We invite you to explore the brain in the episode Neuroscience: Emotions, Memory and Pixar with Western Washington University Neuroscientist Dr. Jackie Rose.
We have a great time discussing flash bulb memories, plasticity and the new Pixar Movie Inside out.
Click Here for Transcript
>> Here we go.
[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass effect, lyrical oxidation, you’re irrelevant ♪
♪ Mass spectrograph, your electronvolt, atomic energy erupting ♪
♪ As I get all open on betatrons, gamma rays thermo cracking ♪
♪ Cyclotron any and every mic you’re on ♪
♪ Trans iridium, if you’re always uranium ♪
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow ♪
♪ Law of definite proportion, gaining weight ♪
♪ I’m every element around ♪
>> Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University and I’m here with my cohost, Jordan.
>> Jordan Baker: Hello.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Hey.
>> Jordan Baker: How are you today?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s your intro every single time [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: How are you today?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So have you been up fronting lately at the improv — improv-ing at the Upfront?
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. I’ve been going. Yeah. Quite a bit.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: You’ve been doing the musical, right?
>> Jordan Baker: Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Have you actually done the musical?
>> Jordan Baker: No. I’ve been going to the practices. It’s scary to progress a story line while you’re singing. I can only imagine.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Can you just tell us real quick the premise of this Upfront improv musical?
>> Jordan Baker: It’s a musical that you make up. You improvise it. You don’t know what’s going to happen.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, how — like time, time wise, how do you get it like to stop?
>> Jordan Baker: You just — it just happens.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s terrifying. I should go see it.
>> Jordan Baker: It is, but it’s awesome and the shows have been super amazing from what I hear.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. And how long is that running for?
>> Jordan Baker: Through July.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. So when this show airs, it will be over.
>> Jordan Baker: Right. You guys might be able to catch it next year.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. Cool. All right. I’m super excited about our guest today because, as some of our listeners know, I like cartoons and I like movies and, Jordan, do you like those things?
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah — no.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: No. He doesn’t at all. But I just went to go see the Pixar movie Inside Out, which talks about memory and, Jordan, you just saw it?
>> Jordan Baker: I did see it. Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. Because I made you.
And I wanted to find a scientist who understood memory and neuroscience and behavioral neuroscience so, from a friend of a friend, a colleague of a colleague, our guest here tonight, Dr. Jackie Rose. So how are you doing?
>> Jackie Rose: I’m doing pretty good so far. So this is good.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. So far [laughing]. So tell us a little bit about what you do at Western and how did you get into behavioral neuroscience?
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, that’s a really good question.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I can’t say that [inaudible].
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. How do you end up in the field that you sort of become an expert in? I started off as a psychology major and then just started learning more and more about the brain as an undergraduate and got into some labs and started doing some research. And just realized that, not only can you understand behavior, but understand the machinery that allows for that behavior. So that was really what kind of hooked me and what was interesting.
Not everyone gets to study the same thing over the course of their entire career, but, as an undergraduate, I started with learning about memory and then just followed through since then.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jackie Rose: Variety of organisms and different types of memory, but it was always this sort of central theme. I actually started working with snails and then —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Snail memory.
>> Jackie Rose: Snail memory. Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jordan Baker: That’s awesome.
>> Jackie Rose: [inaudible] snails [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like which snails were you studying?
>> Jackie Rose: The species was called Lymnaea. Lymnaea stagnalis. It’s a really small little creatures. So I learned early actually that you don’t need to have a lot of neurons to learn and remember.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jackie Rose: Before moving on to looking at learning and memory and rout models and then now, in my own lab, incorporating the use of a microscopic worm [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jackie Rose: So the worm only has 302 neurons. And so the upside of this is that it’s sort of a step up from just having individual learns in a dish because they’re already prewired to learn and remember things, but there’s just very few neurons. So you can really start to get to what are the circuit dynamics and what’s happening with the individual cells. And hopefully anyway that’s our plan for the research that we’ll be able to uncover some of that for learning and memory.
So I’m glad to be here to talk about all things memory and emotion and whatever else.
>> Jordan Baker: To get this straight, you’re not like — I don’t remember the guy — the character’s name on Lie to Me, you know like read facial ticks and like body mannerisms.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: You have to explain.
>> Jordan Baker: Oh, I’m going to explain it right now.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. So what is Lie to Me because I don’t understand?
>> Jordan Baker: Lie to Me is a TV show — an awesome TV show that was only on for like two or three seasons. And I think it was like the FBI or somebody would hire this guy who could learn like facial — like, “Oh, he winced right when they asked this question,” and that’s when they know that they’re lying. Or, “He’s doing the arms across the chest and like he’s in a defensive mode.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, OK. So your question is like, is she a scientist that can understand like physical like movements and get some sort of behavior out of that or something?
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I don’t know the history of that.
>> Jordan Baker: I’m just saying she’s not that, right? Because when I heard “neuroscience” I was like, “Oh, she can read people.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Right.
>> Jordan Baker: But that’s not —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: She can read their brains.
>> Jackie Rose: Well — right. And I would — that’s not to say that I can’t take — you know, recognize behavioral patterns. Maybe not like what someone with a tick or something.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Not like Sherlock Holmes.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Jackie Rose: But I think, if any of my students are listening, they’re always familiar with me trying to condition them to get used to certain surroundings. Like, in the classroom, making sure you get used to the sound of the fan so that, when I turn it on during the exam, it’s not distracting you. And I’m taking advantage of plasticity mechanisms that I know about in order to get them into that — they don’t know this. They do now, but —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Now explain plasticity.
>> Jordan Baker: Does that mean they’re moldable?
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. That’s like the whole thing, right? It’s like our brains are trying to adapt from moment to moment. But they’re not just sitting there sort of dormant and receiving. They’re trying to predict the next moment. And so the real important piece for adapting is that, with that prediction, when it’s wrong, that error is actually what drives a lot of this behavior and memory and whatnot.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I actually have a question about that. Like these errors. Right? That’s kind of what is Jordan said, “molding,” their personality or their reaction to the next time they kind of predict, right? And my question is, we’ve had — I’ve had discussions with my friends about negative experiences versus positive experiences. I’ve always thought that negative experiences are the ones that are most memorable, but is that true?
>> Jackie Rose: Some — well, to some extent, because the negative ones tend to be the ones that we aren’t expecting.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Ah.
>> Jackie Rose: But if we have something positive happen that we weren’t expecting, that’s —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like the lottery.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. The lottery. Some of the examples I give in class are like so if you’re cleaning your house and you find a $20 bill under the rug. Right?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, my god. So awesome.
>> Jordan Baker: I should clean my house more.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: More often, yeah [laughing].
>> Jackie Rose: But then, the next time you clean, that might be the place you start. Right? So —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh. So like — I think you had mentioned a previous e-mail when we were talking that surprise is one of the — like you’re just saying now — is what is kind of cementing these experiences.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I guess — because you’re surprised that you weren’t right.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. I think that, you know, your brain is making all these sort of calculations and predictions and then it’s calibrating to reality what’s actually the outcome. But, when there’s a big difference between what your brain has predicated and what actually happens, then it’s almost like it’s notable and that’s where we can get things like, obviously surprise, but a lot of other emotions can come in.
And those emotions really, when it comes to memory, they’re like the fast track to memory. So every student knows, if you want to learn something that doesn’t interest you [laughing] —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s never happened to me [laughing]. Or any of my students [laughing].
>> Jackie Rose: None of my classes [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Right [laughing]. Sarcasm.
>> Jackie Rose: Right [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Sorry. Go ahead.
>> Jackie Rose: It takes repetition over and over. You have to review like flash cards and you’re doing it not just the night before the exam, but, you know — ha-ha.
>> Jordan Baker: That’s how I study [laughing].
>> Jackie Rose: You’re supposed to do it like several times before the exam in order to get that information into the brain. But that’s because that information isn’t interesting to you. So you’re literally — it’s almost like you’re manually driving plasticity where you’re like, “I must remember this,” versus — I mean, if you hold — I don’t know — movie stars in any sort of importance in your life and something shocking happens —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Which I do.
>> Jackie Rose: And you read about it, right? You only need to read about it once and you’ll remember it later and tell somebody or the next day or even later that week. So that has really — that interest really has a fast track to memory because you didn’t have to read that 10 times and test yourself over and over again with flash cards.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: But it’s that sort of link towards arousal and emotion and all of that seems to really fast track us into being able to recall the information that is important to us.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: And especially with things like movie stars where things just happen out of the blue. Right? Like suddenly they’re divorcing and someone is, you know, the least expected. That’s when we’re like the most reactive to it. Right? So.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Spark Science is an all volunteer run show and, if you’d like to help out, go to KMRE.org and click on the button “Donate.”
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
Today we are talking about emotions and memory with Dr. Jackie Rose.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
>> Jackie Rose: Especially the visual system and fooling us all the time where you’re getting little bits of visual information and your brain will put it together as the face of someone you know. And so you approach that person and it turns out it’s not the person you know, but when you —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s so surprising.
>> Jackie Rose: It is [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And horrific when that happens [laughing].
>> Jackie Rose: And slightly mortifying. But, you know [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: But, what made you think of that person when you saw those visual elements, that’s because your brain put it all together and made this prediction that, “Oh, that’s so and so across the street.”
So, when we have emotional memories, that’s the other thing, is that it’s not just a recall of, “Oh, yes, I remember that and that was mortifying.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: It’s like, “I remember that and now I get to re-experience being mortified,” because [laughing] the emotion is really tightly synchronized to the actual memory when it comes to feelings anyway.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So does this explain pessimists? Right? Because they don’t want to be surprised. I mean, I’m a pessimist and I just don’t want to be let down. Right? Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: Sure [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Keep the bar low.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I do [laughing]. I do. Not very far to fall, you know?
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. Um — I think that it’s really hard to kind of have a cognitive rule to anticipate surprise. But, yeah, I think definitely people can try to limit. But then, of course, in doing so, you’re kind of limiting the use of memory moments, right? Because you’re like, “Oh, yeah. I wasn’t expecting that to be the case,” and then you don’t have that benefit to the kind of drive — that surprise to drive the memory basically.
And it’s interesting too because we’re starting to look at surprise in terms of even things like the systems for drug addiction.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Would you want to have — if you have any ideas of somebody to talk to about addiction, we wanted to have another show on that.
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, you should ask them about — well, I don’t know if everyone — if we all, you know, subscribe to the same theories. But there is this idea that that might actually be the role for one of the neurotransmitters, dopamine, in terms of naturally what it’s supposed to do is signal when something unexpectedly good happens, is how I’ll say it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Jackie Rose: And so then you’ll get this like rush of dopamine and the idea is that it will go around and enhance the signals that were just active before that happened. So that might explain why you would go and look under the rug again the first time — when you first start cleaning because now those were the connections that were active when you saw the $20 bill and the $20 bill released the dopamine.
And then there’s this idea that, when something negative happens that’s unexpected, we actually get a drop in dopamine and, presumably, that’s supposed to, I don’t know, maybe weaken things or something like that. But there’s supposed to be this kind of brain marker with this chemical as to, when something was expected and it was good, and when something was unexpected and it was bad.
Now, the issue is when you take drugs that sort of hijack that system, then it tells you that everything you were doing up to the point where you introduced dopamine to your system is what will get stabilized. So the act of taking the drug, for instance, will produce that sort of rush of dopamine that says, “This is what you should do again.”
I don’t know if it’s the most popular idea out there. It’s the one that is in our textbook so I feel comfortable stating it [laughing]. But it’s definitely not my area of research. I don’t look at dopamine, but I think it’s fascinating to see — and to think about drug addiction is almost being like this hyper memory state because you can’t — it’s so hard to undo it or to forget that behavior pattern.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. So I want to talk about what you were saying about surprise, but what about humor. Is there like a kind of — I’m sure there’s studies of how — is there a science to humor? Is there a way you can kind of like make a good joke? Or is there like — “this is how you make people laugh?” We’re trying to study that.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah [laughing]. I don’t know if I have like a formula exactly for humor, but the people who do research on humor, what I hear frequently is that humor comes when you can draw a commonality between two very sort of distinct concepts or ideas that don’t naturally go together. The sort unexpected relationship.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So it’s surprise again.
>> Jackie Rose: It kind of relates back to that.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jackie Rose: But — and what’s interesting is that, when you are processing humor, like when you find something as humorous, the same sort of — the same brain centers that are involved in sort of pleasure and reward seem to get activated, from what I read. I don’t test this either [laughing].
But, similarly, there was a study — I don’t even know if it’s been published yet — but it was at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last fall.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is recent?
>> Jackie Rose: Very recent.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. We’re on the cutting edge here.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. Cutting edge. A lab out of USC, so University of Southern California — tested professional comedians, amateur comedians, and controls, you know, people with no humor [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: The accountant that just walks up to the brick wall [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Knock, knock [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I don’t know the rest. Line?
>> Jackie Rose: And yeah, they did, I think it was fMRI. Must have been fMRI.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: What’s fMRI?
>> Jackie Rose: So basically what they’re doing is so contrived, but these people have to sit in a brain scanner.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, yeah. OK.
>> Jackie Rose: And then watch — like, as they’re doing something so the “F” is like the functional — so as they’re doing something, they’ll see sort of activity light up in different parts of the brain. And what was interesting is that the task was — they were given — what was — a cartoon with no captions. And so these people had to like make a joke basically about the cartoon.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. This is like standard improv.
>> Jordan Baker: Right. Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is like —
>> Jordan Baker: Make an observation and —
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. So the same brain areas that light up when you’re perceiving humor actually light up when you’re also trying to generate humor it seems.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, OK.
>> Jackie Rose: But it lights up the least, they said, in the professional comedians and the most in the controls. And amateurs were sort of this midpoint.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So why is that, Jordan?
>> Jordan Baker: I wish I was there for that test [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, I mean, maybe it’s because the professional comedians are really analyzing it. They’re taking it as a science and they’re breaking it down. And I think the controls are trying to make something funny because they would find it funny. Right?
>> Jackie Rose: True. And they probably don’t do it a lot.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. And the comedians —
>> Jackie Rose: And the accountants [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And the comedians, they do it a lot so they’re not doing what they would think was funny.
>> Jackie Rose: True.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: They’re analyzing what somebody else would think was funny.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. I think that’s a good interpretation of the data.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Neuroscience degree for me.
>> Jackie Rose: There you go [laughing]. It’s as easy as that [laughing].
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind ♪
♪ Smiles we gave one another ♪
>> Jordan Baker: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Jordan Baker and today we’re talking about emotions and memory with Jackie Rose.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ For the way we were ♪
♪ Can it be that it was all so simple then? ♪
♪ Or has time rewritten every line? ♪
>> Jordan Baker: Can you talk about maybe the public perception of emotion, memory, and brain function, what misconceptions there might be?
>> Jackie Rose: Well, I think that there might be an idea that, in the brain, that there are specific areas that have this particular — that rule this particular emotion or fear, anger, that kind of thing.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like the movie Inside Out.
>> Jackie Rose: Like the movie we’ll be talking about!
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’ll be talking soon.
>> Jordan Baker: And like people left and right brain? That’s not a thing or –?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. That’s not real, right?
>> Jackie Rose: Well, it is not… [laughing]. Was I convincing [laughing]?
>> Jordan Baker: Sounded like you told a bunch of kids that at an orphanage that there’s no Santa [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s OK. We tell the truth on this show.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. We’re truth tellers.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So is there — I mean, I’ve been told that there’s –?
>> Jackie Rose: There is some.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: That’s how I’ll word it. There’s some.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Some. It’s not as intense as people think. It’s like, “I only use this side.” That’s ridiculous.
>> Jackie Rose: Right. But there is some evidence with emotions anyway that sort of fear and anger related to the amygdala. I’m just going to throw that out there. Part of the brain, amygdala. Almond thing is what it’s called. The amygdala.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Jackie Rose: It’s related to emotion. And then it is stronger on the right side. You have two on — like one on each side. So you have two all together. And that the one on the right is much more sort of in command of fear and anger. And that the left side is more about pleasure and sort of all things calm.
From the people who do emotion work and work with animals that have brains, that’s what I’m seeing in the lit. That there does seem to be some asymmetry with brain areas that process emotions, but, again, it’s not like one particular area is responsible for everything to do with far or everything to do with anger. It seems to be several brain areas that all sort of play together in order to generate those emotions.
And there’s also a difference between emotion and mood.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. Oh, tell us about that.
>> Jackie Rose: So mood is much more like when you’re —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Hungry.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah [laughing]. When you’re hungry.
>> Jordan Baker: When you’re hangry.
>> Jackie Rose: When you’re hangry [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Mangry is what I like to call it.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of like your — the level of your — your general state as you approach new events. Right? So you can be in a happy mood or a sad mood.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: Whereas emotion is usually talked about in terms of being a reaction to something.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, OK.
>> Jackie Rose: So something happens and I get angry. Or something happens — but it is not that I am coming at everything with fear for 24 hours. It’s not supposed to be — you’re not in a fearful mood. Usually you approach something with either sad or happy or something much more general and then, when something happens and you have a sort of visceral reaction, that emotion, that emotion is in response to an event usually.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. On like mood is preparation, emotions are reaction?
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. Mood is almost like this sort of filter in terms of how you’re perceiving all the different events that are going on in your life. You might actually view them differently based on your mood.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: And it gets really weird when you look at sort of human brain activity, mood versus emotion, because emotion can be quickly — can be timed. It’s much more discrete and distinct versus a mood, which is kind of always there in that, say, day or moment. Does that make sense?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: For a few hours. Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. It’s kind of long-lasting.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, when you go see a movie and you go in with very, very low expectations, right? You come out having a great time.
>> Jordan Baker: You were saying something about fear all the time. Is that — would that qualify somebody to be like, “anxiety?”
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. So, I mean, that would be much more like an anxiety — if it was all the time, you have an anxiety disorder or, more extreme, like a post-traumatic stress, that sort of where you’re anticipating something, not just negative, but dangerous and threatening your survival quite frequently.
And so it’s almost like taking — it’s almost like taking the discrete period of an emotion and drawing it out into a mood when you’re not really supposed to be doing that. There are times when you should be afraid. And, in fact, you perform better when you’re afraid in some things, whether it’s some physical activity or even some kind of sort of high intensity, even cognitive task, that sort of thing. But it’s not beneficial when you’re in that state all the time.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. I was actually just listening to another podcast talking about this and talking about how children that don’t have the best childhood, they are in this constant like fight or flight mode, or they’re in constant anxiety. And that kind of — like you said — is an emotion that’s stretched forever and that’s going to affect them. But does that cement itself in their brain?
I was told that basically if you’re anxious, it means that your pathways in your brain — it’s like highways. Like you’re just used to going to that anxious feeling.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, that’s part of experience in terms of your previous experiences going to cause you to develop into the person you are today. And so if that’s your go-to strategy to be anxious and that was what was paying off in the past and that was beneficial in the past, then that’s definitely what you would go to, you know, in the future.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. It helped you survive as a child.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. But it’s not impossible, I would say, to introduce —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Plasticity.
>> Jackie Rose: Right. Plasticity.
>> Jordan Baker: Bringing it back.
>> Jackie Rose: I mean, there are definitely — if there is brain damage, that’s where we have a limit in plasticity [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Right. Right.
>> Jackie Rose: You can’t — and I’m thinking about post-traumatic stress disorder, patient where in fact you’re starting to see atrophy of particular brain areas.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jackie Rose: So it becomes really difficult to get them to try to use a different coping mechanism because their brain is now, not just adaptive, but it’s structured now for constant anxiety. So you see that.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And that’s where we get to personality, right? So that’s what I was going to say earlier is what’s the difference between mood and mindset? Or are they the same thing? And how do we have these type A personalities, type whatever, I don’t know anything about that. All I know is I’m something.
>> Jackie Rose: I feel like — well, I’m not entirely sure about the Type A, Type B. I remember taking those tests as an undergraduate to determine what you are.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. The Facebook quizzes.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah [laughing]. I feel like you can fail those. Anyway [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jordan Baker: Fail them all.
>> Jackie Rose: Fail them all [laughing].
But I always feel like you can be drawing from different qualities of the different types.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: So, I mean, maybe — personality used to be a pretty big division of psychology when I was an undergraduate and graduate school. I’m not entirely sure if it’s as big today or if it’s been sort of taken over by other areas. But personality seems to be structured based on previous experiences, but then there’s also that question of temperament.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: And that seems to be — I mean, I’ve always heard the argument that that is more inborn.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Temperament is genetic.
>> Jackie Rose: That’s what I hear.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. OK. Growing up, I’m one of three kids. I’m the middle one. My husband’s the middle one.
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, you’re the middle child.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Jordan’s the middle one.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. Analyze that.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think we surrounded ourselves with a lot of middle kids.
>> Jordan Baker: Probably.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I don’t know why that was, but —
>> Jordan Baker: Why do we group together?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, why do we group together [laughing]?
>> Jackie Rose: OK. So what I’ve learned about middle children, just off the internet [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Oh, geez.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Tell us. The internet’s always right.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. I just hear — because this was in preparation for a public speaking event.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And, for our listeners, this is not your area. This is more like fortune telling and we’re having fun. OK?
>> Jackie Rose: Fortune telling [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’re all middle children.
>> Jackie Rose: So I always see the memes that say middle children are always forgotten.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: That’s what — that’s the issue with being a middle child [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Abandonment issues.
>> Jackie Rose: Abandonment issues [laughing]. But I will tell you, as an only child —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh.
>> Jackie Rose: Only children migrate out [laughing]. Only children migrate to only children too.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s true.
>> Jackie Rose: We have this like weird way of talking that only only children can understand.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, I’ve seen like my siblings and my friends were first children will like hang out with first children and like — and it’s not even that they’re the same age. It’s just that they have similar mannerisms and like personalities.
>> Jackie Rose: They’re used to getting beat up on, right, because they’re the first and they have —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Get beat up on? The younger ones get beat up on.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. The younger ones definitely took —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Thank you, Jordan. I was like, “hello.”
>> Jordan Baker: By brute force.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. I mean, I was beat on and I beat up my brother so I mean. He was younger.
>> Jordan Baker: It rolls downhill.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It rolls downhill, definitely. Yeah. The first kid is always — gets everything.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah, I feel like — yeah. The parents are strict with the first kid and then by the third kid, they’re just lucky they’re not dead.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s right. What do you mean breaking in? Oh, you mean breaking [inaudible].
>> Jackie Rose: Class curfews and stuff. Yeah. Like parents will have like a 9pm curfew and by the time the third one comes along, it’s like, “We don’t need curfews. You guys are fine.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It seems like we get all these things in society — so these are these misconceptions we were just talking about. You have like, “you’re a middle child so you’re this,” or, you know — or even worse, horoscopes, you know? I mean, my mom’s Chinese. Chinese horoscopes, you know, that everybody born in this year is all the same, which is crazy. Whole year, everyone’s like this. Everyone’s going to be a general in this year. You know? It just seems very crazy.
>> Jackie Rose: A general [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, I don’t know.
>> Jordan Baker: I just saw a horoscope today on Facebook that was like, “Here’s the drunk version of yourself if you’re a Gemini,” or whatever. It was like — named all the traits of your —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Jackie Rose: Was it accurate?
>> Jordan Baker: I don’t know if it was accurate.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is the section of our show of just pure non-science, just nothing.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Memories ♪
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff.
>> Jordan Baker: And I’m Jordan Baker. If there’s a science idea that you’re course about, send us an e-mail or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Memories of the way we were ♪
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think another misconception, or maybe it’s not a misconception, is this — the actual reality of memories, or factual-ness of memories and how — at least for me, I have memories of memories. Right?
So you start to alter them so many times and how accurate is your memory in reality?
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. It’s very interesting how you can look at a memory, you can actually study memories over time, and some memory researchers can actually go and, because they do these long-term studies, determine how many errors get sort of introduced over time.
Our brains are — they operate in such a way that it’s expecting new information. So you have your original memory and then you’ll learn more information and you want to integrate that into a much more, I guess I’ll call it robust or broader memory. But it’s not entirely accurate. And especially early memories because sometimes it’s not really the memory you’re remembering, but people telling you about what happened.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: And so you have this weird like memory that you can see yourself doing it, but it’s not from the first person.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Right. Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: And so, yeah, there’s very few memories that are autobiographical that are actually in that sort of third person [laughing] position.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: Something interesting too, talk about with emotion and memory, when people have a very strong emotion tied to a memory, brain centers — one area of the brain that’s very closely associated to memory, or linked to memory, is the hippocampus. And so when this —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Where’s that?
>> Jackie Rose: It’s sort of here-ish [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Oh.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like the temples?
>> Jordan Baker: Between the ears.
>> Jackie Rose: Between the ears, roughly [laughing]. Kind of just above the ears actually [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I was like, “That’s where the brain is, between the ears.” OK.
>> Jackie Rose: But that area is very closely related to some of the emotion centers. And they actually — they’re firing kind of synchronizes and so the idea being that, when you have this memory come to mind, that in fact it triggers the emotion centers and then you start to sort of re-experience that emotion and it’s sort of producing this whole cascade of events in the brain.
But what’s interesting is, with really strong emotion memories — so I think I just told you about this, but the flashbulb memories.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. What is a flashbulb memory?
>> Jackie Rose: OK. So, sometimes something very significant happens that it’s almost like that moment is frozen in time. So that’s why it’s like the flashbulb. Where you remember what you were doing when this happened and it’s usually very significant. And so there’s actually even talk of sort of generational flashbulb memories.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like the moon landing?
>> Jackie Rose: The moon landing. Or JFK assassination. Recently — more recently would be 9-11.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Are.
>> Jackie Rose: So people always recall what they were doing when they heard about 9-11. And so this actually presented a really interesting opportunity for a big group of memory researchers actually. Once 9-11 helped, they started to look at flashbulb memories as well as event memories.
So flashbulb memories are being more autobiographical, “This is what I was doing when this happened.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Jackie Rose: An event memory is, you know, “What can you tell me about 9-11?” And so that’s going to be sort of the composite of everything that you’ve heard over a long period of time.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Or like what you viewed at that moment, like the videos and all that kind of stuff?
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. Sort of. Like even the days following, some of the news coverage and that kind of thing.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Jackie Rose: And so what they — actually it just came out I think last month — because they looked at the long-term retention of these flashbulb memories. Because for a long time people thought what’s happened is this moment gets sort of frozen and kept perfect in your brain because it’s so emotional. And before what they’ve demonstrated — before 9-11 they demonstrated actually that flashbulb memories are just as susceptible as other memories to errors.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Of course.
>> Jackie Rose: Error introduction. But what they don’t lose is the emotional sort of certainty that, “This is what I was doing.”
So with 9-11 they were able to kind of track this over a longer period of time with a large group of people. And what seems to happen is that those flashbulb memories, they sort of stabilize after about a year. So whatever state, whatever errors are in that flashbulb memory a year after the event, that seems to be the final state that that memory will be stored in in the brain.
But the event memory also stabilizes, but the event memory can be updated. So, as you learn more — so some of the things that would come out, right, is, “Oh, so and so knew about it before it happened,” or, “This was caused because of a weak link here,” or that kind of thing. So as new information came about, that would update the event memory. And those corrections to both the memory errors as well as that new information was getting integrated into the event memory, whereas the flashbulb memories, even if they’re inaccurate, those get saved in their state.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, OK.
>> Jackie Rose: For a long period of time. So what’s different between the two types of memory, though, is of course the level of emotion that gets attached to it. Because, if you have a significant event like that in your life and it generates a lot of emotion and then you’re asked to recall it, your certainty that, “This is exactly” — I can tell you what I was doing when I heard about 9-11.
I actually don’t know if it’s accurate, but I can tell you that’s what I was doing [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: It’s different from the other types of memory, even the other types of memory that are related to the same event. Those memories — those details seem to be — they can change and they can update, whereas the flashbulb, you know, there’s this certainty with it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, but I mean, if you’re changing — I mean, why would what they’re doing change? Right? Like, so, for instance, at 9-11, I was an undergrad here and I remember getting up and seeing it on the TV. Now, how is that — how could that be slightly altered? I’m trying to think like with new information because like I watched TV and I lived in Bellingham.
>> Jackie Rose: There’s a limited number of changes that could change?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. There’s a limited number of things that can change. So can you like elaborate more on like how — how does that flashbulb memory that I have that I just told you, how is that — I don’t know. I don’t know. I know it’s subject to error, but, I mean, in what way? What kind of error?
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. So when they looked back at previous interviews — so they interviewed very close to the event and people were able to recall, not just what they were doing, but, you know, some of the intention behind those actions. Like if they were at home, maybe they were cooking breakfast and this is what they were cooking. And so some of that memory gets —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. Erased.
>> Jackie Rose: Erased. Yeah. But you remember you were in Bellingham. And then you have to wonder too, because Bellingham and waking up — how much of that is really what you reconstructed given that you were an undergrad in that time? “Oh, well, I was an undergrad and it was a Wednesday so I would have been doing this and doing that.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Yeah. That’s true.
>> Jackie Rose: So it’s like this logical memory that we sort of add to our personal experience versus, you know, remembering actually getting out of bed and, “This is what I was doing when I heard about that.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, and you’re right. I was just thinking now that like the thing I saw, or the video I saw on the TV, was that really what I saw or is it the video that I saw days and days after? Right? Where they kept on playing? Was it really that video or was it a different video that I saw? Or did I see it live? Or what did I — you know? I understand.
All right. So we’re going to take a quick break and, when we come back, we’re going to talk about Inside Out.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Can it be that it was all so simple then? ♪
♪ Or has time rewritten every line? ♪
>> Jackie Rose: I’m Jackie Rose, faculty from the Behavioral Neuroscience program at Western. You are listening to KMRE, LP, 102.3 FM in Bellingham, your community, your voice, your station.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Memories may be beautiful ♪
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I started out this podcast or this show with my interest in the Pixar movie Inside Out, which I loved. Did you like it, Jackie?
>> Jackie Rose: I liked it. It was really technical. Like I was there for a good time and I’m like, “Oh, this made me think. Like this is a lot of work.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: They had behavioral neuroscientists as consultants for the movie.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Did you know that, Jordan?
>> Jordan Baker: I did not know that.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: How did you like it?
>> Jordan Baker: It was entertaining.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jordan Baker: There was one funny part it in.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Which was what? Spoiler alert. We’re going to talk about this movie.
>> Jordan Baker: Spoiler alert. It was at the very end where she gets done playing hockey and she’s about to go onto the ice. Yeah. About to go on the ice. And she like runs into this boy. This boy turns around and you could see inside of his brain. There’s a flashing light. It’s like, “GIRL! GIRL! GIRL!” and everybody’s running around crazy because they don’t know what to do because this is the first interaction with a girl.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So is that accurate?
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. I think that’s why it was funny.
>> Jackie Rose: I totally remember that [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Your reaction to the movie, Jordan, is interesting to me because a lot of women that I talk to and a lot of reviews that I’ve read online or podcasts I’ve listened to about this movie, a lot of women are like, “Oh, this is exactly how a young girl feels!” You know, something like — and I didn’t think it was exactly like how I felt growing up, but that idea that you kind of always have to be happy. That kind of pressure that society puts on women and young girls to like, “Be happy. Be happy. Be happy.”
And like boys can be crazy and loud and break crap and like, you know — and make zip lines and hurt their butts and — and that’s OK. But the moodiness of girls is not OK. So I thought that part was really interesting.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. And there’s a lot of good research too with emotions. And especially the ones that we try to avoid like sadness. And our ability to make decisions and remember things when we’re sad. And so it seems that, when we’re sad, we’re really good at remembering details. We’re a lot better at remembering details when we’re sad than when we’re biasedly happy. I guess, is that words?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Is this like a fog of happiness or something?
>> Jackie Rose: I wonder if you’re like — and so I think that also affects the decision making because they say that you’re basing your decisions on much more sort of pragmatic factors when you’re in a sad mood versus when you’re happy. Maybe you’re giving — maybe you can see what’s going on, but you’re giving the benefit of the doubt or something like that.
>> Jordan Baker: So I’m going to interject and say I have depression. So does that mean I’m better at making decisions all the time because I’m always sad?
[ Laughter ]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Jackie is making nervous faces.
>> Jordan Baker: Trying to come up with a good an that won’t hurt my feelings.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s right.
>> Jackie Rose: You definitely don’t want to experience prolonged sadness. That is the sort of clinical definition of depression.
>> Jordan Baker: Right.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: But just to argue that there is a sort of adaptive advantage to having saddens periodically is how I’d word it. So my hope is —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So like the cautiousness of it?
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Jackie Rose: So my hope is that you get to experience sadness on occasion, but not as a consistent —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s OK. You said depression. I’m super anxious. So I have crazy anxiety.
>> Jordan Baker: We’re both —
>> Jackie Rose: And I am in the corner [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’re making the most of it. I did actually like that and I liked this idea of fear. I like the character of fear in that like, “Yeah, I’m crazy anxious all the time, but I also am really cautious.” And that fear character in that movie was making her not trip over that, you know, cord. And I really liked that.
And bringing it back to what you said that sadness is important in a way. And that the movie takes you through this journey where you’re like, “Sadness is the loser and she’s no part of this,” and then you realize that she’s like the hero of the movie. And that was great. I loved that part.
>> Jackie Rose: I mean, I love when they showed that fear moment and fear taking over to sort of provide caution and safety. But then, as soon as she’s past what she’s aware of, the cord, then, of course, everything behind her goes to pot.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Right.
>> Jackie Rose: So it’s really just kind of, again, what your brain is perceiving and putting together. I mean that’s what you’re applying your emotions to. So it’s not like this aura of protection that fear offers, it’s just what you can see is where fear is going to act.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. And you can utilize it.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: At — when you need it.
>> Jackie Rose: Yes. And I — I mean, I’m definitely much more — I subscribe to a strong theory of fear [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Excellent. Excellent.
>> Jackie Rose: Love it [laughing]. It’s kept me — brought me to this moment [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. I like to say to my husband all the time — we’ll be in like some scary part of traveling scary part of town or something and I’ll be super cautious. And he’s like, “You need to settle down.” I’m like, “Well, I haven’t in the past and I’m still alive, aren’t I?” Like it’s obviously paid off.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. It’s hard because —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s terrible reasoning.
>> Jackie Rose: Every time nothing happens, you just reinforced it [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Yep. This is how to act.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s that freeway of negative thoughts, right, that we were just talking about that I’ve built up there.
So I do want to talk about that freeway and those — the connections. Because the movie, like you said, is very technical. And how you have these pathways that are built by these memories. Tell me more about that, how accurate or inaccurate that actually was.
>> Jackie Rose: Well, I thought it was really funny how, in the movie, there’s the command center. And then the technology that’s running the command center is very sort of, I don’t know, ’50s or ’60s science fiction like the nomadic tubes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: Who uses that anymore [laughing]?
>> Jordan Baker: Bit levers.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, the air tubes, I mean, banks still use them.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. True.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: In Futurama that’s in the year 3000 use them.
>> Jackie Rose: The — you know how at the end of the day they collected all the memories from the day and then fired them off to be consolidated into long-term memory.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Or to go into the dreams, which I really liked that part.
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, the dreams was neat. I really like the dream.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’ll come back to dreams. Go ahead.
>> Jackie Rose: And then long-term memory being such — I mean, I think it’s a pretty accurate depiction to show it as this big sort of storage maze. I mean, we’re not entirely sure how memory — which elements of memory get tied together in the brain. And, I mean, I don’t know about vacuuming out the ones we don’t use anymore, but [laughing] —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Well, I did like how they dimmed. I did like how the memories dimmed the longer you didn’t access them.
>> Jackie Rose: I mean, when I think about some old memories, that’s exactly how it feels is that you’re like, “I remember this portion of that memory, but I don’t have access to the rest of it.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. It starts to get like Vaseline lensed.
>> Jackie Rose: Yes [laughing]. Exactly.
Yeah. And I love the — what was the Land of Abstraction? That was interesting.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, right.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: The — when they go through the tube. Right. What was that called?
>> Jordan Baker: When they were doing the short cut?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, the short cut.
>> Jackie Rose: Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: But it was a tube, right, that separated certain lands.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. Imagination Land and —
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, right. Imagination Land.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So — yeah. And when it was turned on — yeah, everything became slightly abstract.
>> Jackie Rose: Yes [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That was really great. I liked that.
>> Jackie Rose: I thought that was really interesting. I was like, “Of course.” Like how do you explain things like loneliness and these kind of — these feelings, I guess, that we have as humans. It’s hard to tie them to a single brain area. And I think that is one thing that we’re finding in research is that these more complex feelings and emotions aren’t really different shades or combinations of sort of base emotions. They’re actually different things.
I really will they included disgust. I thought that was —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And somebody said they would have rather had, not disgust, but shame or something.
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Or like something on the positive end. What’s a positive, complementary —
>> Jackie Rose: Regret [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, regret isn’t positive.
[ Laughter ]
What would be the positive like component to —
>> Jackie Rose: Pride.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Pride! There we go. Pride. That’s what it was. Yeah. Pride.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. And then, you know, as soon as you start getting more specific like that, then things get complicated because, of course, in order to have pride or shame, you need to have like a sense of self. And, I mean, we as humans have a sense of self, but do amylase have a sense of self? And so can we find that brain area and model systems?
And there’s a lot of research into that. But, yeah, it’s almost like our brain has these different areas that command very specific functions and then we have this experience that we’re perceiving as, “this is anger,” and we think of it as this singular thing. But really it’s this compilation of several brain areas acting in a particular rhythm, I would say, to bring about that experience.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, the movie actually does kind of address that. This idea that, as you get older, your memories become more complex. And like she would get those memories that had two colors. Right?
>> Jackie Rose: Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And, when she was younger, the console was smaller. At the end of the movie, again — we don’t even need to say “spoiler alert.” We spoiled everything.
But at the end of the movie, she has more of those islands from her core memory.
>> Jackie Rose: Right.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Remember ♪
♪ We simply choose forget ♪
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Spark Science is an all volunteer run show and, if you’d like to help out, go to KMRE.org and click on the button “Donate.”
>> Jordan Baker: We’re talking about Pixar’s Inside Out with neuroscientist, Dr. Jackie Rose.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Remember ♪
♪ Whenever we remember ♪
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And so I do want to talk about the islands.
I couldn’t help and leave that movie and think what islands are in my own brain. So, for those that haven’t seen the movie, you should not be listening to us right now.
>> Jordan Baker: Go watch the movie and then come back.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Go watch the move. Then come back.
If you’re still listening, the islands were — they had these core like memories that really, really defined her personality. And, from each memory, there made some sort of island in her brain. So there was like Hockey Island because she really liked hockey. And there was like Family Island and there was Honesty Island.
>> Jordan Baker: Goofball.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Goofball Island. Sorry, that was Jordan’s favorite island.
And I just thought in my head — my husband goes, “Well, you obviously have a TV island.”
[ Laughter ]
TV shows.
>> Jordan Baker: In replay. It’s TV Land.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s TV Land over and over again.
How accurate is that and what would be your islands?
>> Jackie Rose: Kind of accurate. Not really [laughing]. I mean, I like the idea of the islands.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Young adulthood.
>> Jackie Rose: I think the only thing I had trouble with was, you know, you have one moment of upheaval and down goes the island.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Are. That was — yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: I was like, “Really?”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: She took a credit card and it was like honesty is all gone.
>> Jackie Rose: But I mean —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Part of me kind of feels that was fairly accurate, though. I mean, like that’s a pretty big deal.
>> Jackie Rose: Sure.
>> Jordan Baker: But she was on the bus and it looked like, from her islands disappearing, that she was a hardened criminal. She can’t feel anymore. What?
[ Laughter ]
She’s 11 years old [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, maybe. The friendship one disintegrating made no sense to me. Because, I mean, you have — you have fights with your friends, but, again, let’s put ourselves in that 11 year old girl’s mindset. She was so far away from her friend. Everything seemed so disconnected. And I think that is what was destroying those islands. This total disconnect from being from the Midwest. You know? Wanting to go back there.
>> Jackie Rose: I think the thing that cheered me up was the Hockey Island and where she got — I don’t know.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, right.
>> Jackie Rose: A little turned around and so all of a sudden could no longer play hockey [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: But she did, right?
>> Jackie Rose: Right?
>> Jordan Baker: I don’t know how to control a puck.
>> Jackie Rose: I’m done [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, but I think the end of the movie addressed that, though, because it was back, right? And then she was back in hockey. Maybe she wasn’t used to being so rattled and she didn’t understand that those islands are the emotions and saying that those islands could actually be rebuilt pretty qualitative. I don’t know.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. I mean, I think I would have bought more into like, “Under this circumstance, when I’m rattled, this island isn’t working anymore, but it’s not gone.” Like it hasn’t gone into the trench.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Where Bing Bong went?
>> Jackie Rose: Oh, poor Bing Bong.
>> Jordan Baker: Awe.
>> Jackie Rose: That was so sad.
>> Jordan Baker: So is the —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I cried.
>> Jordan Baker: The islands, is that sort of — I don’t know. Do you guys do brain mapping at all? Is that sort of the same thing to kind of find out where all your different neurons are firing or misfiring or whatever it’s called? I don’t know.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Like where the pathways are going?
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. I mean, I think people do that [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Is it witchcraft?
>> Jackie Rose: No [laughing]. No. Definitely a lot of researchers look at what brain areas get active when performing different tasks or experiencing different emotions. You know, the organism I work in has 302 neurons so it’s really not going to have a lot of islands.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: He doesn’t have any islands — or it doesn’t have any islands.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. I mean, we’re at the point where we’re trying to determine if they can recognize one another as individuals or if they’re just like, “Oh, you’re another.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Right. All the same.
>> Jackie Rose: But definitely a lot of human research looking especially with the different scanners, that kind of thing. The fMRI is really popular. Trying to determine what areas become excited when, of course, you’re maybe performing a task that makes you sad or makes you happy, that sort of thing.
And then asking you to remember or recall a memory that was happy or sad. Those are interesting because it seems to — some of the data suggests that those brain areas that rule emotion actually come back — not come back — but are lit up basically when you’re remembering that memory. So it’s not like you’re remembering, “Oh, I remember that time. It was very bad,” and you have this very like academic description of it. It’s almost like you’re going to relive it in some capacity almost.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. I did like that part of the movie where she had these happy memories, these happy core memories. But, because she was so far away from the Midwest and now she was in San Francisco, they turned sad.
>> Jackie Rose: Yes. Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So is that accurate? Because we’re talking about the emotion kind of getting cemented, but maybe that was just those flashbulb memories that you were talking about.
>> Jackie Rose: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So can — I guess, now it’s memory of a memory.
>> Jackie Rose: Right. Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. OK. So that’s how the feeling gets changed?
>> Jackie Rose: I mean, it’s kind of funny because neurons — you’re born with the majority you’re ever going to have. So whatever you’re remembering is going to have to be coded —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So don’t take drugs.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. Don’t take drugs [laughing]. And whatever you’re remembering has to be — utilize those neurons for your entire lifetime. So, presumably, they’re going to be involved in memories over the course of a lifetime. And so you will have things where you’re — memories that will make you happy or sad or that kind of thing.
So with each memory — and each memory can be updated and it can include a variety of emotions over time as you reflect or as those memories get recalled. And it’s almost like those new emotions will get now integrated into that memory.
So I always talk about it in my classes in terms of think about, you know, your best friend and maybe the first time you met was because that person, I don’t know, tripped you in line at the cafeteria. I mean, it’s not a very happy memory, but over course of several years, you become best friends and there’s all these different events that get associated to “best friend.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, but at that moment —
>> Jackie Rose: At that moment, you’re not happy.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Jackie Rose: And you can kind of take a step back and remember all these sort of happy, sad, angry moments and they all get incorporated into that one theme of best friend. And that’s because we can continually update our memories to accommodate all that new information. I mean, if you only could make a first impression and that’s how people would remember you forever, that’s scary to me [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Some people are like that, though.
>> Jackie Rose: True. I am all about second chances [laughing]. For that reason [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, OK. So we’ll come back to what memories — or, sorry, what islands you feel are in your brain. But let’s go back to dreams because I really liked that part. I like this idea that the dream team would go through the long-term memory and they would just pocket certain memories and they were like, “We’re going to use this one tonight,” you know. Is that kind of common thought that that’s how dreams work, the day’s experiences and then –?
>> Jackie Rose: I think so.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Jackie Rose: I think historically there was this period where we thought dreams were sort of the window to our subconscious and that, you know, how we really thought about things would be revealed in our dreams. But I think now the idea or the consensus is just that we have this random firing producing these sort of images while we sleep and that they can be sort of a grab bag from our daily experiences.
And what we do know about memory and what happens when we sleep is that we think the brain is practicing a lot of the important things. So research in rats, they’ve shown, when the rat runs a maze, you know, they’ll be recording from a bunch of neurons in their brain while the rat is running the maze. And then, if they record from those same neurons while the rat sleeps, they’ll show a similar pattern. So it’s almost like the rat is sort of rehearsing or practicing what had happened that day while it’s sleeping.
And so that’s this idea that maybe memory is consolidating during sleep. But then this whole grab bag for dreams, it sort of makes it just this random like whatever’s active or — rather than it being of special significance or meaning.
>> Jordan Baker: So when I have dreams and I try to tell my wife about them, she’s just, “Stop. Does it make any sense?”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wait. Jake does the exact same thing [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Because hers are pretty much just like a story, like a story book. And mine is like something you would see on Cartoon Network. Like these just super random super weird things.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’ve had both. I’ve had like super, super random and then like an actual story line.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. Never a story line.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Never a story line?
>> Jordan Baker: Never a story line.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. No. So to speak of the story line, my favorite part — you said your favorite part was the boy’s brain. My favorite part was when fear was watching the dreams and he was like, “Excellent. I’m just going to sit back and watch the dream,” and like he yells at the screen, “Pick a plot,” because like people are coming in — that was like my favorite part. And he was like horrified when the dog — oh, man. That was so good.
>> Jordan Baker: Clown comes in with the dogs cut in half.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Pick a plot. So yours wouldn’t have a plot is what you’re saying?
>> Jordan Baker: No. I would be just like that first dream where he’s like, “pick a plot.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Jordan Baker: We aint got one. We aint got one.
>> Jackie Rose: There is a plot that is — you know, you get really emotional in the dream. Have you ever had waking up and being really angry at that person [laughing]?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes.
>> Jackie Rose: It’s really hard to come back from and justify like, OK, that was just a dream because you are in it and all those brain areas are firing and why did you do that.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. It’s the power of these emotions. They’re so intense. They’re just so intense.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. I mean, if you had that dream without the emotion, you’d be like, “Well, that was weird.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Yeah. You’d be like, “whatever,” but that emotion is coming out full force when you’re sleeping.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. And it’s — you can’t — you can’t turn your frontal cortex on to justify it or to qualify it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Because you’re still half asleep.
>> Jackie Rose: Exactly [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. So, OK. Islands, Jordan. What islands would –?
>> Jordan Baker: I have — there’s no plot.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: There’s no plot. There’s like Goofball Island and then just random small islands that make no sense?
>> Jordan Baker: Oh, yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s like a golf course.
>> Jordan Baker: I have tons of hobbies and stuff so I don’t even — I couldn’t even —
>> Jackie Rose: Maybe you have like Hobby Island.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. Maybe Hobby Island, but it’s a really huge island.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Things are falling off the sides [laughing]. It’s all cluttered.
>> Jordan Baker: Like if it was in the Florida Keys, it’s Cuba.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Is it? OK.
>> Jordan Baker: Just random hobbies.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. Or it could be like England.
>> Jordan Baker: No.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: No, it’s not that big. That’s ridiculous.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. That’s just crazy.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, Jackie, what would be your island or islands?
>> Jackie Rose: Well, I’m going to go with the obvious. I think there’s a neuro island. I get really excited when I hear about new advances in neuroscience research that aren’t even related to what I’m interested in. But then, I don’t know, I might have to go Hockey Island. Not that I play, but just that I am an avid fan is what I’ll call it [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, and you said you’re from Vancouver, BC.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. OK. That makes complete sense.
>> Jordan Baker: Yeah. I don’t think we need to explain it any further.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think I needed to.
>> Jordan Baker: She’s Canadian? Oh, of course she likes hockey.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: We all just talked about Inside Out for a long time, but is there any other movie or something in the media, TV show that kind of talks about your field that’s just crazy ridiculous or crazy accurate, or somewhere in between?
>> Jackie Rose: Any movie where the cure for amnesia is another hit on the head drives me batty.
>> Jordan Baker: You watch a lot of cartoons, don’t you?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It isn’t just cartoons.
>> Jordan Baker: Really?
>> Jackie Rose: So — it’s like this — it’s like they think our brains are juke boxes, right, and you just have to hit it right in order to get everything kind of up and running [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: Like the Fonz. That’s my TV reference.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That wasn’t your PhD dissertation?
>> Jackie Rose: No [laughing]. No. How to hit the brain so everything fixes itself and it plays good music. Yeah. That kind of irritates me a lot.
And then probably — the movie that comes up a lot for me is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
>> Jordan Baker: Oh, yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I really liked that movie.
>> Jordan Baker: It’s a great movie.
>> Jackie Rose: It was a good movie, but, I mean, just — you know, when they’re trying to delete all the memories and then they’ve decided — the memories have decided to become volitional and hide in like really weird memories? And I’m like, “What’s going on here?”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like they have some sort of consciousness of their own.
>> Jackie Rose: Right [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Emotions have consciousness like Inside Out, not memories. Geez. Come on.
>> Jackie Rose: Well, that was one thing I didn’t like about Joy and Sadness in Inside Out is that they weren’t experiencing joy all the time. Like Joy got really anxious and then sad [laughing]. And I’m like, what do you do when Joy is sad [laughing]?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, sad stuff.
>> Jackie Rose: Sad stuff. And I guess that’s what needed to happen. But —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It moved the plot along.
>> Jackie Rose: It moved the plot.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So did you like the movie?
>> Jackie Rose: I did. I love Pixar films. They’re so cute. And what I liked about this movie too is that the parents survive and it’s — you know [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And actually somebody pointed out, there’s no villain.
>> Jackie Rose: That’s true. There is no villain.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: The conflict comes from within, which is very old kind of story, but it’s not something we see a lot in children’s movies.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah, especially with children’s movies. I like that a lot too. Yeah. But it was definitely one that — I mean, I took my daughter to see it and she came out and was like, “I don’t get it.” Like what are we doing [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: How old is your daughter?
>> Jackie Rose: She’s 11. She’s like, “Oh, that’s neat.” Like [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: The movie was about a girl her age and she didn’t get it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: You’re like, “What’s wrong with you? Come on!”
>> Jordan Baker: I didn’t like the parents — like all the guys had a mustache and all the women had glasses.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: The more reviews I read, that’s like the least favorite part of the movie.
>> Jordan Baker: Really?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Because they’re like so sexist. I don’t know, people are sometimes like that.
>> Jackie Rose: That’s true.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I took my six-year-old and she loved it, but we talked about it a lot before that and I prepped her.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah. You almost need to give them like, “Here’s what you’re going to see.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: No. I did. I told her. And it totally worked.
>> Jordan Baker: My dogs loved it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Your dogs [laughing].
>> Jordan Baker: I brought my dog to see it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: No. No [laughing].
All right. Well, I want to thank you, Jackie, for coming to talk to us. We actually learned a lot about flashbulb memories. Never heard that before.
>> Jordan Baker: Nope.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And analyzed us in a fun tarot card reading kind of way. And talked about cartoons, which is my favorite thing.
>> Jackie Rose: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I hope you had a good time.
>> Jackie Rose: It was great.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Thank you for coming.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ Memories may be beautiful and yet ♪
♪ What’s too painful to remember ♪
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Thank you for joining us. We just spoke with Dr. Jackie Rose about neuroscience. If you missed any of the show, go to our website, KMRE.org and click on the “Podcast” link.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
♪ So it’s the laughter ♪
This is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraff.
>> Jordan Baker: And I’m Jordan Baker. We’ll be back again next week. Listen to us Sunday at 5:00, Wednesday at 9:00, and Saturday at noon.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us an e-mail or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science.
Today’s episode, Neuroscience: Emotions, Memory, and Pixar, was produced in KMRE Spark Radio Studios located in the Spark Museum on Bay Street in Bellingham. Our producer is Katie Knutson [sp?]. The engineer for today’s show is Eric Fabrueta [sp?]. Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious. Our feature song today was “The Way We Were” by Barbra Streisand.
[♪ Barbara Streisand singing The Way We Were ♪]
[♪Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc ♪
♪ When I rap you think ♪
♪ Iodine nitrate activate ♪
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound ♪
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in ♪
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients ♪
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them ♪
♪ And they hit the ground ♪
[End of podcast.]