 So, I am Karim Nader, and so I've had the pleasure to study memory in a lab that's quite well known and ready for its description of how the brain controls fear and emotions. And at that time, when I was in Joseph Ledoux's lab at the Center for Neural Science, I had the opportunity to see Eric Candell give a beautiful talk. Eric Candell has won a Nobel Prize deservedly for describing a vision and an approach and a fulfilling a vision in terms of how to study memory processing. And so at that time, when I saw that talk, I thought, wow, wouldn't it be beautiful? And so like the typical, I think, expectation or description of memories is that when you have something new, it's initially unstable, and then gets stabilized in the brain over time within a few hours. And so I showed that when you have a memory that's stored in the brain, it can get un-stored, like physically kind of unwired from the, from the brain has to be re-stored. And if you think of memories as being not just entities in our, our identity, but in our culture, and in some times, if memories are negative things, such as pathologies, lead to PTSD, if you figure out a way of kind of erasing memories when they are being transformed back into this unstable state, then you could theoretically, I think, make people better and the cultures around which some people have suffered and identified themselves with suffering. And perhaps if you can target those memories, that's some of, sorry, that's some of the implications of targeting the memory mechanisms in the brain. So I'm a visual artist, my name is Shuman Atty. I have five minutes to do what I usually do in an hour, which is a wonderful challenge. So I've worked in a variety of media, I come from photography originally, I work with multiple channel immersive video installation, public projects. Ultimately, I suppose I'm a salmon installation artist, and I, for maybe 20 years since I got my MFA, I've been very interested in how artists or how I might be able to use contemporary media to give visual form to human memory. So this is an image, for example, from the first project I did after art school in one of Berlin's former Jewish quarters. And what you're looking at is not Photoshop, it's not montage, it's a color photograph of a building with a black and white projection of something that was photographed there in 1930, which was a Hebrew bookstore. So I would intervene on various facades in the neighborhood and create these temporary site specific installations that would in a sense reanimate these sites with images of their former denizens, residents, businesses, et cetera. And then I would make color photographs of these images. And one of the driving forces for my work, which is something that Megan, Elizabeth, sorry, had asked us to address. How does one give physical form to something that has no form? How do we get presence to absence? So this is something that's often been an interest in much of my work. This is just a couple of minutes of documentation from an underwater installation that I did in Copenhagen. These are nine very large light boxes. There's not enough time to get into the concept. They relate to human rights, two human rights challenges, one present day dealing with refugees and immigrants in Europe and the other historical dealing with the history of the Second World War. But in this project with these underwater light boxes and they're very, very large, I was in a sense addressing another question that nags at me in my work, which is how to represent the fragility of memory. That memory is never fixed. It's never static. And it's never complete. And I think that was sort of driving part of some of the aesthetic choices that I made in this project. And if we had more time, I could linger, but I'm not going to. And last but not least, and I think I was inspired to show this project because of Julia when I read about her work and also about memory in the body. I did a project. It was a very difficult project. It was with the Welsh village of Aberfan. And if there are Brits in the audience, I wouldn't need to say anything more about Aberfan. But it's a very well-known village in the UK because it became famous in quotation marks, famous in 1966 when a man made avalanche related to coal mining came down a mountainside and buried the village's only elementary school. Like a Welsh Pompeii. It was only one school in the village, so they lost their entire generation of children, about 115 kids and 25 teachers. And that was the first disaster in trauma. And the second trauma is this sort of media voyeurism that has descended upon the village ever since. It became famous as the village that lost its children because it's kind of an epic scale of disaster. And they have felt on the receiving end of what's the expression rubber-necking and disaster tourism ever since. So I worked with members. I lived in the village for six months, and this was on the occasion of the 40-year anniversary. And I had them perform being themselves, playing their role in the village. There's no actors. There's no digital effects. They are literally holding steel on a revolving plinth. And she's the dancer of the village. She sees herself as the dancer. The villager sees her as the dancer. And I filmed about 35 different characters of the village. Again, I could go a little bit more into the project if there was more time. But my main point here is that part of why I used this strategy around trauma is that in a traumatized landscape is that it was my way to reflect how we respond to trauma that we freeze in part, but it's always an incomplete freeze because the forces of life keep moving forward. So this kind of moving stillness is what I was trying to give voice to. This is just a dumb-down viewing copy. It's a five-channel installation, and they're projected larger than life-size in high definition. And the other thing is I wanted to give visual expression to that sense of voyeurism, of being in a fishbowl with the world looking in. The villagers feel forever fixed by the world's gaze and their association of the disaster, of the village with the disaster 40 years ago. So I think that will do it. What you're looking at is Michelle Buckley, who's a dancer I work with regularly and who has been subject to many experiments that may have felt compromised her ability to dance the way she would like to. Performing what ended up in this performance, it may be somewhat less, but in the end, 301 digits past the decimal place of Pi. And the memorization of Pi is a much-favored activity of many nerds and geeks, myself included. Let me turn this down. And this was part of a program called the Broadman Areas, which was this guy, Broadman, mapped the cerebral cortex. And so I investigated the cerebral cortex. And obviously, of course, one of the things that came up was memory. And so I had several experiments, experiments, we called them experiments involving memory. Of course, they became performances. Let me get rid of that. So, you know, the memorization of Pi, one of my role models was this guy, John Horton Conway. I think he's a professor at Princeton right now. And he used this sound-based mnemonics to divide up the digits of Pi, because the whole issue here was in memorization, to get it into long-term memory, you have to have some sort of storage or encoding device to keep it there. And so I thought, you know, how can we create an encoding device and then stress the dancer so much that she can't make it through all the digits, even though she's learned them or studied them? So we used some phrasing, but the way we devised the movement is that each digit had a particular movement quality or action. Maybe it came from a particular joint. She has one we called leg butt and another one we called butt leg. Zero was facing forward. I think that was zero right there. But of course, the context of each of the digits would be different because she would be in a different place and position as each digit came. The result of this was that it truly was apparent that Pi is an irrational number. There are no repeating digits anywhere. I mean, there are times when you have a 2-2, but there is no pattern that she could ever latch onto. So after finding out that I was coming here to talk to you tonight, I met with Michelle this week on Monday. And I asked Michelle to bring her shoes and her Pi outfit. We were going to take some pictures. And she said, oh, good. I'll practice Pi for you, Julia. And I said, no. And of course she wrote back and said, I knew you'd say that. Because during the performance of Pi backstage, I had to keep telling her to stop rehearsing. I didn't want her to rehearse. I really wanted to challenge her memory. And I really wanted it to fail. So we got together. And I didn't know really what to expect. But we started out and she remembered seven digits past the decimal point. Which is, I think that's the short-term memory number. Is that right? Seven elements. It is. It's exactly how many elements you can keep in mind at a time without any kind of distraction. So she remembered seven. Clearly seven. And then I sat there and I didn't talk to her. And I let her struggle. And she tried and tried. And she came up with some of the movements she remembered. And then she started to piece little bits together. And she managed with a little help to come up with a phrase that was fairly long, maybe 13 digits or so. But after that always needed prodding. And I just thought that it was an incredible example of, first of all, the difficulty in memorizing beyond a certain point. The failure of the long-term memory. If she hasn't done this for eight months. And it was essentially gone. I thought that we'd put it into muscle memory that she would, that it would still be there somehow. And I think it is. But it was there with prodding. If we could find a moment that she knew, then she could derive some of the movements that came after through the process of knowing where she was. Because of the feeling of a movement. I want to just tell you what she said. She said, there's no other challenge of any ballet repertoire can match the process of performing pie. She said, when I watch myself doing pie, she's still going by the way. And she had to overlap with the next segments in the ballet because I just, I wanted her to keep going until it was done, which was partly the representation of just how far she would go. She's very determined. She says, when I watch myself doing pie, it's a completely different person. I feel no connection with any other experiences in my life. And I don't, and she said that she just, she feels disconnected from it. She doesn't, she can't really, she can sort of predict the movement, but the numbers aren't really in her. And she said, it was a very different nervous kind of experience that before performing, she didn't really have any nerves. And I think that was because she's, the focus had to be such a major part of her process of going through this. The last thing I want to say, perfect, is that when I think about memory and dance, it's, you know, we do memory. It's, you know, as an artist, we think about, you know, maybe creating memories, but we do memory. We do memory every single day, every single class. One of the things you do in a technique class is you learn new material and you have to memorize it through whatever systems, mnemonic systems, rehearsal, chunking, whatever you're going to do, and you have to perform it. And the best dancers are the ones who do that the most quickly. But it just occurs to me that we use memories of memorizing, and I watched her do this. So there's visual, so she would try to, you could see her kind of seeing the movement, but not being able to put it together. There was no real audio component. She didn't have anything to latch on to in terms of music. There was a spatial component, so sometimes she would know that, oh wait, I was up here in space, and that maybe would trigger some numbers. But also what studio we were in, if I had brought her back to this space, I think she would have remembered more. And unfortunately, her kinesthetic memory wasn't really strong here because nothing really flowed. The movement was a little bit awkward. The patterns were difficult to memorize in her body. And lastly, we often use imagery, but I avoided using any sort of imagery because I wanted it to be about memorizing numbers. So we didn't let her go into other areas of her process of memorizing. I think that about covers it, and you've seen she's finished now. Part of me keeps thinking when we're talking about it, is that memory can perhaps, or more than perhaps, has been proven to be able to be malleable and change as it's reconsolidated. But that of course doesn't mean it inevitably will. It sometimes has that potential because of the experience of memory sometimes hardened over time rather than become elastic. And that's a great point because if you think of reconsolidation as a way of updating your views on life and culture being the sum of people's views on an incident, then reconsolidation, updating people's perception of an event could kind of change culturally the value of something in their history and their narrative. And so that's one way. Reconsolidation is one way by which the value and the cultural representation of some events could change, but some things do not undergo reconsolidation as you said. And therefore, you would hope that some things would be so robust in somebody's culture. Perhaps the value of that is just going to be static. Again, it's an open question. And many societies have a narrative passing of their history. So every time it's said and the memory is reactivated, then it's possible for that information to be changed and then updated in ways that would suggest that maybe the latest generation of people would have the greatest input on that. It makes me think about cognitive dissonance. In the sense that maybe memory at times can also be the slave of cognitive dissonance, meaning that sometimes we will keep re-encoding memories in a certain way to conform to certain ideologies or beliefs or opinions we have. Otherwise it would make us feel too uncomfortable to do otherwise. And I actually think one of the things that we know is that typically you will reshape the events of memories and the causes because you tend to think that that was the best you did the best thing. If you ever talk to two people who have been in a fight and they haven't spoken at all since the fight and they both think they're completely right. So I also wanted to ask you about the reactivation of these images in Germany. And so of course you're going to re-avoke them but could you also think make people slightly more comfortable with those images and their history? Make people more comfortable So do you think for you is the re-avocation of those images fair to re- experience a certain context in time or through reactivation you can hypothetically reduce some of these say trauma or experience of some of the something bad by just adding something good to it. So for example one of the ways in which PTSD was created 9-11 was that people would say okay remember the event and then they would try to have some positive something happy after the re-avocation of the trauma and so by that so every time you remember that in that case they were trying to reduce the trauma of it by just adding something less traumatic so you can imagine in this case if you're calling something back up that each child is going to be restored as being restored with less sillience or in different contexts now then maybe it's some way to connect with the historical kind of narrative of that people. I have a question about closure when we have all the psychologists who come and they have you relive your memories in order to achieve closure then in fact are they re-strengthening the actual memories that you don't want to keep? Yeah so I mean a lot of these things I think can happen depending on the situation so memories you obviously want to keep memories can help us identify ourselves and so there's some cool early studies showing that if you can store down new memories then you're stuck in the present you can never move forward right and so that says how important memories are to us but by saying token under some conditions they can be pathological so if you are tied into the past and you can't go forward with PTSD and that was exactly what I thought of in your film everyone slows down emotionally and then but I guess in PTSD they're kind of like stuck in the past and not quite slowed down so then when we're trying to target and block the PTSD reconciliation the people with whom it's been successful say it's allowed them to move forward and which is so I was hoping I was wondering if in your presentation and the re-enactment of other traumatic situations maybe to facilitate help the emotional kind of tenor of that population to move forward in time well that was sort of the whole I mean I should just back up and say because I'm a visual artist and sort of come from the realm of sort of working with the imagination most artists we're not that instrumental meaning it's not like I come to a situation and have one specific goal which would or intention in that way I'm rather trying to create situations where there that will hopefully be evocative of various kinds of experiences for different people but in terms of what you just mentioned definitely that was part of the intention because it was such a short presentation I couldn't really go into I was playing off of Welsh iconic types the ex coal miner, the minister the the male choir what it was was why isn't this village entitled to the same tropes or Welsh types as any other Welsh village so that was sort of part of where I was coming from but indeed I well if we had more it was a very interesting project but I feel a little bit the constraints so as to not get in too much detail but they were very while I made the project with them there was a film about the making of it and a BBC film and a lot of this issue was that these issues were addressed and how they felt participating how they felt at the end seeing the finished piece etc but these are very interesting questions I'm sort of again I I know both of you but this issue of memory a kind of memorization memory tools memory signifiers mnemonics memory aids I think to me it seems it feels like a different kind of it's more of a cognitive not the body manifestation but the mapping that goes on seems a bit more like a cognitive process you know I don't I'm just sort of curious if for you I was curious if the re-encoding neurochemically is different when let's say somebody has a memory of anxiety or sadness versus somebody who remembers a mathematical chart yeah good question so at the biochemical level the best guess we know is that it's all kind of the same similar mechanisms right but not really the same kind of like psychological process and so so there are implications in terms of say reconciliation not just for traumatic memories but for all kinds of memories so if you imagine somebody who for example dance one of the first demonstrations of this reconciliation process was in motor memories right by Matthew Walker so they learn a little of motor sequence in their fingers and then they show that memory when it was enacted could go back to this reconciliation stage along the same lines possibly of Pi so the other thing I thought about Pi was the I think so people who have a certain excellence in terms of say athleticism in their sport try to kind of get into a groove where their conscious memory gets out of the way and so at least on the scientific of things people have reported that if you get rid in rodents of the part of the brain that does a conscious thinking then the rest of the body is better at doing what they've got to do. We often call it flow but I kind of thought we might ever, we might at some point get there and perhaps she did to a certain extent but the effect wasn't lasting but I think that's interesting you said that because in rats they have to do the same thing over and over again so in order to hit the flow thing you have to have a repeat that then you get into a groove so if Pi in every single thing is different then that will hold that up. Yeah it's just too many different things lined up and we kept increasing it of course as we went to. Isn't there a point where if I understood the process correctly she learns a dance where the movements are their key to different digits and so it's almost like using Pi as a choreographic sort of That was my original idea that it would create choreography but in the end the choreography was completely secondary to the process of dealing with her memory. Oh interesting okay so there wasn't that was sort of my question there wasn't a point after which like let's say having learned the Pi dance like a dancer having learned any dance at some point you know the whatever it just becomes kind of a it becomes its own Well you would know as an artist you create rules and constraints and then you decide okay when do I stick to the constraints or when do I break my own rules. In this case as we went on you know what I thought would happen kind of didn't happen there are sections in it where she calls one section the ballet section another section the turn section so you'd think that they would have sort of stuck in some dance way for her and yet they really didn't and yet I can put on a piece of music that she danced to a year ago and she will pick up phrases. That's interesting. And has it enhanced her ability to pick up dancing free-style dancing or not? I don't know. You think I might? No I don't actually I you know this is a process we kind of go through anyway but just not so rigorously I mean this is kind of ridiculous although you know you could think of somebody like Tricia Brown who had set up all sorts of crazy mathematical processes for her dancers. She does these accumulations and the movements are all different. Yvonne Rainer in trio A it's just a string of movements and they're not meant to have any sort of direct relationship with each other and so typically it's not far from what we would typically do It was so interesting watching it because there were there were moments where I just loved watching the movement and I almost didn't care where the actual art, the dance to me it transcended the concept at times and I love that when that happens. That's good by me. I enjoyed the movement on its onset and just in and of itself. I would use it again I mean I use some mathematical tools to generate movement and it was sort of a painful process but it did produce something interesting and different in dance there are many people especially in the field of ballet who remember the steps to every single ballet they've ever performed and you put on the music and they go through from the beginning to the end and in a way that's the only version of that music that they can feel or see or have in dance and so as somebody with I don't have that kind of memory and in fact when I recreate my own material it's not in my memory physically or mentally especially since I'm not performing it I have to really look at it and think about the processes that were involved so I like to think of it as in mathematics where you have to devise the theorem you don't just memorize the theorem you devise it you go through the whole process of proving it and so with that in mind you know I'm wondering if it's possible that having an inaccurate memory or a poor memory I'm not sure which I should say would enhance or limit creativity yeah great question I'm not sure I'll let you give your best guess first no it's it's it's kind of a profound question because it touches on so many different it touches on many many different issues you know I guess the question the first question that would come to my mind is somebody's memory poor in a way in an interesting way you know it's sort of distorted in a way that's repetitive and compulsive and fright paranoid and you know it's a quality of it is it themselves or is it something like creative difference yet or like restrictive difference we always use these ideas Mozart who had this photographic memory or he could remember a whole symphony and write it down but it seems to me that that could be a limitation on your creativity as well yeah I mean well one thing we know and we've always known is that our memories and I love teaching this to students because I say we've known that your memories are never remembered with accuracy every time you remember it you know most people have the image of having a little snapshot of your memory over the event sorry and then it's stored in your brain and then it's never like changed and somebody a very profound thinker of memory called Bartlett in 1932 in a book called remembering so he was a Cambridge and he showed that every time he had somebody recall an event or a narrative they would kind of change the narrative in a way that was consistent with their beliefs of the world and so they called it a schema so it showed two things memories are not just static entities in the world and the second thing it showed was that memories will change over time in a way that will make most sense to your perspective of the universe right and so it's always funny because I ask students look I'm going to ask you I'm on the exam I'm going to ask you questions even though I know that you may have studied for the answers and the answers might have changed already but this time the exam comes right they don't after that they're still a bit resolved for that that's perfect for me I want to take your exam right right right not to mention the questions right the memory is changed so I think if the expectation is that memory should be constant we've always known that's not the case and it's also kind of an interesting thing and it's not like a bad thing sometimes people say well is that going to change profoundly my identity and some people like Dan Schachter at Harvard for the longest time have been saying that's just like the way that it's evolved right and part of the reason why we think the memories are not so memory systems are not so concerned about getting every single bit of information accurate for long periods of time is that if you have more flexibility in the information then he has a beautiful kind of story suggesting that what it allows you to do is it allows you to imagine many different possible futures right so if all your memories had the kind of neurobiology to be wired in there and never change then you would not be able to imagine very many features right so with pride if you have you know with many dance steps you want a memory system that's going to be very very changeable otherwise it would become just very tough obviously I mean it brings up so many different questions one question of course is the relationship between memory and learning which is joined at the hip and I still circled back to the fact that kind of this sort of classical conditioning you know I learned such and such or I remember such and such that when another event happens and they coincide in time and that way I remember the salivating dogs which is a very sort of cognitive behavioral sort of approach to it but there are so many different matrixes for different kinds of memory and I feel like the cognitive is experientially and phenomenologically pretty radically different than let's say an memory where you're flooded with emotion or sense so I'm just sort of I agree yeah perhaps if we attached emotion to some of those memories students seem to react best when there's some sort of emotive guidance from teachers they say who are your best teachers, they're never the ones who are boring, they're the ones who had some sort of change in their emotions, enthusiasm, energy something we know that the emotions cause stress hormones to be released and that will enhance memory and that is why we remember many things but more about say our birthdays, what happens if I ask you what happened on your birthday when you were 17 you probably remember more details than what happened like a few years ago on that day it was kind of boring so they get the enhancement from the stress hormones and so yeah that's completely consistent with what we think about the brain so are you saying that when I'm choreographing and I don't have a lot of time I should get cakes with candles I'm not saying I'm not going on record for anything that would be a bad thing you signaled that we need to wrap this part of it up shortly but not to be a downer you don't like cake? I do like that but I was being a little fussy just when I said downer it's interesting having this conversation we also have to recognize that it's occurring within a social context whereby a moment in time whereby the whole phenomena of memory has become like a cottage industry and to the point of being fetishized or commodified in certain realms like in the realm of monument and memorial making or other things and it just gets there's I think about things like what's the relationship of media and memory how media actually we get confused between things we've seen on television and confuse them for our own memories when in fact maybe we haven't experienced a more spectacle and memory there's public spectacle and how that sort of influences our memories there's the riots in London I was just visiting a friend from Hackney and she was talking about how where the second round of riots broke out which riots were these? these were the well it started as a kind of a race riot but it really became an opportunistic looting opportunity and where that started was on this one block in this area of Hackney in London and this person lived just on the next block and she said nothing happening on her block but because the media had taken this little section of area of where she lived nearby where she lived the whole world saw that the whole town was enveloped by this riot and now that's the experience of the people in the town is that they think that their whole town was taken over by this riot and in fact it was only a very small area it did though inflame other areas in south London and that I think is a perfect example of how memories can change according to your environment and your beliefs right? I'd love to open it up to questions from the audience but before I do selfishly since I have the microphone I just had a question for the three of you you mentioned a favourite memory that was formed when a lot of emotion was present like your 17th birthday but in remembering it over and it seems like every time you remember this memory it's likely to change so in some ways our most precious memories are incredibly vulnerable and I feel like I wonder if there's a connection with the visual arts like a worn photograph that we look at over and over again does it lose meaning or gain meaning a dance that you performed countless times so I was just curious if there was like an artistic equivalent to this memory cycle memory cycle well certainly with dances they change over time but it's partly if we're talking about my own work it's partly because I want them to change over time that is I want the dancers to do it as though it's the first time they've done it rather than repeating the dance that they did last night so I suppose in a way the integrity is in some big ideas connected with the dance and not in the rote memory of all of the details so I suspect in that case it does change I'm sure that the dances change over time if you do Nutcracker your memory of it your experience of it, what you think it is the value of it but I don't know if that's because you're tired of doing it so for me as a visual artist it's a difficult question to respond to partly because I think one of the biggest challenges we as artists face is at least in my mind is trying to create works of art that are complex and don't give everything away on the first viewing so that you come back to it again and again if it's a strong piece and have a different experience each time or see something that you didn't see before or feel something that you didn't feel before otherwise it has a danger of being sort of didactic or reductive like a one liner art so it's difficult for me to respond because I think that's an overarching challenge the issue of memory is only a subset of that it's hopefully it should be the gift that keeps on giving an intense from the viewer's experience I know that different times of day different different times of person's life the experience is very different even though it is the same dance they'll remember it differently they'll have it, it's just not and also just one of the ways in which we can protect or the brain protects from the change in content is that so in some conditions memories will not undergo reconciliation so sometimes if a memory is very robust it won't sometimes if there's too many repetitions of it then it will not perhaps that's just nature's way of preventing things that are dear and close to us from being modified in a way that might threaten it's kind of content but again the other thing we should also just keep in mind is that there's probably a limit to how much you can change memories can change so I'm not sure whether if you said you were abducted by 18 aliens yesterday just too much maybe they did all once but obviously people like Elizabeth Roth has shown it's amazing what you can have people think happen to them over a longer period of time hi I just want to say Mr. Nader I'm a huge fan of your work and as an artist and curator it's had a very strong direct effect on my practice so I want to thank you for that thank you very much but I work from memory and some distant memory and some more recent and I found that some of the more distant memories that I have from when I was 15 I'll have maybe 3 or 4 memories from that time in my life but those memories hold much more information like a conduit and so the specificity of the memory ends up communicating a lot to me about my own story and what I found so interesting in the way that I'm sculpturing creating a memory is that the the way that I would the own memory the way that I would reform it over and over again and ends up being the same way that an artist would work so that let's say I have a memory of my mother from a certain period of my life and she was upset with me about something and the exact positioning or even her rhythm the way of telling me something very specific about my relationship with her at that period of my life so that I can have some kind of continuation in my own narrative so I'm wondering is there a way in which we are always acting as artists with our sensory imprint of a memory and constantly recrafting it so that we can have a sense of meaning and narrative and can more collaborations come from that using what we know about neuroscience and contemporary art so certainly on a day-to-day basis at least from that memory side every time, so Bartlett would say every time you remember an event let's say in this case it's your mother then you can, I mean it's not challenging the continuity of the perception but it just allows you to interact with it and perhaps update it in some manner and if it doesn't require perhaps updating then that's fine and you would just do justice to that memory but with visual art I think that would be another way in which you can possibly do some of the people's narratives whether it's a person's narrative or a culture or the narrative of a culture I think that's what I was impressed with Shimon's images because this is like the culture of in Germany and I guess one of the what was it again, I guess in Germany and so by re-evoking that you could in some ways hypothetically call up a certain kind of meaning for that time period and change that meaning if that was the way in which you were predisposed but I wonder what's your name? Ryan, I wonder if you're asking, it's an interesting question but I think there's a deeper kernel to it that maybe we're not getting at which is that you said greater collaboration for example between visual art or visual artists and let's say neuroscientists yes oh I see yeah yeah myriad possibilities it sounds like you're already collaborating with yourself though and I mean I don't believe personality is a fixed thing so it would seem like your palette shifts over time as well and that your memories then change over time because your palette also shifts so it seems to me that there are it's a dual layered sort of collaboration with yourself with someone else yeah so hang on, quick question so hands up, how many people have seen the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind? I watched it last night so this is one time when I say science is better than fiction because on the artistic side of that the implication was that if you erase a memory altogether in this case the person's breakup his girlfriend then and so what they did was they in the movie erased the entire memory and they showed the implications of what happens if you get rid of the entire memory and it's never kind of ideal I mean even if you had a magic wand for scientists had a magic wand you could do that, maybe it's not so ideal especially for people who have had PTSD for say decades because they try to I mean they identify with being PTSD they try to move on to move through time so the treatment that we thought of and specifically with the intent of trying to do slightly better than the science fiction film and there's no genius involved it was just based on taking what we knew about how the brain is organized and works and just applying it and what we know about the brain is that there are different memory systems in the brain and we've known that for decades and so if you have trauma the pain and loathing and the fear and loathing of the event is kind of sort of in one part of the brain called the amygdala and the conscious part of that event is sort of in another structure and systems of course just called the hippocampus and so then what we did was we thought okay so if you just block reconciliation of the emotional value of the trauma and you use manipulation that would spare the conscious memories which are also undergoing reconciliation then what we did then the prediction was that you should still be able to remember the trauma the patients but they should not be stuck in the past so they should be able to forward and move on with their life and that's what essentially we found and so people women who have been raped decades ago could talk about their trauma for the first time after decades I was in India this year and I was flying on an airplane and the man who leads all of the neuro-linguistic programming this NLP course in all of India was sitting next to me on the plane to sell me on taking his course and I'm skeptic I don't believe in any of this I teach yoga, I meditate anyway he tells me that if you have trauma or something that's happened to you in your life and you have a phobia about it that there's an actual way that you can brainwash somebody by making them remember this traumatic memory or dysphobia bring them there and then you start to have them go backwards playing like loud carnival music and crazy and then you bring them back to the memory and then they go backwards and then they bring them back and then their phobia is gone really this really works because apparently this loud carnival music is destroying neural pathways in their memory I've been in India for about six months and lost most of my pathways there it's pretty loud there's a correlation between India and all over the world do you believe in this I thought it was it's always for scientists an empirical question so in a study will a joke bear them a placebo so I don't know I don't know enough about the day after we published the initial nature paper showing that memories can be erased the the group from the I'm going to get I can't remember this so one treatment if you have desensitization eye movement desensitization I think so there's a certain kind of treatment that's just if you have somebody recall the trauma in manipulation visual manipulation then they have reported that it can improve somebody's traumatic experience pretty rapid like the EMDR right so the time course was kind of consistent with reconciliation blockade so but again it's just it's still I think an open question as to whether the treatment is as effective as other treatments and how reliable so it's still I think an open question I think it's interesting though because you were saying dancers use music to help remember so you talk about memory in a way which it seems to reinforce a sense of self-esteem so memory is inherently flawed so that we can have a better understanding just a little louder living of the self in a positive way like you're talking about people getting into fights and each individual always thinks that they're right and I wonder how this natural buffer which you've sort of elaborated on in a way which can erase and alter memories how this pertains to the artistic practice and if it's beneficial in any way or negative because I know that sorry I'm nervous that trauma can incite a lot of artistic practices and that it can benefit art in many ways so I wonder how altering memory affects art if that makes any sense so I would like to know whether anyone is there any data that trauma makes art better or is better inspired I was listening to everybody and still I can you reduce the question to something a little more condensed like is there a way on the issue of how trauma our natural ability to alter memory to preserve self-esteem could help art and how it could be affected negatively possibly or how it could be affected positively by altering memories and therapy like that I think that some of the artistic process is simply that some people make a dance they make the same dance over and over and over again but with some changes along the way as though they're trying to I don't know either remember something or perfect some memory maybe that's sort of the opposite of what you're saying and that they're trying to zoom in on some particular idea that exists in them that they have in their mind I don't know if that's directly an issue about memory I suppose in a way I think it is I wonder if it goes the other way then that you I don't know if I have a response to that one it's a challenging question to address partly because for starters of course memories the example you gave of how memory can be a self-esteem buffer or booster is you know I wish it was always like that but you know that's sort of one color out of the rainbow it can be a self-esteem destroyer it can be many many different things you know you can have chronically low self-esteem because of the nature of the memories that you have but in terms of visual art an artistic practice more generally a lot of what we're working with is narrativity creating narratives and whether it's kind of a complex narrative whether it's a multi-layered narrative whether it's a a narrative that undermines itself etc but in other words telling a story if I was a documentary filmmaker which I'm not we talk about telling a story but I think that the issue of it's impossible to separate those two things out memory and the telling of stories because it's a temporal medium past present future you can't tell a story with by definition without having creating memories each step along the way so I think it has all kinds of potential in a number of different directions I don't think I can answer it better than that because it's it actually is an interesting question I think when I'm listening to all of the conversation and the questions you know personally I feel that nothing about me is fixed and so when we talk about memory I've never really felt like I had a memory that was true or even repeated in the same way over time so I think for me the discussions seem to have a question about what is fixed when we talk about palettes and things like that are there things that are fixed or is everything fluid and in flux and of course then we can all scream and run and say the world is coming to an end which it is on the 21st I want to know how you relate all of this especially to jazz music because in jazz you have highly sophisticated chords that are this mathematical set of equations and at the same time you have and you must memorize that at the same time you're supposed to improvise and take those somewhere new at every second that you go through it so I just want to know how that relates or how you think about it well that's interesting because I I love working while I'm listening to jazz music I find it frees me up and I think there is something about that combination that there is a systematic structure even if it sort of evolves and changes over time combined with the free flowing improvisational elements so for me personally it's my favorite music to have on when I'm working of course I I do I mean it's very memories very important to me I mean it's been my as an artist it's been my subject matter for a really long time some of it's just a question of temperament I'm somebody who I'm not very good at making a separation between past present and future I always feel like the past is always here in the texture of today and the texture of my life you know for better or for worse sometimes I wish I wish I was better at making that separation but so no it's something that I sort of think a lot about every day essentially or experience some aspect of it every day I think I'm very much in the jazz mode this consolidation that was being discussed I think jazz is a perfect example of where you've consolidated memory of the techniques but you know we do that in dance too although it's maybe slightly you know it may seem less complex but I just have to contrast past present future for me I'm kind of the opposite extreme and partly the reason of course that I ask the question about creativity and memory is that I regularly remind myself I'm creating memories in fact that I don't memorize things well or that they don't stay with me over time enhances my ability to choreograph new and imaginative works because I'm not relying on what I made last year so it was a little selfish question there well thank you and please help me and thanking our speakers one last time