YouSaid · the spoken record

Charan Ranganath

lines on the record: 203
first: 2024-05-25
most recent: 2024-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But according to memory, it did because what happened was people were doing the same thing over and over in the same context. And without that change in context, their feeling was that they were in one long monotonous event. And so, but then at the end of the week, you look back at that week and you say, well, what happened? No memories of what happened. So it must the week just went by without even my noticing it. But that week went by during the same amount of time as an eventful week where you might have been going out and hanging out with friends on vacation or whatever, right? It's just that nothing happened because you're doing the same thing over and over. So I feel like memory really shapes our sense of time, but it does so in part because context is so important for memory.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we were doing the remote instruction. So, one of the things I did was I would pull people. And so I just ask people, do you feel like the days are moving by slower or faster or about the same? Almost everyone in the class said that the days were moving by slower. So then at the, I would say, okay, so do you feel like the weeks are passing by slower, faster, or the same? And the majority of them said that the weeks were passing by faster. So according to the laws of physics, I don't think that makes any sense, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the reason is that in some sense, I think, especially the farther we go back, I mean, there's all sorts of interesting things that happen. So your sense of like, if I ask you, how different does one hour ago feel from two hours ago, you'd probably say pretty different. But if I ask you, okay, go back one year ago versus one year and one hour ago, it's the same difference in time. It won't feel very different, right? So there's this kind of compression that happens as you look back farther in time. So it's kind of like why when you're older, the difference between somebody who's like 50 and 45 doesn't seem as big as the difference between like 10 and 5 or something, right? When you're 10 years old, everything seems like it's a long period of time. Here's the point is that, you know, so one of the interesting things that I found when I was working on the book actually was during the pandemic, I just decided to ask people in my class.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't do it because of the outcome, you do it because of the process, because the process is part of the balance of the world that you're trying to preserve, right? And of course, you could take that different ways. But I really think about that from time to time in terms of letting go of this idea of does this book sell or trying to, you know, like impress you and get you to laugh at my jokes or whatever and just be more like I'm sharing this information with you and, you know, getting to know you or whatever it is. But it's hard, right? It's like because we're so driven by the reinforcer, the outcome.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, this is where Hinduism and Buddhism, or at least some strains of Hinduism and Buddhism differ. In Hinduism, like if you read the Bhagavad Gita, the philosophy is not one of renouncing the world because the idea is that not doing something is no different than doing something, right? So what they argue, and again, you could interpret it in different ways positive and negative. But the argument is that you don't want to renounce action, but you want to renounce the fruits of the action.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something I think about a lot, and I'm reminded of how I talk to somebody who's like, you know, who's a Buddhist? And I was like, you know, the whole idea of Buddhism is renouncing attachment. Some way the idea of Buddhism is staying out of the world of memory and staying in the moment, right? And they talked about, you know, it's like, how do you renounce attachments to the people that you love, right? And they're just saying, well, I appreciate that I have this moment with them and knowing that they will die makes me appreciate this moment that much more. I mean, you said something similar, right? In your daily routine that you think about things this way, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's funny because it's like after I turned 50, I think of death all the time, like, I just think that, you know, I'm in like I probably have fewer probably have fewer years ahead of me than behind me, right? So I think about one thing which is What are the memories that I want to carry with me for the next period of time? And also about just the fact that everything around me could be, you know, I know more people who are, you know, dying for various reasons. And so I'm not lots. I'm not that old, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't believe that an owner of a lonely heart is much better than an owner of a broken heart. You think an owner of a broken heart is better than the owner of a lonely heart”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But about the positive aspects of it, right? Because the loss comes from not only the fact that the relationship is over, but you had all of these good things before that you can now see in a new light, right? And so part of one of the things that I found from my clinical background that really, I think, gave me a different perspective on memory is so much of the therapy process was guided towards reframing and getting people to look at the past in a different way, not by imposing changing people's memories or not by imposing an interpretation, but just offering a different perspective and maybe one that's kind of more optimized towards learning. And, you know, an appreciation maybe or gratitude, whatever it is, right? That gives you a way of taking, I think you said it in the beginning, right? Where you can have this kind of like dark experience.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's really so many reasons though. But, you know, I mean, I've had this. My first pet I had, we got it for a wedding present as a cat and got it after, but it died of FIP when it was four years old. And I just would see her everywhere around the house. We got another cat that we got a dog, dog eventually died of cancer, and the cat just died recently. And, you know, so we got a new dog because I kept seeing the dog around and I was just so heartbroken about this. But I still remember the pets that died. It just comes back to you. I mean, it's part of this. I think there's also something about attachment that's just so crucial that drives, again, these things that we want to remember and that gives us that longing sometimes. Sometimes it's also not just about the heartbreak.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God, that's so hard to ask for a friend. I love that. It's such a hard one. Well, so, I mean, part of this is we tend to go back to particular times that are the more emotionally intense periods. So that's a part of it. And again, memories designed to kind of capture these things that are biologically significant. And attachment is a big part of biological significance for humans, right? Human relationships are super important. And sometimes that heartbreak comes with massive changes in your beliefs about somebody say they cheated on you or something like that or regrets and you kind of ruminate about things that you've done wrong.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's a basic recipe for it, which is you feed people the information that you want them to remember. You stress them out. You have an authority figure kind of like pushing this information on them, or you motivate them to produce the information you're looking for. And that pretty much over time gives you what you want”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you're in this weakened mental state and you're being encouraged to imagine things by people who give you a plausible scenario. And at some point, certain people can be very coaxed into creating a memory for something that never happened. And there's actually some pretty convincing cases out there where you don't know exactly the truth. There's a sheriff, for instance, who came to believe that he had a false memory. I mean, that he had a memory of doing sexual abuse based on, you know, essentially, I think it was not going to tell the story because I don't remember it well enough to necessarily accurately give it to you, but people could look this stuff up. There are definitely stories out there like this where people confess to crimes that they just didn't do and objective evidence came out later on.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's different reasons. I mean, one is people just get tired of being tortured and just say whatever. But another part of it is that you create a very interesting set of conditions where there's an authority figure telling you something that you did this. We know you did this. We have witnesses saying you did this. So now you start to question yourself. Then they put you under stress. Maybe they're not feeding you. Maybe they're kind of like making you be cold or exposing you to like music that you can't stand or something, whatever it is, right? It's like they're creating this physical stress. And so stress starts to acts to down-regulate the prefrontal cortex. You're not necessarily as good at monitoring the accuracy of stuff. Then they start to get nice to you and they say, imagine, you know, okay, I know you don't remember this, but maybe we can walk you through how it could have happened and they feed you the”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of history of this actually in the criminal justice system. You might have heard the term the third degree. If you actually look it up historically, it was a very intense set of beatings and starvation and physical demands that they would place on people to get them to talk. And, you know, there was certainly a lot of work in the that's been done by the CIA in terms of enhanced interrogation techniques. And from what I understand, the research actually shows that they just produce what people want to hear.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could build a false memory of a show, in fact, if we want. Let's just put it all together so we don't even have to do all the work to play the show. We can just create a memory of it and might as well. Happen because the remembering self is in charge anyway.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it depends on how you take that. If you get this uncomfortable gap between what you know and what you want to know, you could either use that to motivate you and energize you, or you could use it to say, I don't want to hear about this. This disagrees with my beliefs. I'm going to go back to my echo chamber, you know.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just one of the weird things in our research is we got into curiosity from a postdoc in my lab, Matthias Gruber. And one of the things that we found is when we gave people a question, like a trivia question that they wanted the answer to, the question, the more curious people were about the answer, the more activity in these dopamine related circuits in the brain we would see. And again, that was not driven by the answer per se, but by the question. So it was not about getting the information. It was about the drive to seek the information.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that adaptation and that basically you learn to expect these things, I think, is a major source of, I guess it's a major way in which we're kind of more, in my opinion, wired to strive and not be happy to be in a state of wanting. And, you know, some people talk about dopamine, for instance, being this pleasure chemical. And it's like, there's a lot of compelling research to suggest it's not about pleasure at all. It's about the discomfort that energizes you to get things, to seek a reward, right? And so you could give an animal that's been deprived of dopamine, a reward. And enjoy it. It's pretty good, but they're not going to do anything to get it, you know.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or maybe cultural connection. Maybe it's about like functioning in social groups that are meaningful and like having time. But I do think there is an interesting memory related thing, which is that if you look at like things like reinforcement learning, for instance, you're not learning necessarily every time you get a reward if it's the same reward. You're not learning that much. You mainly learn if it deviates from your expectation of what you're supposed to get, right? So it's like you get a paycheck every, you know, month from MIT or whatever, right? And it's like you're kind of, you probably don't even kind of get excited about it when you get the paycheck. But if they cut your salary, you're going to be pissed. And if they increase your salary, oh, good, I got a bonus, you know.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life is getting better, but I don't know necessarily that tracks people's happiness, right? I mean, I would argue that maybe who knows, I don't know this, but I wouldn't be surprised if people in Hunter-Gatherer societies. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they're happier than people who have access to modern medicine and email and cell phones.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what happens is it's not that the technology necessarily is doing anything so bad as much as it's just going to constrain my language because I'm just doing what's being suggested to me. And so this is why I say, you know, kind of like my mantra for some of what I've learned about everything in memory is to diversify your training data, basically, because otherwise you're going to, so like humans have this capability to be so much more creative than anything generative AI will put together, at least right now knows where this goes. But it can also go the opposite direction where people become much, much less creative if they just become more and more resistant to discomfort, you know, and resistant to exposing themselves to knowledge, to cognitive dissonance and so forth.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think one of the things I learned when Google started to introduce autocomplete in emails, I started to use it. And about a third of the time I was like, this isn't what I want to say. A third of the time, I'd be like, this is exactly what I wanted to say. And a third of the time I was saying, well, this is good enough. I'll just go with it, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problems that come up with technology aren't the technology itself as much as the fact that people adapt to the technology in Maladaptive ways. I mean, one of my fears about AI is not what AI will do, but what people will do. I mean, take text messaging, right? It's like pain in the ass to text people, at least for me. And so what happens is the communication becomes very spartan and devoid of meaning, right? It's just very telegraphic. And that's people adapting to the medium, right? I mean, look at you. You've got this keyboard, right? That's like got these dome-shaped things. And you have adapted to that to communicate, right? That's not the technology adapting to you. It's you adapting to the technology.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From memory. And that's a way to inoculate ourselves, I believe, from misinformation in the modern world. But like everything else, it requires a certain tolerance for discomfort. And I think when we don't have much time, and I think when we're stressed out and when we are just tired, it's very hard to tolerate discomfort.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People don't like to hear things that disagree with them. But if you're in it, I mean, you can see two situations in groups with memory. One situation is you have like people who are very dominant who just take over the conversation and basically what happens is the group remembers less from the experience and they remember more of what the dominant narrator says, right? Now if you have a diverse group of people, and I don't mean diverse in necessarily the human resources sense of the word, I mean diverse in any way you want to take it, right? But diverse in every way, hopefully. And you give everyone a chance to speak and everyone's being appreciated for their unique contribution. You get more accurate memories and you get more information from it, right? Even two people who come from very similar backgrounds, if you can appreciate the unique contributions that each one has, you can do a better job of generating it.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From different perspectives, and we allow them to talk to each other and we allow ourselves to listen. I mean, right now you'll hear a lot of just jammering, you know, people going blah, blah, blah about free speech, but they just want to listen to themselves, right? It's like, let's face it, the old days before people were supposedly awoke, they were trying to ban two live crew. Just think about Letty Bruce got canceled for cursing Jesus Christ, you know. It's like this is nothing new.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was reading Tan Viet Nguyen, but he wrote a book about the collective memory of the Vietnam War. He's a Vietnamese immigrant who was flown out after the war was over. And so he went back to his family to get their stories about the war. They called it the American War, not the Vietnam War, right? That just kind of blew my mind having grown up in the US and having always heard about it as a Vietnam War. But of course they call it the American War because that's what happened. America came in, right? And that's based on their perspective, which is a very valid perspective. And so that just gives you this idea of the way we put together these narratives based on our perspectives. And I think the opportunities that we can have in memory is if we bring groups together.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's so much in what you're saying. I mean, one of the things that people's sense of collective identity is very much tied to shared memories. If we have a shared narrative of the past, or even better, if we have a shared past, we will feel more socially connected with each other. And I will feel part of this group. They're part of my tribe, if I remember the same things in the same way. And you brought up this weaponization of history. And it really speaks to, I think, one of the parts of memory, which is that if you have a belief, you will find and you have a goal in mind, you will find stuff in memory that aligns with it and you won't see the parts in memory that don't. So a lot of the stories we put together are based on our perspectives. And so let's just zoom out for the moment from like misinformation, take something even more fascinating, but not as like.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People would end up becoming convinced he had these policy things or these personal things that were not true, just based on the polls that were being used. So it was a case where, interestingly enough, the people who were using misinformation were actually ahead of the curve relative to the scientists who were trying to study these effects in memory.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's no longer your memory or my memory, it's our memory. And so now the misinformation spreads. And the more you trust someone or the more powerful that person is, the more of a voice they have in shaping that narrative, right? And there's all sorts of interesting ways in which misinformation could happen. There's a great example of when John McCain and George Bush Jr. were in a primary. And there are these polls where they would do these, like I guess they were like not robocalls, but real calls where they would poll voters. But they actually inserted some misinformation about McCain's beliefs on taxation, I think. And maybe it was something about illegitimate children. I don't really remember. But they included misinformation in the question that they asked, like, you know, how do you feel about the fact that he wants to do this or something? And so.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is exactly what they do. And so all these kind of foibles of human memory get magnified when you start to have social interactions. There's a whole literature on something called social contagion, which is basically when misinformation spreads like a virus. Like you remember the same thing that I did, but I give you a little bit of wrong information. Then that becomes part of your story of what happened. Because once you and I share a memory, like I tell you about something I've experienced and you tell me about your experience of the same event.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you're exposed to some more information somewhere else. And eventually your memory becomes totally detached from what happened. And so sometimes you can have cases where people, this is very rare, but you can do it in lab too or like significant, not everybody, but a chunk of people will fall for this where you can give people misinformation about an event that never took place. And as they keep trying to remember that event more and more, what happens, they start to imagine, they start to pull up things from other experiences they've had. And eventually they can stitch together a vivid memory of something that never happened because they're not remembering an event that happened. They're remembering the act of trying to remember what happened. And basically putting it together into the wrong story.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a minor distortion. But what happens is that sometimes things can really get out of hand where people have trouble telling the differences in things that they've imagined versus things that happen. But also, as I told you, the act of remembering can change the memory. And so what happens then is you can actually be exposed to some misinformation. And so Elizabeth Loftus was a real pioneer in this work. And there's lots of other work that's been done since. But basically, it's like if you remember some event and then I tell you something about the event later on when you remember the event, you might remember some original information from the event as well as some information about what I told you. And sometimes if you're not able to tell the difference, that information that I told you gets mixed into the story that you had originally. So now I give you some more misinformation.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if I were to tell you that I'm like, you know, a story about this person who's worried that they have cancer or something like that. And then, you know, they see a doctor and the doctor says, well, things are very much like you would have expected or like, you know, what you're afraid of or something. When people remember that, they'll often remember, well, the doctor told the patient that he had cancer. Even if that wasn't in the story, because they're infusing meaning into that story, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I like to say there's no such thing as true or false memories, right? It's like Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols he had a saying that's like, I don't believe in false memories anymore than I believe in false songs, right? It's like, um, and so the basic idea is that we have these memories that reflect bits and pieces of what happened. As well as our inferences and theories, right? So I'm a scientist and I collect data, but I use theories to make sense of that data. And so a memory is kind of a mix of all these things. So, where memories can go off the deep end and become what we would call conventionally is false memories are sometimes little distortions where we filled in the blanks, the gaps in our memory based on things that we know, but don't actually correspond to what happened, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it doesn't happen all the time, but I think what may be happening is it's such a, it's a partial match to something that we have. And it's not enough to trigger that sense of that ability to pull together all the pieces, but it's a close enough match to give you that intense sense of familiarity without the recollection of exactly what happened when.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if I tell you the word rutabega, your brain's going to work a little bit harder to catch it than if I give you a word like Apple, right? And that's because you hear Apple a lot. So your brain's very tuned up to process it efficiently, but Rudibiga takes a little bit longer and more intense. And you can actually see a difference in brain activity in areas in the temporal lobe when you hear a word just based on how frequent it is in the We think it's tied to this basically a byproduct of our mechanism of just learning, doing this error-driven learning as we go through life to become better and better and better to process things more and more efficiently.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have them go through a virtual arcade. But the map of the two places was exactly the same. She just put different skins on them. So one looks different than the other, but they've got same landmarks and same places, same objects, same everything, but carpeting, colors, theme, everything's different. People will often not have any conscious idea that the two are the same, but they could report this very intense sense of deja vu. So it's like a partial match that's eliciting this kind of a sense of familiarity. And that's why, you know, in patients who have epilepsy that affects memory, you get this artificial sense of familiarity that happens. And so we think that, and again, this is just one theory amongst many, but we think that we get a little bit of that feeling it's not enough to necessarily give you deja vu even for very mundane things, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that in higher order areas of the brain, they're integrating for many, many different sources of input. What happens is that they're tuning themselves up every time you process a similar input, right? And so that allows you to just get this kind of a fluent sense that I'm very familiar. You're very familiar with this place, right? And so just being here, you're not going to be moving your eyes all over the place because you kind of have an idea of where everything is. And that fluency gives you a sense of like, I'm here. Now I wake up in my hotel room and I have this very unfamiliar sense of where I am, right? But, you know, there's a great set of studies done by Anne Cleary at Colorado State where she created these virtual reality environments. I mean, we'll go back to the metaverse. Imagine you go through a virtual museum, right? And then she would put people in virtual reality.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who did a lot of the early characterizations of epilepsy? And one of the things you notice is an epilepsy patients, some group of them right before they would get a seizure, they would have this intense sense of deja vu. So it's this artificial sense of familiarity. It's a sense of having a memory that's not there, right? And so what was happening was there was electrical activity in certain parts of these brains. So the sky Penfield later on, when he was trying to look for how do we map out the brain to figure out which parts we want to remove and which parts don't we? He would stimulate parts of the temporal lobes of the brain and find you could elicit the sense of deja. Sometimes you'd actually get a memory that a person would re-experience just from electrically stimulating some parts. Sometimes they just have this intense feeling of being somewhere before. And so one theory which I really like is.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So deja vu is actually one of these things I think that some of the surveys suggest that like 75% of people report having a deja vu experience one time or another aren't aware that came from but I've pulled people in my class and most of them say they've experienced deja vu It's this kind of sense that I've experienced this moment sometime before I've been here before. And actually there's all sorts of variants of this. The French have all sorts of names for various versions of the chamis, parley vous. I don't know. All these different voosa vu is the sense that it can be like almost disturbing intense sense of familiarity. So there was a researcher named Wilder Penfield actually this goes back even earlier to some of the earliest like Hewlings Jackson was this neurologist who”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And use viruses and so forth and lasers to turn on circuits that you just can't do in humans. So I think there's a lot that can be learned from mice. There's a lot that can be learned from non-human primates. And there's a lot that you need to learn from humans. And I think unfortunately some of the people in the National Institutes of Health think you can learn everything from the mouse. Why study memory in humans when I could study learning in a mouse? And just like, oh my God, I'm going to get my funding from somewhere else.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, but that's very important, right? So you can understand, for instance, how do neurons talk to each other? That's a really big, big question. Neural computation in and of itself, you think it's the most simple question, right? Not at all. I mean, it's a big, big question. And understanding how two parts of the brain interact, meaning that it's not just one area speaking. It's not like Twitter, where one area of the brain's shouting and then another area of the brain's just stuck listening to the scrap. It's like they're actually interacting on the millisecond scale, right? How does that happen? And how do you regulate those interactions, these dynamic interactions? We're still figuring that out, but that's going to be coming largely from model systems that are easier to understand. You can do manipulations like drug manipulations to manipulate circuits.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also have all these other structures as social animals that allow us to respond differently. There's language, there's like, you know, so you name it, there's obviously gobs of differences. Humans aren't just giant rats. There's a bunch more complexity to us. Time scales are very important. So primate brains and human brains are especially good at integrating and holding on to information across longer and longer periods of time, right? And also finally, it's like our history of training data, so to speak, is very, very different than the human's world is very different than a wild mouse's world and a lab mouse's world is extraordinarily impoverished relative to an adult human.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of conservation of some of these neural circuits across evolution in mammals, for instance. And then some people would even say that there's genetic mechanisms for learning that are conserved even going back far, far before. But let's go back to the mice in humans question, right? There's a lot of differences. So for one thing, the sensory information is very different. Mice and rats explore the world largely through smelling olfaction, but they also have vision that's kind of designed to kind of catch death from above. So it's like a very big view of the world. And we move our eyes around in a way that focuses on particular spots and space where you get very high resolution from a very limited set of spots in space. So that makes us very different in that way.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, okay. So let's go to the, so I think I've got great colleagues who I talk to who study memory in mice. And there's some one of the valuable things in those models is you can study neural circuits in an enormously targeted way because you could do these genetic studies, for instance, where you can manipulate particular groups of neurons. And it's just getting more and more targeted to the point where you can actually turn off. So”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I mean, more or less. I mean, there's a lot of details. But yes, I think, and not just FMRI, but you can relate it to, like I said, recordings from large populations of neurons that could be taken in a human or even in a non-human animal that is where you think it's an anatomical homologue. So that's just mind-blowing to me.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much. But if you do it right and you do it in a theory driven way as opposed to just throwing all the data at the wall and see what sticks, I mean, that to me is just exceptionally powerful.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you can actually take a ground truth code for the metaverse, basically. And you can feed in the visual information, let's say the sensory information or whatever that's coming in to a computational model that's designed to take real world inputs, right? And you could basically tie them all together by virtue of the state spaces that you're measuring in neural activity and these different formats, these different species and in the computational model, which I just find that mind-blowing. And you could do different kinds of analyses on language and basically come up with just like basically it's the guts of LLMs, right? You could do analyses on language and you could do analyses on sentiment analyses of emotions and so forth and put all this stuff together. I mean, it's almost too”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source