The Science of Memory with Steve Ramirez

**Steve Ramirez** (0:01)
Welcome to The New Books Network.

**Caleb Zakarin** (0:05)
I'm Caleb Zakarin, and you're listening to The Truth About Bullshit on The New Books Network. Today, I'm speaking with neuroscientist Steve Ramirez about bullshit and memory. Steve is an associate professor at Boston University, where he runs a lab dedicated to uncovering the mysteries of memory. How memory works, and importantly, how it doesn't, are extremely crucial questions for understanding everything, from the validity of eyewitness testimony, to understanding how people overcome traumatic experiences.
Well, the science on memory is far from settled. Researchers like Steve are pushing the frontiers of the field forward to better understand how memories are created, stored, and altered.
If we are able to better understand how memory works, we'll be better able to understand ourselves. To help us avoid the pitfalls of the bullshit that surrounds The Science of Memory, I'm pleased today to get the chance to speak with Steve Ramirez. Steve, thanks for joining me today on The Truth About Bullshit.

**Steve Ramirez** (0:56)
Absolutely. Awesome to be here.

**Caleb Zakarin** (0:58)
It's so great to get the chance to speak with you again. Of course, several months ago, we spoke about your book. Then after that, we ended up doing an event with Princeton University Press and New York Philosophy Club, where we actually did an event based on memory. You came and you spoke to over 175 participants, and we had them all engage in a conversation about memory, about the philosophy of memory. What is memory? How do they experience it? What do they think memory is? That was a really interesting and exciting event, so I'm glad that we get the chance to talk again and to move a bit further in our discussion because I think we've already gone quite deep on memory. But of course, there's always more to go because memory is one of those topics where the more you unravel it, the more you really see how crucial it is to understanding everything.
So Steve, I was wondering if you could just maybe begin by talking a little bit about your research for memory for those who didn't hear our earlier conversation and weren't able to attend the event that we did.

**Steve Ramirez** (1:56)
Definitely. So my lab in particular studies how the brain makes memories possible. Like how do we learn things and how do we remember things?
In particular, we study this in mice who we think are biological mirrors of our own systems in the brain that are involved in memory.
What we do is we look at their cellular activity in their brain, and we try to find the exact brain cells that hold on to individual memories so that we can track those cells and therefore track those memories to see how they evolve over time, how they change when we recall them, how they change when you recall them and experience something else at the same time and so on. The other half of the lab is dedicated to not just tracking cells that hold on to memories and making videos of them, but manipulating them and turning these cells on and off by either stimulating them artificially or toggling their activity down artificially to see what that tells us about the brain and behavior. Because we can do things like artificially activate a positive memory in a rodent model of say, depression to alleviate some symptoms associated with depression or turn down the negative oomph associated with an emotional experience to see if we can treat symptoms associated with PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder. So half of the lab is what does memory look like in the brain? What are all of the cells that are involved? What kind of symphonic patterns are involved in producing memory? Then the other half is can we now go in and actually start playing the piano with the brain to start producing different kinds of music and activating or inactivating memories with the overarching goal of restoring health and well-being to the organism. That's in a nutshell what the lab does.

**Caleb Zakarin** (3:51)
Memory is one of these topics that when you ask someone what they think memory is or how it works, you'll get a different answer from most people. Obviously, people in your lab are probably going to give similar answers because they've studied it. But I'm curious at the event what you encountered as some of the most common misconceptions that people had about how memory works. Was there anything surprising that you heard?

**Steve Ramirez** (4:14)
When I was a sophomore in college, I was interested in joining a lab to see what research was all about.
One of the labs that I joined happened to be studying memory.