Does this work? You have to talk right into it to get it to work. Okay. I've been waiting to ask you this question for a long time ever since I read your book. In fact, I tried to send you an email, but you probably didn't have time to answer it. I don't understand where the the issues of spirituality fit into this framework that you've laid out. Because there's all, as people here in the Zen Center can attest to, there's a lot of transformation that occurs with awareness and enlightenment and nirvana, all those kinds of things. And in fact, some believe that... Those kinds of things can happen instantaneously rather than through the hard work that you're talking about.

[01:01]

Others think you have to do the hard work. So I wondered if you would comment on that. Sure. It's good that you don't understand where spirituality fits in because I haven't fitted in at all. So if you understood from this, it wouldn't be from me and your brain would just be adding it right in. So it's good because I haven't said. That's the brain... Systems around spirituality and around religious sentiment and spiritual feelings are just being elucidated really in the last few years. It's kind of a hot topic. There may be some future delivery about that, but it's really hard to say. In other words, it's an interesting area. There's some people doing research on it. I didn't write about it in the book and I haven't written about it here, mostly because I myself don't know. It's always good for me not to write about things I know nothing about. That's a good rule of thumb. In terms of enlightenment and things like that, I'd be surprised if enlightenment came without hard work.

[02:11]

That would surprise me. One of the characteristics of realization that people have is that the implicit memory system learns something and it knows it to itself because it evolved long before consciousness did. Consciousness can get wind of it and then it gets very excited and feels that it has learned something just like that. which in a sense it did, but really the learning process has been going on for a long time. If you look, for instance, at an experiment in which kids are given arithmetic problems of this format, say 54 plus 17 minus 17 equals... What you find is that universally for school-aged children, their solution time is greater than 60 seconds because they add the first two numbers and then they subtract the second number and then they get the answer. And you give them, say, 63 plus 9 minus 9. 74 plus 73 minus 73. You do that over and over.

[03:12]

Eventually what you see is an abrupt transition and their solution time goes to under 10 seconds. If you ask the child at that time, gee, I noticed you did that very quickly, what did you learn? The kids say nothing, actually, because they don't know what it is they have learned. But their implicit memory system has acquired the rule, which is that you just write down the first number. You don't actually have to add up anything. Several trials later, the kids say, oh, I understand what this is about. You just write down the first number, although they were already doing it beforehand, so that their kind of aha realization clearly was a product of hard work by some brain part. It wasn't the same brain part that later claims credit for it. So the brain part that says, oh, I just thought of this, is kind of like you know, the obnoxious fellow in class or something that claims credit for everybody else's hard work. That doesn't mean that no hard work went into the learning process. It just means that the announcer gets to feel like no hard work went into the learning process.

[04:16]

So there are insight moments and aha moments, but a lot of them, I think, come after hard work. If there are insight that just happens without any hard work, I'd like to sign up for that. But... It hasn't been present in my life. I don't know, maybe it's in other people's lives. Okay, I have lots of other questions. Well, I wanted to ask you if you could say more about love because that's the title of your book and I think a lot of us came here this evening expecting to hear more about love and so could you say a little about how all this stuff about memory relates to love? Yeah, and actually we'll talk about substantially tomorrow in the workshop. But where love intersects with this memory material is that people learn the rules of love early in life before they have a chance to have any insight into them. And they learn them implicitly, as George Costanza did, when he learned that when someone really loathes you, that's love.

[05:20]

That's the real thing. There are a lot of people who learn implicit rules of love like that, say that every time someone gets very close to you, they want to take over your identity and suffocate it. Or every time someone gets mad at you, you're in danger of being killed. Or different things like that. Depending on the family you grew up in, it's quite possible to learn idiosyncratic lessons about love that are not true in the general world of people, but were very true in your learning experience. And one of the great difficulties that presents is that when people go out into the world and they engage in loving or relationships, they see primarily what they have seen before in the past, they have almost no ability to know that that's true. And so life is not one thing after another, but it's the same thing over and over. And that's one of the biggest difficulties that this kind of learning material presents for romantic life, is how do people get out, if they need to get out, of these vortices or attractors of learned information?

[06:27]

And can you say a little quickly about how we break... out of those vortices. Well, I'll tell you how, which is there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is it can be done. The bad news is it cannot be done very simply, and it never, as far as I can make out, with rare exception, can be done by yourself. that by definition you need somebody who can see outside of the thing that you can't see outside of. So that, for instance, say one of the patients I saw early in my career, the first patient that I understood why someone should pay money for psychotherapy, was a person who actually had a mother who's very intrusive would burst into her when she was on the toilet going to the bathroom. The mother would burst into the room because she couldn't stand that the door was shut. She was extremely intrusive. And what this person learned was that every time someone gets a little bit close, they want to take over your whole identity, and they want to be you, essentially. So she would go on a date, and then she would tell me, well, you know, the guy called me the next day, and so I'm sure he just wants to take over my identity.

[07:33]

Yeah. And I would think, well, what are you talking about? He's called to the next day. That's what people do. They just want to take over your identity. But she was convinced that that was the case. And I could tell, see eventually, that she could not distinguish between ordinary behavior and the people who wanted to take over her identity. And the world has both in it. But all of them in her mind went into one giant attractor. And so the... I had to retrain her mind so that I had to be the guy standing next to the chicken sexers in Japan saying yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. I said, just bring me experiences. I will tell you if the person is trying to usurp your identity or not. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. And she said, well, I don't understand how this is supposed to help me. And I said, yeah, I know you don't understand. But... eventually, if we do this enough, you will learn this distinction that I know because I can tell the difference and you can't tell the difference. So that if you have, you need access, I think, to someone who can retrain you from a perspective outside of the attractor that you're in, that is able to make distinctions that you can't.

[08:40]

Somehow you need to be next to a person who says, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, that's relevant to your attractor. Yeah, let me just say quickly, that's what's happening when we're doing things like Zen meditation or interacting with a spiritual teacher. It certainly can, under ideal circumstances, yeah, sure. Definitely. That's a terrific question, yeah. What is the relationship between implicit memory and intuition? Are those the same thing? They are the same thing, yeah. You know, intuition gets a bad rap in Western culture, and it's almost synonymous with something that's mythical, it doesn't really exist, or you shouldn't trust because it's a bunch of nonsense, which is unfortunate, because it's clear from the brain science standpoint that there is a brain system which is dedicated to doing nothing but providing you with intuition. It doesn't mean it's flawless, but... It is a system, and that's what it does, is it provides you, it analyzes the world, it examines co-occurrences and correlations, it extracts underlying patterns, and then it tells you, do this, don't do this, move in this direction, don't move in this direction.

[09:56]

People who have trouble in life, say in the sense that we were talking about just a minute ago, have faulty intuitions on the basis of faulty training. Not all intuitions are faulty, though. Plenty of them are correct. And it's a problem, I think, in America more than some other places, that people think that only rationality or argument has any evidentiary weight or should have any evidentiary weight in... guiding their behavior, so that if they don't have a good reason to do something, they think they shouldn't do it or it's nonsensical. But that's not true. People who use their intuition well can get along without very many reasons as long as their intuitions are good, like the people in the card experiment who don't figure it out because they're not smart enough, but they have the correct intuition and they can use it. So it's clear from science that there's a brain system, just like there's revision or language, there's a brain system for intuition, and that's what it does. So we should pay some attention to it. Doesn't mean we have to believe it without any critical examination or without hesitation, but we should at least pay attention to it.

[10:58]

Yvette? I wondered if you could say anything about pattern recognition in recovering from addictions. About what was that? I wondered if you could say anything about pattern recognition in overcoming addictions and how memory and attachment play into overcoming denial. Did you say overcoming addiction? Overcoming denial specifically, but the pattern recognition aspect. Tell me more about what you mean, because I'm still not getting the gist of it. Well, the early pattern in addiction of not being able to recognize that there is a pattern of not being able to control the behavior is very common. And there seems to almost be a lack of memory that the last time the addict tried to control the behavior, it failed. And there seems to be some kind of development of memory over time.

[12:04]

An ability to recognize patterns that not everyone is able to develop. Yes, that's true. That probably relies on at least one brain area that's outside of the ones that we've been talking about. The recognition of self occurs in a right frontal area. And some people who have addiction problems have relative hypofunction of this right frontal area in addition to other brain areas. But it's possible for people who underuse this area to engage in behaviors repetitively without associating themselves with the situation or with the outcome. So that it's easy for them to say, it wasn't me, it was me. X environmental factor. It was my friend, or it was a Thursday, or it was laundry day, or it was the milk I spilled on the floor, and that's why I did it.

[13:04]

And one of the things that happens in some successful interventions is that somebody else holds the personal memory of that. There's somebody else accountable saying, well, actually, this was you, and this was you, and this was you, and this was you. And eventually, a helping person can serve kind of as the as the off-site storage for that information, and then gradually feed it back into the system repetitively so that that area gets used and the information gets in further. There are people, for instance, say people who have a frank lesion of that area who never see themselves as the cause of a situation or a problem or anything else, which is an interesting neurologic finding. But I think that's the area that you're talking about. And it can be an extremely useful function for either a group or an institution or a person to hold the off-site storage of that information that, yes, this was you who did this, and it was you who did this, and it was you who did this, and feed it back until that gets incorporated into the person's system.

[14:08]

Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, sure. This is great. It's very daunting. A lot of people here. Two quick things, one experiential in my life and then a question. But I spent some time last year at a yoga center, and we talked about this particular issue. In the yoga tradition, it's the vrittis, the mind waves, the good and the bad. And I always thought vrittis were bad, but it turns out it's either, it's how your mind is working, that eventually will become samskara. That's like a long playing record, the grooves. That's the habits that we grow. And that really came to me, seeing that brain wave. those are the habits, those are the samskara that can be built up over time. And this is what I love about the Zen practice, is that you just come to sit, you see those habits, and you get to ride like that. be present with them, and then let them go. So it's really an interesting combination. My question, though, is about another situation in my life around clutter issues. And I've actually gone down to UCLA to work with them a little bit about this.

[15:10]

The front of the brain, it turns out, if it's not functioning properly, it's not making good executive decisions. Supposedly, that's what they're doing there. And it occurred to me a little bit with your talk about the same problem. You'd look at it... something, a piece of paper, you just can't get rid of it, we're not really sure where we are in the past, present, or future with this item. So we decide not to make any decision about it, and it just sits there. So I'm just curious in your clients and so forth. Yes, you're right. Dealing with clutter center is frontal, and it's primarily dopaminergic. And that's why dopamine promoters like Ritalin or Adderall can help people out a lot with that particular situation. One of the difficult things about paper is that it's devoid of stimulus value. So that if you have a rattlesnake sitting in front of you, it has a very... pronounced stimulus value, or if there's a wolf leaping for your throat, there's a lot of stimulus value. And your brain can say, well, I know what to do with that.

[16:12]

But if you look at a piece of paper that's featureless, there's nothing threatening or interesting or dangerous or doesn't taste good or doesn't sound good. It almost doesn't exist in terms that mean very much to your brain. And if you have enough dopamine, you can manually make it mean something. And you can say, this is trash. This should be safe. If you don't have enough dopamine, you can't manually make anything out of it, and you just go, like that. And it's a strongly dopaminergic function. Yeah, and you know, there are coaches now that will help with this, and they'll come to your home, and you have to sit there and really feel all the emotions about, what if I need this six years from now? You know, there's that. Seriously, as a journalist, an old ex-journalist, you know, I'm not a big drug fan, so there are other ways to deal with it. Yes, there are. Good question. I just have a question about birth anoxia. What about anoxic encephalopathy in an adult who has a brain injury in adulthood?

[17:16]

Does it also affect the hippocampus? It certainly can. If it's pure anoxia, in other words, a stroke... is when an artery that feeds a portion of brain tissue gets occluded, and then the cells don't get any oxygen because of the occlusion. If it's just anoxy, just suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere, that hippocampal area that's between the middle and posterior cerebral arteries is poorly fed, and it goes first. So if adults have a pure anoxic brain injury, they certainly can lose the hippocampus bilaterally. And does that mean that the... Like at birth anoxia, of course, there isn't the life experiences. But in an adult who has had previous life experiences, does that in any way help reform anything in the hippocampal area? No. What happens for those people, and there are quite a lot of them actually, and it's somewhat unnerving to speak to them if you ever meet them, is that they have memory for everything right up until the injury and no memory since then.

[18:20]

so that they remember their address at that time, their phone number, who was president at that time. If you say to them, who's president? They say, Ronald Reagan. And so they never learn anything new, but they have intact memory up until the point where they had the injury. Okay, so what I guess I'm asking is the learning that they did previous, isn't there some way that that learning that they had already established is going to help them learn? In the present now? They can only learn implicitly. Okay. But they cannot learn explicitly. So that they could not learn, say, the words to a new song. They could never learn that. But they could recite a song that they knew before then. They could develop new skills, for instance. They could learn how to speed read or how to knit, for instance, in one experiment. But the interesting thing is that if you ask them, do you know how to knit, they say no. because they have no memory of it. But if you just put the yarn and the needles in front of them, then they can do it. So they can learn implicitly, but they can't learn explicitly.

[19:23]

Okay, and then the last part of it would be, if somebody is, in fact, showing behavior that you would imagine... that they have explicit memory somewhere working, then could you conclude that the hippocampus was not damaged and that they must have had some oxygen circulating in the brain at the time of the injury? You could be confident that their hippocampi were not totally destroyed. But someone can have partial damage to a hippocampus or partial to both, and they still have an impaired memory function, but they still have some. So you can have partial damage. Okay. All right. Thank you. In the example... Well, maybe we'll just do these three questions and we'll stop because we're getting close to the 9 o'clock wishing hour. So with that in mind, we'll proceed. In the example you had on the screen about words that were spelled as nonsense, my...

[20:34]

question has to do with context because I don't think apparently that it mattered that those words were misspelled as long as the signal words in the context were there and were properly spelled so that the grammatical substructure came through. We were able to infer the sense of the rest of it. I would like you to talk about context and the relationship of context to learning and memory. Actually, all of the words were misspelled. The only words that were not misspelled were words that couldn't be, because they had too few letters. So all of the words had the first and the final letter was intact, but for instance, the word the was not misspelled because it's impossible to do that in that setting. The context is the reactivation of of those subgroups in an attractor, if that makes sense. So if I say, you know, what was that movie with Bruce Willis where he's trapped in the high rise that you saw with me at the Coronet Theater, that's one of those groups that's in that attractor.

[21:47]

The more of those things you fire off, whether they're part of the stimulus or part of the surrounding environment, will increase the likelihood of an attractor settling down on a thing that's meaningful to you. there's no inherent difference between context and any other part of the information, if that makes sense. Not to me, but thanks. Hi. I have a question about language. I'm a teacher, so I'm a little distraught by the whole presentation. I feel like I haven't done anything this week now. Actually, the pressure is off you, because once you realize, people are not going to remember anything you say. Exactly. Pressure's off. Exactly. Yeah. My question is specifically about learning vocabulary. And the research I've understood is that children, after sort of initial language acquisition, as they're in school and they're actually learning vocabulary, a very small percentage of that is explicitly taught, right? A few words per week they can learn. And the vast majority of it is implicit.

[22:50]

My question is then, how is that getting from the implicit learning into the... Because your explanation led me to believe that the language for the most part is in the neocortex, right? So how is it making that transition from being implicitly sort of put in place to becoming something that gets explicit? In brief, Altaya, what happens is that the implicit memory system learns the rule. The conscious brain... can observe what the other part is doing, and it learns from observing what it's doing, that doesn't mean it knows how to do it, but it does observe that it has been done, if that makes sense. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's how it happens, actually. For instance, if you ask somebody, do you know how to tie your shoes? People say yes. If you say to them, all right, tell me, how do you tie your shoes? Tell me right now. No one can say, actually. The only way people can say is by either doing it and describing it or imagining themselves doing it and describing it.

[23:55]

So that conscious part of your brain can observe the part that does and then it acquires knowledge from observing. It's like some guy watching you work and he gets some secondhand knowledge of what it is that you're doing. Thank you. My question is, do you have a sense of how long-term marijuana use comes into play with explicit and implicit memory, how it affects those kinds of memory? That's a good question about how long-term marijuana use affects memory. People have looked long and hard for something really bad that marijuana does to the brain. And... One of the worst things you can say about it is that it makes people... less motivated acutely most people while they take it. So people under the acute influence of marijuana are very apt to sit around on the couch and watch TV or play video games or zone out and not do much of anything.

[24:58]

So there's the so-called amotivational syndrome. While people are intoxicated with marijuana, their memory function is relatively poor as it is, say, if they're intoxicated on anything, alcohol or Valium or anything else. Their memory function is relatively poor as a lot of their cognitive the functions are relatively poor. If people, even long-term users of marijuana, stop using it and you wait until it gets out of their body, then their memory function is fine. So there are cognitive deficits that occur in the setting of intoxication, but there do not appear to be long-term brain damage results, say, as there are for alcohol, that if you abuse alcohol every day for several years, once you stop your memory function is much better, but not as good as it would have been if you had never done it. So marijuana appears to be much more reversible, say, than an intoxicant like alcohol, which is maybe more directly damaging to neurons. So how long would you have to have been an alcoholic, say, to get brain damage then?

[26:03]

Well, no one really knows, but... There is an entity called alcoholic encephalopathy, which essentially is due to the fact that alcohol is somewhat neurotoxic. It kills neurons while it's around. You have a lot of neurons, 100 billion neurons. But if every single day you kill a good 20,000 of them, eventually it catches up with you. So most people, certainly if someone abuses alcohol in large amounts every day for a period of years, it's quite likely that they will lose at least some neuronal function because of that. If someone abuses alcohol every day for decades, it's extremely likely, say. So if someone abuses alcohol every day in large amounts for 30 years, the chance that they'll have an alcohol-induced encephalopathy is pretty good. And you can actually measure their brain shrinkage and neuronal atrophy and death from repeated exposure to the neurotoxic environment. Thank you. You betcha. Should we stop here?

[27:08]

That sounds good. Okay. Here comes Michael again with some more words of wisdom. My words of wisdom is thank you, Tom. There is still room in Tom and Morsha's workshop at Green Gulch. It should show up at 10 o'clock. Or actually, the best thing to do would be to sign up right now as you leave. And I think some of the Buddhist songs, the tapes are available as you come out. And the next in the series is on March 31st is Houston Smith. So be there. Thank you.

[28:00]

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