Because this first story is about being lost in space.

It is.

So this is a story about the Swift Observatory, which is basically a big NASA telescope, a space telescope.

And it was put off about 22 years ago.

And its goal was to try and measure gamma ray bursts, which are these kind of bursts of gamma radiation that appear every so often, about once a day, all around space.

And scientists don't really know where they come from.

Like, do they signal the birth of a star or the formation of a black hole? But the Swift Observatory has been there for 22 years and its orbit is starting to decay.

Or is it

The lizard brain.

Well, we could call it that.

I don't think neuroscientists would call it that.

So that sort of controls the kind of autonomic functions.

So like breathing and heartbeat regulation and like hunger and satiety and things like that.

And it was kind of always, you know, originally assumed that all of these different pieces of the brain sort of came about through the same evolutionary track.

And that, you know, we know that the hindbrain is older than the midbrain and the forebrain, but that they kind of just all evolved along the same track.

Yeah.

But he evidently believes a totally flawed version of a reality that we've all seen.

Yeah, so like a lot of people, George Bush, his memory of 9-11 was of seeing the first plane hit the tower.

But actually, there was no footage of the first plane hitting the tower until much, much later.

Eventually, some came out.

But originally, when the attacks happened, nobody happened to be training a camera on the towers at 10 to 9 in the morning.

So there was no footage of that first plane.

There was lots of footage of the second plane.

What is it?

... also, if you like, increase the cognitive load on the brain?

Well, it does to a certain degree, yeah.

So look, I mean, the thing is, our brains are very good at rapidly task switching.

This is something that's just kind of part of our everyday activity.

We're very, we're very good at doing it, but the more things that you're trying to do at once, the more balls you're trying to keep in the air, the more likely it is that one of those balls are going to drop, and the more tiring it is to kind of be constantly doing that sort of, uh, back and forth switching.

So there are some costs to, to engaging in that sort of task switching.

Um, you know, like the, like mostly when we measure them, they're, they're very small.

Hmm

How does the negativity bias which we have discussed at length on Hidden Brain intersect with your research on memory?

So in general, in autobiographical memory, we actually see a positivity bias, so that people will tend on average to remember events in a more positive light.

Now, I think what's interesting and what often happens is a very common thing that people'll fall into, like Jo- what, what Joe said there, and a lot of people will say, is they'll say, "So I'll only remember the negatives," or, "I'll only remember the positives." But it's not really that.

It is more of, like, a bias.

It's more about, like, them slightly tilting the scales in one direction or another.

Um, on the whole, for most people, on average, we tend to have this sort of positivity bias that leads us to remember our lives positively and to see the world through rose-tinted glasses.

But those are averages, okay? Um, there are things that can affect that, and one of them is depression.

Um, it's not just reconstructed, of course, just in our own heads, but it can be sometimes reconstructed collectively.

I worry if I have a disorder of some kind." Talk about this idea that in some ways we get it profoundly wrong when we think about forgetting as a flaw.

Yeah.

So, I think the first thing to note is that forgetting is actually a fundamental component of memory.

We tend to think of, of forgetting almost as, as the flip side of memory, and that memory is the positive, what we're supposed to do, and then forgetting is the, the thing that, the accidental thing that happens.

Um, but that's really not the case, like forgetting is a fundamental element o- of what happens whe- in our, in our memory processes.

I think a lot of the, the problem here comes in and that when we tend to make the mistake of thinking that our memories act like a computer system, that we should be able to just file away information and then it will stay in that same place and then later on we should be able to retrieve that information and we pull it back exactly the same way it was before.

And if we had a computer where we went to go and retrieve a file and the file wasn't there, it had been accidentally deleted, we'd be disgusted.

(laughs)