Radio Lab, Show 304: Memory and Forgetting

Summary:

Radio Lab unravels the mystery of memory. What sticks. What doesn't. And why.

Website:

http://www.radiolab.org

Additional Credits and Funding:

Jad Abumrad (Host/Producer), Robert Krulwich (Co-Host), Ellen Horne (Senior Producer), Lulu Miller (Assistant Producer), Sara Pellegrini (Production Assistant), Dean Cappello (Production Executive)

Timely on:

May 14: Rights Window opens May 14, 2007

Tones:

Edgy, Humorous, Sound Rich

Language:

English

Description:

According to the latest research, remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. It's easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7 second memory.


Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Rat
What is a memory? Science writer Jonah Lehrer tells us is it's a physical thing in the brain-- not some ephemeral flash. It's a concrete thing made of matter. And neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux's research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD.

Adding Memory
We start this section off with a question from writer Andrei Codrescu: "where do computers get their extra memory from" And then we take it literally. Can you add memories? Professor Elizabeth Loftus says yes. She's a psychologist in the department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California at Irvine, and her research shows that you can implant memories--wholly false memories--pretty easily into the brains of humans. Her work challenges the reliability of eye-witness testimony, and is so controversial that she once had to call the bomb squad.
Then, producer Neda Pourang brings us the story of finding a lost memory. Painter Joe Andoe incessantly paints huge canvasses of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and - more recently - a girl with a particular about-to-say-something look on her face. He didn't realize until recently that he'd been painting a day from his past, a fragment of an afternoon 30 years earlier.
 
Clive
The story of a man who's lost everything. Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls "the most severe case of amnesia ever documented." Clive's wife Deborah tells us the story, along with Oliver Sacks. And they try to understand why amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers two things: Music and Love.




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