: dive into this for the listeners. This is the idea
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: that a memory is inextricably tied to the environment, the
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: physical state, and the mental state you were in at
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: the exact moment the memory was made. Right.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is the idea that a memory does not
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: exist in a vacuum. A memory isn't just the isolated
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: event of a birthday cake.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: It's everything around it.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: It is a complex web of neural connections that includes
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: your mood, your physical state, your height, the vocabulary you possessed,
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: and your physical surroundings at the exact moment the memory
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: was encoded.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Like that's scuba diver study.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Yes, the famous experiment where scuba divers learned a list
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: of words underwater and another list on the beach. When
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: tested later, they remembered the underwater words significantly better when
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: they were back.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Underwater, and the beach words better when on the beach.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The physical environment acts as a retrieval cue. For
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: a memory to be a retrieved successfully, you generally need
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: cues that match the original context of the encoding.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: It's exactly like how you can be sitting in the
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: living room, realize you need a glass of water, walk
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: into the kitchen, and suddenly have absolutely no idea why
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: you are in the kitchen.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, it happens to me all the time.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Right. You stand there looking at the fridge totally blank.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: You can't remember your own thought from ten seconds ago
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: until you walk back into the living room, see the
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: empty coaster on the coffee table, and the living room
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: environment cues the memory.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: That is a perfect everyday example of encoding specificity. The
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: living room contains the cues the kitchen. Does not now
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: take that concept and apply it to an infant or
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: a toddler.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, the context is entirely different.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Completely different. A child's internal biology, their emotional vocabulary, their
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: physical height, and their external environment change so rapidly and
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: so drastically that the original context of a one year
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: old or a two year old is lost forever to
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: the adult they become.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Because you will never again view a room from two feet.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: Off the ground, exactly. You will never again process an
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: emotion without complex language automatically shaping and categorizing your thoughts
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: because that original infantile context can never be reinstated. The
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: retrieval cues are permanently gone.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: They're just erased.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: The memory might technically still exist somewhere deep in the
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: neural architecture. Perhaps a few synapses survive the neurogenesis remodeling,
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: but the bridge to reach those synapses has completely collapsed.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: The bridge has collapsed. Yea, that is a devastatingly clear image.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: The data is on an island and we have burned
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: all the boats.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: And honestly, if you are listening to this right now
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: and your mind is currently buffering as you rethink your
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: entire childhood timeline. If you are wondering which of your
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: cherished memories are actually just misdated fragments from when you
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: were five, take a second to rate beyond infographics five stars.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: Please do.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: It really helps us keep bringing you these incredible reality
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: bending insights, because it truly is a paradigm shift when
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: you realize how fragile and constructed our personal history actually is.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: It really is, So let's recap the destruction before before
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: we move to the creation. We misdate real memories, pulling
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: them further back in time than they belong to fill
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: the void. Our biological hardware actively overwrites early circuits with
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: new neurons, wiping the hard drive, and our contextual bridges
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: collapse because we grow up and learn language.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: All of those factors combined.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: Which leads us directly back to that startling, terrifying statistic
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: I mentioned in the introduction fictional first memories, because I
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: was looking at this major insight recently that nearly forty
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: percent of people possess a first memory that is entirely
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: one hundred percent.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Fictional, not just misdated, but literally never occurred, an.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Event that never occurred in physical reality. How does this
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: happen naturally? Because we are not talking about maligious brainwashing here.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: We are talking about normal, everyday people walking around, going
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: to work, raising kids, with fake foundational memories anchoring their identity.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: It happens naturally because at our very core human beings
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: are storytelling creatures. We have a profound, my own desperate,
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: hardwired psychological need for a cohesive life story. We hate gaps,
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: We despise gaps. Gaps in our timeline make us feel
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: unmoored and anxious. So when our brains encounter the void
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: of infantile amnesia, they unconsciously act as a narrative editors.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Where do they get the material?
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: They take? Desperate fragments of information gathered over decades, A
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: faded photograph we saw in a family album when we
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: were twelve, a funny anecdote our parents tell every single Thanksgiving,
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: a vague emotional feeling associated with the childhood home.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: And they go to work, and the brain just acts
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: like a film editor stitch and all that be roll together.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: It stitches them together, absolutely seamlessly. It weaves the visual
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: aesthetic from the photograph, the plot narrative from the family story,
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: and the generalized emotional resonance of childhood, and it projects
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: this new compilation onto our internal theater as a vivid,
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: first person memory.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Just accept it.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: Yes, And the most crucial part of this process is
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: that it happens completely outside of our conscious awareness. You
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: don't know you were fabricating it.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: See. This is where it gets so counterintuitive, and it
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: pushes back hard against everything we feel about our own minds.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: I've been thinking a lot about the common sense memory
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: belief system. Ah.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, the great myth.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: It is this widely held, almost universal cultural assumption that
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: memory works like a video camera or a highly organized,
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: secure filing cabinet, which is so wrong. The common sense
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: belief dictates that if a memory is highly vivid, if
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: it comes to mind fluently without effort, and if it's
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: packed with specific, granular details, it must be accurate. People think,
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: I could literally see the floral pattern on the curtains
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: in that room, I can smell the cherry pie, so
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: it has to be a real memory. I couldn't possibly
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: invent that much detail.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: And that assumption is perhaps the most dangerous myth about
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: human cognition. We have to completely dismantle the common sense
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: memory belief system. It is fundamentally demonstras incorrect.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: Vividness does not equal truth exactly.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: A memory can have stunningly vivid, highly specific, incredibly granular details,
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: the smell of the room, the texture of the fabric,
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: the exact words spoken, the lighting, and be holy one
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: hundred percent false. Subjective vividness does not correlate to objective.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Accuracy because it's not a video file.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: Memory is not a tape recorder. It is not a
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: video file you retrieve from a secure folder and press
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: play on. Memory is an active, live, reconstructive process.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: It's like playing a lifelong game of telephone with yourself.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: That is a very apt way to describe it. Every
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: single time you recall a memory, you are not pulling
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: up the original pristine file. You are pulling the components
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: out of storage and rebuilding the event from scratch in
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: real time using the current state of your brain.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: And when you rebuild it in the present moment, you
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: inadvertently incorporate new information, your current emotional state and outside
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: suggestions into the neural trace.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: When you save that new version.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: Then when you stop thinking about it, you save that
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: newly modified, slightly altered version back into the filing cabinet.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: So over time, through repeated retrieval and reconsolidation, a story
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: you merely heard at a dinner party becomes a story
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: you visually imagine, which eventually solidifies into a story you
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: distinctly remember experiencing firsthand.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: That is wild. The implications of that reconstructive process are
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: just staggering. Because if our brains naturally and innocently fabricate
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: memories just to fill in the gaps of our life
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: story and make us feel whole, it forces me to
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: ask a much darker question.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: What happens when it's weaponized?
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: Exactly what happens when someone intentionally tries to exploit those gaps.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: If our own biologies automatically photoshopping our childhoods to make
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: us feel better, it makes me wonder how hard is
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: it for an outside force to hijack that photoshop process?
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: Not very hard at all, Unfortunately.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: In someone else's intentionally write a fake file into our system.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: I've been fascinated by the misinformation effect. To me, this
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: is one of the most wild, deeply concerning, and slightly
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: terrifying quirks of human psychology.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: The misinformation effect is the exact point where the fragility
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: of memory moves from being a personal biological curiosity to
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: a massive societal vulnerability. It demonstrates empirically how easily memories
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: can be altered, or how entirely fabricated events can be
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: implanted into a healthy mind simply by exposing individuals to
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: misleading information after an event has occurred.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: I really want to dig into the methodology this because
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: there is a legendary piece of research here, commonly known
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: as the loss in them All technique. Can we break
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: down exactly how those researchers achieve this? Sure, because when
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: I first explore this step by step process of this,
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: it sent chills down my spine. How do you convince
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: an adult they experience something they completely didn't?
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: The methodology is brilliant in its simplicity. Researchers wanted to
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: see if they could implant a completely false memory of
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: a moderately traumatic childhood event, specifically getting law lost in
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: a shopping mall, into healthy, high functioning adults.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: Right. They couldn't just walk up and say, hey, remember
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: when you got lost?
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: No, they had to be subversive. They contacted the older
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: family members of the subjects, parents or older siblings to
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: gather three real, verified childhood memories for each participant. Then
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: the researchers constructed a fourth, completely fabricated story that.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: The subject had been lost in a specific shopping mall
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: as a young child, right.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: That they were crying and terrified and were eventually rescued
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: by an elderly person and reunited with their family.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: So they used the truth as a trojan horse for
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: the lie. They mixed the fake event in with three
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: highly accurate events to give the whole package credibility.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: Exactly the mechanism of a chrojan horse. They present the
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: subject with a physical booklet containing brief descriptions of the
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: three real memories and the one fake memory. The researchers
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: asked the subjects to read the booklet and write down
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: absolutely everything they can remember about each of the four
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: events and initially what happens initially in the first Many
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: subjects read the mall story and say, I don't remember
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: this happening, But the researchers utilize suggestive pressure free interviewing
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: they say, that's okay. Sometimes these things take time. Just
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: take the booklet home, take your time, really think about it,
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: and it might come back to you.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: And it works.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: Over the course of a few weeks and a few
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: follow up interviews, a significant percentage of the adults, about
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: a quarter of them, did not just passively agree that
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: it might have happened. They actively remembered being lost in
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: the wall.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: But they didn't just say, yes, it happened, right. They
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: went way beyond.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Them, way beyond they began to generate highly specific, vivid,
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: sensory details that were never in the original brief prompt
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: the researchers gave them. They would describe the physical appearance
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: of the old woman who found them, what clothes she
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: was wearing, the specific stores they were crying in front of,
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: and the visceral feeling of panic in their chest.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: They took the skeletal framework of the lie, and their
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: own brain synthesized the flesh and blood details to make
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: it real perfectly sex and if fully developed adults can
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: be manipulated that easily over a few weeks, children's minds
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: must be incredibly permeable. I want to look at another example,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: one that I find even more illustrative of the danger here.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: It's often referred to as the mouse Traps study done
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: with preschoolers.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: Yes, a foundational and heavily debated study in developmental psychology
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: regarding suggestibility.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: The setup here is incredible. The interviewers took these young
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: preschool aged kids and over the course of seven to
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: ten widely spaced out sessions over several weeks, they ask
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: them to remember a highly specific non.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: Event, something that definitely never happened.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Right. They asked something like, do you remember the time
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: you got your finger caught in a mouse trap and
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: had to go to the hospital to get it taken off? Now,
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: at first, in session one, the kids obviously say no
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: because it absolutely never happened. But the interviewers don't push hard.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: They just gently persist, exactly.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: They just keep gently, persistently bringing it up session after
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: think really hard, are you sure you don't remember the
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: mouse trap?
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: We have to unpack the cognitive mechanics of what is
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: happening to the child over those ten weeks, because it
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: beautifully illustrates the concept of source.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: Misattribution, source misattribution.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: Okay, As the weeks went on, the children didn't just
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: break down and comply with the adult. They didn't just
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: say yes to make the interviewer happy. Through the process
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: of being forced to visualize the event repeatedly, they eventually
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: remembered this fake event as reality.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: Just like the adults in the mall.
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: And just like the adults in the mall study, they
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: generated incredibly detailed, highly plausible narratives. They would describe the
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: car ride to the hospital, who drove them, what the
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: doctor looked like, the specific color of the bandage on
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: their finger.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: They literally build a physical reality out of a repetitive question.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: How does the brain allow that leap from imagination to memory?
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: That leap is the essence of source misattribution. When the
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: child is asked to think about the mouse trap, they
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: have to use their imagination to visualize a mouse trap,
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: their finger, and a hospital. They create a mental image.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Which is just a fantasy at first.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: Right over ten weeks, they recall that image over and over.
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: Eventually the child genuinely remembers the image in their mind,
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: but they misattribute the source of that image. They forget
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: that the source was the interviewer's repetitive question from week one,
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: and they wrongly attribute the source of the image to
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: their own lived experience.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: And because it's so vivid, they believe it exactly.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: Because the image comes to mind so fluently, with such
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: ease and detail, the brain's common sense memory belief system
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: kicks in and says, this image is vivid and easy
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: to recall, therefore it must be a genuine memory.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: And the roots of this inception goes so deep. There's
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: a specific, incredibly vivid anecdote from the aftermath of this
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: study that I think perfectly encapsulates how permanent this alteration
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: can be.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: The debriefing issue.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: Yes, after the study concluded, there was a debriefing phase.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: One child was so utterly convinced by his newly fabricated
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: mousetrap memory that the researchers actually had a very hard
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: time debriefing him. When his mother sat down with him
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: and explained, honey, this was just a psychological experiment with
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: the nice people of the university. The mouse trap never happened.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: It was just pretend. The kid refused to believe her.
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: He argued with his own mother, the person who was
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: supposedly with him during the event, about a reality that
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: never existed.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: Yes, and it escalated. It made national news. There was
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: an interview with the very famous television reporter John Stossel.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: Stossel went and interviewed the kid and challenged him on
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: national television.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: Which is intense for a kid.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Very Stossel said, your mom says this didn't happen. The
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: researchers say it didn't happen, and the child protested vehemently.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: He looked Stoscile in the eye and insisted it really happened.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: He described the hospital again. He refused to back down,
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: even in the face of absolute authority figures explicitly telling
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: him it was a fabrication.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: That is the terrifying, awesome power of the misinformation effect.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: The fake memory, once fully synthesized and source misattributed, becomes
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: more real to the subject than actual documented reality.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: It is a profound, almost frightening demonstration of the malleability
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: of the human mind. And while arguing with Mom or
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: a TV reporter over a fake mouse trap is one thing,
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: it's a fascinating academic anecdote, we have to connect this
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: to the bigger.
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: Picture, the real world stakes.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: What happens when this extreme malleability, this susceptibility to source
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: misattribution is put to the test in the real world,
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: where the stakes are quite literally life and death or
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: freedom and imprisonment.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: We are just talking about ruining Thanksgiving dinner by misremembering
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: who dropped the turkey or arguing about a childhood toy.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: No, we are talking about the justice system. We are
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: talking about eyewitness testimony, which is often considered the gold
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: standard in a courtroom.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: The forensic implications of the misinformation effect are incredibly severe,
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: and it has caused a massive reevaluation of how the
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: legal system operates, particularly when it comes to young children
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: in legal settings such as abuse.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: Cases, because they're so vulnerable.
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: Imagine a child who is a potential witness to a
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: crime or a victim. They are thrust into an incredibly intimidating,
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: high stakes legal system. They are interviewed by police officers
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: in uniform, by social workers, by prosecuting attorneys, by defense attorneys.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: And those interviewers might be entirely well meaning, they might
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: genuinely want to get to the truth, but they are
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: operating under their own biases, and they are looking for
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: specific answers to build a case exactly.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: And the process itself is the danger. Repeatedly thinking about
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: an event or a non event and being asked repetitive, suggestive,
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: or leading questions in an interview absolutely fatigues the brain.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: It just wears them down.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: It wears down the childs or even the adults cognitive
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: defenses and creates massive source monitoring errors, leading directly to
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: false reports. An investigator might say he touched your arm,
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: didn't he over and over across multiple interviews.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: So they visualize it.
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: The child visualizes the arm touch. Eventually, they misattribute the
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: source of the visualization and say, yes, I remember he
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: touched my arm. Furthermore, things like crime reenactments or taking
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: a witness back to the scene of the crime, which
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: police sometimes use to supposedly jog a witness's memory, can
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: actually cause the misinformation.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Effect because they remember the reenactment, not the crime.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: The witness remembers the highly stressful reenactment, not the original crime,
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: and their brain conflates the two events into one distorted memory.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: It's the ultimate double edged sword. The very tools we
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: use to extract the truth you repetitive questioning, visualization, returning
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: to the scene are the exact tools that manufacture the lie.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: It's a paradox, And I want to add another layer
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: to this, because it's not just external suggestion that warps
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: our reality in high stake situations. I was exploring a
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: broader psychological heuristic recently that I find endlessly fascinating. The
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: peak end rule.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, this is a great concept.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: Our memory doesn't just differ from reality because someone planted
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: a false suggestion. Our brains naturally actively distort our own
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: experiences as a matter of routine, daily efficiency.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: The peak and rule is a fantastic framework for understanding
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: how our internal editing works. How do you see it
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: operating in the context of what we've been discussing.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: Well, from everything I've observed and read about human behavior,
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: we do not remember an experience as a linear, continuous
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: timeline of events, like a two hour movie playing from
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: start finish.
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: We can't.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: No, our brains are simply incapable of holding that much continuous,
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: mundane data. We would run out of storage immediately. Instead,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: we judge and remember an entire lengthy experience based almost
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: entirely on two specific, isolated data points, its most intense
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: emotional peak, whether that peak was incredibly positive or terribly negative,
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: and how the experience ended.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: It's a brilliant cognitive shortcut. The brain throws away the
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: bulk of the data and keeps the emotional extremes as
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: a summary.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: Right. Think about the last time you argued with your
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: partner or a friend about how a vacation went. You
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: might be arguing because one of you is anchoring on
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: a peak negative and the other is anchoring on a
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: peak positive.
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: Like a bad flight versus a great dinner.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Imagine a two week trip to Europe. You do
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: not remember the hundreds of hours of mundane driving, sleeping,
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: staring out the window, or waiting in line at the airport.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: What you remember is the terrifying moment you almost lost
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: your passport in Paris, the peak negative, or the incredible
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: perfect sunset over the ocean in Greece the peak positive.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: And you remember the massive argument you had in the
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: taxi on the way to the airport on the final day.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: The end, yes, the end. Your brain averages those two
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: extreme points out and concludes that vacation was stressful or
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: that vacation was beautiful. It completely ignores the duration of
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: the trip and the vast majority of the actual live time.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: It's a natural, built in distortion of reality.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: We discard the duration and save the highlights and the finale.
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: And when you combine the natural internal distortion of the
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: peak end rule with the external vulnerability of the misinformation effect,
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: you realize that human memory is an incredibly precarious, highly
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: manipulated construct.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: It's terrifying we are.
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: Constantly editing, conflating, and rewriting. But this naturally raises an
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: incredibly important question for society. Is it entirely hopeless?
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: God? I hope not.
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: Are we just at the mercy of our faulty hardware
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: and suggestive questioning? Or are their solutions? Can we protect
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: our memories, especially in high stakes environments like forensic interviews
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: or legal testimony.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: I would certainly hope there are solutions, because if not,
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: the entire foundation of the justice system, which relies heavily
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: on people swearing to tell the whole truth, seems fundamentally
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: flawed and terrifyingly fragile. What does the research suggest we
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: can do to protect the integrity of the mind.
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: There is a significant glimmer of hope In the psychological fields.
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: Experts have extensively explored various methods to inoculate people against
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: suggestibility before they are ever exposed to misleading.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: Questions, like a vaccine for the mind.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: In a way, yes. One incredibly interesting and highly effective
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: approach is a technique called reinforced self affirmation.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: Reinforce self affirmation that sounds a bit like positive psychology.
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: What does that actually look like in practice, Say, before
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: a child goes into a forensic interview.
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: It involves deliberately boosting a witness's self confidence and providing
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: explicit positive feedback before the rigorous interview process begins. If
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: you sit a child or even an adult witness down
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: in a room and have them engage in a simple
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: task where they succeed, maybe a simple memory game or
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: a puzzle, and the interviewer explicitly affirms their competence, it
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: changes their entire cognitive.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: Posture, so they pump them up.
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: Yes, the interviewer says things like, you are very smart,
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: you have a great memory, you are doing a fantastic job.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: You know what happened better than anyone.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: So you are building their ego before you interrogate them.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: How does that actually protect the memory.
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: By empowering the individual, you make them less reliant on
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: external social cues. When someone feels uncertain, they look to
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: authority figures for the right answer.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: They want to please the adult exactly.
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: But when they are primed with self affirmation, they trust
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: their own internal source monitoring more than they trust the
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: interviewer's suggestions. They become significantly less likely to yield to
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: the social pressure of a leading question.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: Well, it makes sense.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: If the lawyer says he touched your arm, didn't he
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: The affirmed witness is much more likely to firmly say no,
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: he did not, because they trust their own internal file
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: over the external pressure. This reinforced self affirmation can actually
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: induce a measurable resistance to the misinformation effect that is fascinating.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: So by empowering the individual by validating their own internal
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: reality and telling them they are the expert on their
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: own life, we actually make the boundaries of their reality
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: less permeable to outside manipulation.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: It's like putting up a cognitive firewall against hackers.
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: A psychological firewall. I love that. It certainly doesn't fix
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: the neurogenesis that deleted our infancy, and it doesn't stop
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: the peak and rule from summarizing our vacations, but it
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: absolutely helps protect the memories we do manage to hold
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: onto from being overwritten by others.
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: Exactly, it's safeguards what we have left.
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's pull all of this together, because we have
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: covered some truly reality bending expansive territory today on beyond infographics.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: We started our journey by looking into the absolute blank
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: slate of infancy, realizing that without a cognitive self acting
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: as an operating system to anchor the data, early memories
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: simply have nowhere to stick and no protagonists to hold
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: them together.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: Right, And from there we moved deep into the biological
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: engine of the hippocampus. We discovered that the rapid chaotic
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: birth of new neurons actively physically remodels our brain circuits,
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: aggressively deleting our earliest, most fragile experiences to optimize our
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: hardware for the complex world of adulthood.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: We talked about how we desperately try to cling to
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: those last years by mistating later memories, dragging them back
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: into the void to fill the emptiness.
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: Creating fake timestamp.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and when the void is still too empty, our
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: storytelling brains kick in. They act as narrative editors, seamlessly
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: stitching together faded photographs and family folklore into completely fictional
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: source memories that we believe with our whole hearts.
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: And finally, we explored the darker side of this extreme
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: cognitive malleability. How easily a trusted figure or a repetitive
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: leading question can implant a completely fabricated event like being
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: lost in a mall or getting caught in a mouse trap,
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: so deeply into our minds that we will argue with
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: our own mothers about its truth.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: But we also found hope in the fact that a
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: little self affirmation can build a firewall against that manipulation.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: It's a comforting thought in a sea of doubt.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: It is The ultimate takeaway for me is that our
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: memory is not an archivist meticulously organizing historical facts in
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: a dusty library. Our memory is an artist. It is
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: a painter, constantly remixing the colors of our past, painting
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: over old canvases to create a portrait that makes sense
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: to us right now, in this exact moment.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: And that artistic, reconstructive nature leaves us with a final
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: lingering question to ponder long after this discussion ends. Think
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: deeply about this. If our earliest memory is the very
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: foundation of our identity, the bedrock of our cognitive self
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: are largely fictions created by our developing brains and the
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: stories our families told us around the dinner table. Are
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: we truly the authors of our own lives?
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: Wow?
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: Or are we, at our very core just characters in
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: a story we've been told by others.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: Oh, that is a heavy, beautiful, slightly terrifying thought to
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: end on. If you are sitting there right now questioning
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: everything you've ever known about yourself and your childhood, I
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: think we have successfully done our job today.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: I think so too.
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us on this mental journey.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: We love taking these complex concepts and unpacking them with you.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: And one final friendly reminder before we go, if you
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: want to support the show and keep these deep conversations going,
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: please take just a second to leave a five star
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: rating for Beyond Infographics on whatever app you're using. It
• 44:02
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• 44:04
  Speaker 1: find the show. Until next time, keep questioning your reality.