Hippocampus Love: Action at a Distance and the bridge of Memory, Part 4 with Lynn Nadel

Maybe memory is a way we communicate with ourselves and the world at various layers, a bridging experience of what we call time and space.

In this episode, Andrea Hiott and Lynn Nadel continue their ongoing talks about memory. This time they explore the intricate workings of the hippocampus, focusing on its role in bridging spatial and temporal gaps. They delve into how memory, navigation, and cognitive maps are interconnected, challenging traditional views and opening up discussions on the dynamic nature of memory. 

Lynn shares insights from this paper, discusses how past research has evolved, touching upon philosophical perspectives from Kant and modern neuroscience findings. The conversation also briefly touches on the broader implications, including how understanding the hippocampus might extend to broader cognitive functions and societal interactions. There’s an in-depth ‘research ramble’ from Andrea at the beginning for those interested in the wider themes of this whole project, but you can also skip past that and go to the main conversation if you wish.

The main paper discussed here is The Hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance

Lynn Nadel is an American psychologist who is the Regents’ Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Nadel specializes in memory, and has investigated the role of the hippocampus in memory formation. Together with John O’Keefe, he coauthored the influential 1978 book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map.

00:00 Introduction to Hippocampal Function
02:07 The Role of Memory and Space
11:38 Philosophical Insights on Space and Time
15:50 Quantum Entanglement and Memory
28:48 Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map
43:43 Encouragement and Introduction to Lynn Nadel
44:30 Discussing the Paper: The Hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance
44:55 Linking Time and Space: The Role of the Hippocampus
47:21 Memory and Cognitive Maps
49:59 The Evolution of Cognitive Map Theory
51:34 Intertwining Memory and Navigation
01:04:30 Philosophical Perspectives on Space and Time
01:09:37 Innate Structures and Evolutionary Adaptations
01:16:08 Plant Cognition and Tropisms
01:16:59 The Importance of Memory
01:17:39 Cognitive Maps in Animals
01:17:57 Symposium and Research Updates
01:19:08 Locomotion and Cognitive Needs
01:20:54 Internal Models and Memory
01:23:27 Temporal Contiguity vs. Contingency
01:29:26 Dynamics of Memory
01:35:11 Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans
01:36:34 Hippocampus and Social Interactions

Previous conversations with Lynn and Andrea

Transcript

 ...if you don't have the hippocampus or if you have some trouble, you're almost in a perpetual present.

 Rats with hippocampal damage were slaves to temporal contiguity alone, and were in effect, highly superstitious, 

 And if you're a superstitious animal and you ex and you happen to experience one of those times when A is followed by B, you, you will conclude that A causes B or that A leads to B, you will not take into account the fact that A happened a lot on its own, and B happened a lot on its own.  Your memories, you. You are your memories, your memories are in constant dialogue with the, with the, the real world, basically 

 Well, that's a fundamental decision the brain is making, you know, all the time. How does it do that? How do you know and when it decides to update, what are the mechanisms that determine how it updates a memory so that it sort of deletes the things that are no longer relevant and adds new things that are now relevant versus when it's creating a brand new memory?  

if we did think of the hippocampus as a way that we're some somehow connected to communication in the way we were talking about, then it would also make a lot of sense to those points you were making about possibly extending the circle of care.

 and I think the, the, the, the claim we made is that we create a psychological space that fits what Con said, not that the physical space is actually like that. In the, in the real world, who knows what, you know, what it, what's the case?

We are just talking about what the human, what the, you know, what the brain, what the human brain, but obviously what the what the vertebrate brain or the mammalian brain, and not just the mammalian brain. 'cause insects have the same thing. You know, what brains, what brains in mobile animals do. Now would you say, do, do plants have a cognitive map?

I would have to say the answer is probably no. Right? Although I think plants demonstrate many of the same cognitive phenomena like memory, you know, and so on, that we do. But they don't have a cognitive map because they don't really need one, not for space. 'cause they're not moving. Right. Anything that moves in the world, you know, in in, in some intentional way.

Needs to have something like a, a cognitive mapping system in order to benefit from its prior experience.  📍 

 Okay, everybody. So today is another bonus episode with Lynn Nadel, psychologist and neuroscientist, and I think this is, uh, the fourth talk. We've had more than that, but this is the fourth one that's publishing. And as you know, I'm. Crazy about the hippocampus, and he's a really important researcher in that field.

So we've talked quite a few times about a lot of subjects. he's not the only hippocampal area researcher that has been on the show, but he's been on the most for sure. And I really appreciate him. And today is a really interesting one because we talk about all kinds of subjects that have a lot of deep roots.

And I thought to begin, I would just tell you about some of those roots. Those of you don't wanna hear all the philosophy and neuroscience and hear me talking through some things as I wanna do today for my research. You can skip ahead, but since this is a. Basically a podcast exploring my ideas and research, which are all inspired by all of these people.

And a different context. it's important for me to go through all this, but you, you're welcome to skip ahead to. Till then, it's about 58 minutes, our whole conversation. So just go to wherever you are, about one hour from the end and you'll, you'll hear it. For those of you who wanna hear the rest, then I wanna talk about this idea of transcending the here and now or the present moment, because that's a big part of hippocampal research.

for example, when there's lesions with HM and others, Clive wearing important people in the. Patients, people who've given a lot to hippocampal research, often when they have trouble, they end up sort of living in the present moment, which might sound wonderful, but it's not because it's a very limited, it's like everything is refreshing, every 20 seconds or every two minutes even.

But still, it's refreshing and that means, uh, that you don't know where you are. Suddenly it's like waking up over and over again. Or just kind of being in a little bit of a almost dream state where you kind of feel like you know what's happening, but you don't really, that's how they describe it in a way.

So how does this relate to space and to memory? This really intrigues me. It's a lot of what I think about, and also just those words, space and memory, those are words that point to something that we all. Recognize and have in common, but we have to detach ourselves a little bit from those words because we're already sort of nesting a lot of our ideas together.

When we talk about those words, we're describing a process that's already all of that, and that's part of this holding paradox idea and why it's so hard to talk about, especially with something like memory, because we've broken it into all kinds of different ways of thinking about it. Episodic or declarative, or.

Um, associative or working memory, all these different ways. We've thought about how to understand the way it manifests, the way a process manifests by which we are able to understand that we're in a continuous, ongoing process and we can use whatever we've been through in the past towards whatever we're gonna be.

Going through in the future. That's really what we're talking about when we're talking about memory and where that's happening is what we're talking about with space, but it might not always be geographical. This is what we're starting to learn. Of course, we're always in a geographical space, but we're also, there's many layered spaces as that geographical space, as our body, as our body encountering everything.

It encounters. There's conceptual space, for example, when we're measuring it, it's all one ongoing thing, not even one. It's all ongoing. Not one and not two, but um, when we study it, we might study it like conceptual space or virtual space or, you know, these different areas where we spend a lot of our time.

If you think about it, when you go on the computer, you're sort of in virtual space, but of course you're also in geographical space and emotional space and all these other ways that we've divided it. But if I wanna know something about the way your body's reacting when you're clicking through websites or moving through.

The app, social apps, those are kinds of spaces or landscapes I call them, which have particular regularities in which your body or your body is interacting with. as you go through those spaces, just to speak of it as if it's geographical. So these are all kind of nesting together and maybe memory is the word that we use to describe our awareness of those.

Habits is a kind of a nice way to think of it, which I bring up here with Lynn a bit too, but. They're binding us, but they're not really binding us because it's all one ongoing process. But when we study it, we can see these habits that are going through our body, but also that we really see in the hippocampus with the action that we encounter.

So when we're talking about the hippocampus, which is this two, you have two of them in both sides of your brain, uh, in the temporal lobe. The hippocampus, they're definitely doing something very important relative to your sensory body and all that you're encountering and how that aligns with all you've encountered before as your body.

And maybe that's not about storage in the sense that like your hippocampus is putting something in some little suitcase somewhere in your body. Maybe it's more that it's an ongoing process of such. Amazing intricacy that we can't really get it yet, but that actually your body itself is that storage.

Storage in quotation marks such that somehow at many different dimensions, your body and especially your central nervous system. With the hippocampal formation, playing a very big part of this is somehow reading all that sensory ongoing encounter all as one and aligning it with all that you've become, as you've been moving to where you are now.

So, I know that's really hard to understand, but it's just thinking of memory, not as storage, but maybe this. Process that's like liberating us in a way from being bound to the present as those people who've had hippocampal damage are, you know, where they just keep refreshing. we still have this continuity of connection of communication with our body, which it represents or not, doesn't represent, but is everything we've ever been through.

So remembering the past, imagining the future, those aren't actually maybe so different, for the, for the body or for the hippocampus. And there's a whole lot of research on both of those relative to the hippocampus. So, but that would be a whole other discussion. But, you know, you, this is kind of habituation from all you've been through to all you might go through.

and of course it's not just the hippocampus, it's, you know. Doing that, but it's playing a very big role, which we see in studies and which we see in the cells, the way the neurons fire, and it's pretty exciting. So maybe memories are communication with ourselves. That's how I like to think of it. And we experience it as thinking or as action at times.

But it's not only like we think of our memory as what we remember as remembering our, our first love of our first kiss. You know, those cookies our grandmother made us, whatever it might be. But that, and that is part of it, but also we're remembering all the time as our body, just the way we can move around and know how to do things.

And that's also memory, but it's not that kind of memory that most of us think of all as all memory. it's, we experience that thinking, but we're also. Part of a nested ongoing remembering, uh, but also and imagining predicting, you know, all these words we use in various areas of neuroscience that I'm trying to start to understand as one ongoing process, or a lot of people are trying to do that, but we're trying to articulate it in a way such that.

It's not, about finding little stored things in the body so much as understanding these habits that we create, and understanding how that becomes something like, thinking and the ability to communicate with your own self. To be aware of your own past habits and experiences at many different levels, many of which are these episodic memories of remembering your first love or remembering a poem, whatever.

You know, there's, um. Semantic memory too. So there's a lot of different ways to think about this, but this is why I brought up this idea of constellation cognition or this metaphor of the kaleidoscope often because it helps us to get out of this way of thinking in contrast only, and instead think of all these different layers and dimensions of an ongoing process that's going on that our awareness, our communication with ourself can switch through.

And understand in different ways instead of either or formulations, and that's why I always use this Gregory Bateson. It takes two to know one because even when we're communicating with ourselves, there's a, there's already a third, there's all of it. There's this part of us that's aware of ourselves and there's what we're aware of.

And all of that actually is coming through our conversations, our encounters with the world, with all these other beings around us. So you can't really take all this away. And that's why we talk about relations so much on this podcast and participatory sense making and all of these, um, forms of bodily cognition and also why computation is so important and why we need models and ways to represent in, think about all of this together because wow, what a process, you know?

But anyway, those positions allow us to have. Other kind of positions of three, like past, present, and future, or body, brain, and world. So this is about action at a distance. So let me think about this through an analogy that might seem a little bit strange, but just bear with me and I'll try and bring it round because it is part of the paper that Lyn and I talk about, which is called the hippocampal Formation and action at a distance.

So I want you to imagine two particles, like whatever you wanna imagine as a particle. I don't care. And they've interacted and they've become so connected that they're instantly, in sync one changes in the other changes, no matter how far apart they move, because somehow they've gotten into the same rhythm.

And so it's not about how far away they are so much as that their bodies are. As particles. Their particle bodies are in complete synchrony with one another, even as they travel across the universe, you know? And this is called quantum entanglement. And of course I'm giving you a very cartoon example, but actually we know it exists it's a really hard thing to say exists.

Even Einstein. Didn't like to admit that this exists. He called it spooky action at a distance, which Len talks about as well, because it just seems so weird to suggest that information or, some kind of influence could leap across what seems like space for us. This, you know, great distances, maybe even faster than anything else, like light or, or something.

So. When we measure a property like spin or one entangled particle, then we find out the other one that's entangled with it already knows that, so to speak. It's already also reacted, as having known that even if it's, you know, on the moon and you're here. So this isn't about signals traveling, it's about they're in a similar state and.

That state changes, so they both change. It doesn't mean they necessarily are exactly the same. It just means they are in constant communication. That's that word again, it's almost like a translation that's happening at some kind of speed or some kind of immediacy that we really don't understand yet, or we don't know how to put into math at least.

And we talk about that as quantum, and of course that gets all kinds of wonderful connotations. Think about quantum, but it is mysterious and uh. Memory is also mysterious. And the way that we remember and imagine, and the way, this is also kind of immediate, right? And we know that the hippocampal formation is part of this.

So it can seem kind of crazy to think about these together. And I'm not saying the hippocampus is quantum, but who knows? But, and, and Lynn's not necessarily saying that either, but I guess what is happening is that. There are these connections that we've broken down into memory space and time. But if we kind of unstick ourselves from those words and understand this is an ongoing process, then we might begin to understand that the hippocampus can tell us something about that.

At least our research about it is, is opening ways for us to think about. How we're performing this action at a distance in a way. Because, you know, we go to a coffee shop that we don't see, we step out of the way of some kind of car or something. We make a plan to go home for Christmas. and we, without our hippocampus, we wouldn't be doing all of that.

We would be reliving the moment and, we might still have some. Ability to communicate with our old habits that we made before we had whatever, before we lost our hippocampus, but we wouldn't be able to attach anything new to that. It's almost like a, a gulf has opened up and we can no longer align what's going on now with everything in our body that's happened before.

So that's that permanent present tense that Lynn talks about and that, uh. Koan talks about with Hm. And it's, you know, trying to figure this out. How do we bridge these gaps between where we are, where we wanna be, who we are right now in this moment? Which again, aren't really gaps, but when you have something happen to your hippocampus, then You notice that it was doing something that now has left, something that can't be done, which is kind of feeling like a gap in the way that I just described. So how does that have anything to do with entanglement? Well, entanglement defies what we think of as space and time, and so does memory. and that's hard to talk about in the same way.

It's hard to talk about entanglement. Especially because it's so intimate to us and it's so rich with research and data and possibility, and yet we can't quite get a grasp of it. I think Lynn is offering a, in this paper a bit, a way to think of memory as a kind of media mediation in the way that we're assessing it.

Again, it's not like actually something we can separate from all this, but. It's a mediation that's, that's, that is that kind of bridging between past and future and present. And I think that's a really interesting way to think about it, even if you only wanna think about it like that metaphorically. But it does challenge our intuitive sense that, that um, there's something stored and stuck somewhere that we pull out and read and all and all of this in the same way that two particles being on opposite sides of the earth that still know what one another are doing, challenges us.

It seems to, and, and Lynn doesn't say this, but I think his paper shows this actually, that it seems to force us to believe that this is ongoing and inseparable and we can actually separate. Are remembering from our bodies and what our bodies are encountering, which would we, we would call space and dime.

And again, Lynn doesn't exactly say that, but I, I say that in my work and I build on Lynn's work because I, I see it in his work and he, he, he gets it in, uh, he hasn't said I'm wrong, so yeah, you'll hear us talk about it. We, we've been talking about it, what, this is like the fourth hour and there's many more.

So. It is ongoing. But one thing Lynn does talk about is Conant. I'm, I like con a lot. He's a philosopher. Some of you probably know all of his work better than I do, but some of you might not have heard of him, he's a German philosopher. Maybe one of the most important, and you probably all know I love Hagel, so let's connect it to Hagel.

'cause those two are very connected. But Lynn really likes e Emmanuel Kant, and. Let's just like step back for a minute and think about him. So he argued that space and time are not things existing out there like independently or at least this is how people take it. Um, but remember all that stuff I just said too because we're, we're changing, we're moving, we're we're learning, you know, since Emmanuel kt.

But it's a very important idea he had that, that that space and time aren't out there. They're not I priority is the kinda word this, I mean, they are, I I priori they're, they're, they're immediate, they're intuitive is more of the word he might use, or some people might say mental, but as I was just telling you, maybe those aren't separate.

But for, for KT, when he was trying to understand them, he was separating them and he was going against what most people usually say, which there something out there. And then. You know you have the in here, which processes it or whatever. So he was basically saying, you know, that out there is actually immediate.

I'm just talking off the top of my head, by the way. So you wanna check all of this, but this is just as I understand it, after having just read, uh, Lynn's paper again, which you can see I've marked all up. Try to take a picture of it for you. it's a good paper. Anyway, uh, try to stay focused here.

But this, so this I priority intuition, these mental structures that our minds impose on. Impose on, I guess is the, the way I would say it on the encountering raw experience is probably what, what they say, raw experience. So our minds impose this on raw experience before we really perceive anything.

And Nadel invokes this in his work. So does John O'Keefe, they talk about this in that book. Hippocampus is a cognitive map from 1978, which we've talked about a lot here. And you can read for free by the way, online if you want to. so Lynn and John talk about this. They write through the hippocampal processes that, I think I wrote the quote down, I wrote a bunch of quotes down.

'cause I, I wanted to, our subjective sense of both space and time are interwoven constructions of the mind much as the philosopher Emmanuel caught postulated. He actually says that in this paper, Linda does. The neuroscience seems to validate this insight. I guess if you think about grid cells in the interal cortex, they kind of, create or code is the word you, we use the spatial structure that's internally generated.

You know, it's the brain, it, it is the brain, it's the brain's neurons, and that seems to scaffold this external environment, which you could, or they, they do say. It's kind of the, what con was saying. So it's almost like saying we're, so this is almost saying that our inner world, our brain is scaffolding what we.

Encounter out there as if it's not out there. But what I'm saying, or what I was trying to open up before and what I think Lynn and John's work opens up actually, even if they don't think that is, that this is an immediacy and that these are both happening. This is holding the paradox, right? You have this scaffolding of the body that is the body and the brain, and you also have the encountering, and those aren't choice.

You don't make a choice between those. How does that have to do with Hagel? Well, I wonder if you listen to my talk with Karen Ng about Hegel I'll, I'll link to all this stuff, but anyway, uh, Hagels got this idea, which is, I'll way oversimplify it and say thesis antithesis synthesis, because that's what most people understand and it's, it's actually pretty good just to think of it like that, but it's actually.

A Tdic formula. More like what I was trying to express before that it takes two to no one and that there's actually no one or two or three. It's not one or not two. and not three either, by the way, and not four, sorry, sorry. Fourth way. It's not, it is not, you don't number, I mean, you number it to understand it, but there's no beginning or end in any case.

There's something about the communication and the relation that we understand through putting numbers on it, and three is a really important one for all of us. How many people have used triads? E, everyone. And Hegel is one. Very important Tdic formula. It actually comes from Fitta. But anyway, Hagel consider considered it his sort of schema, or I consider it as sort of schema and it's this dynamic imminent or to to name a word.

A lot of people like these days, space where contradictions unfold and are. Realized at the same time that they shift into other contradictions, all from the position of assessment, not from actually what's happening, but we need to assess it. That's that communication, right? That becoming aware of it and communicating, which is of course always part of it, which is why you can't absolutely measure it and uh, that's why hagels so hard to understand and also so wonderful because this truth or whatever this process is emerging from.

That, uh, structure that we understand through the triad, even though it's not inherently tdic. So in the same way that it's not in here or out there or some kind of hole that synthesizes those, it's through holding the understanding that it's going on in what seemed like both. Oppositional spaces at once that you then open this third, which is kind of the portal by which you have a epiphany or an understanding of the process itself, which doesn't require parts and isn't a whole in the sense of it's not one, it's not two.

So Wow, that's hard to understand. Think of it as a synthesis, if it's, if it's easier, it's really more like ablation. But anyway, all these are just words. And what's important is that we understand that contradictions aren't the end of anything. And that in fact, realizing contradictions is itself already a movement beyond them when you notice them and let them be what they are.

So you're not eliminating polls. You are recognizing them. And in that recognition, what I think of as the constellation opens many more levels and options and possibilities. And that's why way making is an approach that's about that space, that holding and all this I'm talking about already. And that's what I've been thinking about with this constellation where you have at least three, right?

But um, when you're assessing and you're moving beyond the opposition. Without trying to solve it. So that's like noticing the polarities beginning to imagine them not as dual poles, but as parts that have. they've, they've gotten our attention for a reason and they, if we let them be, we'll, a portal will open just to get a little mystical and we'll, we'll actually see, wow, oh, these, these things we thought were too open into a constellation, or they, they change into the kaleidoscope shifts and we see many, many other different visions.

I guess I should try to put that in more scientific terms, which you can find. Well actually I'm not going to, because if you really wanna hear the science about how this relates to the hippocampus, you can go somewhere else. ' cause we wanna get to lens talk. But I do argue that hippocampus enables not just this binary dialectic, but it's more like a kaleidoscope, as a metaphor, as a way of understanding it.

Of course, you know, it's, it's much richer and more. Amazing than I could ever, than a kaleidoscope could ever be. But the way that a kaleidoscope shifts, is just that pattern, uh, might help us understand how this body and this central nervous system is encountering the world sensor really, and shifting that constantly into what it already is as the body.

And this never stops. And that that is memory and that is imagination and that is being present and aware. And when we are present and aware, we can shift what we know of the past in the future. So that's all very interesting. And, um, the hippocampal formation in action at a distance, just to try to come back to Lynn and his paper.

Is making some steps towards that, towards understanding that more consolatory, na na nature of everything. And also the way that we can talk about it in neuroscience. 'cause that's important too. You probably know I've written about re representations in the, the way we talk about it in our languages.

Often keeping us stuck in that, uh, outside, inside, looking for things inside that somehow correspond to things outside view. So what I see in this paper is that, which you can watch a video by the way that Lynn did, where he talks a lot about the entanglement and stuff, which I will also link to, but let me just try and connect it back to that quantum entanglement now too.

So that shows us that the spatial separation isn't some kind of absolute thing. You know, if two particles on other sides of the world can. Be communicating without what we understand as traveling through space and time in a logical way. Then there's some kind of other thing going on. So it's not absolute spatial separation, at least in the way we know it.

And you know, particles can be connected at fundamental levels across distances. So, and then we have Kant who argued that the experience of space and time. Are like mental constructions, and or at least. That's where the reality is of it. Um, which I don't agree with. And, but I love con and I think he was an important step towards this realization.

So anyway, but it's not direct perceptions of reality as it is in itself. He would say it's, you know, this mental, ongoing categorical, uh, imperative in the hippocampus. As Nadel and O'Keefe demonstrate is like the biological mechanism that stitches together. He says he uses the stitches together. This space temporarily disparate experiences, right?

Because if it's all happening inside, then we have to stitch, stitch together all these different experiences that we're having and create this subjective sense of, you know, ongoing coherent space and time. The out there, and this would be the mediation for the action at a distance. It's bridging the gaps, but you know.

If we think of Hegel again, he showed those contradictions aren't actual contradictions. They're ways of understanding an ongoing process. So what happens then? What happens if we let all of that be true and con and all of that they've said, and we're still moving forward and knowing, right? We're still learning more.

So we don't need to say all of that is wrong, but maybe there's another way of seeing it. Maybe what we thought of as either or is gonna open into a constellation now. But all of us, including Lynn and I, are grappling with basically this mystery, which is as mysterious as what Einstein called spook spooky action at a different distance as entanglement, because it's like how are we so connected to what is so separate from us or what we think of as so separate from us, and how our space and time and memory.

All here as us, part of us, and not out there or or out there or in here. All of this, this kind of amazing ability we have to communicate with ourselves and one another and actually know this process. And in knowing it, change it. So let's now think about that 1978 book, which I've talked about so much here called The Hippocampus as a cognitive Map.

And I wrote down some quotes for it on it from it because Lynn talks about it here and I wanted to have some quotes, uh, from it. And hippocampus is a cognitive map. They said they were really already thinking about these issues. Then in 1978, so even before then, 'cause that's when it was published, so this is like 50 years.

50 years on, you know, pretty cool. Okay, so here's what they say at the very beginning of the book, because you'll hear. Lynn talk about how they were, they said this on page one, and he's right. So here it is. This book is concerned with three topics, which at first glance do not appear to be related. One, a part of the brain known as the hippocampus.

Two, the psychological representation of space. Three, context dependent memory. And in this book, uh, we shall argue that the hippocampus is the core of a neural memory system. Providing an objective spatial framework within which the items and events of an organized organisms experience are located and interrelated.

So they were already thinking about memory as a system for a system for connecting all these different experiences, or maybe just the system is what we study as this connective communicative process. and there's. Quite a lot of insights in this book that resonate with all that I'm always talking about here, but also with what Lynn and I talk about here.

And I wrote some notes, so I'm just gonna read those. So when I've been talking about the gaps in action at a distance, well. Here's a quote that's interesting in that regard. The play system permits an animal to locate itself in a familiar environment without reference to any specific sensory input to go from one place to another, independent of particular inputs or outputs, which are cues and responses, and to think, to gather conceptually parts of an environment to link together conceptually parts of an environment which have never been experienced at the same time.

So that's action at a distance. And then this whole stitching mechanism, which I don't think the hippocampus is doing any stitching. I think it's more like a translator. I think of this as better to think of it as communication, and the hippocampus is like the translator of this ongoing sensory encounter with all that the body is from past sensory encounters.

But anyway, here's the quote. We shall call the system, which generates the ab, this absolute space, a cognitive map, and we'll identify it with the hippocampus. This system underlies the notion of absolute unitary space, which is non centered stationary framework. Which is a non centered stationary framework through which the organism and its egocentric spaces move.

Okay, well that's holding some paradox, but they're trying to relate it to this inside outside, but I think they're already starting to hold it in the way that I suggest. here's another quote from about the contin absolute space from that book. In contrast to this view, we think that the concept of absolute space is primary and that it's elaboration does not depend upon prior notions of relative space.

There exists at least one neural system, which provides the basis for an integrated model of the environment. This system underlies the notion of absolute unitary space, and you can see what I'm doing I think. I think they were already onto a lot of important ideas here that have been really hard for us to articulate bud.

They have a lot to do with what I think of as constellation cognition or constellation thinking, or this hippo hippocampus as a translator. So anyway, and when I say hippocampus, I really mean I. Hippocampus and all its confederates, as Len puts it in the article, the hippocampus, the hippocampal formation, the interal cortex, all of that.

Anyway, um, here's a quote. Each new item, which is located on a map, is automatically related to every other place. An item already on the map, a change in a feature of the landscape occasions, only a single alteration in a map. Yet it changes every route statement in which that feature occurs. That's a little bit technical, but wow.

That's really wonderful. I just need to put this here just for my notes too, because I think that's really, really talking about that. Function of translation, actually, that flexibility and that shifting of the kaleidoscope and that constellation. Um, another one I wrote down, which I think has to do with object dependent stuff, which has some relation to other podcasts we've done.

So the constituents of space are places, places and space are not in our view, defined in terms of objects or the relations between objects.

The absolute space defined by CON exists in the absence of objects. This freedom from reference to any specific object or set of objects is one of the most important properties of maps. Okay, awesome. But the map is not necessarily located anywhere. It's our communication with our own. Habits, our own body, our own, everything we've ever gone through, which is still, which has molded or sculpted our body at so many levels and so many dimensions, which is a little bit like storage.

then this one, just because of this, um. Across time dimension. So here's a quote. Since each representation of a stimulus is encoded in terms of its spatial relations to other stimuli and identical stimulus occurring in different parts of the same environment, or in totally different environments, will have distinct and.

Representations in each case. This, of course, is the way in which a Spatiotemporal framework solves by its very structure, the problem of re-identification. So central to our philosophical discussion. And then, uh, gosh, how many did I write down? Okay.

We have organized this chapter around the dichotomy between absolute and relative space and the hope of showing how the choice of either or. Of either of these as prior crucial, crucially influences the ability of any theory to cope with space perception. It seems reasonable to conclude first that there is a clear need for the concept of unitary space further.

And again, I think by unitary space that's like the ongoingness. The, not necessarily something with a beginning or an end. further, it appears that this framework cannot be acquired through experience. It must be available soon after birth for the process of localization, identification, and the coherent organization of experience depend upon it.

Okay, so that's very Kantian you know, that you're born with this and actually a lot of work with the Moser lab, as Lynn mentions here, I think they're finding that you're born with this scaffolding, so to speak. But of course, because we are bodies. that doesn't actually mean that there's nothing out there that you're encountering.

I think that's a very important thing not to overlook that you can have a scaffolding because of course you are, you're a body and also you're encountering the real world, which is gonna shift and mold that. In a way it's just kind of common sense, but a lot of these things are hard to articulate through the data, so.

All right, so that was, you know, the book from 1978. Isn't that amazing? 50 years ago, and they were already conceptualizing the hippocampus as a system for bridging spatial temporal gaps. And, um, thinking about this spatial framework that isn't necessarily derived from experience that we're born with, which is the body, but also that experience molds or shapes as we communicate with ourselves and with that world.

So it's translating that world into what it's born with or vice versa. Right. It's using the scaffold to translate the world to itself. 'cause it's always going in a lot of different directions at once. So it's this kind of flexible constellation, or this constellation system that's flexible, but that's providing, you know, re-identification or, or just identification that we can communicate with ourselves through.

Through as we move through the world and through life. And when you have something wrong with the hippocampus, it disrupts that clearly. now finally, let's get to this 2021 paper, which is the one that Lynn and I talk about here, and this is called the Hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance is from 2021.

And I think it's deepening all these insights and switching them towards the CONSOLATORY framework. And just to kind of give you a little bit of an idea of the paper, because it has a lot to do with our conversation. I think I should read a few pieces from the papers so you don't have to read it, but just so you understand what we're referring to.

And also that, you know, what Lynn actually wrote back then and what he's saying now, which is a little bit different. At times. So yeah. Let's see, what did I put those quotes? okay, I'll just read them the ones I have here.

The question of why our conceptions of space and time are intertwined with memory in the hippocampal formation is at the forefront of much current theorizing About this brain system. In this article, I argue that animals bridge spatial and temporal gaps through the creation of internal models that allow them to act on the basis of things that exist in a distant place and or existed at a different time.

The hippocampal formation plays a critical role in these processes by stitching together spatio, temporarily disparate entities and events. It does this by one, constructing cognitive maps that represent extended spatial context. Incorporating and linking aspects of an environment that may never have experienced, may never have been experienced together.

So you see there's this kind of stitching together of things that seem to be. Happening in different areas at the same time. Two, creating neural trajectories that link the parts of an event, whether they occur in close temporal proximity or not. Enabling the construction of event representations even when elements of that event were experienced at different, quite different times.

And three, using these maps and trajectories to simulate possible futures. As a function of these hippocampal driven processes, our subjective sense of both space and time are interwoven constructions of the mind much as the philosopher Emmanuel Con postulated. Okay. I would say that's one side and the other side is that it's also not.

They're not constructions of the mind in the sense of only being in the mind. They're also constructions of the ongoing encounter and of the encounter itself. The encounter is also structuring. But anyway, um, okay. And then Len says in the paper, mediated action at a distance is central to much of what psychologists care about.

Given that behavior is frequently motivated by things that are at a spatial and or temporal remove from the here and now. I'll argue that mediating and action at a distance is so important that a brain system centered on the hippocampal formation is largely devoted to carrying it out. So you see this wonderful turn where he's really saying whatever's happening here is this process of, the three that I described earlier.

This way that we have past, present, future, that we can even communicate with ourselves as that, or, you know. Here, there elsewhere, whatever you wanna wanna put on it. But also, he talks about Suzanne Corgan's book, and he says, without a hippocampal formation, I will argue organisms are largely incapable of escaping the here and now.

A state of being captured quite well in the title of Susan Corkin book about the famous Amnesic patient, Hm, present, permanent, present tense.

And finally, last quote of the day. This is from Lynn. In this book paper that we're talking about nearly 45 years ago, we proposed the cognitive map theory of hippocampal function spurred by the discovery of O'Keefe and ostrovsky of place cells in the hippocampus. This theory spelled out the ways in which the brain structure and its neighbors allowed organisms to move about and explore space and to store in memory specific experiences that played out over time.

Much has been discovered about the hippocampus and its neural confederates since then, most of which is consistent with the broad outlines of cognitive map theory, but one enigma remains. Why is it that the same neural system is so intimately involved in aspects of space and time and memory? So you see why is that?

It's a little bit like asking how can the same part of the brain be so important for both navigation and memory. but of course it is. So Anyway, he talks about, you know, how animals with hippocampal damage became sort of locked or trapped in this temporal moment of contiguity, uh, feeling alone. And he relates that to superstition, which is really interesting because a lot of diseases where we become paranoid or we have, certain hallucinations that are relative to superstition, do affect it, are, can come from damage to this area.

And that has to do with the way we connect events together. And this kind of pattern matching or fitting to that is the body. that's a really interesting point that's brought up here too. And I. How we understand, you know, how we distinguish and communicate with our context and with ourselves, uh, is really important.

So let's go to today's conversation. And it's like 50 years now since that 1978 book that Nadel and John wrote, actually it's not 50 years since 1978, but it's 50 years since they started writing the book and thinking about it. 'cause of course these things take time before they're published. And it's, uh, that's when they first started this cognitive map theory and when O'Keefe had his, amazing findings with the play cells.

And so now we're only beginning to really understand this and rethink memory through a lot of people's work. Like Yuri Zaki and John Kuy was on, on the podcast. And a lot of these people, Brad, love, a lot of people have been working on this from different angles. Computational, but also. Uh, just theoretical and always in the lab.

And so we, we talk about here how this, what, what this, this, these ideas and how the hippocampus might be accomplishing this, so to speak, and what it all really means and how we're linking events across space and time. And yeah, the main. Evolution, I guess is to, when we think of what, what I think he's expressing here with the action as a dis at a distance is almost like a Gibson kind of ecological immediacy that I think, and again, Lynn does not say this, but that I see.

also it kind of helps us explain how this is actually happening as a process and how the body itself in its encountering is doing a lot that we think or thought had to happen through something like a representation. So. You know, it's all threaded together in our studies of it. It is the same process, and space and time aren't separate scaffolds, neither our memory and navigation.

But when we study them, we need to break them into those because it's just too overwhelming and we're part of it. So we have to do this. And how do we realize we're doing that as we're doing it anyway? The hippocampus is still this amazing translator Also just metaphorically, a beautiful thing to look at when you look at the research and both that 1978 book and this 2021 paper are open access and you can all read them yourself and decide what you think about them.

And I would love to, Encourage you to do that and also share what you think about it if you do read it and explore these mysteries with me. And also then you can even better understand Lynn and all these conversations and what he's saying because he is really one of the architects of this whole new way of beginning to understand the connection of the threes beyond the  📍 threes, so to speak.

Past, present, future. All right, so here's a conversation with Lynn Nadel about his paper and thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to my research ramble, and let me know what you think. All right. Bye.

 So that one is fine. I don't know 

I don't have any particular, uh, particular agenda. 

Okay. Well. Well, um, I thought, so. We're gonna talk about your paper.

I have it printed out because, well, just because I love it. But, um, so I can actually read the title in the right way. The hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance. I mean, that's pretty exciting title. 

Mm-hmm. I should send you the, uh, the talk that I gave, you know, with that title. Oh, 

please do. 

Which was a, I should have thought to do this before, but once you said you wanted to concentrate on that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a kind of a general approach to the issue of, um, of how important it is to link things across time and space in, in a way that, uh, allows for, um.

Causality, you might say, you know, between things that are not directly in the, in the, in the same space or in the same time, you know, so it's action at a distance, you know, how do you get action at a distance? I mean, the physicists talk about that as something that can't happen, you know, uh, you know, so to speak or shouldn't happen.

Although the quantum entanglement is a, I mean, the, the talk goes into a little bit of that. Starts out with, with quantum entanglement. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you 

talk about spooky distance, Einstein in the paper too. That's it. 

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. So I, I, I play that out a bit in the talk and then I move to, uh, you know, that, you know, we, humans, animals, you know, are constantly doing things, you know, that involve action at a distance.

You know, we, we, we behave based on things that happened hours ago or weeks ago or months ago. And, and we, and we, and we engage in spatial behavior based on things we don't see. We navigate to goals that we don't actually see at the moment. So somehow we have to bridge those things, you know, we have to bridge them in order to be able to behave.

Appropriately in space and time. Uh, but then it gets more interesting because then, you know, then the question of how does learning occur? I mean, how do you connect up things in learning when, when there's a gap between the cause and the consequence or something like that. So, you know, you need a system that actually bridges those temporal gaps.

Somehow and, and the, the claim is that the hippocampus is sort of integral to that capacity. And in fact there's, you know, I think it's laid out in the paper, you know, there's pretty good evidence that without a hippocampus, animals are, are not very good at bridging those temporal gaps that the kinds of tasks that require them to do it and the sort of.

Knowledge that you build up about the world that you know, is somehow a distillation of things that are separated in time and space. Um, you know, that, that without a hippocampus, you're pretty bad at those kind of things, if not hopeless. So, you know, that was the gen that was, that's the backstory, you know, to the general idea that you know that, that amongst other things.

You know, and partly as a function of what it actually does by helping form memories, which is one way to bridge time and forming cognitive maps, which is a way of bridging space, uh, that it, you know, the hippocampus. Permits the system, you know, permits the organism to act at a spatial and temporal distance, so to speak, from, from things that it either wants to get to or wants to, you know, make use of from the, from the past.

That's the, that's the rough claim. And it's a, you know, it's a kind of an overarching story about, about what the hippocampus does and the actual things it does forming maps, um. Building, building representations, you know, over multiple experiences in the same environment. Somehow you have to connect those things up.

I mean, when you go back into an environment you've been in before that you only partially explored, you know, you want to add the new information you're gaining from the second time you've gone back to that environment, to the one that you, you know, made last week or, or a month ago or whatever. Well, how do you do that?

I mean it, you know, it's easy to say the words, but how does the brain actually do that? You know? In order to do that, it's gotta access the appropriate old memory. It's gotta activate it in some way. It's gotta have a mechanism for adding new information to this old memory. I mean, all of that is, you know, you know those other actual steps that the system has to take in order to accomplish this ability to.

Aggregate information over multiple experiences. You know, that it judges to be relevant to each other even though they're separated by time. So, you know, again, the hippo, the claim is that the hippocampus allows you to do that. That actually is part of the, part of the critical machinery that allows you to stitch together those sort of temporarily separate occasions that are linked by the fact that they occur in the same context or something like that.

Yeah. Anyway, that's the, that's the idea. 

It's interesting to think of action at a distance, because I even think that in physics, they, it's, it's a discuss through motion, you know, like emotion is affected without the two being in contact. So that's interesting with the hippocampus. and I, but I think before, you can correct me if I'm wrong, I have the paper, I can look it up.

But someone had talked about this, was it. Not Davenport, but, uh, had talked about action at a distance in relation to the hippocampus And you're bringing in the spatial aspect here too and time. 

Yeah. But again, but Memory is the linking device. I can't remember which paper that was. But number of people have, a number of people sort of raised this idea, but they, they never really. Took it all that seriously as a framework that might organize a lot of what we.

What we think about when we think about the hippocampus. to 

me, this goes to, you know, hippocampus has a cognitive map, which you and I talked about a lot. Yeah. And you're building out of those ideas a lot. There's a lot about the cognitive map itself being mm-hmm. This kind of structure that you're thinking of as doing what you just explained.

Right. And there's some part in the paper where you kind of say, yeah, we came up with all this, what, 45 years ago? 

Yeah, it's more like 50 at this point. 

50 now. Yeah. 'cause it's paper idea. The 

idea started in the, in the kind of, um, 72. 71, 72. Yeah. It's over 50 years now. 

Wow. That's like hard to get my head around.

Me too. It's amazing 

how long it takes for, for people to start to understand the ideas, you know, too. 

Well, I, you know, there was always some understanding of it and then, you know, once the grid cells came along, it really, it really became much more. Popular. 

That's, that's what I mean. It's been this whole process though, if you really think about it.

it seems like, oh yeah, that, that, that's how it went. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But when, when you hear 50 years, it's like, oh yeah, these things take time. And that's just a blip too. 50 years. I mean, but anyway, this is kind of part of what we're talking about, right?

from where we are now, this looks different, but the point is, in the paper you say, yeah, we, we came up with these kind of ideas about the cognitive map and the hippocampus as a cognitive map. And over time those have kind of played out. You and I have talked about that and others on come on the research podcast, have talked about that all over time in hippocampal research.

A lot of these things have actually kind of structured even a whole area, of hippocampus research in a way. much of it, 

you know, I, I would say yeah, a lot of it '

cause, but here's the kind of thing that's been happening that I feel like this paper is addressing. and I'd like to see where you're at now.

'cause you wrote this, what, five years ago? You say at some point, you know, okay, all that is happening with cognitive map theory and so on, and we're making progress, but we still don't really know how to understand like the same system, the hippocampus, the hippocampal formation, whatever we wanna call it.

This area of the brain is doing all of the stuff with space and time and also with memory. how do we understand all of that together? Because what's this neural system that's so intimately involved with the space and time and navigation do you see that as still such a question? 

No, because actually the two are totally intertwined and dependent on one another. Basically. I mean, for a long time people were saying, you know, why is this spatial navigation system happening in the same zone as memory, so to speak? But no, I, I mean, I think this proposal is a proposal that, you know, it, it does.

Space and time as a memory function, you know, and that allows one to, to bridge gaps in space and time. I mean, let's assume that there was no memory, right? And, and the system was still involved in space and time and would allow you to navigate, you know, just in your immediate environment basically, and to put the string together, or temporal sequences of movements in an immediate environment, but you'd never remember any of it.

And you'd never, you know, you, you wouldn't have any memory from prior experiences. Basically, it's just a system, an online system for navigating in the immediate environment, absent memory. Okay. I mean, it might be useful. You could, you could, you might be able to claim there are animals where, you know, more primitive animals where that, that's what the hippocampus does.

It just helps the animal navigate immediately in space and time based on the things that it sees right in front of it. You know, maybe early, you know, way hundreds of millions of years ago. You know, that's what, you know, what was the case. But in order to make full use of that system, uh, and to be able to build on, you know, on, on what experiences you have, then it necessarily becomes a memory system.

You want to, you need to be able to remember, you know, where things are in space. You need to be able to remember. Uh, the sequence of things that you experienced in space. So I don't see any separation between them as if they're two different functions. Like, here's color, vision, and here's, you know, black and white vision, and somehow they act together, you know, but they could be separate or something like that.

Or here's, here's vision, here's sound. And they're two completely separate things, but you can put 'em together sometimes to sort of space. The notion, the space and time notions in hippocampus kind of depend upon the idea that they are memory systems for space and time. They're not just space time systems, they're memory systems for space and time.

And those things just naturally have to go together. And when you put 'em together, then you come up with this idea, you know that, that when they run together, then the system will allow the organism to act on the basis of things that are distant in space and time. Just like, just like that. 

I mean, I agree, but I think, you know, even just four or five years ago that would've sounded a bit strange because people were sort of studying memory and people were sort of studying the so-called GPS of the brain We thought, oh, those, you know, how do we put those together? It seemed like a big puzzle. Absolutely. and I was, 

you know, I was saying some of the same things for quite a while, you know, that, you know, this is a bit of a puzzle. The field is spending time trying to figure out why a system that's a memory system is also a cognitive map space, time system.

But now I think it's a, it's, it's a, it's necessary. I think for it to be of any use, it really has to be a memory system. Can't just be an online, you know, robot that just basically deals with the immediate environment. It's got to actually create a model of the environment. 

Yeah, 

you know, in space and time.

And once you do that, then you know, then, then that kind of bifurcation and you know, the problem dissolves. It's no longer a question of how can the same system be doing these two different things? They're not two different things. They're actually inextricably intertwined, 

 So when we're looking, when we're trying to look at something that we call memory. It depends on the memory, but I mean, 

yeah, that's the point. I mean, yes, of course there are kinds of memories that have nothing to do with space and time.

So it's not that this is a system that encapsulates all memory. I might, my memory, you know, for how, how an apple tastes has nothing to do with space and time. So I've got memories for the quality of things in the world, you know, that are totally independent of space and time. That, you know, they're not, but if 

you looked at that from another angle, I think that's what I'm trying to say.

you could say, oh, I have this memory of the apple because my grandmother always gave me apples and I miss my grandmother. So that's kind, I'm, that may be why. 

Sure. What we're 

looking for that, what we're gonna, how we're gonna use these. That 

may be why. But I think the, the problem here is that the word memory.

You know, is ill-defined in that equation. You know, here's this cognitive map of space, let's say, and then here's this memory function. You know, and if you think of this memory function as including all kinds of memory, like, you know, memory for the taste of an apple and so on. Now, you may have acquired that memory from a particular episode in space and time, but you may, you probably don't even remember that, you know, that's, that's not a critical part of the, of your memory for how an apple tastes.

The problem is. People wouldn't use the word memory to describe that. You would say, oh, I have a memory for how an apple tastes. They would say, oh, I have knowledge about how apple tastes. Right. But, but what, you know, what is knowledge? But simply the, uh, the accumulation of, you know, the information we acquired into memory, you know?

So the word memory is kind of poorly articulated in, in the, in these debates. I mean, the idea here is that a certain kind of memory. Namely about the distribution of things in space and time is involved with the hippocampus. Other kinds of memory which may be parasitic on this kind, but which nevertheless exist on their own.

Those other kinds of memory are, don't require the hippocampus and don't have anything to do with space and time. Kind of literally. Although they may, they obviously were acquired. At some point in space and time, but that, that's not an important part of that memory. It's now just some general knowledge you have about the properties of things in the world.

The, the, the, the particular property that the hippocampus is concerned with in terms of memory is the distribution of things in space and time. You know, in the past, this is, these are the experiences I've had about the distribution of things in space and time in the past, and you build up a cognitive map based on that.

So they were just completely hand in glove. It's really a hand in glove kind of thing. You can't, you can't have a cognitive map without it being a memory system because you can't acquire a cognitive map all at once. Right, necessarily. It involves putting things together over time, and sometimes the time is continuous.

So you could make the argument in some sense that it's a single thing, but quite frequently it's discontinuous. As I said, you know the example I gave before. You go into an environment, you, you sample some of the stuff there, you go away two weeks later, you come back to the same museum and you, you kind of investigate a different part of that museum and you add that to your knowledge.

And so, I mean, so, uh, very, most of the time we're building up these, these, these knowledge bases, uh, about the distribution of things in space and time. You know, o over O over, you know, in, in. Dis in disconnected episodes, so to speak. So it's really a problem for the brain to put all that together so that becomes part of what the hippocampus is doing.

Allowing the brain to put things together that belong together because they happened in similar spaces, but at quite different times. 

So we go, if we go to the museum and we're maybe we're, we could imagine that we're. There for the first time. And yeah, we explore it and we're sort of creating interactions with that space that, yeah, when we come back to that space again, we are gonna interact EAs more easily.

I don't know how to go to certain. Sure. 

And you do that by activating your memory for that, for your prior experience. Or, 

or that's the same thing, isn't it? Like I'm, I'm not activating a memory necessarily and finding my way. I'm sort of at the same time both of those are happening, aren't they? It's not.

Or, or do you think I stand and I say, okay, now I will activate my 

memory? No, I don't think, yeah, no, no. You're on the right track. I, I, I mean, this doesn't happen consciously, but it is the case, you know, when you walk inside, you know. Say the Reichs Museum, which, you know, I've been to for three, three or four times, you know, and don't have a very good mental map of, but you know, I can, I, I know exactly where it is in Amsterdam.

I know what the entrance to it looks like. I mean, I could easily identify it from pictures. I would, I know if I'm walking in that. General part of Amster, I know exactly where it is and you know, I know where the Van Gogh museum is relative to it. Hopefully it will survive. I know it's having some financial problems.

Um, so, so when I, you know, when I walk into the museum, I mean, I don't consciously activate, you know, but, but the cues that I get that are familiar to me will activate, you know, whatever information, whatever knowledge I have about the layout of that museum is gonna get activated. Just by some partial cues, you know, then, then the hippocampus.

And that's the same process. There's not like two different, that's all the same processes that we call memory and we call navigation. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And 

they're studied like that. So it can be very confusing. I think 

unfortunately it, they got separated, you know, in the way people were studying them 

or maybe just so that we could understand them more.

because I think the confusing thing is, and maybe you have some insight here, is once we go home, and it's funny you were talking about the Reichs museum 'cause that's what I was imagining. So that's very weird, like at a distance there. I was literally imagining going in there because I was there not too long ago.

But, anyway, so like I go home. Right now, I'm home. I'm not anywhere near that museum and I can just sit here and remember 

Absolutely. And. 

I think this is why this is becoming, at least in neuroscience, not so hard to understand that you can have something like a kind of space that you're navigating.

Mm-hmm. Um, as you're remembering. But I think that's still a very hard idea so I wonder how you think of that, right? So we're at the museum and we created these kind of cognitive maps, as you would call them, but then when I come home and remember that what's going on there, would you say, is it kind of just.

The same sort of process as when I was there, oh, it's 

certainly using the same system. I mean, it's not exactly the same as when you were there because you don't have the supporting, you know, ti sort of external stimulus. But, but yeah, it's part of the same, it's part and parcel of exactly the same system.

I mean, then you, then you replay, essentially you're replaying in your head. Or reactivating in your head. You know, those, that knowledge structure, that cognitive map that you built up, you know, when you were visiting. And that then allows you to imagine walking through the museum to you. You know, if you know the museum really well, you know how you get to the particular paintings.

You really want to see, you know, all the kind of stuff you do when you go into a museum. Um, you know, I think, you know, if you, if you go back to the 78 book, we made it. Absolutely clear from the very beginning that what we were talking about was a memory system. We did not separate them. This is the spatial navigation system and then there's this function of memory which somehow, you know, connects to it at some point.

No, we were very clear right there in the, like the first page of the book, we are talking about a memory system, right? A particular kind of memory system, you know, that deals with space and time, so. It's true that that didn't settle the debate, that didn't convince people that these things should be thought of in the same breath, so to speak.

But you know, our commitment to that idea that those things were inextricably intertwined was there from the very beginning. I mean, when I wrote later that people are struggling with how to fit them together, that was other people that I was writing about. Other people are, you know, spending a lot of time trying to understand how these things go together.

For us, it was necessarily the case that they went together that, that a cognitive map is a memory device. 

And you also talk about con a lot in that book and also in this paper. So, and, and, and we, we, we talked her a little bit about how memory is a, kind of, an impossible word to define. Mm-hmm. Define, and we don't really need to define it.

If anything, what, this would be another conversation, but a lot of people have been trying to understand that. We've come up with the word memory to discuss something that, you know, isn't necessarily one thing. Mm-hmm. to look for a memory, uh, is kind of a bit of a strange, um mm-hmm. Stance to take, right?

Yeah. So we're not, you know, that, let's leave that for just a minute, because space and time to go to K and, and to go to your, you know, 50 years of work, those are also kind of tricky. Whereas, I mean, we can go back to Leiden is in Newton, which you know, con talks about, Yep. You know, where you have absolute space or you have something like where space isn't about the material relations and there's been constant arguments, not two separate from the ones we've had about memory and navigation.

Uh, 

I mean I 

haven't, you know, occasionally I dabble in the Phil philosophical literature again to see what people are saying about, 

he seems like Kant, is he your favorite because he comes up?

Oh, 

totally. I mean, I think Kant got most things right. I mean, I think by and large, you know, he's the philosopher, you know, who got most things right. Um, but, you know, and I go back occasionally to read. People are still arguing about, you know, absolute space versus relative space and, you know, it's kind of an interesting philosophical debate.

But, but I don't, I can't say I have any new insights or thoughts about it. You know, particularly, uh, and I think the, the, the, the claim we made is that we create a psychological space that fits what Con said, not that the physical space is actually like that. In the, in the real world, who knows what, you know, what it, what's the case?

We are just talking about what the human, what the, you know, what the brain, what the human brain, but obviously what the um, what the vertebrate brain or the mammalian brain, and not just the mammalian brain. 'cause insects have the same thing. You know, what brains, what brains in mobile animals do. Now would you say, do, do plants have a cognitive map?

I would have to say the answer is probably no. Right? Although I think plants demonstrate many of the same cognitive phenomena like memory, you know, and so on, that we do. But they don't have a cognitive map because they don't really need one, not for space. 'cause they're not moving. Right. Anything that moves in the world, you know, in in, in some intentional way.

Needs to have something like a, a cognitive mapping system in order to benefit from its prior experience. So it's, that's a big statement, but that's, you know, that's just what can't be any other way, as far as I'm concerned, has to be like that. And so the philosophers are talking about, you know, partly about, you know, and Newton and Liveness we're talking partly about what the real world was like.

But what John and I were talking about is what is the, what is the psychological world that we create inside our heads, which of course. It has to be consistent with what the real world is like, but it doesn't have to be exactly like it, you know, down to the microscopic level. And we know it's not.

Basically you get down to the microscopic level and the table that we think is a nice flat surface is actually rather bumpy down at the, you know, down at the atom, the atomic level. But we don't sense any of that. And that doesn't matter, you know? And the world may actually not conform. You know, at, in very, at various scales to Euclid and geometry, like Kant would've argued and like we argued, but that's not our problem.

Our problem is to have a system that actually allows us to effectively move around and, and, and adaptively in the world that we live in. And, and sort of the conte in an hour, you know, the sort of Euclidean space of Euclidean absolute space does that job perfectly well. And you know, from an evolutionary point of view, it's a much easier solution than kind of building the brain on, you know, kind of non-Euclidean ri and geometry or some weird thing like that.

Um, yeah, well all, a lot of those things are ways we've tried to put some kind of model or structure. Into the world so that we can all talk about these things. I mean, so, you know, thinking of trying to find the, that specific kind of thing, like Euclidean mm-hmm. Geometry or something in anything is a bit, you know, and of course there's arguments about all of this and mm-hmm.

Even about what? Continent by space and time. Right. Because you know, he talks about it as a form of intuition and it's not objective reality. But then he actually opens kind of by. Presenting live liveness and Newton's views, and I imagine it this way, you can tell me how you feel, but, and I, I even imagine as, you know, your work a bit like this, but that instead of having to choose these options, we're either objectively, you know, everything's absolutely outside or everything's absolutely inside.

That there's some interactional thing going on that we're all trying to figure out and Oh, 

totally. 

You gotta hold that and you can't put it into words. Precisely. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, we're just finishing up a paper. Me and Mary and two other colleagues are just finishing up a paper exactly on this question.

Sort of the, you know, the debate between inside out and outside in, you know, the busa kind of argument. And, and this, this is a paper about the generation of meaning, you know, and where meaning comes from so to speak. And you know how the brain basically represents meanings. So we're just, paper is gonna be sent off a publication and a special issue of.

Philosophical transactions we think, you know, within the next few days. So we're, we're very much thinking about exactly how do those things come together Because even though the, even though the, the brain doesn't have to construct something that is sort of microscopically faithful to the outside world, it has, in fact it has nonetheless, in fact, evolved in that world.

You know, so it has to capture, you know, the, the, the aspects of that world that are important to a species, uh, of a certain size, you know, that, that, that has the capacity to move around, you know, so, so it's, it, it's gonna be an approximation. To, to that world, but an approximation that works basically that has worked evolutionarily, that means animals who have it survived and reproduced, and animals that don't have it didn't survive and didn't reproduce, so, so how does that external world kind of.

Basically anchor, you know, this internal system. So the evidence is that this internal system is hardwired. I mean, the latest evidence from, from the, from the Moser lab, which of course I'm here and hearing about, you know, uh, uh, uh, in terms of the grid cell. Coordinates system that the grid cells provide to the whole network that's there before rats even open up their eyes and start to move around in the world that shows up on day 10 postnatally, independent of anything the rat has done.

It hasn't even. Again, hasn't opened its eyes. It's not moving around that system. The, the, the, the core features of that system, the, the nature of the way it works is there by day 10, independent of anything else. So that, so that's something that presumably Evolution has built in. It is built in this coordinate structure that provides the scaffold, you know, that organisms can use to attach actual experienced information to.

So I have this kind of scaffold and then I experience in the world that the table is over here, the thing is over there, and. It just gloms onto this coordinate system, you know, this hardwired system that provides the framework for, for, for thinking, you know, effectively about space and time. And according to us, it's a Euclidean framework.

Again, because it works, not because it exactly mirrors, you know, hyperdimensional space, but because it on this planet in the ti, in the way in the environments that we move in and function in, it works perfectly well. It does the job basically, and it's computationally easier than one would imagine. Other more complex geometries would be.

Basically it's a kind of a geometry that you can, that the system can, can handle, so to speak. 

Yeah, I think that's really fascinating. The, you see that with a lot of the body and a lot of the brain too, where you do have this sort of. Basic scaffolding. I mean, we're born and we, we are here, we, we have structure and it seems very strange that we wouldn't have that structure.

Yeah, exactly. Was interacting in particular ways. 

Yeah. Yeah. The question is how does you know how it ontically, how does it emerge? Is it affected by experience? Can it be broken? Can it be changed if you have different experience and things like that? So again, the Mosers in some experiments some years ago, they, they raised rat pups in a non-Euclidean environment.

I think I told you about. I think we've discussed this before. Uh, 

I've discussed it with people before. I was actually just about to ring it up. Yeah. And, and it did shift a bit. 

Yeah, it shifted a bit, but not in a significant way. Basically, the main, the main framework, the main Euclidean framework remained intact.

There were some minor, you know, distortions, but it was nothing. Nothing that you would, you know, write home about. So, so their conclusion was no, you know, but barring a completely dysfunctional ear, early developmental environment, you know, where the system itself doesn't develop the way it should, you know, doesn't get enough nutrition or, you know, with something like that, barring circumstances like that, which do occasionally happen, of course, and we can do them artificially, the system will inevitably.

Have, you know, have those properties independent of specific experience. Now it may be like as individual system, you need to have some input to just, you know, jack up the activity, you know, but it could be random input. It's just gotta be something to get the system going. But the system self organizes kind of developmentally to have those properties.

Yeah. Well, we're all in the womb and we're Yeah. Coming, but you brought up a couple things that are really interesting about if we don't have the hippocampus and there's so much evidence, you know, before we got to John and you, and navigation and all of this, we understood, okay, the hippocampus is memory and there's Clive wearing, or there's Hm.

Sure. And you were talking about you're kind of living in this perpetual, you talk about Corgan's book in your paper, but Yeah. that, you know, if you don't have the hippocampus or if you have some trouble, you're almost in a perpetual present. 

That's exactly right. That's the assumption. Yeah. You're, you're in the present where the present is a kind of a small temporal window.

I mean, whatever that window is, it's fairly, maybe 20 seconds or something like that. But that's the window of, that's the window where, you know, you, you, you can. You have a little bit of time to play with, but outside of that, you're, you're basically out of, out of business. 

Yeah. So with these people, you can't learn something new like how to go to a new grocery store and still remember it the next day, for example.

Right, right. And you won't remember it either. So both of those kind of layers that we were talking about Right. Are, are connected. But also, you know, you brought up the plant, which is kind of interesting 'cause you know, this is this whole controversial thing about. Do other creatures have cognition? And sure, you know, yes, they have it differently than humans, but you, it's interesting to think of the cognitive map, right?

Because if we think of, of having hippocampus damage where we can't create these cognitive maps in the way we're talking about here, and we're in the pre present moment all the time. Now I'm not saying that's like a plant because the plant is nothing like, it doesn't have a human brain.

It's nothing like that. But I can, I mean, I just planted all these crazy sunflowers this summer and they got so tall and, you know, we had to kind of move 'em around like with, with a string, because they were just everywhere. Mm-hmm. And you do notice that they immediately turn, I mean, they might, I might wake up and they've completely changed their direction and gone another way.

I, I don't know how they grow so fast, how they changed their direction, but they're in a kind of. They are moving and they're in an interaction, well, 

they're moving. Yeah. Within the, with yeah, they're in, they're interacting with the environment in particularly, you know, where the, where the light is coming from.

All life is sort of doing that, right? Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, 

these are tr these are tropisms, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a word for that. I mean, so they are, you know, they, they, they, they alter their behavior. You know, in a trop, in a trop way with regard to moisture, probably with regard to light, with regard to odor plumes, you know, there may be a variety of things like that that will influence, certainly plants, exchange, pheromones, I mean, I don't know if they're called pheromones in plants, but they influence each other.

by emitting stuff that you know, has odor or so, you know, basically, yeah, yeah. I think plants are pretty cognitive, you know, and in most ways except they just don't, because they don't move, uh, by and large, or at least they don't move, you know? They 

don't, they 

move, they move their parts, their 

full position.

They, they move, they don't move 

their position. Right. They, but they do move. They move, but not, not their position. Yeah. I guess what 

I'm trying to get at is that, you know, when we're trying to understand like, why are we even studying all this in, in a way it's because we wanna understand how all this amazing stuff is going on.

How Yeah. How we know that we know. And I really feel like memory is such an important idea. And, of course, you know, how we find our way through the world in the most metaphorical ways and the most literal ways mm-hmm. Is so important. And I think we can get lost from that in a way, but. If I, if we just kind of for a minute, just take life as it's, it's trying to make its way through the world and it has all these different ways of doing that.

Mm-hmm. There's something about the human right, and if we wanna call it the cognitive map or we wanna think of it in other ways 

but it's not just the human. I mean, it's every animal, not just 

the human right. But we're talking about the, pretty much every 

invertebrates, you know, since the, you know, jawbone fish, I mean, it goes back at least 350 million years in, in this lineage that you see something that is essentially a cognitive map.

You know, it, it, that's what it, you know, so all manner of animals and, you know, there's, and there's a lot of science on this. In fact, you know, some of the, some, there's, there's gonna be a symposium. Are you gonna be at SFN this year? 

I don't know yet. I got a lot of stuff going on. 

There's a lot of stuff going on.

I'm not gonna go probably, but there's a ger uh, a Johnston Club symposium this year. Organized 

Oh yeah. 

Partly by Menno. Whi who by the way, is living outside Amsterdam now. He's moved from Oh, wow. Time. Um, he was just up here last week, so we saw him a bit, but he's now living in a little town, about 40 minutes outside Amsterdam.

Oh wow. Um, 

I can't remember the name of it, but if he's probably 

near me, then it's not Zeiss is it? 

No, no, it's not that, uh, anyway, that, you know, that that workshop is about comparative approaches to hippocampus, you know, and it's got some, got various people in it that are gonna talk about, you know, the, the kind of, the way in which this system has been preserved across eons, essentially, again, because it's crucial to animals that move around in the world.

Yeah. And some of the best work on this is done by a group in, uh, in Seville, Cosme Solace and, and others who are, you know, who've been studying this in, in lizards, in turtles and fish, you know, all that kind of, it's the same system essentially. 

So there's something about, uh, locomotion can call. There is 

something about lo, there's something about it changes 

what we need.

Cognitively, 

the, the cognitive kind of composition of the being is that, can we say that, I mean, is that 

any animals that move around the world intentionally need it Now, of course you have animals that move around in the world, unintentionally, they just get like fly 

mold or something, 

like molds or, you know, or things in the, in things in the ocean that just get swept around by tides, they don't actually choose where they go.

They just get, so there are animals that move, that are moved around in the world, but they don't, they don't. Do the moving themself. So therefore they don't have to make decisions about where to go, so to speak. And given that they don't have to make decisions about where to go, then they don't need a cognitive map.

They just go with the flow, literally. 

Well, slime mold is interesting though 'cause it does move towards the goal and it moves the way a sunflower moves towards the light. 

Yeah, it's istic then there. Then you, right. Then you go from animals that are just moved around randomly by the right. Existence.

There's no linear, 

clean way to talk about this. And 

then you move on to animals that move, you know, according to tropisms, you know, where you have a single, where you have a gradient of odor or light or temperature or something like that. And they can approach and avoid, you know, those things based on this gradient, right?

And then you move on to animals that you know, have much more flexibility. To combine sources of information to, to behave in a much more flexible way in space, you know, where they're not dependent upon an odor plume or so, or they may still use those things, but they're not dependent upon those who are getting around in the world.

So there's a progression, you know, of, of ways in which mobile animals interact with the spatial world all the way up to, you know. The map idea, the internal model of the world. That's the key idea here. That these, that animals, you know, at some point, animals acquired the ability to form an internal model of the space, of the spatial distribution of things.

That's memory. Right? Right. So as soon as you put memory into this, you end up with maps. 

And how do you see like an internal model as different from. An activation pattern or a, or a, a habit or something like that. I mean, do you 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could make the argument that a, you know, that a, an internal model is nothing more than a bunch of habits.

You know, that, that, that they get linked. That's a 

lot actually, to have a bunch of habits that you can, 

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the argument for why it needs to be a map rather than just a, you know, a why 

not a mapping happening. You know, what, why not a mapping, why a map? Like a, is it, do you really think of it as a noun, for example, or as.

A cognitive, it's mapping. You think of it as something that you can actually find in the brain. 

Well, that's all. We 

talked about representations before, so we don't have to go. Yeah. This 

kind of gets to that issue, you know? What does it mean to have a map? Um, I think it, I think about it as a thing, you know, it may not be a thing that you can actually.

Nailed down and say, this is the thing I'm talking about. But, but it's a thing that exists, not just something that is built on the fly. Every time you're in a given situation, it's not just something that you can create, you know, on the go. It's an actual preexisting thing, you know, that, you know, it's a model.

It is literally a model of the world. You know, that you know that you can. That you can activate and use in some way. So yeah, it has a physical instantiation that if you were smart enough and had a, a kind of a powerful enough computer in your head. You would be able to say, well, you know, the, the map is, you know, the combined activity of these two, 2,473,000 neurons, you know, which, which I've identified using these new neurop pixel probes that allow me to record from thousands and thousands of cells simultaneously.

You know, that, that the model is, you know, somehow there, there is a model in there. We just can't actually, it's not like a physical map. We know that and we know that, that these things are distributed in ways that you wouldn't be able to point to them as a, you know, as a physical map. But it has all the properties of the physical map.

Yeah. 'cause 

it has all the information involved, you know, that is captured by the interactions and interrelations between the, the bits, you know, that comprise the map. I mean, one of the, well one of the interesting things, and it's in this paper is, is when you don't have the hippocampus and you're trying to understand.

The causal relationship between things in the world, what you know, what caused what, arguing backwards. If you have a hippocampus, you're able to make causal leaps that jump over time in space. You know, you can say that this thing, that, you know, this thing that's happening now. You know, it was related to this thing that happened, you know, a week ago.

You can do that and you can then say, ah, now I can derive certain properties based on combining the knowledge from those two separate experiences. If you don't have a hippocampus, you're really confined to drawing conclusions based on a much more narrow definition of what, of what sort of caused what.

This just simply recapitulates the argument about the, the relative importance of temporal contiguity. Which are the things that are happening right now together? Versus contingency. And contingency requires a much broader swath of time that might force you to jump across time gaps. This is in the paper.

Yeah. There's a really interesting section on it. 

Yeah. And this is where, and this exactly. And this is where those Devonport paper comes in. Right. 

Right. 

Because what it means to to be an organism that is completely. Dominated solely by temporal contiguity is to be an organism that is, in quotes, superstitious.

Any, any two things that happen close together in time, a brain like that will assume they are causally related because that's all it's got to go on. 

Yeah. Davenport and Holloway reported that rats with hippocampal damage were slaves to temporal contiguity alone, and were in effect, highly superstitious, so That's exactly 

right.

You know, so, you know, you know, and the interesting thing is I think people vary on this dimension. I think there are some people who jump to conclusions based on, you know, very little input and very little data. They just happen to see that this, this occurred next to that and, and, and, you know, it might have been a coincidence.

It might not have been, but for some people that's all the evidence they need. Right? Then there are people who, you know. Necessarily take a much broader swath of, of data into, into their consideration. You know, they're using their hippocampus more to link, first of all, to get a sense of the base rate, you know, of occurrence of these things.

I mean, so did you know, it's not just that these two things ever happen close together in time, it's do they consistently happen together close in time, and how often do they happen separately from one another? So in, in which case. You know, if, if, if event A happens 30% of the time and event B happens 30% of the time, are those the same 30% so that they are always together, or is it there or are they just randomly happening 30% of the time?

And some of those times they're gonna happen together? Mm. And if you're a superstitious animal and you ex and you happen to experience one of those times when A is followed by B, you, you will conclude that A causes B or that A leads to B, you will not take into account the fact that A happened a lot on its own, and B happened a lot on its own.

That because that requires bringing in information that is not. Right here and now that requires acting at a distance, right? So in order to bring that information into this is what Risco and Wagner kind of were all about. You know, basically pointing out that it was contingency. 

Yeah, it's 

contingency and not temporal continuity.

That kind of determined learning what Davenport stuff shows is that Yeah, that's true in an animal with a hippocampus, but in an animal without a hippocampus. They're not re Wagner animals. They're, they're skinnerian animals or they're whatever holyan animals. They just basically behave on the, you know what just happened in temporal continuity.

That's the driver basically. 

Yeah, I love this part of the paper and I, I think it's such an important thing right now to think about in a lot of ways because. You also bring up re the future in this paper a lot and you know, because we're remembering and imagining are not that different actually.

Absolutely. We're doing something very 

similar. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We assume so. Yeah. 

And this is why I bring up, do you really think the map is a thing and why? I think that's an important question and um, a very, you know, why we talked, we've, you and I have talked about these things, representations and so on, but let me just be messy here and you correct me or just say what comes, okay?

Mm-hmm. 'cause I think it matters a lot right now and, uh, I wanna try to understand it and I've been trying to understand it. So you, you talk about, it can sound like there's a little map that we sort of use and that it's solid. And I know you're not saying that, but also it's not it. Everything that we're experiencing is changing kind of that.

That immediate, uh, map or mapping mm-hmm. Is what I would prefer. Okay. But there's layers of this because, you know, just as we're like, if you, you and I go for a hike and a snake comes out and I move out of the way, I didn't think about it. Mm-hmm. But I need to move out of the way. Mm-hmm. And, but also, you know, we do that in our memory too, or in our thinking or in our remembering, we.

Be lost in thought, for example. Mm-hmm. Or we can know that we are thinking about something. So there's not a, you talk about this in the paper, how it's not linear and you're trying to open up to different ways. Mm-hmm. And I think it's very hard, but I think also when we're thinking about mapping mm-hmm.

Because those are, you know, if we, if we generalize that to the way it's talked about in. Everyday life. Yeah. We think we have these memories, which are true or false, you know? Mm-hmm. And we send them out and they're, we can compare them and it actually isn't working like that, which is why No, 

no, no, no, no.

And I think more people don't 

understand. No, it's mapping, it's on, it's almost a com. It's almost like the hippocampus allows us to communicate with ourselves or something. 

Uh, well, yes, but also to constantly update our own knowledge, 

which is a kind of communication, which is the kind of 

communication we need.

I 

don't mean there's a thing sitting in our head communicating. It's a whole body. 

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable way to think about it. Absolutely. And I think the field in general, the memory field in general, is moving towards this much more dynamic understanding of what, you know, memory really is.

And does, you know, it's not a fixed thing. It's, you know, it's constant. Your memories, you. You are your memories, your memories are in constant dialogue with the, with the, the real world, basically with 

everything you're putting in, whatever you're watching on YouTube. Exactly. 

Right. Exactly. Whatever you're reading, 

the people that are around you, those are shifting the algorithm, so to speak 

all the time.

Yeah, absolutely. this is very 

important. I don't, I don't know if we, you know, to talk about the superstitious thing that you brought up. Mm-hmm. I don't know if we realize how. That's happening. You know that? 

No, I don't think we understand all. We're doing that to 

ourselves through what we surround ourselves with.

Yeah. Sure, sure. I don't think we understand 

that at all at this, but wait minute, I think we're working towards it and I, you know, a lot of the effort now is towards trying to understand exactly. You know, what are the consequences of this dialogue basically between our existing self and, you know, the new stuff that we're constantly being exposed to that forces a dialogue of the sort you're describing.

How does that work? I mean, how does the system constantly updating itself, you know, so that it stays true to the current reality rather than just ResSem just basically reflecting what used to be, what might still be, but. Might not be anymore. So, so this, yeah, 

because everything's always changing.

Everything in the world is changing, right? Yeah. Now some of it's changing at a scale that it doesn't matter. We don't have to win. It doesn't matter to us that the, we 

have to think about it. Yeah. That 

we can't step into the same par river water in the river, you know? It's still the river. Right. It's not the same water.

Exactly. The molecules are different. Right. So that's that old example that, that, that scale doesn't matter. But there are scales that it really does matter. You know, that there are changes that, you know, really now the river, you know, no longer flows in this direction, you know? But because of a flood, it now flows in that direction.

Okay. That's something we better be aware of, so to speak, and 

yeah. 

Do you still in, 

we're trying to become aware of that in a different way now than we've ever had. I think the field is very much 

focused on this question of the dynamics of memory. How memories are, you know, constantly changing as a function of current experiences.

That's what I'm focusing and 

how that affects the future. Because I think that's the thing too, when we were talking about trying to hold both things at once, that Yeah, yeah. We're also having to realize that what we're remembering is also what we're imagining or putting forward in a way. They're not the same thing, but.

In the way we're talking about, they're very connected. And also that's the difference between the sunflowers in my backyard that don't move and the reason that we need to have these mappings and be aware of them because 

right now they may predict those sunflowers may actually have enough of a memory, so to speak, that they like a 24 hour clock, let's say.

So that they will predict when they ought to shift, you know, according to where the sun is in the sky. I don't know if that's true or not, but, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were capable of that because that's just a timing mechanism. 

They're definitely moving in relation to everything that we do, and that 

happens.

Well, what happens if you take them out of the sun and put them in a, in a, in a place where there's constant illumination and see if they still move. On some regular basis, according to the clock, that they would've moved, you know, if they were out there in the real world. I mean, how, how built in is this circ, is this circadian kind of rhythm?

Basically. I mean, a lot, a lot of it again, gets, has been so in, built in over evolutionary time because fundamentally the cycles of light and dark haven't changed, right. Uh, in a given biome. You know, depending on where these plants are living Yeah. 

Regularities that shift are much smaller than what we're dealing with once we get to what we're talking about now.

So, I mean, of course we have the Sunflower Nest in us too, right? We have these kind of, you know, rhythms, but we also have, we do, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've also developed this way of communicating with ourselves and communicating with each other and all that happening at once. Yeah. And needing these ways to, um.

Scaffold, all of that stuff. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, that feels to me really important, especially when we think about this kind of a paper and action at a distance. Yeah. Um, how we're all, you know. How we're all doing this for each other in strange ways right now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That we are trying to see more clearly.

You knows. Good luck with that. 

It's so messy. Yeah. 

Yeah. Good luck with that part. Yeah, no, I agree. But certainly the dynamics of memory and the way in which we update our knowledge, you know, in the systems that allow us to do that. And so on. That's kind of a focus that I'm, that I'm focusing on that right now and I'm not the only one.

There's quite a few people who are, I mean, we're just about to publish a paper in tins. Just got accepted a couple of days ago on, on the role of the Locus rubius in. Orchestrating, you know, you know, this updating ability and sort of influencing it. You know, whether you update a memory or whether you decide, no, this really isn't related to my prior experience.

This is a new experience and I'm gonna create a separate memory for this thing. Well, that's a fundamental decision the brain is making, you know, all the time. How does it do that? How do you know and when it decides to update, what are the mechanisms that determine how it updates a memory so that it sort of deletes the things that are no longer relevant and adds new things that are now relevant versus when it's creating a brand new memory?

How does it keep it separate from this older memory that you know, you initially activated 'cause you thought that was what the situation was gonna be. I mean, those are all choices. The brains the brain has to make, you know, as it continues to try to build internal models. That will work in the future.

It's all pointed towards creating models that will be adaptive in the future. 

Yeah. And it's not just the brain, it's the body and us. And it's all of information about it now too. Yeah. 

It's all of it. 

So, yeah. Well, has it helped you, you know, I mean, do you have any, I don't think I've asked you about love yet, and this is love and philosophy, so 

I 

have to finally, Lynn, ask you about that word.

And do you see any relation at all to the work you do? I don't have any, 

I have no insights into it. I'm, I struggle. I have no, but. 

But all this work that you've done, we talked about 50 years ago you guys were writing this book. Yeah. 

You know, is 

there something about what you do that connects to care and to like thinking that it's I don't, or you just, you know, you just do it?

I wouldn't 

say in any direct way. I mean, you know, beyond the fact that, you know, you know, having a reasonably good model of the world, uh, I, I would say allows you to behave more appropriately, you know, contextually appropriately, you know, when, you know restaurant. Restaurant voice versus home voice. You know, all these things that you do that are contextually appropriate, you know, that are socially important.

You know, that's a, that de that kind of depends upon this system in a way, but it's not really, I don't think understanding this system will give us a, you know, much of a handle on, you know, you know, on compassion or resilience or any of those things. I think they're really in another zone. Basically this is a more kind of purely cognitive, purely knowledge based system, you know, that can be deployed to, you know, in useful ways in, in all of those social domains.

And there really are parts of the hippocampus, ca two in particular that are very important for social interactions. We know that social stuff gets caught up in the system. But I don't know that the, that this hippocampal formation system makes fundamental contributions to those, to those things. It makes these kind of contextual contributions and these, and so on shadings, but I, I don't think it helps me understand emotion at all, quite honestly.

I wish that that were not true, but I don't think it helps me understand the basis of emotion, the basis of any of these sort of. More socially oriented cognitions. I mean, I don't consider emotions separate from cognition, but you know, the emotional side of our, of our cognitive life, I don't, I think is really, not so much in the zone of the hippocampus, but because of what it does, it influences a lot of that.

I mean, I keep reading papers where people claim the, the role of the ventral or anterior hippocampus is, is, is anxiety and, and, and, and. Basically all of the behavioral tests that they tend to use are ones that measure anxiety from being in open spaces or being in places that are fearful. You know, so, so, you know, so it's, it's not so much about anxiety, but it's about the kind of anxiety that comes from being in a space that you're uncomfortable in.

So somehow, you know, the notion of this, of space gets caught up in with anxiety, but it isn't. But there are plenty of anxieties that have nothing to do with space. You know, you're anxious when you see a spider and you don't know why. I mean, you, that doesn't matter where you are, right? So I don't think it's fundamental to those things, but I think it can intertwine with those things under some circumstances.

There's a Venn diagram overlap between, you know, the role of facial models of the world and these other things, you know, that remains.

I lost you. I lost you.

I lost you. Lynn. I can't hear you or see you.

Are you still there?

Yeah, I think my system kicked out basically. Yeah. I don't know, just at that moment. But anyway, the hour is up, so it, I, I actually thought initially your system kicked out, but then I saw that I, I was suddenly offline briefly. I don't know why this, 

yeah, I don't know, but I think we got most of it, but, oh, you're frozen again.

I think we're. I think we're, we're back in connection, but I now have to 

Yeah, me too. I just wanted to say if we did think of the hippocampus as like a way that we're some somehow connected to communication in the way we were talking about, then it would also make a lot of sense to those points you were making about possibly extending the circle of care.

Yeah. 

Oh well, sure. But you know, it's, it's a stretch, but, you know, it's a stretch that I'm happy to see you make, but 

yeah. Well, I'm, I'm making it so 

good. Go for it. Based on 

your research or, or building, building a time, so. Alright, 

good. Thanks for today. I, I forward to it. Okay. We can, you know, we can, we can connect up again sometime in a not few more months, you know, when I'm back in Tucson.

Temporarily. So I'll be back in about 10 days and settling and I'll be pretty busy through October and you know, November. Then the whole family is kind, know what, you know, it's gonna be in and out where a lot of things going on back in Tucson, not to, you know, and in America, you know that, et cetera.

So I don't know what that's all gonna be like, but we can stay in touch and, uh, try to set up another time, sometime down the road. 

Awesome. Well, I look forward to it. I wanna read the paper that's coming out too. That might be a good one to talk about. Yeah. 

Pro prod me to send you a copy of this paper.

Okay. 

And that video, I want you to send me the video of this paper. 

Oh, the uh uh. Yeah, send me an email. I'll email you, remind you with some other, 

okay. 

Okay. All right. Thanks a lot. Take care. 

We'll, all 

right. 

Appreciate it. You too. Bye. Bye.