with beautiful beings and rich food and all the things that we gravitate toward. And he didn't budge on that. But then he tried maybe the most, the last thing we need to overcome, which is self-consciousness. He said, who are you to come here and meditate and become enlightened? And Buddha touched the earth with his fingers, making the earth his witness and saying he was doing it with all being. So that's a wonderful image for us to have a series and gather people around. It's not only that, it's also touching the earth. Our earth is under attack, is under degradation. And to gather together people who are for touching the earth and enriching the earth, and appreciating what we've inherited to try to make it better, not worse.

[01:03]

So that's the idea of this series. And now I get to introduce Marsha and Tom. Tom, I was introduced to by Marsha in his book, The General Theory of Love. There's also a book called The Specific Theory of Love. The General Theory of Love. And I was really enthralled by him, and we had several meetings with him, and we examined a lot of different things. And to have the title of The General Theory of Love, wow. Just like in the song, for them to say, I love you, wow. So Marcia introduced me and many people at Zen Center to Tom's work. And now I want to introduce you to Marcia. Many of you know Marcia from years of her practicing in the community and her work. When some of us had been burnt out or needed somebody to talk to, she was always there.

[02:11]

And her heart and commitment is one that we cherish in our community. And please come up, Marcia. Thank you. Hi. Thank you all for coming tonight, and I think you're in for a big treat. Tom Lewis's generosity is great. He came here very early this afternoon and spent a lot of time setting up for this great electronic extravaganza. I refer to him as Mr. Gadget sometime because it's just amazing how many things he's put together. I met Tom about Dr. Lewis about five years ago, and what I was excited about was that he's... I've worked doing psychotherapy for over 30 years, and he was the first psychiatrist that I actually agreed with and that I could actually speak to and that could tell the difference between brain chemistry and personal emotional problems.

[03:33]

And so it was wonderful to be able to work with him and talk to him and argue with him and have somebody that was truly in the inquiry, on the edge of really trying to figure out, you know, what's really going on here? What's so? And how is it that we're making the decisions and perceiving the things we're perceiving? So it's very exciting to me because I think his work very much reaffirms our mindfulness practices and Zen practice that we do. And you'll see that occur. So I wanted to also... I felt it was important to really give you a sense of Tom's credentials, and I thought I'd just read a few of them, because I went online and sort of printed out his curriculum vitae, and I thought just for some context, you might want to know a few things, so I just put this out here. But I was thinking maybe that... I didn't want to take up all that time.

[04:35]

He might really want to see what's on the slides. You can just go online, thomaslewis.com, and then you can read this for yourself. Would you like to come up and talk to the people? Thank you. Well, thanks. Can you hear me in the back there? Yeah. Great. Good. Well, thanks for coming out tonight and braving the rain and the thunder and lightning we saw here earlier tonight. So we're here to learn a little about memory and about how people learn or how they don't learn. And we're also here in search of a promise, a promise that science makes available to us now. And we're really the first people in the history of the world that science has made this available to. which is the promise that if you understand your brain, you can understand your life better than you do now.

[05:37]

We're really the first people in history who've had that opportunity, so we may as well take advantage of it. Let me begin with a little illustrative video here. Protecting your purchases. That's using your credit card wisely. So I showed you this not because Citibank has sponsored tonight's talk. which they haven't, but because really all of us are in this same boat with respect to our memory, that it doesn't work exactly how you think it does.

[06:42]

Sometimes it's working when you think it's not. Sometimes it's not working when you think that it is. And if you don't know how it's working, which almost none of us do, then you can get taken for a ride and in for some big surprises. So it's good to know what science has to tell us about our memory and learning. This is the Dalai Lama, who's recently ventured into making some comments in the realm of science. And he had this to say, that my confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science, so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation. If the scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims. So in that spirit, we'll forge ahead. If it's good enough for the Dalai Lama, it's good enough for us. It helps a lot. If you're going to try and understand a little about your brain, it helps a lot to know where it came from exactly.

[07:43]

And so if we look into the brain very closely, it's helpful to look into the history of the brain. And here's our planet touching the earth there. So the planet we have is roughly 4 billion years old, give or take. Life on the planet is about a billion years old. But if we are interested in things like nervous systems or anything like ours, really the first interesting thing happens maybe 300 million years ago. And if we just go back in time 300 million years ago, animals like this were on the planet, basically unchanged from how we find them on the planet today. Some of them... grew legs, and they crawled out onto land, and some of them lost their legs but stayed on the land. Some of them grew very, very large, and this was the age of the reptiles. I'll show you just a little bit about what this age was like. So those are the reptiles.

[08:49]

It was a tough Tough time to be alive on the planet at that point. But we weren't. Reptiles have a particular mode of reproduction that we don't have, and so it's worth pointing this out, that reptiles give birth to eggs that are tough and leathery, by and large, and then they leave. So that here you see an Australian spiny anteater performing its last parental duty, which is laying the eggs and then leaving. When the eggs hatch, the parents or progenitors are nowhere to be found. They are, by and large, indifferent to the fate of the young, and really their strategy is to produce as many eggs and to have the young be tough tough, and instinctually motivated to survive so that some of them make it into the next generation. And it's quite a successful strategy, and there are plenty of reptiles around on the planet today. Then, about 100 million years ago, something happened in the evolution of the brain, which is of great interest to us, which is that an animal line split off from the reptiles, and that was the mammals. and the mammals got a new part of the brain when they evolved, mammals have a fundamentally different mode of reproduction.

[09:56]

So instead of giving birth to eggs that are tough and that hatch young that are self-sufficient, mammals give birth to live helpless young that are neurologically immature, and that require lots of elaborate care or they'll die. So the mammalian young have to be sheltered from the cold, for instance, or they'll die. They have to be ferried around because they're often not particularly mobile. They have to be communicated with at regular intervals so the parental mammal can discover what it is that's needed. They have to be protected from predators. They have to be fed. They have to be bathed. They have to be taught how to do things because they don't know, for instance, how to hunt. A kitten doesn't know how to hunt successfully, and if it's not taught, it'll never learn. It doesn't know how to clean its paws after a meal. Here's a famous picture of a parental mammal going the extra mile to make contact. Mammals also sleep together. So this is really our mammalian heritage. And if we look at the brain,

[10:58]

In side section, this is the human brain. This part in green is the part that dates back to our reptilian heritage. If you're a comparative neuroanatomist and you look at the brains of reptiles, they have structures which look very much like this. When the mammals evolved... We got this new structure here that you see in red. In other views of the brain, it looks a little bit different. And this is called the limbic system, or sometimes called the mammalian brain. The great French neuroanatomist Paul Brokaw discovered this area. He was a comparative neuroanatomist. And he named it the great limbic lobe, using the Latin word limb for line, because he thought this was the line of division between lower forms of life and upper forms. Then... A couple of million years ago on the African plain, we got the last stage in our brain development. And some monkeys on the African plain got smarter and smarter. And as they did, then we got this massive neocortical area, which is the part of the brain that's most recent. It's the part that makes us smart. So it's the part that allows us to have logic, say, and reason, mathematics, physics, written communication, PowerPoint.

[12:05]

Things like this come out of the neocortical brain. Really, the only difference between a monkey and a man is really the extent of this neocortical region right here. Otherwise, we're very similar. Now, this three-stage model of brain evolution is called the triune model. It's a product of a comparative neuroanatomist named Paul McLean, and you can read about it in his book, The Triune Brain in Evolution, which is a very interesting book. So the reptilian brain... has these survival-oriented reflexes, keeps us alive. There really is no learning in the reptilian brain. Reptiles are instinctually oriented. They come into the world knowing what they need to know, and they don't need to learn anything. This last brain, the neocortical brain, gives us ideas, cognition, abstraction, symbolic representation, the ability to imagine things that have not yet happened. It comes from the neocortical brain. And then sandwiched in between them, or it would be,

[13:10]

is this limbic brain here. And the limbic brain has three particular aspects. We'll be looking at one of them tonight, and then we'll be looking at the remaining two in the workshop that Marcia and I are doing tomorrow at the Zen Center. Tonight we'll be looking at the learning systems of the mammalian brain. Also in the mammalian brain that we'll be talking more about tomorrow are the emotion system, which is in the limbic brain, and the attachment system, or the system whereby bonding and affiliation occur. So for tonight, we'll be looking at memory. The neocortex has a very fast and efficient memory mechanism that we'll look at. The mammalian brain has a much slower memory mechanism. The reptilian brain essentially has no memory mechanism whatsoever. This is Richard Feynman. He was a protege of Einstein's, one of the brightest physicists of the 20th century, very active in quantum theory. And Feynman had this to say about science. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

[14:14]

This is true also about your own memory, as we'll see, so it's a useful guidepost. This is a cartoon that a patient of mine gave me once, which is entitled Short Session. And then one little man says, forget your troubles, and the other one says, okay. There must be a reason why psychotherapy doesn't work this way, because in principle it could. On paper, there's no reason why this couldn't work. But in reality, it doesn't work. So we have to look to the underlying physiology of the brain to understand why memory doesn't work this way. Reptiles don't learn much. So a little reptile this big knows everything it needs to know to become an adult reptile. It needs to learn nothing. However, people, on their journey from this into this, we generally think they learn a lot. So we generally take it for granted that experience will have a lot to do with changes in the brain that produce this final organism over here. So how did that happen?

[15:16]

What we understand now is this fundamental division between memory mechanisms, and we'll look at that tonight, that there is one mechanism, the explicit memory system, which is potentially available to consciousness. This other memory mechanism, which is older and more the property of the limbic brain, is not amenable to conscious reflection. And we'll talk about first the explicit form of memory. If while I'm talking you have a question or something doesn't make sense, let me know. We'll also be having questions at the end, and there's a microphone down there. But if something is not making any sense, let me know, and we'll take a look at it. So explicit memory. The disquieting truth about explicit memory is that it's very rapid and efficient, and it's usually wrong, which most people don't want to believe about their own memory, but that's just the truth of it. So this is the kind of memory that allows you to have potentially a conscious recall of the material. So if you memorize something or autobiographical recall, something happens to you and then you remember it later or you think you remember it later.

[16:22]

This kind of memory is extraordinarily error-prone. It's very unreliable. And it's gullible in the sense that people make lots of memory mistakes without realizing they're making any mistake at all. So it's easy for your memory system to sucker you into believing that you know what happened when in fact you don't. Children are also not very good at this form of memory for reasons that we'll talk about. So in the explicit memory system, information comes in. The person may be aware of some of the information coming in or they may not be. So if some information comes in... Awareness is partial. And then if you ask the person, what have you learned, you get back some of the information and then just some stuff that's garbage that either never happened or it's garbled up, but the person is generally unaware of it. Now, this structure here is the hippocampus in this nice drawing coming from the same word for seahorse because it looks kind of like a seahorse. This is a key structure in the creation of explicit memory.

[17:23]

So how stable or explicit memories. If someone creates explicit memory, how stable is it? Well, here's an experiment that illustrates the relative lack of stability, is in this experiment, a group of grade school children are exposed to this once a week. An adult meets with them and says exactly these words. Think real hard and tell me if this ever happened to you. Can you remember going to the hospital with a mousetrap on your foot, which was deliberately chosen as kind of an outlandish thing that nobody would think had happened to them? By the 10th week, 60% of the children say that they do remember this happening to them. And in fact, they have elaborate stories about it. This is an actual story. My brother Colin was trying to get blowtorch from me. This is blowtorch, an action figure. And I wouldn't let him take it, so he pushed me into the wood pile where the mousetrap was. And then my finger got caught on it, and we went to the hospital, and my mom and my daddy and Colin drove me there in the van, and the doctor put a bandage on this finger. Many of the children in this experiment could not subsequently be convinced that this had not happened when they were told by the adults, well, that didn't really happen, we just talked about it or it was made up.

[18:35]

A substantial fraction of the children couldn't be convinced that this didn't happen. This happens to me all the time, as it probably happens to you, but we don't know it. This is an experiment that whenever I... discussed with the residents at UCSF. None of them want to believe that this is true, but there you go. It's science. So this experiment, these people actually interviewed 14-year-old English boys, and they asked them a series of questions about their childhood, like what's your mother's best trait? Who's your father's favorite child? What's the nicest thing about your home? Which parent do you take after? Do you expect to make more money than your father? And so on. So there weren't questions about specific biographical details, like what's the name of your school, but more about the the emotional environment in which the person is embedded. Then 30 years later, they interviewed the same people when they were 44-year-old English gentlemen and asked them, when you were 14, who was your mother's favorite child? What was the nicest thing about your home? And the agreement between the answers given at age 14 and those given at age 44 was no better than chance would suggest.

[19:44]

So that age 44 is this person has no access to reliable recall about what he thought his family home was like at age 14. Despite the fact that we often ask people, what was your family like when you were a child, but we might as well not bother because they don't know. Or if I wanted to know what Marcia's childhood was like, I might as well ask the person sitting next to her because Marcia doesn't know, but she doesn't know that she doesn't know. She'd be happy to tell me the answer, but she actually doesn't know. And that's Mark Twain said, I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not. And this really depends on your disposition, because there are some people for whom the opposite is true, that the further they go back, the worse things were, whether they happened or not. So why is explicit memory so unreliable? Why is it so poor at keeping track of what actually happens? Here's one of the major reasons. If you see an apple, it's easy to track where in the brain activity shows up if you actually show somebody an apple.

[20:52]

So it's relatively easy to map the brain area that's active. If you then ask somebody to imagine an apple while you're imaging their brain, you find that the same area is active. So the unfortunate truth is that for the brain, there's not that much difference between what it actually sees and what it imagines having seen. because they cause a similar pattern of brain activity. They're not identical, but they are very similar. To the brain, it just doesn't matter that much whether it really happened or whether it was only presented to the imagination. This is a study demonstrating this effect in which ordinary people went to a seance, and the seances were all administered by professional magicians. And during the seance, at some point, the magician would say, look, You can see the table is levitating. Look, I'm levitating the table, as you can plainly see. Now, the magician was not levitating the table in any way. Then three weeks later, the subjects were asked, did you see the table levitate?

[21:54]

And 34% of them said yes. And the reason that people who have been to a seance think that they saw the table levitate is because someone suggested to them that it had, and they imagined it. And their brain didn't reliably keep track of whether it had really happened or whether they just imagined it. Similarly, this is an incident from Amsterdam after 9-11 where a disturbed young man flew a Cessna into the side of an office building. The actual footage of the plane striking the building was not captured, unlike 9-11. But a study of law students... revealed that 67% of them claimed to have witnessed the footage in which the plane struck the building because they had probably imagined it because of the newscast. Similarly, a British study asking British television viewers had they seen the footage of Princess Diana's car striking the pylon in Paris that killed her. revealed that 44% of them indicated that they had seen that footage. But there's no such footage that exists.

[22:54]

But what did happen to them was that television newscasters invited them to imagine the event vividly as they recounted stories about it. So the lesson that we should learn from this is that if you can imagine it, then you can remember it. And because of this, we should be careful about what we imagine ourselves and what we encourage other people to imagine. Because if you imagine it, you can come to believe a short time later that it actually occurred. This is another reason why explicit memory is not so reliable, is that people only remember what they attend to, what they focus on, and what they focus on is notably incomplete. Different people focus on different aspects of the scene, for instance, and so they may have different memories of it. And in a famous study that has been mentioned actually even on Law and Order a couple of times, there's a study in which people see a video of, a black and white video of people passing a basketball and... people are told you're supposed to count the number of times that the ball has passed.

[23:58]

And so they're intently focusing on the ball. During the ball passing, a guy in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the scene and then walks out of the middle of the scene. And about half of the people don't see it or don't recall having seen it because they weren't attending to it. They were watching something else. So you can only encode in memory this kind of memory, what you attend to and what you attend to is incomplete. There's another reason why explicit memory is so unreliable is that Sensory information during the day comes into the hippocampus where it's stored during the day. The hippocampus is actually kind of a fragile structure, unfortunately. And if you whack somebody on the head, you can get those memories to drop right out of their head. That's easy to do. So there's no trouble with that. However, what happens after the memories get into your hippocampus is that at night, They get downloaded into your neocortex. And this is one of the purposes of sleep, is the downloading of memory from this very plastic, malleable area, the hippocampus, into this very rigid, structured area, the neocortex.

[25:07]

So you think, well, the memories are safe and secure in the neocortex. They're quite rigid there, so they should be safe. Unfortunately, that's not the case, because every time you access the memory... It has to be reconstituted in the hippocampus, and once again, it's in this very malleable plastic structure, and it's vulnerable to being changed in ways or deleted entirely. So memory is rigid after it's been stored, but every time you try and use it, it could be changed or it could be deleted again. Not so good. Another reason, before we go on to implicit memory, where explicit memory is not so reliable is that In a recent brain imaging study, they showed people two or three hundred different scenes and they asked them afterwards to remember them. They showed them scenes and said, do you remember this one? Do you remember this one? They also asked people while they were looking at the scenes to rate them in terms of how well they thought they would remember them. Unfortunately, the brain area that lights up when you think you're going to remember something is not the same area that lights up when you're actually going to remember it.

[26:14]

So that you don't know when you're looking at something that you're going to remember. You have a feeling like, oh, I'm sure I'll remember that. But it's a complete fantasy, actually. It's a very poor correlation between what people think they're going to remember and what they actually remember. And the reason is because their different brain areas handle that function, and they're not particularly connected. So a lot of us think that we know what happened in our past. Unfortunately, most of the time, we don't, actually. And there was a great movie that was made about a guy... who for sure doesn't know what happens in his past because he has no hippocampal function bilaterally. The hippocampus, his instrument of explicit memory, has been damaged beyond repair, and he can't make any new memories, a fact of which he is aware. And this movie was Memento. I'll just show you a little clip from that. The guy in this movie has no explicit memory. Supposedly. Where are you?

[27:21]

You're in some motel room. You just wake up and you're in a motel room. There's the key. It feels like maybe it's just the first time you've been there, but perhaps you've been there for a week, three months. It's kind of hard to say. I don't know. It's just an anonymous room. Mr. Shelby from 304.

[28:28]

Right, what can I do for you, Leonard? Bert. Bert. I'm not sure. I think I may have asked you to hold my calls. You don't know? Well, I think I may have. I'm not too good on the phone. Right, you said you like to look people in the eye when they talk to them. Yeah. You don't remember saying that. Well, that's the thing. I have this condition. A condition? It's my memory. Amnesia? No, no, no, no. It's different from that. I have no short-term memory. I know who I am. I know all about myself. I just... Since my injury, I can't make new memories. Everything fades. If we talk for too long, I'll forget how we started. The next time I see you, I'm not going to remember this conversation. I don't even know if I've met you before. So if I seem a little strange or rude or something, I've told you this before, haven't I? Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to mess with you, but it's so weird. You don't remember me at all. No. You've talked a bunch of times. I'm sure we have, yeah. Or what's the last thing you remember?

[29:28]

My wife. Well, it's polite. It's like waking. It's like you just woke up. There are people who are really like this. Yeah, I know. There are people who are really like this. And actually, the discovery of people who are really like this helped out science a lot because even though they have no explicit memory and they can't remember anything that happened to them in a way that they can recount to somebody later, it was clear from studying them scientifically that they do retain some ability to learn. They have some capacity to learn something. Emotional memory, for instance. This guy has some emotional memory of his wife, dramatically portrayed. An emotional memory, in some ways, survives the destruction of the explicit memory mechanism of the hippocampus.

[30:30]

From the fact that this is so, actually, science discovered this second somewhat secret or hidden memory mechanism in the brain, the implicit mechanism, which we will talk about now, implicit memory. In this kind of memory, information comes in. The person is not aware of anything. in the learning process. They're not aware of learning information. And when you ask them what they've learned, they can't tell you anything either. So this is not the kind of memory that you can ask people what they know. Instead, in order to find out what they have learned, you have to watch their behavior, measure their behavior, and then deduce what they must have learned by tracking how their behavior has changed in response to experience. This is also a memory, strangely enough, that not only tells you what has happened in the past, but it's a memory system that tells you what will happen in the future, which is a function that we don't ordinarily think of as being related to memory, but it is, and we'll see how. Instead of the hippocampus, implicit memory relies on these structures here.

[31:35]

These are the basal ganglia in color, and you see them in a section that's a horizontal section of the brain, like someone just took a slice horizontally right through your brain. Here are the basal ganglia. If someone doesn't have any hippocampus at all, bilaterally, then what happens to them? Well, this has been studied, say, for instance, in the case of children who have lost their hippocampi bilaterally during birth anoxic episodes. So the hippocampus is a little bit of a fragile part of the brain. It's one of the first parts of the brain to die if there's anoxia during birth. And so, I beg your pardon? Oinoxia is lack of oxygen, say. There's not enough oxygen getting to the fetal brain. And then this, the hippocampus is in a watershed area where it's not really fed very well by the arterial flow, and so it can die. And in studies of kids who have no hippocampus bilaterally, they have no explicit memory, what they cannot do, for instance, is recognize anybody new.

[32:36]

They can never navigate in space because they can never find their way... from one way to another because they can never remember landmarks or directions or that they've been a particular place. They can never remember conversations that they've had with somebody the day before. They can't relate telephone messages. If you ask them the day after Christmas, what day was it yesterday? They don't know. So they have no explicit memory. But strangely enough, there are some things that they can still do that indicate learning. For instance, they can speak and write normally. They can answer questions like, why is meat inspected? Which is a question that you have to live in the world and have some experience of the world in order to know the answer to this question. So interestingly enough, what they have is a memory mechanism that has been disconnected from any specific instance. They just have a generalized knowledge of how the world works. If you ask them, this piece of meat here, was this inspected? They can't answer that question.

[33:38]

because that's a specific thing that the hippocampus would handle. But they do understand or know generally how the world works. Their brain has managed to learn something about how the world generally works. And that is the domain of this implicit memory system, is that there's a part of your brain not the hippocampus, but the basal ganglia and some associated structures, which are constantly scanning the world and extracting from your experience the underlying rules that predict what is happening in the world. And it operates whether you want it to or not. In this study, they took a guy who has no hippocampi bilaterally, just like Guy Pearce in the movie, and they had him interact with three people serially, sequentially. One of the investigators came into the room and was nice to him, complimented him. That was very kind. Another one came in and was quite stern and unpleasant with him. And then a third investigator came in and was just kind of neutral. Then all three of them left the room. Then all the three of them came back.

[34:39]

And the fellow was asked, have you ever seen any of these three people before? And his answer was... No, I've never seen them before because he has no conscious memory of doing so. And then the fellow was told, well, fine, pick one of them that you would like to go to the store with. Pick out one. And the guy he chose was actually the guy who had been nice to him, indicating that despite the fact he has no event memory, he has still some capacity to learn emotionally tinged information that survived in his brain. Probably the biggest or greatest example of this came in the journal Science, a study connected by Antonio Damasio and his colleagues, a study entitled Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy. In this study, regular people are sitting in front of four decks of cards, and they're told, well, your job is to pick a deck, any deck you want, and turn over a card. If you get A certain low card, you get a certain number of points. There are very high-ranking cards that cause you to get a lot of points.

[35:43]

But at the same time, there are some high-ranking penalty cards, like the Suicide King, for instance. And if you turn over a high-ranking penalty card, then you lose a lot of points. And your job is to get the most number of points that you can. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the decks are rigged. So that two of the decks, if you play from them, eventually you'll win. and two of the decks, if you play from them, eventually you'll lose. Not every time, but eventually you will lose. And so what happened in this study, as the people sit down in front of the four decks of cards, and they start turning them over, is that after about 20 or 25 turns of the cards, the investigators can detect an increase in the galvanic skin response of the subject as their hand passes over the unlucky decks. indicating that their autonomic nervous system is beginning to extract some information about the experimental condition. After about 50 turns of the cards, the people begin to express a behavioral preference for the lucky decks, and they start avoiding the unlucky decks.

[36:45]

Some of them vocalize an aversion to the unlucky decks. By about 80 turns of the cards, two-thirds of the people figure it out, and they say, two of these decks are rigged, and they're unlucky, and I'm not going to play from them. The remaining one-third of the people are not smart enough to figure it out. But they don't need to because they are already playing advantageously, even though they do not know the advantageous strategy consciously. They have extracted implicitly information about the card game that allows them to win despite the fact that consciously they know nothing. And this is the same way that we go about our lives, is that sometimes we figure it out, what's going on. Sometimes we don't figure it out consciously, but whether we do or not, the implicit memory system is operating in the background, extracting information and guiding our behavior, causing us to avoid certain things or approach other things that seem advantageous to it. So this kind of implicit knowledge is... Knowledge without awareness.

[37:47]

It's the same kind of knowledge that underlies, say, the rules of English grammar or phonetics, so that all of us can use those rules, even though very few of us can say them explicitly. But you can use them nonetheless, and there's implicit knowledge, most of it, that you don't know that you possess. But I'll test you here on a bit of implicit knowledge, and we'll see if you know it or not. And you probably do, even though you don't know that you know it. So if you show English speakers these sentences, my ball bounces, my ball can be bouncing, you say, are these valid or legitimate English sentences? People would say what? Yes, they are. How about these two? My dog walks and my dog can be walked. Yes, they're valid English sentences. How about these two? My brother dies. My brother can be died. No. people will instantly say this is not a valid English sentence, despite the fact that it is not clear why it isn't. So there is not agreement among grammarians about why it is that you can't say this.

[38:49]

You probably have never contemplated whether you can say this or not legitimately. Nevertheless, your implicit memory system knows instantly that you can't say this. So it's free to guide your behavior without your insight. No one can. to the best of anyone's knowledge, has insight into why he can't say this. Nevertheless, we all know it to be true. So the implicit knowledge is knowledge without awareness. The person extracts the rules that underlie a given situation, even if the rules are quite complex. They can demonstrate what they've learned, but they can't describe what they've learned, they don't understand it, and most of the time they're not aware of having learned anything at all. The same thing is true, for instance, of the activity of chick sexing. So that when chicks hatch, the males and the females look pretty much the same. And it's really not until about six weeks of age that it's possible for the informed observer to tell what is a male chick and what is a female chick.

[39:50]

Nevertheless, the poultry industry would like to separate the male chicks from the female chicks because they have different things in mind for them. And so the American poultry industry got wind of the fact that in Japan there were some poultry operations that were sexing chicks at the time of hatching. So they didn't have to wait six weeks until sexing them. So they sent some people down to observe and find out how is it that these Japanese people are sexing the chicks. And what they discovered was that the Japanese workers could not describe how they were sexing the chicks. They could not teach the Americans because they themselves did not know. But if the American workers stood next to a Japanese worker and watched them sex the chicks, male, female, male, female, male, female, after a certain amount of time, the Americans learned how to sex chicks one day after hatching. And they still can't say what it is they know. And no one can be taught explicitly how to do this, although it is possible to learn from exposure.

[40:51]

So someone who knows can teach you. Someone who can make the distinction can teach you, but no one so far has been able to learn it. So we don't know what cues people are using to sex chicks. Now, one of the reasons why this impacts our lives as human beings is because relationships have an internal structure or an order to them, a pattern, just as languages do. So as you're a child, you grow up in a household in which there's a particular language spoken. Your implicit memory system effortlessly extracts the rules of grammar and phonetics that underlie that language, enabling you to speak. Similarly, you grow up in a particular system of relationships that have a highly ordered grammar of their own or highly ordered structure. And your implicit memory system absorbs information about that as well. So that the relationship language that you speak as an adult emerges more or less effortlessly from you, just as language does. without the ability of your conscious mind to have insight into what you have learned or to evaluate its legitimacy.

[41:55]

And again, in the relationship department, people learn as children without knowing that they have learned anything, whether or not they want to learn the lesson that is present in the environment, and then they proceed to act in a similar fashion whether they want to or not either. I'll show you an example of an acquired... relationship pattern. And this is an implicitly acquired pattern that comes from the television show Seinfeld. And if you guys are familiar with the television show Seinfeld, this is George Costanza here. And all you need to know in order to understand this is that George's mother loathes him so that she really, really doesn't like him. And you can see what trouble this causes for George in his grappling with his relationship life. This is his real girlfriend.

[42:59]

Jerry's girlfriend. You know what? I should really go talk to her. Nothing computational. Just two adults sitting down trying to clear the air. You know, I just know if I could spend some time alone with her. I've got to. I've got to. You're doing now? Well, I think I can still catch her. All right, George. I have had just about enough of this. What? What are you talking about? I am talking about you and Jody. You're completely obsessed with her. I know. I know. Who is more important to you? Her or me. I like you. She doesn't. Who are you going to pick?

[44:01]

I'm sorry, Karen. I know I can't hear you. I can't stand when someone doesn't like me. Well, now I hate you. Then I'm used to. Then George catches up with Jody and Jerry at Jerry's apartment. Excuse us for a few minutes. What for? We need to talk. You need to talk. We have nothing to talk about. Look, it's no secret what's going on between us. She doesn't like me. Now, Jerry, if you don't mind. George, anything you have to say to her, you can say in front of me. Jerry, this woman hates me so much. I'm starting to like her. What? She just dislikes me so much.

[45:09]

It's irresistible. I can see that. I'll get out of here. Don't call me. Don't worry. A woman that hates me this much comes along once in a lifetime. You're lucky, Kim. I gotta go after her. George, I wouldn't push for the massage. So this is the kind of thing that we see every day in ordinary life. The explicit rule is you should like people who also like you. But George grew up in a particular household in which another lesson was taught, no matter what people say explicitly, another implicit lesson was taught. And what he knows implicitly is that if someone really doesn't like you, that is love. And you should stick to them like glue. That's what he knows.

[46:11]

There are a lot of people running around the world who have disadvantageous implicit knowledge. There are some people who have advantageous implicit knowledge, but regardless, it's hard to get it out of them in an explicit form. So, Michel de Montaigne said, we can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom. And that's what he meant, is that explicit memory or explicit information is easily transferable. You can write it to somebody, you can tell them, you can text them. But implicit memory that's in someone's head, they know it, but it's not easy to get it out in a form that's usable by anybody else. Now, there really is a reason why the brain records information in this particular way, because it doesn't seem that advantageous to do it. But there's a good reason, and I'll show you what that reason is. If you look at something that retains a record, say like a painting, and you look at how the information is stored in a painting, you get very close to it, you would see that the information is stored in these tiny little dots of pigment that are unchanging, say, that are on the canvas.

[47:17]

If you look in a book and say, well, how does a book store information? You can find the information in these lines on a page that don't change. In order for information to be stored and persist, there has to be a record of it. Something physical has to be made that endures. And that's a bit of a problem for the brain because the brain has only neurons to remember with. And neurons fire a lot. So if we were looking at the brain and say this is a population of neurons, we would see them firing willy-nilly. Some are going off, some are not going off. It's not obvious how you're going to get a memory mechanism out of this, how you're going to get something, a record that is created and endures, and that can be accessed later or called up. And in 1949, a Canadian psychologist proposed a mechanism for how neurons, even though they fire all the time, how they could store information. And he proposed this, that if two neurons are simultaneously firing and they're connected at all, that the connection strength between them should be increased substantially, and that this strengthened connection trace, that this would be the thing that persists, the concrete

[48:30]

thing that could be likened to a pixel in a painting or to a line on a page, that this would persist. Even after the neuron's not firing anymore, this thing would stick around and remain. And if you look in the brain, that's actually true. So if we were to look at that same pattern of activation that we saw, every time a couple of neurons fire together, the connection strength between them... is going to get laid down stronger and stronger. And you can see that as firing patterns kind of flow through the brain or just flicker across it, we're going to be left with different underlying increases in connection strength, depending on what kind of activation has been present. This kind of memory has some advantages and some disadvantages. One of the advantages is that it generalizes very well. So that in this particular study, It's possible to create artificial learning computer programs that learn according to this mechanism that model the brain. They're sometimes called artificial neural networks. And physicians at the University of California, San Diego designed a network to analyze people presenting to the emergency room with symptoms of a heart attack, chest pain, shortness of breath, so forth.

[49:42]

A lot of people presenting to the emergency room with these symptoms are having a heart attack and they should be hospitalized. But then a lot of them are not having a heart attack. They're having indigestion or they ate a burrito or something like that and they should be sent home. And so emergency room physicians have to decide many times a day who's having a heart attack, who's not. Who should be sent home with an Alka-Seltzer and who should be admitted. If you make the wrong call too often, then it's not so good. This particular computer program was given data from 350 patients who presented to the emergency room at UCSD complaining of chest pain. Then the program was told for sure who did and didn't have a heart attack. Then on the next 350 patients who came in, they gave the computer program the data and they asked it, all right, who had a heart attack and who didn't. Physicians are about 85% accurate in making this determination. This program, after its exposure to 350 patients, was 98% accurate. And what this demonstrates is that it is not necessary to know anything about cardiac physiology in order to accurately predict if somebody's having a heart attack or not.

[50:46]

No comprehension is needed, actually, just the right kind of pattern recognition. And really good physicians have very good pattern recognition. But what this suggests is that even some of our best physicians may know too much for their own good, say. Something gets in the way of their pattern recognition training. So if we imagine this is a network of neurons that are all interconnected, I'll show you the most common thing that happens that leads to what we'd call a habit of the mind, say, a piece of learning that takes place beneath your conscious awareness that influences what you can see and how you can act in the world regardless of how you want to act. So here are these neurons. They're all interconnected. Suppose you show them a stimulus, say, like the letter H. And we see some neurons will fire. Lots won't. And then the ones that are connected, that are firing simultaneously and are connected, we ought to increase their connection strength in accordance with the Hebb rule. And then after the neuronal firing is gone, the increased connection strength remains as the persistent part of the memory trace.

[51:52]

Any piece of information is represented over... tens of thousands or millions of different synaptic connections. So the information is widely distributed. It's scattered in tiny little bits all over the brain. And if we show a fragment, say of an H, to a person who's seen one, then we get a couple of neurons firing. And because they're all wired together, the ones that have been activated can activate the ones who have not been activated. And now these neurons have recreated the original pattern of firing. And so what's present in your mind is the stimulus that was represented by the original pattern of firing. This is how memory recall happens, say. If I say, what's that movie with Bruce Willis, and he's in the high-rise building, and the people have been taken hostage, activating certain neurons in your brain, and then if all of them fire together, then you come back with the answer, which would be what, Marcia? Oh, come on.

[52:53]

You have to see more Bruce Willis movies. The... Somebody else, what's the answer? Die Hard, yeah. But I told you very little about that movie for you to be able to retrieve the name of it, and that's how I did it. It was just by causing one or two units in this chain to fire, and then it causes the rest of the chain to fire. So far, so good. But the plot thickens if we show, say, a second similar stimulus. It's similar, but it's not identical to the original one. It'll cause a similar pattern of activation, but not an identical one. Those connection strengths, will be enhanced, and then the activation fades, and they leave behind little connection strength signatures. If we do it a couple more times, what we'll find is that there's a particular group of neurons that are linked together by very strong connection strengths. And if you think about it, you must conclude that what these neurons have in common is that they were all firing all four times.

[53:55]

And therefore, what they must encode for is what the four things have in common. Simply by showing your brain a series of things that are closely similar but not the same, your brain strongly encodes not a separate memory of each one, but it most strongly encodes a memory for the common denominator that those things have in common or the summary or the central trend. So, say, a bar outline of the letter H. This, once it's instilled by repeated training, this is called an attractor pattern, and these neurons are called attractor neurons. And you'll see why here. Once we've instilled the attractor, say, if we present this ambiguous figure after the attractor has been entrained, then we'll fire off some neurons. Some of them are bound to be in this attractor pattern because this is kind of like an H. Once some of the attractor neurons are firing... then the attractor springs to a very high level of activation. And then mostly what's represented in the brain is this, the summary figure, and not the original stimulus.

[55:00]

And that's why people, for instance, can read handwriting, where none of the letters really look very much like what they're supposed to look like. They just look kind of like what they're supposed to look like. But your brain has extremely strong attractors for... English letters saying what they look like so that you can read handwriting even though the stimulus varies a lot from what it actually is. The tough part is that what you wind up seeing is not what was presented, but the nearest attractor in your brain to what was presented so that your brain presents to you a simplified version of reality that has been condensed, kind of like Reader's Digest condensed books, and all the complex parts have been taken out. So if you look at this, most people think, well, this is a relatively unambiguous figure. But these two things are not actually legitimate English letters, even though the context makes them appear as though they are.

[56:01]

And that's, again, because of strong attractor activation that removes a lot of the ambiguity from the stimulus. We often think that the real world presents itself to our senses and then... That's what we experience is just the real world. But the truth is that there are these attractor basins that are created by repetitive learning experiences. And that if something falls kind of within the basin of the attractor, then it gets altered. And what comes out the other end is an experience of the attractor itself, not something that looked just a little bit like it. Does that make sense? So if you look at this, most people are pretty confident of what it says, which would be what? Yeah, it looks a lot like it says that. Because I made it myself, I can tell you that what it actually says is this, which is much harder to say.

[57:04]

And it's even harder to get your mind to imagine that that's what it is. for the same reason, that if I fire off even a couple of neurons that suggest that there might be an English word lurking here somewhere, the attractor immediately springs to a very high level of activation. It activates all the rest of the members of the team, and what springs out very strongly is not the original stimulus, which is ambiguous, but... the attractor stimulus, which is unambiguous. And so as we go through daily life, our brain is constantly sifting the world, translating things into simpler versions of them, and in particular, translating them into versions of things that we have seen a lot in the past. So it's like your brain has these whirlpools in it, say, and a piece of information could come in and then get sucked in and turned into something else. So this is that H stimulus, for instance.

[58:04]

And we throw it in at the top of the whirlpool or the attractor. Then after rolling around a bunch inside like a washing machine, it comes out in this unambiguous form. And that's one of the reasons why it's very hard to go through your day and not see principally exactly what you have seen before many times. So that neural systems that learn, of course, not all neural systems learn. Reptiles have neurons, but they don't learn. So neural systems that learn have to distill repeated exposure to things into their essences. The good news is this is a big time saver. You don't have to pore over every stimulus trying to make sense of it. The bad news is that there's an inevitable distortion of reality that's inside your own brain that you have no insight into and that you can't get out of your awareness. strong attractors that you already have embedded in your brain can easily overwhelm the sensory data that's coming in, turn it into something else before you even get a chance to see it. Because of this, human beings are inherently prejudicial in the sense that they inherently prejudge information according to what they have seen before.

[59:09]

These attractors, as we'll see in a minute, are also incredibly resistant to change. So whatever you've seen most in the past... That's what you'll see most in the future. And that's one of the difficulties of life as a neural being is that whenever you think, well, that's just exactly what I've seen in the past, you should be extremely suspicious. And the more you think it's like what you've seen in the past, the more suspicious you should be. But that's the last thing your brain tells you. Your brain, in fact, tells you, don't be suspicious of this at all. It's just like what you've seen in the past. Also, you do have a memory that works forwards and backwards because the implicit memory system predicts what you can see. Once it's learned, it's very difficult to see outside of it, to see things that are novel or new, because things that are novel but a little bit like something you've seen before will just get sucked into an attractor and be presented to you as the same old thing that you've seen before. Again, a vivid illustration of the attractor principle.

[60:22]

If we really interpreted reality in a straightforward way, this should be unintelligible. But it's easily intelligible because we don't. So Bertrand Russell remarked, everywhere, every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer's day. Now, this is a study which demonstrates one of the great difficulties of this whole attractor business, a study which is actually entitled, Easier Done Than Undone. And in this study, they imagined two different fictional groups. They weren't actually the Sneetches and the Lorax, but I just made them like that. And they told people in one part of the study, well, just imagine, say, that one of the groups is very good. and does nice things all the time. And imagine that the other group is not very nice and does mean things all the time.

[61:25]

Just imagine that that's so. Later, when you test people, either on their implicit or their explicit learning, the experimenters found that people who just imagined this was so learned it both implicitly and explicitly. In another group, people weren't told what to expect of the people. of the two different races. They were simply told stories in which, say, this group was, in fact, doing nice things all the time, like giving people money or giving money away from charity to charity. The other group was shown doing things that were not so nice all the time. Then when people are asked, well, either explicitly or implicitly, who's nice and who's not, Once again, either through imagining or having an experience of it, people learn who's nice and who's not. In this experiment, they then tried to undo this learning experience by having the people imagine that it wasn't so.

[62:29]

And so they went back to some of the people who imagined and said, well, we made a mistake. It actually wasn't this group that was nice all the time. It was the other group. So imagine that instead. And they went to the people who had seen the actual experiences of the two groups and presented different stories in which this group did things that were not so nice and this group did things that were very nice. And in both cases, they found that regardless of the mechanism of the retraining, it was extremely difficult to change people's initial learning. Once this implicit learning has been acquired, it's much easier done. than undone, which is tough for us as neuro beings if we want to learn something new. So that's all I'm going to say for now. And then I think Marcia and I are just going to give you a little heads up about the workshop tomorrow that we're going to do that hopefully is going to touch on some more aspects of the emotional part of the limbic brain and the attachment-oriented part of the limbic brain.

[63:32]

So Marcia's here to tell you all about that. And then we'll take some questions after that. Well, I would think this gets a little... This could be depressing when you start to see how much just this last part, how do we undo some of these things we've learned? So is there any hope? No, there's no hope, fortunately. That's the message of science. As Nietzsche said, there's infinite hope, but not for us. Right. I'm just kidding, of course. Yeah, no, there is hope. I think... The tough part is that it's a lot more work than you think off the top of your head. And sorting through reality and trying to piece together the bits of it that are real and the bits of it that your brain invented, either from the present or the past, is tough. So mindfulness practice would help a little bit. I guess you'd have to fill me in on what that is. Very precise, paying attention for a long period of time over and over.

[64:37]

Absolutely. I think the more you have in mind just how tricky reality is and just how slippery an organ your brain is in terms of processing it, the better off you'd be. Yeah. So there's some hope, but it's not a lot of hope. Well... Or it's a lot of hope, but it's in little teeny pieces. No. It's hope, but with work. That's the thing. Okay. It's not an easy hope. It's not like Tony Robbins, like, oh, you're going to be rich tomorrow and famous kind of hope. Was it going to be any fun? It was going to be a lot of fun. But I think the fun, the thing is, reality really is a prize, but it only comes to people who seek it very arduously. And I think that makes sense. I mean, if you want anything in life, it's a hard work. That's the way it should be, I think. Well, I think that's where you agree. Yeah, I do. I do. Because I think the fun is going to be, and what we want to inspire is that for people to be experimenting and starting to really question how it is they know what they know or how they think they know what they know.

[65:40]

And to really give some tools or maybe some different lenses about how you can do that. And to go out and feel like you're much more interested in that kind of inquiry. So I think we could do a couple little things like that. Oh, yeah. A lot. I think we could do a lot. Okay. So now I'm going to give you back. Go ahead. You're such a pessimist, you know. I had no idea you were such a pessimist. Well, I don't want to get everybody's expectations up too high. I want them nice and low so that we can... And so tomorrow also we'll be talking a little bit in more detail about emotions, particularly in how they work, how people recognize...

[66:23]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.82