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Charan Ranganath

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203
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2024-05-25
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2024-05-25
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  1. “That's like my only philosophy really that I've ever had. But it's so brilliant in the way that they frame this idea of like he frames this idea of assumptions being core to the scientific process. And the paradigm shift comes from changing those assumptions. And this idea of like finding out this kind of whole zone of what you don't know to me is the exciting part, you know?”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's all love. That's right Is the ADHD talking so but at some point I had this aha moment where I was like to be aware of that much that we don't know and have a beat on it and be able to go towards it that's one of the biggest scientific successes that I could think of you are aware that you don't know about this gigantic section overwhelming majority of the universe right and I think The more what keeps me going to some extent is realizing the changing the scope of the problem and figuring out oh my god there's all these things we don't know and I thought I knew this because science is all about assumptions right so if you ever read the structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “yeah no no no i'm kidding this is the physicists who do neuroscience could be rather opinionated so sometimes i like to dish on that”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny that you mentioned that. So, one of the reasons I wrote the book amongst many is that I really felt like people needed to hear from scientists and like COVID was just a great example of this because like people weren't hearing from scientists. One of the things I think that people didn't get was the uncertainty of science and how much we don't know. And I think every scientist lives in this world of uncertainty. And when I was writing the book, I just became aware of all of these things we don't know. And so I think of physics a lot. And I think this idea of like. Overwhelming majority of the stuff that's in our universe cannot be directly measured. I used to think ha hate physics. Physicists get the Nobel Prize for doing whatever stupid thing. It's like there's 10 physicists out there. I'm just kidding.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “But it's all connected by this dark energy that's holding that whole universe of your mind together, right? And without that, it's just a bunch of stuff. And somehow we put that together and it forms so much of our experience. And being able to figure out where that comes from and how. Is just amazing, but just this idea of like that the world in front of us, we're only sampling this little bit and trying to take so much meaning from it. And we do a really good job, not perfect. I mean, you know, but that ability to me is just amazing.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think the most beautiful but incredibly hard to put your finger on is this idea of the internal model that it's like there's everything you see and there's everything you hear and touch and taste, you know, every breath you take, whatever.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And Pavlov, of course, was like basically created learning theory. So, you know, there's that, but also it's like, but I mean, Iggy and the stooges, that song. So I play and sing on it, but it's just like it devolves into total noise. And it just like fall on the floor and generate feedback. I think in the last version, it might have been that or a velvet underground cover in our last show. I actually, I have a guitar made of aluminum that I got made. And I thought this thing's indestructible. And so I kind of like was just, you know, moving it around, had it upside down and all this stuff to generate feedback. And I think I broke one of the, I broke one of the tuning pegs. Oh, wow. I managed to break an all-metal guitar. Go figure.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Carrie Hoffman, and also Paula Croxen. And so they do, yeah. So Carrie does Blondie amazingly well. We do like gigantic by the pixies. Paula does that one.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So it's mostly late 70s punk and 80s new wave and post punk blondie Ramon's clash. I sing Age of Consent by New Order and Lovell Terrace Mark Female sing.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And so it's like some people are very kind of excited when they get this dissonance and they want to like go with it. Some people are just like, no, I want to lump everything. I don't know, maybe that's even a different thing. But it's like basically it's like, I think some people get scared of that discomfort. And I really thrive on it.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, yeah, yeah. Learning about it. So, I mean, it depends. So, a lot of my style of songwriting is very much like in terms of like repetitive themes, but messing around with structure, because I'm not a great guitarist technically. And so I don't play complicated stuff. And there's things you can hear stuff where it's just like so complicated, you know. But often what I find is like having a melody or and then adding some dissonance to it just enough and then adding some complexity that gets you going just enough. But I have a high tolerance for that kind of dissonance and prediction. I think I have a theory, a pet theory, that it's like basically you could explain most of human behavior as some people are lumpers and some people are splitters, you know.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I guess it would be like so instead of you might go like instead of playing four beats in every measure no no no no you go no no no no no you know and just do these things and then you might arrange it in weird ways so that there might be three measures of verse and then five measures of course and then two measures so you could just mess around with everything right what does that”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, yeah. And it's like, so I'm actually like a very one of the genres we explain was math rock, is what they called it. It was just like, this is so many weird time signals.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “But you're thinking in four because that's how we're used to thinking. So the music flows a little bit faster than it's supposed to. And you're getting a little bit of prediction error every time this is happening. And once I got used to that, I was like, I hate writing at 4.4 because I was like, everything just feels better if I do it in 7.4, if I alternate between 4 and 3 and doing all this stuff. And then it's like jazz music is like that. They just do so much interesting stuff with us”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Accord? What if I just play like notes that shouldn't go together and just mess around with stuff? And I said, well, what if I don't do four B's go, nah, nah, nah, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. What if I go one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five? And started messing around time signatures. Then I was playing in this band with a great musician who was really Bump and a bump bump bump bum bum You feel like it's in 4-4 because it resolves itself, but it resolves on the last note of, basically it resolves on the first note of the next measure. So it's got seven beats instead of eight where the riff is actually happening.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Sound right. These are not power chords. And this isn't just have like shouty verse and then a chorus part. It's not going. This is just like weird. And then it occurred to me, you don't have to write music the way people tell you it's supposed to sound. I just opened up everything for me and I was playing in a band and I was struggling with writing music because I would try to write like, you know, whatever was popular at the time or whatever sounded like other bands that I was listening to. And somehow I kind of morphed into just like just grabbing a guitar and just doing stuff. And I realized a part of my problem with doing music before was I didn't enjoy trying to play stuff that other people played. I just enjoyed music just dripping out of me and just, you know, spilling out and just doing stuff. And so I started to say, what if I don't play?”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And that time was kind of like, oh, why don't I play guitar? I can do this and I had friends who were doing that. And I just never got it. Like I took lessons and stuff like that. But it was different because when I was doing trumpet, I was reading sheet music. And this was like I was learning by looking, there's a thing called tableture, you know, this where it's like you see like a drawing of the fretboard with numbers and that's where you're supposed to put your it's kind of like paint by numbers right and so I learned it in a completely different way, but I was still terrible at it. And I didn't get it. It's actually taken me a long time to understand exactly what the issue was, but it wasn't until I really got into punk and I saw bands like, I saw Sonic Youth, I remember especially, and it just blew my mind because they violated the rules of what I thought music was supposed to be. I was like, this doesn't.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, so basically in high school, yeah, so I kind of was a late bloomer to music, but just kind of MTV grew up with me. I grew up with MTV. And so then you started seeing all this stuff. And then I got into metal was kind of like my early genre. And I always reacted to just things that were loud and had a beat like ADHD, right? Like, you know, everything from Sergeant Peppers by the Beatles to Led Zeppelin too my dad had both my parents had both those albums. So I listened to them a lot. And then like the police ghost in the machine. But then I got into metal, Def Leopard and ACDC Metallica went way down the rabbit hole speed metal.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, so I started playing music just when I was like doing trumpet in school band and I would just read music and play. And it was pretty decent at it, not great, but I was decent.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Integrating everything and predicting and generating this kind of like rich model. I'm just catching up, you know. And so, yeah, there's great research by Melina Unkafer and Anthony Wagner on multitasking that people can look up that talks about just how bad it is for memory. And it's becoming worse and worse of a problem.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I mean, you probably see this, I imagine, in AI conferences, but definitely in neuroscience conferences. It's now the norm that people have their laptops out during talks. And conceivably they're writing notes. But in fact, what often happens if you look at people, you can speak from a little bit of personal experience, is your checking email and you're like, or I'm working on my own talk. But often it's like you're doing things that are not paying attention. And I have this illusion, well, I'm paying attention and then I'm going back. And then what happens is I don't remember anything from that day. It just kind of vanished because what happens is I'm creating all these artificial event boundaries. I'm losing all this executive function every time I switch. I'm getting like a few seconds slower and I'm catching up mentally to what's happening. And so instead of being in a model where you're meaning”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So many things like about how to structure my activities more and basically say, okay, if I'm going to be emails like the big one that kills me right now, I'm just constantly like shifting between email and my activities. And what happens is that I don't actually get the email. I just look at my email and I get stressed because I'm like, oh, I have to think about this. Let me get back to it. And I go back to something else. And so I've just got fragmentary memories of everything, right? So what I'm trying to do is set aside a timer like this is my email time. This is my, you know, writing time. This is my goofing off time. And so blocking these things off, you give yourself the goofing off time. Sometimes I do that. And sometimes I have to be flexible to go like, okay, I'm definitely not focusing. I'm going to give myself the downtime and it's an investment. It's not like wasting time. It's an investment in my”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I'm still trying to figure out the flourishing per se, but education, I mean, being in science is enormously enabling of ADHD. It's like you're constantly looking for new things. You're constantly seeking that dopamine hit. And that's great. They tolerate your being late for things. Nothing is really, nobody's going to die if you screw up. It's not like being a doctor or something where you have to be much more responsible and focused. You can just freely follow your curiosity, which is just great. But what I would say is that I'm learning now about.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Issue, right? And so, and people with ADHD often will have great memory for the things that they're interested in and just no memory for the things that they're not interested in.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “How much of that is based on true kind of like maladaptive kinds of tendencies? But what do we do know is this, is that ADHD is associated with differences in prefrontal function so that attention can be both more, you're more distractable, you have harder time focusing your attention on what's relevant. And so you shift too easily. But then once you get on something that you're interested in, you can get stuck. And so, you know, the attention is this beautiful balance of being able to focus when you need to focus and shift when you need to shift. And so it's that flexibility plus stability again. And that balance seems to be disrupted in ADHD. And so as a result, memory tends to be poor in ADHD. But it's not necessarily because there's a traditional memory problem, but it's more because of this intentional.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “An outcast, even in my own grade, but then my parents said, okay, well, they got me on a diet free of artificial colors and flavors because that was the thing that people talked about back then. So I'm interested in this topic because I've come to appreciate now that I have many of the characteristics, if not full-blown. It's like I'm definitely timelindness rejection sense. If you name it, they talk about it. It's like impulsive behavior. I can tell you about all sorts of fights I've gotten into in the past. Just you name it. But yeah, so ADHD is fascinating though because right now we're seeing like more and more diagnosis of it. And I don't know what to say about that. I don't know how much of that is based on kind of inappropriate expectations, especially for children.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, it's interesting for me because when I was a child, I was actually told my school, I don't know if it came from a school psychologist, they did do some testing on me, I know, for like IQ and stuff like that. Or if it just came from teachers who hated me, but they told my parents that I had ADHD. And so this was, of course, in the 70s. So basically they said like, you know, he has poor motor control and he's got ADHD. And so there was social issues. So like I could have been put a year ahead in school, but then they said, oh, but he doesn't have the social, he doesn't have the social capabilities. So I still ended up being like, you know.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And I will never be convinced unless I that we've replicated human, I don't even like the term intelligence because it is a stupid concept, but it's like, I don't think we've replicated human intelligence unless I know that the simulator is making exactly the same kinds of mistakes that people do because people make characteristic mistakes. They have characteristic biases. They have characteristic like, you know, heuristics that we use. have yet to see evidence that chat GPT will do that.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, at the same time, people are terrible at detecting changes that can happen in the environment if they're not attending in the right way, if their predictive model is too strong. So you have these weird things where like the machines can do better than the people. It's not that it's like, you know, so this is the thing is people go, oh, well, the machines can do this stuff that's just like humans. It's like, well, the machines make different kinds of mistakes than the people do.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “A glance, they're just like the computer-vish models. So then what he started to say was maybe let's look at people's eyes, right? So computer vision models sees every pixel all at once, right? It's not, and we don't, we never see every pixel all at once. Even if I'm looking at a screen with pixels, I'm not seeing every pixel at once. I'm grabbing little points on the screen by moving my eyes around and getting a very high resolution picture of what I'm focusing on and kind of a lower resolution information about everything else. But I'm not necessarily choosing, but I'm directing that exploration and allowing people to move their eyes and integrate that information gave them something that the computer vision models were enabled to do. So somehow integrating information across time and getting less information at each step gave you more out of the process.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And he went back to computer vision and he said, let's take the best state of the art computer vision models and let's give them the same kinds of perception tests that we were giving to these people. And then he would find the images where the computer vision models would just struggle. And you would find that they just didn't do well, even if you add more parameters, you add more layers on and on and on. It doesn't help, right? The architecture didn't matter. It was just there. The problem. And then he found those were the exact ones where these humans with particular damage to this area called the perhrinal cortex. That was where they were struggling. So somehow this brain area was important for being able to do these things that were adversarial to these computer vision models. So then he found that it only happened if people had enough time, they could make those discriminations. But without enough time, if they just get...”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, even if we want to go super simple, right? Tyler Bonnon, who's a postdoc who's collaborating with me, he actually studied a lot of computer vision at Stanford. And so one of the things he was interested in is some people who have brain damage in areas of the brain that were thought to be important for memory. But they also seem to have some perception problems”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Exactly, but you basically said, you know, if I wanted to train a typical AI model to make me as much money as possible, first thing it might do is sell my house. So it's not even just about having one goal or one objective, but just having all these competing goals and objectives, right? And then things start to get really complicated.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And these are the hard questions we're still trying to figure out in people. And then you start to think about all these mechanisms that we have in the brain for figuring out some of these things. It's not just one, but it's many of them that are interacting with each other. And then you just take not only the episodic and the semantic, but then you start to take the motivational survival things, right? It's just like the fight or flight responses that we associate with particular things or the kind of like reward motivation that we associate with certain things so forth. And those things are absent for me. I frankly don't know if we want it. I don't necessarily want a self-motivated LLM, right? It's like, and then there's the problem of how do you even like build the motivations that should guide a proper reinforcement learning kind of thing, for instance. A friend of mine, Sam Grishman, I might be missing the quote.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Is right, so it gives us this enormous amount of flexibility to stop on a dime and change without having to erase everything we've already learned. And that solution is incredibly powerful because it gives you the ability to learn from so much less information, really, right? And it gives you that flexibility. So one of the things I think that makes humans great is having both episodic and semantic memory. Now can you build something like that? I mean, you know, computational neuroscience people would say, well, yeah, you just record a moment and you just get it and you're done, right? But when do you record that moment? How much do you record? What's the information you prioritize and what's the information you don't? These are the hard questions. When do you use episodic memory? When do you just throw it away?”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “David Marr is one of the early pioneers in computational neuroscience and then Jay McClelland and my colleague Randy O'Reilly, some other people like Neil Cohen, all these people started to come up with the idea that maybe that's part of what we need in what the human brain is doing is we have this kind of a actually a fairly dumb system, which just says this happened once at this point in time, which we call episodic memory, so to speak. And then we have this knowledge that we've accumulated from our experiences as semantic memory. So now when we want to, we encounter a situation that's surprising and violates all our previous expectations, what happens is that now we can form an episodic memory here. And the next time we're in a similar situation, boom, we can supplement our knowledge with this information from episodic memory and reason about what the right thing to do.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Would say superficially not that hard, but then in a deeper level, very, very hard because we don't understand episodic memory, right? So one of the ideas I talk about in the book is one of the oldest kind of dilemmas in computational neurosciences, what Steve Grosberg called the stability plasticity dilemma, right? When do you say something is new and overwrite your pre-existing knowledge versus going with what you had before and making incremental changes? And so part of the problem with going through like massive, you know, I mean, part of the problem of things like if you're trying to design an LLM or something like that is especially for English, there's so many exceptions to the rules, right? And so if you want to rapidly learn the exceptions, you're going to lose the rules. And if you want to keep the rules, you have a harder time learning the exception. And so Dave.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “You can read it a mile once you get become a great driver, you can see it a mile away. This guy's going to pull an asshole moving front of you”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Model, like, you know, the visual information that a person sees when they drive, I can basically reverse engineer driving. Well, that's not really how it works. I went and saw a talk by somebody or I saw somebody talking in this discussion between neuroscientists and AI people. And he was saying that The problem with self-driving cars that they had in cities as opposed to highways was that the car was okay at doing the things that's supposed to, but when there are pedestrians around, it couldn't predict the intentions of people. And so that unpredictability of people was the problem that they were having in, you know, the self-driving car design because it didn't have a good enough internal model of what the people were, you know, what they were doing, what they wanted, or what do you think about that?”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Long we spent, or whatever. There's something deeper that is there, that's this idea, but it's like, how do you understand that thought? I encounter a lot of concrete thinking that it's like, if I show.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “In order to actually modify it, then what is the memory? That is the key part of the problem. So if we go back to reading people's thoughts, what is the thought? I mean, people can sometimes look at this like behaviorists and go, well, the memory is like, I've given you A and you produce B. And I think that's a very bankrupt concept about memory. I think it's much more complicated than that. And one of the things that when we started studying naturalistic memory, like memory from movies that was so hard was we had to change the way we did the studies because if I show you a movie and I show and I watch the same movie and you recall everything that happened and I recall everything that happened, we might take a different amount of time to do it. We might use different words. And yet to an outside observer, we might have recalled the same thing, right? So it's not about the words necessarily and it's not about how.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Well, I mean, in some sense, we know we can do it just behaviorally, right? Behaviorally, just like tell you under certain conditions anyway, I can. Give you the misinformation, and then you can change the people and the places and so forth, right? On the crude level, there's a lot of work that's being done on a phenomenon called reconsolidation, which is the idea that essentially when I recall a memory, what happens is that the connections between the neurons and that cell assembly that give you the memory are going to be more modifiable. And so some people have used techniques to try to like, for instance, with fear memories to reduce that physical visceral component of the memory when it's being activated. Right now, I think I've, as an outsider looking at the data, I think it's like mixed results. And part of it is, and this speaks to the more complex issue, is that you don't need somebody to actually fully recall that traumatic memory in the first place.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Our intentions in our internal models. And, you know, so are you really going to be able to restore language without dealing with that part of it? And he brought up a really interesting question, which is the ethics of reading out people's intentions and understanding of the world as opposed to the more concrete parts of hearing and producing movements.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “And understanding which data to use and what to do with it, right? And then the other part of it then is the algorithms for decoding it and so forth. And I think part of that has really resulted in some real breakthroughs in neuroscience as a result. So there's lots of new technologies like neuropixels, for instance, that allow you to harvest activity from many, many neurons from a single electrode. I know Neuralink has some technologies that are also along these lines, but I haven't, again, because they do their own stuff. The scientific community doesn't see it, right? But I think BCI is much, much bigger than neural link. And there's just so much innovation happening. I think the interesting question, which we may be getting into, is I was talking to Sergei a while ago about, you know, so a lot of language, it's not just what we hear and what we speak, but also.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Yeah, I mean, I can't say specifics about the company because I haven't studied it that much, but I mean, I think there's two parts of it. So one is they're developing some really interesting technology, I think, with these surgical robots and things like that. BCI, though, has a whole lot of innovation going on. I'm not necessarily seeing any scientific evidence from Neuralink, and maybe that's just because I'm not looking for it, but I'm not seeing the evidence that they're anywhere near where the scientific community is. And there's lots of startups that are doing incredibly innovative stuff. One of my colleagues, Sergei Staviski, is just like a genius in this area, and they're working on it. I think speech prosthetics that are incorporating, you know, decoding techniques with AI and movement prospects, it's just like the rate of progress is just enormous. So part of the technology is having good enough data.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Kid, and now it's not right, and you're selectively remembering the things that we don't realize how selective our remembering self is. And so, you know, I lived through the 70s. It sucked. Partly it sucked more for me, but I would say that even otherwise, it's like there's all sorts of problems going on. Gas lines, people were like, you know, worried about Russia, nuclear war, blah, blah, blah. So, I mean, it's just this idea that people have about the past can be very useful. It brings you happiness in the present, but if it narrows your worldview in the present, you're not aware of those biases that you have, you will end up, you can end up, it can be toxic, right? Either at a personal level or at a collective level.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Yeah, so my friend Felipe de Bregard wrote this and it just like blew my mind where the word nostalgia was coined by a Swiss physician who was actually studying traumatized soldiers. And so he described nostalgia as a disease. And the idea was it was bringing these people extraordinarily unhappiness because they're remembering how things used to be. And I think it's very complex. So as people get older, for instance, nostalgia can be an enormous source of happiness, right? And being nostalgic can improve people's moods in the moment. But it just depends on what they do with it because what you can sometimes see is nostalgia has the opposite effect of thinking those were the good old days and those days are over, right? It's like America used to be so great and now it sucks. Or, you know, my life used to be so great when I was a kid.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And that act made them more likely to want to do things for other people. So that act of mental time travel can change who you are in the present. We tend to think of, this goes back to that illusion of stability. We tend to think of Memory in this very deterministic way that I am who I am because I have this past. But we have a very multifaceted past and can access different parts of it and change in the moment based on whatever part we want to reach for, right?”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “And so I could imagine in that sense there is this kind of the present is with you, right? But what's interesting about what you said too that struck me is that your 16 year old self was probably very complex. By the way, I'm the same way, but it's like it really is the source of a lot of darkness for me. But when you can look back at, like, let's say you hear a song that you used to play like before you would go do a sports thing or something like that, you might not think of yourself as an athlete, but once you get back to that, you mentally time travel to that particular thing. Dan Shachter's lab did this really cool study where they would ask people to either remember doing something altruistic or imagine doing something altruistic.”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Maybe what it is that you really like to see connections between things. This is like really what motivates me in science actually too. But it's like when you start recalling the past to, you know, and seeing the connections between the past and present, now you have this kind of web of interconnected memories, right?”

    2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source