Steve Ramirez

Now, from some bad science to some utterly fascinating cutting-edge science.

Steve Ramirez is author of How to Change a Memory, and he is another of the shortlisted authors at the Royal Society Trivedi Book Prize.

The book is about the science of memory manipulation and all the ways that contemporary neuroscience has successfully been able to manipulate memories to restore health back to the brain and to understand how memory works.

And throughout the book, I talk about my friendship with my late friend Xu, who made these seminal co-discoveries with me.

And through this process of writing the book, it really felt like I'd not just extracted different reasons and different purposes for being, as a scientist, and for reconciling what life and death mean to me, but it just, it was even more empowering to, to, to share not just this work and this story, but to share the, uh, it, it sounds maybe off-color, but almost the upside of experiencing something so profoundly difficult.

Because that upside, I think, imbued me with a very different kind of respect and resilience for what life and memory really are.

That was Steve Ramirez.

And if anything today has sparked your interest, please do search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University to discover more.