Charan Ranganath: belief

Transcript context

…So the discreetness of our encoding of events? Maybe, yeah, and again, there’s controversial ideas about this, right? But it’s like, yeah, this idea that… And this gets back to just this common experience of you walk into the kitchen and you’re like, “Why am I here?” And you just end up grabbing some food from the fridge. And you go back and you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute, I left my watch in the kitchen. That’s what I was looking for.” And so what happens is that you have a little internal model of where you are, what you’re thinking about. And when you cross from one room to another, those models get updated. And so now when you’re in the kitchen, have to go back and mentally time travel back to this earlier point to remember what it was that you went there for. And so these event boundaries turns out in our research, and again, I don’t want to make it sound like we’ve figured out everything. But in our research, one of the things that we found is that basically, as people get older, the activity in the hippocampus at these event boundaries tends to go down, but independent of age. If I give you outside of the scanner, you’re done with the scanner, I just scan you while you’re watching a movie, just watch it. You come out, I give you a test of memory for stories. What happens is you find this incredible correlation between the activity in the hippocampus at these singular points in time, these event boundaries. And your ability to just remember a story outside of the scanner later on. So it’s marking this ability to encode memories, just these little snippets of neural activity. So I think that’s a big one. There’s all sorts of work in animal models that I can get into. Sleep, I think there’s so much interesting stuff that’s being discovered in sleep right now. Being able to just record from large populations of cells and then be able to relate that… [inaudible 01:32:03], I think the coolest thing gets back to this QR code thing, because what we can do now is I can take fMRI data while you’re watching a movie. Let’s do better than that. Let me get fMRI data while you use a joystick to move around in virtual reality. So you’re in the metaverse, whatever. But it’s kind of a crappy metaverse because there’s only so much metaversing you can do in an MRI scanner. So you’re doing this crappy metaversing. So now, I can take a rat, record from its hippocampus and prefrontal cortex and all these areas with these really new electrodes that get massive amounts of data. And have it move around on a trackball in virtual reality in the same metaverse that I did, and record that rat’s activity. ese areas with these really new electrodes that get massive amounts of data. And have it move around on a trackball in virtual reality in the same metaverse that I did, and record that rat’s activity. I can get a person with epilepsy who we have electrodes in their brain anyway, to try to figure out where the seizures are coming from. And if it’s a healthy part of the brain, record from that person, right? And I can get a computational model. And one of the brand new members in my lab, Tyler Brown is just doing some great stuff. He relates computer vision models and looks at the weaknesses of computer vision models and relates to what the brain does well.…

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