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.

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

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

MY MIND IS BLOWN. The best part of this is I had read Kant's quote before and I was thinking about it as she brought it up.

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!

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Excellent. Very informative, useful and comprehensible to laymen.

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...

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.

Excellent information and presentation! Excellent questions and answers!

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!

Learned something new today. Thank you.

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.

Outstanding! Thank you!

Outstanding lecture & exceptionally engaging. Thank you !

As always, a really amazing lecture. Thank you!

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

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.

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.

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.

her voice is so beautiful

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 have travelled the world for over 35 year's and I time travel all the time in seconds I can travel with ease to any country!

Thanks for this knowledge

remembering smells is the most extraordinary thing.

Marvelous video....!

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.

Excellent talk

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.

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.

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

@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.

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.

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!

I didn't understand the test, so when that image for a millisecond or the displayed image

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.

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

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.

My god. Brilliant!

33:03 Are these patient able to form usual dreams?

amazing!! Thanks!!

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?

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.

@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.

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).

Excellent!

Keep moving!

MEMORY IS WHAT I FORGET WITH !!!

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

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

Fantastic!

Loved it

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.

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

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 ?

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

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

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

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.

how do you assess the MRI while person is using driving game? in 23:18 min???????

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?

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.

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

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

Hyperthymesia sounds amazing especially if everyone has it. How would society be different?

nice presentation

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

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 was there, a fantastic lecture

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?

Bien, esta información sirve para la tecnología que estoy creando ! :)

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!!

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

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

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

I, actually, thought like the 60% but, knowing that it was a "trick" question decided to go with the 30% and, just by chance I got it right.

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?

1:56 Memories are the glue that holds society together

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.

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?

this video has enraged me , I loved learning about memory and also to see video of navigation skills.

Which gene is responsible for memories?

thanks

Verry good.

The last slide shows some images from a paper "Hassabis et al., 2009". That is Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind who created AlphaGo.

Emma Bruce this says what i was thinking about in Lunch,

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

Do you have english text this video?

I do believe this is the first time ive heard someone call memory a skill relating to future rather than the past ... or have i just forgotten ...in all seriousness it does seem that since its always now anything involving thought and planning has to be about intention of reimagining yoursrlf as already there