The Neuroscience of Memory - Eleanor Maguire 

0:00: relevance/importance of memory, types of memory: definitions and origins. 5:00: 1) memory is improved if can be related to past experiences (old experiment) 2) memory is not accurate (live experiment) 13:00 superior autobiographical memory patient 15:00 patient H.M. - hippocampus for autobiographical memory and memory formation 19:00 place cells (discovery + new experiment) 33:00 scene construction 38:00 boundary extension 49:00 questions

The delivery of this lecture was a Rockstar performance, the voice with character, great use of the stage, a set list that kept you interested and hooked.

Her voice is gentle on the ears; her pacing suits people new to this info; she involves the audience with preparation and well-timed repeats; her focus is on sharing the info not so much on making a big impression so she does! I learned about one's memory as related to the hippocampus (spell check: really?) when I was still a blank canvas and am left curious for more since she made it seem attainable...I'm gonna track her down and look for more

Watch our latest Friday Evening Discourse 'The neuroscience of memory' with Eleanor Maguire now up on the Ri Channel and have a go at some of her experiments yourself. #science #video

Thank you Dr. Maguire and RI for another excellent lecture. Very interesting and informative.

Not only a great lecture, but some solid questions! All in all, I enjoyed this video very much, and very consistently, throughout!

This is an excellent set of facts for refuting the still practiced recovered memory therapy.

Took me 6 years to enjoy this lecture!. But still think is up to date!!.

Excellent. Very informative, useful and comprehensible to laymen.

Ms Maguire is so stunning, I almost forgot the subject matter, several times! It was a very intriguing lecture! Thank you, Prof Maguire!

Now I have the memory of the neuroscience of memory in my memory. Oh what a memorable memory!

I would love to see an RI study of the cognition and behavior of Alzheimer patients before, during, and after hearing music. This is being studied by observable behavioral results but it would be valuable to see what's happening deep in their brains which could possibly lead to a treatment for this terrible disease.

Fascinating presentation, thank you so much for making this available!

Just stumbled across this wonderful RU-vid video explaining human memory in thoroughly enjoyable Queen's English and excellent presentation. Thank you RI.

22:22 - Excellent! The virtual tour of London with fMRI of brain activities shown along is very informative for learning about brain.

Well done Dr. Maguire ! very well explained for a lay audience. In a nutshell, the hippocampus acts as a "hub" for co-ordination of input signals from various brain regions to facilitate construction of a "mental landscape" in space & time.

showing an accurate and deep understanding; great perceptive. 💡 Muito obrigado for all the insightful information. 🤝

Fascinating lecture Dr. Maguire. I first heard of HM in a lecture by Larry Squires while a student at UCSD. Subsequently I was a grad student in Joseph Altman’s lab at Purdue. Also your taxi driver study is featured in the Brain section of the Franklin Inst. in Philadelphia. The story reminds me of the title of the Firesign Theater album, “How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?” The hippocampus is the bridge between the past and present, able to recall elements of information about past events given current context to imagine or visualize some novel (future?) setting - fundamentallly, the basis for prediction. In the “super autobiographical” patients, a scene is not broken down into iconic elements - dogs, people, buildings, streets, etc. Instead it must be stored like a jigsaw puzzle stitched together only be temporal cues, and cannot be recalled on the basis of a given person, scenes with dogs, the London Wheel, etc. Such individuals do not decompose the world into “common” elements capable of being rearranged intependently of time of acquisition. I am only half-way through but I am willing to bet they have a deficit in REM sleep and dreaming - which relies on the hippocampus. Kudos!

Interesting talk! I've wondered, given physical determinism, if free will might be found in our ability to visualize different potential (future) realities. I like the idea that memory's main function is enabling our ability to make those visualizations. Memory enables free will!

Fascinating stuff. So, put very simply, it would appear that the primary function of memory, rather than to recall the past, is to help us make sense of the present and anticipate the future...

43:58 I was assuming that the enlarged black and white "noise" image they placed between the two images played a crucial role in this test but apparently it didn't. Would have liked to hear an explanation for the odd choice of that frame.

Excellent information and presentation! Excellent questions and answers!

19:48 ah, that makes perfect sense, that anekdotal or autobiographic memory is so closely linked to the memory of places. That would be why most memory athletes make journeys or memory castles or roman rooms. It is one of the strongest and most flexible ways to bind anekdotes to memory. The next ones in my opinion and experience of memory training would be persons/objects, actions, causes (relational information) and for some people stories. If you have a strong autobiographical memory, using personal touches works a treat as well. And singular or strange things are easier to remember. That´s why I use PECS, making things personal, emotional (or urgent), crazy/peculiar/singular, and specific to attach them to places and autobiographic memory. And I use people and objects for coding systems, which makes it necessary to be very specific. Other people use stories, which is also quite flexible, but that is not my strongsuit, especially under pressure. It seems rats, humans and roombas have more in common than previously thought.

@41:54 I have to contest this methodology. The conclusion might still be true, but it cannot be concluded from the setup of this experiment. The "masking image" had a much smaller object in it, the process of animation or gluing together of subsequent images to create a movement, which is well documented and will start way before 42 ms at around 3ms under normal stress levels, would make a subject record an increase in size, leading to a logical conclusion of a closer object. So this could very well be and is more likely to be a case of priming, context and animation. The same experiment would have to be done with a bigger object in the masking image and if the results are then still conclusive, only then might we consider this to be an effect of background extension. It seems a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, but just not very well isolated in this particular experiment. Also, if the subsequent explanation were true the masking image wouldn´t need to have an object in it at all and that gets me wondering, why there even is an object (green smiley) there. The picture test can have an alternative explanation too. It might be, that being "stuck in the present" made them more attentive and therefore better artists, because what all the regular folk showing background extension missed is analysing the layout or composition of the picture of the four bananas and finding that the bananas touched the border of the picture on both sides, were horizontal and had the concave part up, forming a sort of cup but mostly horizontal bent line and then estimate the angle of the background´s incline, so as to estimate the decrease in apparant size of the stones in order to reproduce the overall effect. 15 seconds is ample time to do this with some training, which I´d argue they have had spontaneously, because of their condition. I had to teach loads of students not to draw what they knew, or thought they saw, but what they actually saw. Which means, you have to step out of your normal view of reality and look at it as if it is already on paper and then just trace it. This method increases drawing quality dramatically within hours and revealed to me that most people, without this training see the world symbolically in stead of actually around 90% of the time. Midieval artist got this training of composition and perspective by painting on a slab of glass, closing one eye and keeping their head really still. We still have pictures of devices to help them do just that. They discovered all kinds of principles like contrapunctive ordonance, layering and "coulissen", that would increase depth-perception of an image. Cues that would help imagining a scene. So, while I do believe background extension is something that exists, this to me isn´t very convincing proof. Maybe this is just because it is "dumbed down" a bit and very much is omited, but this is the Royal Institution and it seems a bit too speculative.

I really Iove these kinds of lectures, but my only problem with Ri is with the sound. Couldn´t you try to pass the audio track into a "S" suppresser. The "ssss" are extremely annoying. Same thing with Tara Shears lecture on antimatter.

My wife has that "all life" memmory. She remembers everything. Say any day she will tell you what she did, who were she was with, wich day of the week it was, what was she wearing, what was the person she was with was wearing, what soup opera was on TV and what happenned on that chapter. And she is the happiest person I've ever seen.

So, the "star trek explanation" is that hippocampus is a sort of a holodeck in your mind, where you can play back and even generate plausible simulations based on limited data.

her voice is so beautiful

Outstanding lecture & exceptionally engaging. Thank you !

On the importance of memory: you couldn´t hear a sound, without your body keeping track of what happened before, since sounds are CHANGES in air pressure, sustained for more than one 850th of second. This is true for more or less all senses, in sight it´s 250th of a second etc etc, so I maintain, that without memory in it´s most primitive form, perception is impossible. We don´t usually think of these processes of involving memory, unless it is in the process of making sense of what you hear or see (categorization), but that is merely shortsightedness.

@58:00 more recent research into the seat of the self did indeed point towards the hippocampus and more core structures of the brain leading into the spine and contests strongly the former placing of in the frontal cortex (with studies of patients who had no frontal cortex but still had a strong sense of self). So this remains an excellent question also since it is a bit of an ethical one. Like the researcher said, we can´t just stick electrodes in humans, but apparantly we can just stick them in rats. Understanding that rats may have a similar sense of self might open up the ethics of that practice again.

Interesting talk on hippocampus by Eleanor Maguire. She is a very good speaker and used case studies and experiments to illustrate concepts.

I find the drawing from memory demo somewhat lacking in that there is much to be said about people's drawing capabilities. By that I don't mean the lacking realism of the photos, I mean that most people will start with the bananas, but most people will also be poor judges of the room the finishes work will take, so in an effort to not extend the borders of the paper, they will tend to make them smaller. This is best seen with people who turned out to actually be somewhat proficient at drawing. They were closer to the right ratio, but they still saved some space on a reflex. Only when you're finished reserving the space for bananas do you realize how much more room is left, and it is only then that you start filling in the surplus room. Had they been given something more easily defined, such as a couple of geometrical bodies with clearly defined positional and size relations, I think the results would have been much more precise, even if said object were placed in similarly textured surroundings. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure this phenomenon could really be fully ascribed to boundary extension as easily as it has been.

As always, a really amazing lecture. Thank you!

If someone with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (on day C) recalls a day (B) when they were recalling a previous day (A) do they recall what they recalled of day A or just the recollection of recollecting day A.

Excellent talk

MEMORY IS WHAT I FORGET WITH !!!

remembering smells is the most extraordinary thing.

Outstanding! Thank you!

I have ADHD and immediately noticed there was no difference in the pictures, and I was rather confident in the fact before she posted the results. I wonder if there is any correlation. I dearly wished I would have drawn the Banana now before finishing the talk!!

I wonder if stimulation or lack of stimulation in early years development impact their mental image construction in later years. I really enjoyed the lecture. Thank you.

It may be that the majority did not fail but were more honest with their response! They said how they see the object on the screen and not what they should have seen. But the reason why the second image seems larger may be the effect of recognition that makes the image perceived more clearly and in more detail.

This was a great lecture. The bananas scene was definitely food for thought, yes I know, I made a funny. Anyway, I personally didn't have a problem remembering that the bananas took up most of the scene. It's not that I'm unable to imagine beyond that, I just remembered what the scene looked like. When comparing sizes of images, my eyes saw the second images as larger but my brain told me that they must be the same size or there would be no point to the demonstration. I think we see the second image bigger because of some kind of auto anticipation. Normally when something in the real world flashes at us, the object is coming toward us. To me it seemed to have something to do with that.

At 34, I can remember up to individual orders for tables of 12 to 16 people and get a 92% accuracy. I continue to exercise this portion of my brain.

I feel bad for the guy in the right bottom corner hoping he gets picked for questions - 20 minutes and she only fielded one question from that side of the room

the experiment at around 12:00 doesn't seem to be about errors in memory at all.. it seemed to be more about perception..the longer one looks at the 2nd image (the image that stays on the screen) the more the 2nd image just looks larger than the 1st.. but if we are only allowed to look at BOTH images for a split second.. they do appear the same size.. we are only given a split second to look at the 1st image.. it's simply not enough time to analyze the image and compare it with the 2nd image.. that seems more of a limitation in our visual perception rather than any kind of memory.. if she were testing memory.. it could only be short-term memory.. specifically what she presents as the "visuospatial sketchpad" memory.. the ability to recall a our visual world.. but for the 1st image.. we have to ask how does the brain encode and decode a visual image? it is entirely possible that an image shown so quickly could be encoded/decoded radially outward.. thus providing the perception that the 1st image is smaller than the 2nd.. and so therefore we have completely normal memories when we are asked what did we PERCEIVE.. and that is the other problem with the experiment.. asking "Are these images larger/smaller/same?" provides different information than asking "Do you perceive these images as larger/smaller/same?" there is nothing wrong with our memories if our own brains "trick" us into believing that the 2nd image is larger than the 1st because we our judgments are simply based on our perception.. we are literally recalling what we have perceived..

This video should be called "A Random Experiments Proving Hippocampuses Function". It's nothing more than that

Excellent presentation! I did draw bananas which took up as much space as in the picture, though! =(

Interesting question about rat place-cells. (1) Even if the place cells were identical in 2 rats (unlikely), it is most unlikely you could record from the “same” one in 2 different rats. (2) Space is relative, so the place-cells presumably fire in a spatial pattern relative to some fixed cue - position of a food reward or visual cue for example. So, what if you have a rat that on 4 successive days shows the same pattern of place cell firing when always fed at some point (e.g. 12:00 on the arena) and then change the reward location to 5:00 for 4 days. Would the place-cell firing re-orient also? (Of course all other possible orientation cues would have to be controlled for or masked).

6:42 has important implications for teaching. I wish more lecturers understood this. You need a christmas tree before you can hang ornaments.

10 yo video with more knowledge of my Desert Storm memory loss than any VA person I've ever met.

The first thing I took note of was the bananas were ripe, horizontal, sitting on rocks, took up the majority of the picture and there were four of them... in that order. Then I took note of the size of the rocks and ran out of time. (The other pictures were same same.) I then drew the picture as accurately as the in patients. Somehow I don't feel cheated.

i like these kind of lectures............. thank you very much

Thanks for this knowledge

So memory is about reconstructing the past based on present experiences. That still doesn't get at the core issue of how we have a sense of a past at all. What exactly gets stored in the brain, if anything?

Powerful talk. Facts upon facts upon facts. I always have thought this thats why i agree with all this talker explained..

I know someone who remembers every football match of Rapid Vienna that he has seen (probably at least 1000) in detail (he remembers every goal including the minute and the player and how it was shot and everything else of great importance that happened in this match) but he seems to live a normal life. Does he have Highly superior autobiographical memory or is there a difference explanation? I would like to remember every football match of Rapid Vienna in detail, but I actually have problems remembering results that where just a few months ago.

Memory is the meaning of life, it's our purpose

When quoting Alice in Wonderland within the context of Science or Mathematics, I think it is important to inform the listener that the writer of the Alice Saga was not an author, but a Mathematician, and that the entire Wonderland adventure is likely just an allegorical expression of our mathematical reality, written by someone who, despite being renowned for their greatness, was likely yet greater.

Excellent!

Is there any research that examines the effect surprise has on memory? Particularly, when the emotion of surprise is strong, does the memory from that particular experience have more strength than others?

1:56 Memories are the glue that holds society together

How it comes that i have perfect autobiographical Memory but i cant remember texts from the 📚 readers?! i would love to exchange those types of memory for my success

I have a persistent childhood memory of having just discovered the concept of "photographic memory" which was relayed to me in the raw on the playground from one of the many know-it-all sixth graders who had the obligation to educate the lower grades on how the world really worked. I was completely enamored with this concept and shared it with as many kids as would listen to me and not one of them seemed to get it as I did. "So? Big deal." What I needed was to bounce this off an adult to explore this concept further and that adult turned out to be my dullard father. He was a helluva good story teller but he wasn't much of a thinker. Without hesitation he pulled a reply out of his ass and informed me that would be a very bad thing to have. I asked why but inside I was thinking this is going to be a whole other level of stupid. "Because your brain can only hold so much and if you remembered everything it would fill up and you would die." Yep, I was right.

I've got a question, as I have followed this Presentation as being part of it: Referring to the perspective test with the Bananas, I drawed them proportional to the picture, and also added the almost unseen 4th banana and the elevation caused by the possible 5th one in the background. I also saw both pictures (the one with the shovel and the one with the sewing thread + needle) as being exactly the same. I also occur not to suffer any kind of dementia nor amnseia. A possibly important information is that I have consumed THC prior to the video. Given the case I weren't using any kind of neurostimulant, just for the sake of the question, what would this say about my Hypocampus and it's functionality? And in the case of prior consumption?

What is the learning memory type of persons in the audience? Some people are visual learners. Being able to give the correct answer because they are visual thinkers ?Age and speed of processing ability of the person could make the difference? Before or after TBI or brain surgery including IQ with and without learning disability? What are the details of the theory used for researchers related to each patient before and after cognitive changes?Recall? History of convergent vs divergent thinking? How we are taught to learn and how we can ?

Very interesting i have suffered on my life from a very bad short-term memory i often wonder why would causes it

Marvelous video....!

This lecture is the kind of lesson that should be used in "network/remotes" based education.

I did the 'Spatial Space Test ' and had Less space in the background... not more... My head must be mush

В философии под рациональностью понимается эпистемологический взгляд, который представляет собой «разум как главный источник и критерий познания» [1] или «любой взгляд как разум как источник познания или обоснования».

1:04:40 - So, watch this space, we'll let you know... So... Have you? If so, where? Not being snarky or anything, but if there's an update on this, I'm quite curious. Especially w.r.t. the impact of the ever-connected society on things like imagination and scene construction.

HM was an awakened individual!

The actress Marilu Henner has superior autobiographical memory. Forgive me if someone has already mentioned this, I have not had a chance to watch the lecture, nor read the comments. I will soon, however!

I thought that the hippocampus was related only to the encoding process of memory, and it's amazing to realize that it also plays a role in the retrieval process. Is it safe to say that the memory retrieval role of the hippocampus resides on the posterior portion of it?

Brilliant

I'm almost like H.M.: I remember what I did earlier today, and usually yesterday (with effort), but every day before that is lost, unless I am given a clue. I do remember better when important things happen, though not as well as most people. It makes me sad, especially when my wife says something like "remember the first time we went dancing?" and I don't. Maybe I should get my brain looked at

Should I be getting a neurological evaluation? I didn't make any of the errors she mentioned were normal.

Verry good.

Fantastic!

Love rat Q & A at the end of this dissertation.

Collective memory and memory recall are key to development of civilization. Or, we will repeat history.

The great mystery is why doesn't everyone have total recall like Marilu Henner? Why isn't such memory recall the norm for all of us? Makes no sense to me.

The idea of memory being about the future instead of the past reminds me of Stanislas Dehaene's perception of human brains as squishy Bayesian predictors in his book How We Learn. Very familiar idea!

I have a feeling that good comicbook artists are familiar with the concept of boundary extension and how to use it to shove extra background in to a scene without having to draw it.

This is true about memory I know that as I had a burst aneurism near my right epycampus which obviosly needed repair before the blood pressure around my brain stopped functioning and I would officially have deceased as a consequence my memory is caput and because of no short term memory cannot visualize a future so she is correct with living life in the here and now

I wonder if the play cells are linked to relevance. You know, data you think might be useful and kept for future reference. Probably why we experience deja vu?

"Closer up" and "further away" are not properly descriptive of the pictures involved. The pictures do not change their distance from the viewer.

I thought it was already decided that the job of the temporal lobes were to traffic past and present events so that you can know what happened in the passed in relation to the present and make a judgment based on what past experiences you might have off of the present circumstances.

Well, simply put, “Mind” is controlling the memory of the past and the future. Brain is just a tool. Regarding the bananas, an analytical person or a good tennis player would focus on the 4th banana in the picture “first”, then pay attention to the background etc. That says, mind uses memory with Changing Timing Scenes related to the MS. “Mind” is a structure (MS) which is constructed by experiences, while it decides the thought (thinking routes per se). Again, brain is just a tool. The “firing signals” in brain cells are simply following the mind’s thought.

I'm wondering if there is a maximum size the posterior hippocampus could become in London cab drivers. Does anyone know?

Love her voice, love her appearance, love her dress.... I’m in love now❤️

Which gene is responsible for memories?

on the test same close far. I don't agree with her. (this applies to me personally) got test 1 correct but got test 2 incorrect thought it was closer up, the reason why I don't agree is because the mask that appeared was small. and it gave a visual signal for me 2nd test that made the picture appear to grow... so I don't think its my memory that was at fault. I think if the mask was plain color with no depth, results will vary. Her analysis is wrong.

When I try to visualize I run into black holes in my memory...it sucks.

The interesting thing for me is, I didn't spot the difference. I suppose I would have made the same mistake. Are there others?

hello, I am 45 years old, I have recently tried to memorize many Algorithm cases for solving 3x3 rubiks cube, each algorithm tackles a partial solving state that targets a particular position on the cube. Exampe of 1 case: [(y') U2 R2' U2 R U R' U R2] then I move on to the next partial solve. and so forth, I have managed to know such algorithms from my memory and can find them and even write them down, but what troubles me is the practical side of implementing these tasks. they are memorized but not memorized enough to be practically used. What other attributes/additionals of long term memory can be useful to me.

Objects in Memory may be closer than they appear? Can someone laser that into the lower-outer inside corners of the lenses of a pair of Sunglasses? I would buy those!

I find it interesting that every time a text is displayed and read aloud Eleanor adds words to that text on her own which are not in reality present in that text. The first "memory" experiment given to the audience didn't rely on memory at all. It's about saccades. Most people were unable to see enough information in the initial image to make a memory or comparison. It's a cheat and has nothing to do with boundary extension.

I was there, a fantastic lecture