JL: As a child I worked in my father’s meat market and the way they-the cows were What is a memory? Like where do you find a memory, where do you go to find it? There’s a scientist we met, Joe Ledoux, works at NYU, who started looking when he was very young, in the most obvious place This is Radiolab and later in the show by the way, a truly unbelievable story of amnesia. RK: OK, well we’ll see all that in the next hour coming up XX: Sometimes things get sharpened, some things leveled XX: We take bits and pieces of experience XX: Everyone is constantly their own artist JA: Maybe it’s more like painting or sculpture XX: On a literal level it’s an act of creation Maybe it’s not as mundane as those metaphors would suggest. JA: Well, maybe, and this is what we’re gonna look at this hour. RK: Well, if neither of those metaphors are an apt description of memory, then what-how should we think about memory? SFX: Malfunction, system is shutting down Memory is not an inert stack of zeros and ones JA: But again, if you ask scientists about this analogy, they’ll tell you XX: The way you put it in, the way you take it out, it’s all the same JA: Then later, when you wanna go back to it, you just find the right file, call it right up and there it is XX: Digital information is stored in zeros and ones
#Little do you know i'm still haunted by the memories code#
JA: Somehow all that experience gets stored in your head, in some kind of neural code JA: Could I put all the images I’ve ever seen in my life, could it go onto this hard drive? JA: How big is big these days for a hard drive? JA: Like your brain is basically a biological disc drive I think of memory as more like a, more like a hard drive JA: Well maybe that’s because your metaphor is a little outdated, frankly.
XX: The filing cabinet analogy is completely wrong. However, when we asked scientists about this analogy they pretty much all said RK: Sure sometimes you forget where you filed it
RK: And later when you wanna remember something you flip back through the files, there’s the one RK: I’m looking for a fairly large capacity RK: So we’re interested in this filing cabinet RK: I think most people think about memory kind of like XX: Yeah please you want to see the furniture JA: And today, our program is about memory