Zeno Rasmussen, a 25-year developmental neuropsychology professor, redefines consciousness as "I perceive, therefore I exist"—a socially constructed reality tied to memory and time. He explores how memory’s fallibility (e.g., Eddie Murphy’s misquoted jokes) shapes identity, even as people legally change names or adopt new roles, like his own shift from Linhart to Rasmussen. Virtual experiences, such as World of Warcraft, reveal context-driven identity shifts, while films like Total Recall and Eternal Sunshine expose memory’s fragility—habits persist despite erased recollections. False memories, the Mandela effect, and confirmation bias prove memory’s vulnerability, yet narratives simplify reality, creating gaps like "memory holes." Ultimately, consciousness hinges on memory’s unreliable yet foundational role in shaping self and experience across lifespans. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And I have a special guest today whom I will allow to introduce themselves.
Thanks, Spencer.
My name is Zeno.
It's my real name.
I can give you the whole thing if it's important to the audience.
Zeno David Linhart Rasmussen.
And I am an academic type, employed for 25 years so far as a professor in the Department of Human Development, which later became known as the Department of Human Development and Women's Studies at California State University East Bay, formerly known as Cal State Hayward.
That's just the place I work.
Now, before that, trained up in what used to be called maybe biopsychology, behavioral neuroscience, mind-brain type stuff, prepared me for work in dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
For my postdoctoral work, I've been all over the place, kind of consider myself a developmental neuropsychologist, which fits into neuroscience in general.
Right.
That's about it, I guess, for now.
You might be the most credentialed person I've had on the podcast so far.
Maybe.
No.
Oh, okay.
Maybe.
That was.
Well, I, you know, I think about I haven't weighed them totally against each other, but that might be the case.
It might, maybe.
That could be.
I know your guests have really rich life experience.
So I never dismiss that.
And great perspective.
Those are very important as well.
So.
Yeah.
I'm real happy to join you because I'm kind of a fan.
Oh, really?
Wow.
Yeah.
At this point, you accompanied me through that camping trip.
You're my only audio entertainment after dark.
Yeah.
Well, we're here today.
We're going to talk about consciousness, not conscience, consciousness.
I'm swinging for the fences here myself.
I'm, as I've said on several different episodes, I'm not a neuroscientist, nor have I any training, formal or otherwise really in neuroscience, but I have casually done some reading on the subject because it's very interesting.
And some of the concepts in neuroscience help me to understand the world and people.
And I think they would help other people understand the world and people.
And so when we had the opportunity to talk to a professor of neuroscience, neuropsychology, I felt like I really needed to step up and go for the big one, which is consciousness.
Really is one of the big frontiers of knowledge in our world now is consciousness.
Yeah, it's so big, I was reluctant to take it on with you, but I'm willing to go there.
Well, we're going to try to do the simple version of consciousness.
For sure.
Yeah.
Keep it simple.
Not a full semester.
Unicorn thing.
No, no, no.
Right.
Right.
So, and as I do with a lot of things, I try to talk myself through it and have myself corrected by the guest.
And I hope this doesn't become a situation where it's onerous.
And that me personally, when I think about consciousness, I don't have any real way to tell whether I'm thinking about the wrong about it poorly or well or anything.
So I appreciate the opportunity.
And maybe we should just dive right in and we'll just see if this is a series of stumbles or if it's smooth sailing.
Let's go.
Yeah.
So when I think about consciousness, I mean, first of all, I get confused a little bit because it's often used interchangeably with wakefulness, as in consciousness or unconscious.
Yeah, it's definitely not alertness.
It's not just alertness, right?
Yeah.
And also sometimes used synonymously with awareness.
I wasn't conscious of that change in my life at the time, right?
I wasn't aware of it.
And so, but generally speaking, from a neuroscience perspective, it's sort of both of those things and several other things.
And it's in that way deeper than that.
So when I think about this and I think deeply about my own conscious experience, the first thing that overwhelms me, usually overwhelms me, is the idea that I only know anything.
I mean, it's, we talked about this a little bit before in other conversations where we talked about Descartes' famous thought experiment where he couldn't tell what really was real.
He could only tell that he himself was thinking.
Cogito ergo sum.
I think, therefore, I am.
And I get caught in that too.
I caught right in that web.
And then I start to think about the things I think about and the things that I know and how I know them.
And the first thing I think is that the concept of consciousness and my knowledge of it is inextricably and irreversibly tied to memory, in that I don't know of any moments except for the fact that that moment is different than the moment that just came before it.
Now, I've said that as simply as I possibly can.
It's the current moment that I'm in is the only moment in which I can make decisions.
I remember previous decisions that I made leading up to this moment.
And knowing that I have previous moments that I experienced tells me something about this moment.
And those things put together lead me to a new thing, which is that there's a future moment about to come because I've had many moments where I was about to have a moment.
And then I eventually got to that moment, in which case it then became a memory instead of a thing.
And so immediately you get the concept that we remember the past and we anticipate the future and that the passage of time is the only thing that allows us to have consciousness, probably.
And then that the only way that we have a record of it is through memory.
So already this is, I said we're doing the beginner.
This is already so complex, even in just the beginner casual view of this.
So I'll just leave it right there and just kind of see how I'm doing so far as a student of consciousness.
Please let me know.
Yeah, you know, you've got a great sense for the logic and even use a lot of the same language as we do in more formal study of consciousness through neuroscience, neuropsychology.
And so so many thoughts come to mind because you are grabbing on to like so many of the big topics.
I was really, I guess, lucky to have the one philosophy class as a freshman in college was a modern philosophy.
I can't even remember, but it was Descartes, really focused on, or at least that's what I took away the most from, was this whole, how do we know we exist at all?
You know, a little bit of existential, but also what are we, mind, body, problem.
And so What you're really speaking to a lot of different models to think about the mind, and one thing I want to make sure we touch on is this information processing model, which is just a model, it's you know analog to our mind, and it's really resembles a computer.
So, the more we know about computers and the more advanced our computers get, the more advanced our model of the mind becomes.
So, you can almost use some of the terminology and concepts interchangeable, interchangeably, because they are sort of built on the same language.
So, you're right.
The fact that there is a record of our experience somewhere in the mind-brain complex.
That is why we can make sense of any moment from here on out, right?
This only makes sense because you have enough language experience with English specifically to decode the sounds I'm making to form words and conjure up concepts so that we can have a meaningful conversation.
You can use a lot of same terms and not really come to common agreement conception, but I want to give a nod to that information processing model.
And I was kind of late to it, I was late to memory and cognition.
I was a real behaviorist early on because I felt it was one of the few things we could really trust empirically to design objective experiments with proper controls and manipulations and free ourselves from the bias that comes from qualitative, subjective experiences.
And you're talking about like the testability of the concepts in behavior, yeah, yeah, yeah, really being able to have a hypothesis and then test it and test it fairly and remain emotionally uninvested, even though you are very intellectually invested.
So, therefore, you do have skin and emotions in the game, but you have to literally not care how it comes out, you have to really be seeking the truth, right?
Yeah, so behaviorism was a big draw to me for me.
And then, later, of course, enough years in neuroscience psychology, you really get a full dose of cognitive as well, especially getting into dementia because you're looking at what domains of cognition fail.
But I'm getting aside because in information processing, there's the process and there's the thing, the thing that's being processed.
There's the signal and a pathway, one way to think of it.
There's the knowledge, the thing, the fact, and then the process of learning it and retaining it to recall later.
So, all of the brain is almost brain processing, right?
It's always processing, it's always going on.
I think we had a conversation earlier about sort of consciousness like a river that's continuously flowing and going through different terrains and picking up debris, if you will, and you know, losing stuff as well along the way.
Um, so yeah, this conscious thing that we have, consciousness that we have, is evidence that we are real.
And it's not just the thinking.
I like to take Kogiko to ergo ergo sum, ergo sum, uh, into uh a simpler, not just I think, therefore I am, is that I perceive, therefore, I exist, and there's a flip side to that, and something else exists that allowed me to register that perception.
So, me and the perception and the thing that's being perceived create this intersubjective reality.
So, this is one of the few things we can be sure of and that we exist, even if that, you know, even if it's totally distorted from what the real physical reality is, because we can't, the true physical reality is unknowable.
We can only rely on our best senses and perception, our best sensory perceptual processing, our discernment at higher levels, and all these quickly diverge out into the human, you know, human experience in general.
So, that's what I think something very valuable about consciousness is it's the ultimate human experience.
It's yours and yours alone.
And it's a combination of things across your lifespan that add up into that very personal, unique inner consciousness and inner self, which is socially constructed.
But even more fully, more formally socially constructed is that outer presentation of yourself.
And so, consciousness is often about balancing that inner and outer self.
Our, you know, evolutionarily, the primate brain became a social brain.
So, so much of the brain capacity, our mind, our mental processing is devoted to figuring out what other people are doing, trying to predict what they will do.
And we are selfish.
We want to survive so we can harness that awareness for good or bad.
So, another concept I want to introduce here is that this is metacognition.
So, it's not just a cognitive operation, it's at that highest executive level understanding that it is a process that we can be fooled by this perceptual sense, sensory perceptual discernment, and we can fool others through those same channels.
Pull back awareness of your own thought processes would be an idea of metacognition, right?
Yeah, that's a cool way to say it.
Yeah, you pull back, take a bigger view, and understand what you're thinking, why you're thinking, what you're thinking, how that would affect other people, what they think.
I did an episode like this about meta-thinking, just simply meta-thinking.
I don't think I even saw that one or heard it.
Yeah, it was mostly about social awareness of it.
Things like, I mean, I use the example of a teenage boy who instead of just interacting honestly with a girl that he likes, would might instead, in some cases, try to figure out what kinds of things the girl likes and then imitate those things to try to get her to like him more instead of just being authentic.
Right.
Authentic.
He's not authentic.
He's posing.
They're posing as someone else that that girl will like.
Right.
That he's trying to outthink the other person.
And then once you get this concept, you get the idea that things like reverse psychology are situations where both parties are engaging in meta-thinking about the same topic at the same time.
Yeah, interesting.
Because each one is trying to outdo the other, pull back to another level.
And, you know, only one of them is kind of the real winner in the situation, but they're both trying to do that.
Yeah.
Well, that's really interesting.
Right.
Were you talking about this or was it another, maybe a space where we were brainstorming on how to sort of like, you know, fight misinformation on a high level?
And we were discussing sort of like deep canvassing.
I don't know if that was.
I don't know if the concept of deep canvassing resonates for you, but it's sort of like when you go to talk to people, not so much to change your mind, but to sort of get in, yeah, gather information on a deep level.
And you, you often, yeah.
So, I felt like the one time where I spoke to Steve Kirsch, maybe we both thought that we were both deep canvassing each other, listening.
I took notes, but I don't know, made some appeals.
And I don't know if he really heard or if I, you know, he certainly didn't change my mind, although he sounded very authentic in direct conversation in a way he doesn't come off in his public to me anyway.
Maybe, but that's because we're fighting on opposite sides in this battle, which can distort our thinking very much.
You know, that in-group, that the social power, the social powers we have that seek out affiliation and belongingness are so powerful.
Yes.
The need to appeal to the biases and the needs and wants of the people that you consider in your social circle are overwhelming.
They're extremely powerful.
And it's a big reason why people can think the opposite of what is true continually, because everyone around them also thinks that.
And they need to, they not only like it, but they, in some cases, feel they need to continue believing those things just to get along with their social circle.
Yeah, as we see, we see an, you know, some groups are not even that extreme, but they're holding some unusual beliefs.
And that's part of what bonds them together with that group.
So mainstream religions hold some pretty far-out beliefs.
And, you know, I dabbled in a lot of different religions growing up.
I was exposed to a lot.
And, you know, I found them all very compelling until I was in my 30s.
And, you know, that's too much of a tangent there.
But, you know, that's one of these huge sources of knowing.
I mean, if our reality is socially constructed, and you often in your episodes, there's been reference to a, you know, we're in a postmodern period here, right?
Modernity was all about measurement and control, believing that we could know all of what reality is in this postmodern time.
We're literally willing to say, we don't know.
We're not even sure what's here, but we know we exist.
We know we are here.
And our thinkings matter and our feelings do too.
And that's sort of new in neuroscience, you know, this attempt to separate sort of the feelings from the thinkings, whereas a lot of brain power is also devoted to processing the feelings.
So feelings are just as much information processing and, you know, neuro-centric as are your thinkings, your cognitive operations.
Right.
So I'm wondering if I want to circle this back to the thing I was getting to here with the memory, because I think it's an important, an interesting question that I have that I came up with just as I was thinking about this was that when I was trying to define consciousness for myself, one definition I came up with, and it's probably far too simplistic, really, but consciousness is potentially the experience of having your experiences written to memory.
And that's, like I say, it's probably far too simplistic.
But the first thing I thought after I kind of came up with that and stopped patting myself on the back was the idea that what if there's a way to have consciousness without writing your experiences to some kind of memory, without recording them?
And that's where I got maybe some kind of thought that I was on the right track because I couldn't imagine one.
I couldn't imagine a conscious, self-aware being that didn't have any record of its own experiences because at that point, that being, I feel like it can't have a self because it can't refer back to anything it used to do.
It can't truly learn from its own experiences.
It can't know the difference between the present and the past and the future because as I was pointing out with the idea being that I only know that there's a future because I had a past.
I don't really know anything about the future.
I have to assume that it looks something like previous moments that I've had in the past.
And that informs some biases, inevitable biases that I have about the future is because of my experiences in the past.
And so, but a being that can't record its own past, its own, really, you'd only record your own present to become a memory that you could refer to as the past can't then know anything about the future, I think.
And I get squeezed into a box.
Like I can picture a creature that has like a memory of a guppy, it only lasts maybe eight seconds or something.
I could even picture that, but I have difficulty really squeezing that down to nothing where I have no actual memories recorded.
What's your thought on this?
Is there any, am I off track or is this a thing that's no, no, you're totally on track.
If you had no ability to make, but so what you're talking about is some sort of an amnestic, you know, condition, amnesia going forward from a certain point of time, right?
So that antero grade moving, a failure to record any new information still has to rely on the back of retrograde, you know, older memories that previous learning.
I mean, learning and memory are intertwined and memory is a really, you know, I'm going to use it in the broadest term, memory is just evidence that something happened.
You know, there's going to be, we're looking for the n-gram, you know, where those memories are written for a long time.
Early ideas of memory probably were insufficient, obviously.
The idea of a hologram where it's stored distributed throughout the brain.
Any complex memory definitely is going to evolve multiple regions of the brain.
Memories, the things that we remember come in so many different forms from what they call muscle memory, you know, motor coordinated, you know, recalling movements to recalling a name face pairing is so different to recalling a story.
Every time you recall and retell a story, it's in a different context and it's a rehearsal of that memory.
So that telling, your own telling of your own story also becomes a memory.
And because it's more recent, it's possible that that newer telling replaces an older, fuzzier memory with a more clear, more recent memory, including the errors.
So this requirement of memory for consciousness, I, you know, is really critical, but I want to add some dimensions to it for you.
And that is it's it's consciousness is, I believe, it's an emerging, one of these emergent properties, an emergent quality that we experience that isn't one thing itself, right?
So it certainly does involve, it's ongoing at that time.
You are encoding new information, right?
But you're at the same time you're doing that, you're also still storing old information.
And in order to make sense of what's coming in now, you're also retrieving at least perceptual or you're filtering through perceptual pathways to make sense of what you're hearing.
So your current consciousness is an integration of all that.
If it is not, there is some disintegration of your consciousness and you are going to suffer in some way or another some mental health issues, right?
So take dementia, where, you know, or a progressive neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's disease, where a lot of brain regions are being affected.
It is not just a memory disorder, but because memory is distributed, what happens?
Those memories are lost, or a lot of memories are lost.
But they're still able to retain information, who they are, how to operate things.
A lot of neuro, you know, muscle memory or procedural memory, we call it more formally, is retained.
So I don't know if that helps, but I do like it's it's at the very least, what's happening in that current moment of consciousness is you are writing what's potentially future memories, but so much is forgotten.
At the same time, you're, it's also what it feels like to be erasing old memories and filtering out unimportant information, which may be a more active process than we realize.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've definitely had moments where my memory, when we say something like my memory failed, that's a situation where I didn't remember something entirely, but where my memory was faulty in some way.
Like I remembered a line from a movie and I repeated that as a, you know, it was a cool line.
I repeated it.
And then I go back and watch that movie and I find that it's not quite the same as the way I repeated it.
Yeah.
And I try to, I have a problem because, I mean, this has happened to me specifically with comedy, stand-up comedy that I watched years ago.
The very famous stand-up comedy when I was a kid was done by Eddie Murphy.
And me and my friends would quote these that raw and delirious were his two big ones, and we would quote these endlessly.
And in doing so, we were cementing it in its new form, but its new form was slightly different than the old form.
And years later, I went back and watched them again.
And I was surprised at the differences, they were subtle, but they were there.
I had put emphasis where he hadn't, and I'd added words where he didn't have, and I'd removed some.
And the idea was similar.
It wasn't quite the same.
And so I was stuck with this new memory problem where I was thinking to myself, I had watched them many, many times.
I had thought to myself, I was able to, and I had repeated them many, many times.
So I thought that was some sort of a level of memory perfection.
But of course, I could see in front of me that it wasn't.
It wasn't perfect.
It was, it was off.
It was, and so I had in my brain, I had two things that weren't quite right.
And maybe that shouldn't have bothered me much, only at the time it did.
And I was like, well, how did I get that wrong?
How did that creep?
How did that slowly change from one to the other?
And I would try to go back and remember all the different times I had quoted that right.
There's no way to go back to each of those moments.
It was no way to do that.
So I was stuck with the idea that my memory was faulty, not perfect, and then therefore not able to be relied upon absolutely for other things.
And I had to face that.
It was years ago already that I did that.
And I'm over it now.
But in that moment, in my late 20s or something, where I had gone through that and I was past the invincibility of youth.
And I thought to myself, well, at least my memory is still very, very good.
I can rely on that with much more clarity.
But then I had to face the fact that I couldn't.
And I thought to myself, well, well, that's a new thing I learned about myself then, I guess, right?
I can't convince myself.
There's no way I could, you know, rewind that part of that movie and watch it again and convince myself that I had had it right the whole time and someone had changed the Eddie Murphy stand-up somehow to fool me.
You know, I couldn't do that to myself.
So I was like, well, I guess, I guess I'm wrong.
My memory's not perfect.
Well, that's a huge, that's a huge developmental leap.
Yeah.
In metic, in metacognition or meta-memory to under to recognize, but but the human memory, of course, is fallible.
We forget way more than we retain.
Right.
Probably by design, right?
Yeah, and probably by design.
And think about this is only a problem.
This is a modern problem.
Yes.
Right.
Without, in fact, think of the early comedians or the early musicians, and that's all they, all you had.
That musician came through town, they played you a song, they went down the road the next day, like, that was a great song.
I'm going to try to recreate that song.
Yeah.
And you can't get it.
You know, you don't get it quite right.
You get the words off.
That's why there's so many different versions of some early folk songs and early hymnals.
You get to around even, yeah, you get to around 1967, and things want to be cemented.
And like, hey, we wrote this song and House of the Rising Sun as an example that sort of is controversial in this.
But you're like, hey, we wrote it.
We own it.
We get a piece of this sale as writers versus saying, oh, it's a traditional song we didn't write.
We're just arranging.
Hey, we want the arranging credit for a traditional song.
So that recording is again, now that we have modern technology, that teaches us something.
It gives us a model.
Oh, here's how our brain operates.
Well, our brain doesn't operate like a tape or like, you know, a hard drive, right?
Which never loses stuff unless you have, you know, a breakdown, you know?
Yeah.
But, you know, replication.
Yeah.
It's not a perfect replication of reality.
Hey, and nobody has total recall.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I see what you did there.
Right.
Yeah.
So for anyone who's obviously no one else knows this yet, but I made some notes for this episode and I included a reference to a movie called Total Recall.
And I'm going to slur the conversation right into that so it makes all that makes sense, which is because I think, at least right now, I can't imagine the shape or the structure of a consciousness that doesn't have memory.
I feel like the sense of self of each person who has a consciousness is also wrapped up in their own memories.
That how you see yourself is also wrapped up in your own experiences and where you're headed to next, what decisions you're going to make now to lead you into the future are also informed by the things you've previously done and what experiences you have, whether you're going to seek vengeance or you're going to let it go or you're just going to eat lunch because you're hungry.
And the last time you were hungry, lunch helped, right?
I mean, all those things are part of this.
And so when we think about this, I think about the movie Total Recall.
I didn't see the newer one that was made a few years ago.
I didn't bother.
I didn't feel the need.
I watched the original when I was young with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Here we have this guy.
He's an average ordinary guy, more or less, and he's living on Earth, an average life on Earth, being married to Sharon Stone.
I don't know how many average people feel that their marriage is.
Typical.
Yeah, yeah, typical American life.
Beautiful blonde wife or whatever.
And you're built like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yeah, yeah.
And you have Arnold Schwarzenegger's build, yes.
In my youth, I don't know how old it was when I first watched this, maybe 12.
I thought maybe, maybe that could be my life, you know.
And he finds that there's some memories that he's missing or that he's looking for, or that he has some desire for some other things.
And he discovers that maybe there's some other memories locked away that are really him, but of a different life, a different person who made different decisions than the decisions he's making now.
And I wonder to myself when I think about this movie now, I didn't think about this then, but I think about it now.
If there is anyone who could learn this about themselves, learn that they feel that their self, the thing that they see as themselves, is full and complete as it is right now with this ordinary life.
And they could learn that they used to be someone else and that they aren't that person anymore.
They're this person now.
And I wonder if there's anyone who could just carry on with their average ordinary life without wondering what that other self was like, whether they would rather be that self, whether that self was superior in some way or at least more interesting or something else, right?
And I wonder if that's true.
I mean, we're talking about an average person.
Maybe there's someone with an extraordinary life who might have that and not think about it.
But for an average person, I think there's an almost natural lack of confidence, lack of self-confidence somehow, where you might worry about your own life isn't good enough because it's just average.
Maybe that other self was a better version.
You could find out about that at least and see if that's a better life.
I wonder if there's anyone that could resist that urge to look into that, to see about that other self.
What do you know your thoughts on this?
Nobody can.
First of all, nobody can because the other cool movie that explores this is The Last Temptation of Christ.
Okay.
And that film, of course, it's a documentary, of course.
No, it's the Willem Dafoe.
And like, there's a whole half-hour sequence near the end.
It's like the third act or squeezed in there between acts, right?
Where he totally explores.
There's letters for these movies, by the way.
Yeah, yeah.
Look, if you haven't seen it, there's plenty of time.
Yeah.
And I think you know how, if you know the story, but you know, he chooses to die for his thoughts.
But it's all in his head.
It's all in his head, at least in the way the movie is, the narrative of the movie is these are all things that Jesus imagined in his moment of self-doubt.
So even Jesus has this temptation where he says, I could just be a regular dude and marry this Mary, settle down, have some goats.
Yeah.
You know, right?
I mean, it's like, he gives up all of that and says, oh, okay, I have the opportunity now to erase all of this and instead sacrifice myself on the cross.
And then he does that.
Yeah, I couldn't tell.
Like, wasn't he already on the cross?
It's like that's basically his dying.
Wow.
But so us too, let me say, like, us too, we are ultimately, I kind of, I don't want to say stuck.
We are ultimately integrated.
We are integrated with this body that we are in and this vehicle of all those experiences and perceptions and the social group that brought in the distortions.
So we can't, you're so right.
We cannot separate ourselves from that memories, but we might have a secret life where, you know, after work every night for years, we whatever, you know, raved or, you know, played whatever games or whatever we did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just something very different, like a secret life or a separate, a second family.
Lots of people do that, but you're talking about something very different.
And I wonder if part of it's simply just the imagining, like, you know, what, what I could have been had I done this.
And I, I find this very relatable.
Yeah.
Had I zigged or Zag is that people do change a lot.
I could go on a quick, I don't want to go too deep into the concept of change, but you get it.
People change across their lifespan.
We really do.
People change so much so that we often change our names.
You know, we're not even the same people in name.
I mean, mine might be an extreme example because I was born Zeno Linhart and now the state wants to call me David Rasmussen.
That's cool.
That's fine.
I know who I am.
It took me a long time to settle with being comfortable, no longer having doubt about who I am.
And my name is Zeno.
That took a while, even for me to get that, you know, most people don't struggle with the name thing, but you change across your lifespan so much that people go from, you know, my mom was Elizabeth, but she was Betsy.
She was Liz.
She was Lizzie.
Right.
Now she's just Liz, but you can call her whatever you want.
You know, it doesn't matter.
But that's often key to developmental timeframes.
Yeah.
What you mentioned where a person has.
And I don't know if that, I don't even know if that helps at all.
Cause well, let's let's unpack it just a little bit.
We, when I look at a person who has another context in which they're living, let's put it that way.
So I used to do this.
I had a regular everyday life and I went to work every day.
And then I got home from work and I played World of Warcraft and I did this for many years.
And I was a completely, I was the same person, but I was expressing other parts of my character in the World of Warcraft context, completely different than I was in my, the rest of the parts of my life.
And they were as different as anyone could imagine because the only way in which they were physically the same was in the fact that I interfaced with the World of Warcraft community through my computer that sat in my living room.
But when I was in that space, I wasn't consciously thinking about or aware of my computer or my living room even.
I was engrossed in that space, that virtual space that didn't have any real, it wasn't a real space.
The movements of the products and the pixels and all the decisions I made weren't affecting the real world in any way, but they were affecting the other people in that community.
And I interacted with those people as a community, as a member of another group.
And I mean, that's an interesting thing, but that's a different thing than what was happening in, say, Total Recall.
And I think in some thing you mentioned, the Manchurian candidate, which is similar to where a person is sort of missing their memories or they're a different person with a different set of memories in some other context.
In Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character feels like he was actually a different person.
It wasn't like he was expressing a different side of himself in some other context.
And people do that all the time.
And we have words for this now, context switching, where code shift, code switching.
A person goes and they, Homer Simpson goes to Moe's and he's has different kinds of conversations there and he acts slightly differently there than he might do when he's at home.
Well, Homer Homer Simpson doesn't, but if a regular average person who wasn't Homer Simpson was in that situation, they could, you could easily see them acting different when they're at the bar after work than they do when they're at home with their family.
And I act differently when I'm at work than I do at home too.
And a lot of people do this, but this is a different thing than the idea that there was a whole other you that might have been completely and utterly different than the you you think you are now and that that's locked away.
You'd have to do some specific steps to find out who that was.
Obviously, I think most people haven't had the situation that was in total recall.
Obviously, we don't have the technology to just delete people's memories and upload new ones.
We imagine, obviously, in the movie, in the context movie, we imagine a future where that might be possible.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But this is the thing that science fiction allows us to do.
It allows us to ask these questions.
It's essentially a thought experiment for us when it's done right.
It's a thought experiment for us where we get to ask these questions of ourselves, of our life, and what that means to us as people, if that's possible.
And I wonder if in doing that, that's a thing that when we look at it, it's a thing that we shouldn't ever do or try to do.
Now that I'm thinking about it, there's another movie, yet another movie where this was happening.
It was called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Oh, yeah, right.
Yeah.
Where these people are selling a service where they do have a painful memory of a relationship that went bad.
And so you can remove all the memories of that.
And this had a very interesting thing.
And I don't agree with the ending of the movie where they just kind of got together again anyway, because you just love who you love.
Maybe that's true.
Did they have alternate endings to that?
Probably.
I don't know.
I don't fully remember.
But the concept itself was interesting where you just removed all the memories of a specific person.
And of course, in the movie, what I thought they got right was that the people still had the same habits that they had.
And so in those habits, they tended to run into each other still.
They tended to interact still because they still had the same habits.
One person worked at a bookstore and the other person had a habit of buying books.
And so their lives still crossed.
They still interacted.
They still lived in the same city.
They didn't move.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's I wrote some notes down.
I actually have the word habit here.
Yeah.
Some things I thought we might want to touch on is, you know, like, again, how do we know what we know?
Where do our beliefs come from?
I mentioned empiricism and, you know, direct experience is very important, but we can be fooled by what we see or what we remember.
That's why we take notes, record it.
We learn from authority, right?
We gain beliefs from authority or tradition.
It's just the way we've always done it.
Right.
And we use our own logic a priori.
Sometimes we reason things out.
But one thing that often gets omitted from that list, and that is habit.
If you've done something one time, it's a weird word, but you're likely, you know, memory makes us sort of, if you've, you can't have a memory you didn't encode, if that makes sense.
You could misremember something.
You could distort an encoding.
But if it doesn't get encoded, it doesn't get recalled.
So anything, any activity, brain act, any activation of pattern of circuits, whatever you want to put it, that happens once is more likely to happen again.
Right.
Right.
They're not totally random, haphazard activations in the brain.
They're responding to input and our processing internal content.
Right.
Right.
So if it happens once, it's more likely to happen again.
So you're right.
Like, oh they, it's not that one experience with that person they removed from them, from their life, their memory their, their memory bank.
They're still who they are.
They have the same, you know, they've learned the same stuff.
They'll have the same habits, beliefs uh, it just won't.
And knowledge and personal experience.
It just won't include that person.
That movie was fascinating and what's cool about it is how again, that this concept of a disintegrated instead of an integrated consciousness, Jim Carry's character, had a disintegration and it was like a mental breakdown uh, for him, uh and others seeing him go through this, or at least the way the narrative on t on the screen showed someone really going through.
You know, you think he's losing his mind.
And he's not losing his mind, he's having memories evacuated and he doesn't want it.
He wants to feel the sad if i'm getting that right he wants to feel the sadness of his lost child.
Is that the right movie?
No no he, he was different.
Movie in Eternal Sunshine, oh, that's a Bruce Willis movie, isn't that a Bruce Willis movie?
That's the?
Uh surrogates.
Oh yes, another saw that one.
That's another good neuro thriller.
In Eternal Sunshine And Spotless Mind.
He was in a relationship with I.
I don't remember the the yeah, someone female right, but she he, he was in a relationship with her and it went poorly and um, he broke up with her and then he ran into her and she claimed that she didn't remember him and he got angry.
And then he, he found out that she had had her memories of him released erased, and so he convinced them to erase his memories of her as well.
Right, and then it goes down this, we experience their I, if I remember the movie correctly, we experience their relationship as his memories are being removed in law yeah, sort of retrograde, and like we're experiencing them one last time before they get sucked out or something, and and we see all the things that happened, how they met and fell in love and then eventually it just kind of turned into uh, a bad relationship.
And then they, they ended in a moment of fire angry passion uh, passionate fight, kind of thing, and and they were bitter about it.
And then right, and then we understand her decision to have it his, the memory of him, removed.
In seeing that yeah, but these, these memories, the idea that ourselves are our, what we see as ourself, is baked into what's in the past.
Um, I think sometimes some people think that when we lose memories we are sort of no longer the same person anymore.
It's probably in part true, but it's probably not entirely true in the way that we think like I don't remember everything that i've done, but I don't think i've changed just because i've forgotten some of those things.
Does that make sense?
And yeah yeah, and just because you've changed as a person doesn't mean you can't have access to those things anymore.
I mean you can say the context of age is so huge, so there's context dependent Learning, right?
We're more likely to retrieve something if the context is replicated.
So sometimes the context of your age is so different.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, a personal story was when I moved from Baltimore to Berkeley, I stopped in and visited a few places I'd grown up and I stood in the empty lot across the street from the house I lived in in first and second grade and a flood of memories came back because they were facilitated by the context, being right there on the corner thinking about it.
Sometimes you just literally don't have the time to think.
I had, you know, 10 or 12 hours, I think, to drive from wherever, you know, thinking about where I was going.
That's a primer for memory recovery too.
It's not just, oh, you know, for some reason, you know, who knows why I remember this, but there's some reason, something triggered it.
Or it's just time in your neural patterns to activate.
Something gets activated just as part of a, you know, again, we're going to use analogy again, a house cleaning, cleaning routine in your brain, mind-brain space.
It's got to go and clean up some memories, revive them, or they're about to get lost, maybe.
I don't know.
But that motivation for why you're remembering it and that, those feel really pure to me.
But I can't tell you those memories because as soon as I do, I change what was really like sweet six, a memory of a six-year-old into my, you know, 33-year-old attempt at telling you what I remembered as, you know, it doesn't make sense.
Now at 58, I'm going to tell you what I remembered at 33, something that happened, things that went on when I was six.
It's just ridiculous.
It's ineffable.
It's, I can't even imagine trying to do that.
But that's what you're getting at.
It's my, it's me.
It's me.
It's still me.
It's part of my consciousness, my river of consciousness still flowing through.
I just replayed some of those memories, imagining, not trying to tell you, but they just came through.
I couldn't stop them.
They were activated.
So we don't have nearly as much control, but we do have this, you know, this, again, a metacognitive executive control over where we steer the ship, so to speak.
Our attentional resources, what we start to think about and say, including memories, like you can turn it off.
You're like, oh, I'm not going to think about that right now.
It's very hard to truly have a repressed memory that later gets revived somehow.
But although these sort of things happen, is what makes us vulnerable for a memory, a memory hole to get filled with all sorts of weird, you know, like, you know, knowing how memory works, they knew they could take, we should look up that.
What's that, Arnold?
It's a famous guy, Arnold Schwetzenegger's character.
Isn't it like, it's not John Wick or something, but it's like somebody, John Galt.
What's his name?
His name is he has a cool character name, but that guy, they took advantage of our knowing that we'll have some memory holes and they just filled it in with their own, you know, implant, which who knows how close we are.
It's a long way away, that kind of stuff.
Still, it's not happening.
But what is happening is people taking advantage of our memory holes, the way we know memory works and doesn't work.
If they are not on the up and up, they can take advantage of your memory failure and turn it into something.
Your imperfect memory.
Your imperfect memory makes us all vulnerable.
Mandela effect, you know, and so on.
Personal memories, it is very hard to recall something that's incongruous with what you know about someone.
Right.
So you have like one thing that you forget about.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, gosh, I keep forgetting about that one thing because it doesn't fit in with the rest of their story or their character.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I keep talking about: is that you, when you have a memory of a person, you do have a model of them in your mind.
And that's what you mean when you say it's incongruous.
It's incongruous with the model that's in your mind.
Right.
It might be that you just didn't know them well enough to know that aspect of them and never included that in the model of them.
Right.
Like my model in my mind of Arnold Schwarzenegger when I was a kid was of an action hero.
Many of the things that he did as governor of California were very incongruous with my model of him that I had in my mind.
But I couldn't deny that he did them because there was too much evidence.
So I had to Reagan.
We have a similar thing with Reagan.
It's hard to reconcile President Reagan with actor Ron Reagan.
Yeah, I never knew Ronald Reagan as an actor.
So I missed that portion.
Well, most of us were too, you know, most of us, whatever the cut was, you know.
Yeah, there's a timeframe whereby you knew him better that way as it went.
But yeah, that's governor or even president of the SAT of his union.
You know, you saw him as like having, you know, even my dad, a total lefty, was open to President Ron Reagan because he looked out for sort of his union needs and said, well, you know, everybody wants to work and he's talking about jobs.
So gave him a chance.
Yeah.
And that's what we mean when you say that it's you find a fact that's incongruous with what's in your mind that doesn't fit with the model you have in your mind.
I feel that's an important thing to remember is that you only have models of people.
You don't have the real people.
And those models are necessarily flawed.
They're simplified and stories too.
Narratives and stories are never the whole story because you can't get all the details.
So every time you tell a story or tell a funny line from a movie or try to, you know, you may, you're at risk to distort it.
You know, you might have to soften the language if the audience has young ears.
Yeah.
You might emphasize other things.
You might switch words out.
You get, it's like memory creep, right?
Just a slow progression of changes that you don't notice because they're so small in each step.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You'll, we combine with the story, we'll take two events on two different occasions and put them in the same day.
Just make sense.
Oh, put them together.
So the story is more eventful, I guess.
More things happen in the story of that same day.
Yeah.
We for a source amnesia, really great example of how memories get disordered.
And false memories sometimes get implanted because we just forget the source of the story.
Yeah.
Or we're convinced that it must be true and we tell ourselves that it is true and then we just repeat it over and over again.
Oh, yes.
And then you've got that, you've got that habit played again.
You believe it because you've said it so many times.
It must be, you, you yourself have said it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's rare to have someone there watching and you know, checking, you know, checking that you don't fool yourself.
And after a while, just giving up, saying, oh, dad always tells that story differently than I remember it.
You know, well, I think before we get too distracted, because we've just brought up three other topics that you're right, right, right.
I said I could stay focused for you.
Oh, well, I'm also getting unfocused here because I, they're very interesting topics.
So I think we should probably wrap it up here so this can be its own episode.
Yeah, for sure.
And I mean, but this has been, this has been really great.
Thank you for coming on the podcast.
And hopefully, I mean, maybe, maybe you enjoyed it.