Hey Vsauce, I'm Jake and I've been playing a lot of A Link Between Worlds which reminded
me of the fact that the original Legend of Zelda was the first console game that allowed
you to save your progress because of an internal memory chip in the cartridge.
That got me thinking about how we create and store memories and if there is a way to save
them forever, to be able to revisit them and replay them like in a video game.
Could We Save in Real Life?
The easiest way to capture a memory is by taking a photo.
It brings you back to that moment in time, lets you relive it in your mind.
But images can be manipulated and adjusted to change our recollection of it or in some
cases, to change history.
Nikolai Yezhov was the head of the NKVD, a law enforcement agency during the Soviet Union.
After falling out of favor with Joseph Stalin he was secretly executed, his ashes were dumped
in a mass grave and Stalin had him airbrushed out of photographs, not only removing any
association but erasing him from history.
Photo manipulation has also been used for much more subtle changes.
Tobacco Bowlderization, it's when a government agency or publisher removes any sign of tobacco
use from photos or videos.
Old copies of the book Goodnight Moon show illustrator Clement Hurd holding a cigarette,
but new editions have removed it.
Or if you were to buy an Abbey Road poster in the United States, you might notice that
Paul McCartney is missing a cigarette.
I tweeted recently about how the guns in ET were changed to walkie-talkies for the 20th
Anniversary Release.
And that is nothing new for movies to digitally change scenes, to adjust what we remembered.
How long until the people who remembered that Han Solo shot first in Star Wars are gone,
leaving everyone to think that Greedo shot first.
An easy way to keep a memory alive is by doing exactly that, staying alive.
Just because your body dies doesn't mean your mind has to.
In 1970 Doctor Robert White took the severed head of a monkey and transplanted it on to
another monkey's headless body.
It was able to smell, see, hear, taste and eat but was completely paralyzed from the
neck down since they were unable to attach the monkey's spinal cord.
It survived for a few days before dying.
More recently Dr. Sergio Canavero came up with a plan to do the first human head transplant
complete with reconnected spine...opening the door to being able to put your head onto
a new body...for a proposed $13 million.
But then there is the problem of aging.
Our minds would grow older, and as our memories deteriorate we would need a way to record
those memories.
Using an MRI, scientists were able to capture the visual activity in the brain and reinterpret
it as video.
The video at the top was what the subject was being shown and the three below it in
green are the reconstructions.
The researchers used 5,000 hours of random videos from YouTube to build a reference library
to try and reconstruct what the brain was seeing to what was actually being shown.
And the idea of building a reference library so that the computer could visually represent
what was happening in our minds, mimics how we reconstruct our own memories.
As the director David Lynch once said, "we only dream of images we already have inside
of us."
Similar to pareidolia, where we see faces or forms in things that aren't.
Like this face on Mars.
Or this eggplant.
There is even a sub-reddit dedicated to pareidolia.
It's easy to think of our memory like video files, something that we access when we need
it and remember it exactly how it was.
But our memories are a reconstruction, not a record.
In essence, every memory you have is a memory of a memory.
The more times you play that memory, the more little changes can occur.
A great example of this is Patrick Liddell's YouTube video where he uploaded, downloaded
and then re-uploaded the same video 1000 times.
By the end, it becomes something completely unrecognizable.
And to a degree that is what happens within our own minds.
When these gaps occur, we fill them in with the images we already have.
We even construct memories that never occurred.
When it comes to implanting memories, kind of like Total Recall, there is Doctor Elizabeth
Loftus who, in her book The Myth of Repressed Memory, talks about an experiment she conducted
where subjects were given 4 descriptions of events by a family member that had happened
in their lives.
One of the stories was always about the subject being lost in a mall when they were younger
and that story was always false.
But when presented with this fake story, over 25% of the subjects remembered it happening.
Some in such detail that they were able to recall sights, sounds and people that weren't
even in the description they had read - they had created new details.
Once that memory is implanted in us, we believe it.
It becomes infallible in our mind.
The Door Study is a fantastic example of how we miss things even if they are right in front
of us.
The person asking for directions is replaced by someone completely different and the person
helping doesn't even realize.
If we can't even trust our own memories, then what can we use to accurately record our experiences
and save our memories?
In the great book "Elephants on Acid and other Bizarre Experiments" author Alex Boese talks
about an experiment conducted that had fiber electrodes inserted into the vision-processing
center of a cat's brain.
The cats were sat in front of a TV screen and software was able to decode the recorded
information, turning it back into an image that closely resembled what the cat was watching.
And while attaching electrodes to your brain is a little extreme compared to something
like Google Glass which can also record what your eye sees in a sense, there is still one
problem: if we watch a recording of exactly what happened, we still have to use our memories
of those events to recreate how it smelled, how it felt, what it was like.
Then there is the Assassin's Creed idea of passing down memories through DNA.
MatPat made a great Game Theory episode on this topic where he mentions how scientists
have been able to save data, like Martin Luther King Jr's I have a dream speech, in the form
of DNA.
But when it comes to our memories, we might not be able to save them in real life the
way you can in a video game, we might not remember clearly what we wanted to do in the
first place but that is what makes us who we are.
Every experience we have, every memory, is unique to us.
Even if it was seen by multiple people, our view of it, the way that we play it back in
our head again and again is ours...even if we might have overlooked a few details.
In 24 seconds when this video ends, if you were immediately asked to describe me, would
you mention that during this episode my shirt changed colors, or that at the start of the
video I had two earrings, an eyebrow piercing and now have none?
And as always, thanks for watching.