#social memory

How a Seahorse Shaped Brain Structure May Help Us Recognize Others

How do we recognize others? How do we know friend from foe, threat from reward? How does the brain compute the multitude of cues telling us that Susan is not Erica even though they look alike? The complexity of social interactions--human as well as mammalian--has mystified brain researchers for decades.

Potential Mediator for Social Memory Formation

Research by a group of scientists at the Department of Physiology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) have discovered that a tiny brain region plays a critical role in the formation of social memory and interaction.

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

Here is part of a proposed message to warn future generations away from a site where nuclear waste has been buried. (Just one of the places where art and science are inextricably connected.)

“This place is not a place of honor . . . no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here . . . nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location . . . it increases toward a center . . . the center of danger is here . . . of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.

This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”

What is this, if not an invitation to a hero? A call, to be refused at first, and then a threshold to be crossed, a whale belly to be entered.

It’s from this FT article about the challenges of how we ensure that the right information is passed on across thousands of generations, to ensure that nobody disturbs the sleeping giant.

As the head of a special “memory” division within the French nuclear agency says,

“How do you write a message that lasts thousands of years? What language do you use? What do you even say?”

In Finland, a site has been designed to leave no trace on the frozen, remote landscape, in the hope that the memory will simply be forgotten and therefore never disturbed. A Danish documentary maker poses the opposite question,

“How do you remember to forget?”

The article goes on to talk about ways to ensure that community memory is continuously passed on to the next generation.

My theatre-making explorations of capturing are not about archiving the event so much as about capturing the collective experience of the event during the time it took place.

I do not want to archive facts so much as give insight to experience. The Copenhagen Interpretation is founded on, and funded by, experience.

In this difficult political climate, it occurs to me that the facts of history are easily dismissed, but the experience of history is much harder to challenge.

For example, it is relatively easy to say, “There was no Holocaust” in denial of factual evidence, but much harder to tell someone who experienced the Holocaust that they did not, in fact, experience it at all.

It is not the fact of the existence of nuclear waste, but the experience of encountering it that we need to capture and communicate to future generations.

(Telling a child that fire burns is not all that useful factual information unless the child has some concept of the experience of being burnt. How best to communicate that experience to a child whilst avoiding their having the actual experience themselves is a question that makes me admire good parenting skills all the more.)

I am fascinated by how - and why, and what - societies and tribes capture and archive, with a view to how best to include it as part of my work.

There is no directly connected tradition of archiving live theatre performance, as such. When shows started being televised, the voice of objection was that it is a live experience which cannot be replicated by watching it on a screen.

When live music concerts are filmed by the crowd, the artists complain that they are not engaging in the full live experience, and that they are giving other audients a somehow flattened experience of the original, which was not the artists’ intention.

I agree that the experience of witnessing live performance is not exactly comparable to the experience of witnessing recorded performance, but when audients are involved in live performance, it is absolutely possible to capture something of the nature of that experience.

The capture and archival of experience seems to me to be crucial to the human race, as evidenced by the challenges we face in the area of nuclear waste, the cyclical nature of war and peace, and so on.

As an artist, I am determined that this aspect of my theatre-making is as important as any other aspect. I continue to explore what stories to tell, and how to tell them, and why, and to whom, and also how to capture the experience that is the result of all those reasoned choices.

To facilitate the experience of connection with each other through story, and capture the essence of that experience so others can hear of it, and seek out their own experiences.

Tweaking Brain Circuit Boosts Social Memory

NIMH researchers have boosted the staying power of a social memory at least 80-fold by stimulating a circuit they discovered in mouse brain. A male mouse that would normally forget a female mouse it had just met within an hour instead remembered it at least a week later! Researchers precisely tweaked the circuit by genetically priming it to respond to pulses of light –a cutting edge technique called optogenetics. The study is the first to enhance social memory by stimulating a specific circuit.