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India Today
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- India Today
Brain f***ed is more than a feeling. Expert links it to mental overload
It's not a scientific term. It's barely polite. But somehow, 'brainf*ck' has become the go-to word for a very particular kind of moment - when your mind blanks out, your emotions glitch, and you're just left staring at a screen, a person, or even your own reflection, could be a movie like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where love, memory, and heartbreak fold into each other. It could be a tweet that exposes a deep truth in one brutal line. Or a conversation that turns your assumptions upside down. Whatever the trigger, the aftermath is the same: your brain glitches. You're in a mental fog that's part awe, part discomfort, part while 'brainf*ck' may not be a word scientists use, the feeling it captures? That might actually have roots in psychology.A WORD THAT CAPTURES CHAOS Psychologist Pulkit Sharma agrees that while the term isn't clinical, it's describing something very real. 'You are so right that brainf*ck isn't a clinical term, but the younger generation uses it so widely to describe what they're going through. What they're describing is something very intense and chaotic, something that destabilises their mental equilibrium,' he to him, the slang neatly sums up a mental state where 'thoughts and emotions just get taken to some sort of extreme.'WHAT HAPPENS IN THE BRAINThere's no textbook definition of a 'brainf*ck', but the feeling seems to align with a few known psychological DissonanceThis happens when two ideas or truths you believe clash, and your brain doesn't know how to process them together. Imagine believing someone is kind, then watching them act cruel. Or seeing something that feels emotionally right but logically wrong.'One can draw a parallel between cognitive dissonance and mental overload and this feeling,' Sharma explains. 'Because what is essentially happening is that the person is seeing something very intense, which they don't understand, which is dissonant, which is destabilising them, and it's throwing a lot of intensity, which causes mental overload.'Overstimulation and Sensory GlitchingWhen your brain is hit with too much-images, emotions, sound, ideas, it simply can't process it all at once. That mental traffic jam creates a moment of stillness or overwhelm. You pause, zone out, or spiral. That's often what people mean when they say 'this broke my brain.'Shattered ExpectationsOur brains love to predict. When something unexpected disrupts that prediction, like a twist, an absurd fact, or an emotionally loaded meme , it sends us into free fall. We're thrown off balance, and the brain rushes to make sense of what just DO WE GET THE FEELING?While the word suggests distress, people often use it with a mix of awe and excitement. There's something about the shock, the chaos - that's also pleasurable. 'It carries the idea of intensity,' says Sharma. 'It's destabilising and yet, somewhere, very pleasurable.'That's part of what makes these moments so magnetic. They offer a temporary break from routine thinking, something that feels sharper, more vivid, more over time, that craving for intensity can spiral into something deeper. 'Once you're used to a certain level of intensity and chaos,' Sharma says, "that creates an addiction. With the easy availability of these reels and audio-visuals on smartphones, the person watches them, and slowly, an addiction develops.'GEN-Z ISN'T JUST USING THE WORD, THEY'RE LIVING ITFrom film plots to random tweets, 'brainf*ck' has expanded to describe edits that feel like emotional whiplash, quotes that send you spiralling, or moments where logic, memory, or identity seem to blur. Sometimes, it's not even something dramatic, just a passing thought or a strangely specific reel that hits too hard, too the constant influx of intense, fast-paced content, Sharma says that the brain doesn't really adapt, it just gets hooked.'People are addicted to these short, chaotic, thrill-filled reels,' he says. 'There's this sense of instability and excitement that comes with it, and yes, people seek those moments. But I don't see the brain adapting. In fact, when people stop getting that level of stimulation, what I see is a very pervasive sense of boredom, emptiness, and sadness. So there's no adaptation, but there is addiction.'advertisementA WORD THAT DOES THE JOBUltimately, what makes 'brainf*ck' work is that it captures a feeling most of us know but rarely name-the emotional glitch, the cognitive jolt, the mental moment where everything is too much, but somehow exactly what we Sharma puts it: 'The slang actually summarises that experience really well. It destabilises their mental equilibrium, and takes them to some sort of extreme.'So no, it's not clinical. But maybe that's the point. Sometimes the brain just needs a word for what happens when everything breaks down, and something new begins.-Article by Arima Singh- Ends
Buzz Feed
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
26 Films People Hated Until They Gave It A Rewatch
Everyone has that one movie that they watched once and hated instantly. Sometimes a movie just needs the right mood, the right age, or more popcorn and snacks. Film buffs are sharing the top movies they once thought were absolute trash after the first watch, but somehow became all-time faves after a rewatch. It turns out, second chances really make all the difference... "Honestly, for me, Disney's Encanto (2021). The first time, I put it on as background noise after exhausting my preferred movies during the pandemic. The only thing that really stood out was the song "Surface Pressure." Over a year later, I looked into this song with a YouTube analysis. That's when I found out that Lin Manuel Miranda was involved with all the songs and lyrics. I decided to watch again, and really watch again. I find it's an incredible exploration of generational pain, and the pain hidden in perfectionism. It moves me a lot, and I watch it at least once every four months for an emotional release." "It was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The first time, I thought it was just a quirky breakup movie with weird editing. Years later, I rewatched it and every line, every silence seems very good. Best portrayal of how deeply we carry the people we love, even when we try not to." "A common answer around here and I agree with it is The Big Lebowski. I think a lot of people have it in their head that it's going to be a more straight up comedy the first time. Mind you it's very funny, often hilariously, but it's not like a more typical comedy. Then going back a second time knowing what type of movie it actually is already, you're able to appreciate it." "2001: A Space Odyssey. When I saw it as a teenager, I was bored to death. When I saw it ten years later, I was blown away by how great it is. It's one of my top three favorite movies now." "Love Actually. First time, I wanted more of some characters and less of others. I got peeved by all the jumping around. Now, I like all the stories, and watch it at least once a year." "Taxi Driver. My dad had hyped it up to me for a while but I didn't like it. Then I watched it again a few years later and realized how powerful it's depiction of loneliness is. I fell in love with the soundtrack, the atmosphere, and the writing. I have no idea what I was thinking the first time I watched it. I must have been in a bad mood. It's now one of my favourite films." "Burn After Reading! I don't know why, but the first time I watched it, I was expecting more of a spy thriller sort of movie. I ended up really hating it, feeling like the whole thing was a massive waste of time. A friend of mine convinced me to give it a second chance years later, and it's become one of my favourite movies ever since. I still crack up when I think about the ending scene, 'You don't know why he wants to go to Venezuela?'" "Starship Troopers. I was 16 when that came out and all the satire flew right over my head. I just wanted a 'rah-rah space marines kill the bad guys' action movie. As that, I felt it was mediocre. I revisited it older and actually understood it's a masterpiece." "Snatch. I watched it stoned the first time and I couldn't understand their accents, let alone follow the story. All I remembered was the amazing soundtrack. I watched it sober with subtitles on a year later and I loved it." "The Terminal. When it came out, I must have been about 12. I thought it was just a movie about a silly foreign man stuck in a terminal and he gets into silly hijinks. I rewatched it recently and it's a gem. It's got an amazing script. Tons of funny and hard-hitting lines. Tons of set ups and payoffs." "My pick would be Blade Runner: The Final Cut. The first two times I watched it, I thought it was boring, motivationless, and not expressive enough for me to get invested. Then on the third watch, something clicked, and now I absolutely love it." "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I didn't get it when it first came out when I was 19. I watched it again at 34 and it's a beautiful meditation on the absurdity of life, missed chances, and the short time we have together. It's Fincher's most romantic and sentimental film." "No Country for Old Men. It's deconstructive and kind of tricks the viewer into thinking things will turn out in a cliché way, and then they don't. I had to rewatch in order to see things from a different POV because my expectations clouded my understanding of what was going on. The point of the film isn't that society today is getting worse. It's that everyone eventually gets old and can't handle the ever-changing world anymore. The characters of Brolin/Harrelson refuse to accept that reality and are destroyed, while Jones' character realizes he is in over his head, backs down, and lives." "RoboCop 1987. I thought it was stupid, over acted, and the stop motion was silly. But then I 'got' the inner conflict of Murphy, how good the acting is, and the satire of corporate America. Now I'm a huge lifelong fan. I even pick up memorabilia now and again. I'm that sad." "There Will Be Blood! Lost me in the beginning with no dialogue, I got uninterested quick! Watched it a few weeks later, and bam! What a great movie!" "Napoleon Dynamite. Everybody raved about it and after my first viewing, I just thought it was the dumbest movie I have ever seen. A month or two later, I saw it again. What possessed me to watch it again, I don't remember, but it hit different at that time and I really enjoyed it. 'Your mom goes to college' is still a line I use whenever I can. Unfortunately as the years go by, it just isn't recognized as much as it once was." "Jackie Brown. I went to watch it opening weekend, and I hated it because it wasn't Pulp I adore the movie and say it is underrated. Plus, the soundtrack is a BANGER." "Zoolander. I watched it in high school and thought it was dumb. I watched it a few years later, and all the jokes just finally hit and it was hilarious. Not sure I've ever had my opinion of a movie's humour flip so drastically from 'it was lame' to 'it's GOATed.'" "Last Action Hero. As a kid, Arnold was the guy I wanted to look like growing up. But this movie is an interesting deconstruction of the super cop trope and how much that shit just wouldn't work in real life. 'In this world, Jack, the bad guys can win!' And they do. A lot." "Office Space. I was like 16 when I first watched it. I'd never worked a soul-destroying office job. It was mildly funny but I didn't get it. I didn't know. Now I know. Now I know what would drive someone to want to beat the shit out of a printer." "The Other Guys. I saw it in theatres and I guess I just wasn't in the right head space. Maybe too high, maybe not high enough, but I remember walking out feeling disappointed. Now on the other hand, every single time I've watched it since, I think it's one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. Michael Keaton alone is amazing. The running jokes of hot girls loving Will and him refusing to accept he was a pimp. And the guys accepting and loving tickets to Broadway shows as bribes. These are both such top tier bits!!!!!!" "Dark City. I saw it in the theatre, and it didn't grab me for some reason. A couple of years later, I randomly rented the VHS, forgetting I had seen it. I ended up loving it so much, I immediately watched it a second time. On my way back home from returning the tape, I stopped at Circuit City to buy a DVD player and that movie in DVD." "The Usual Suspects. The ending (first viewing), provided a whole new layer of appreciation when I watched it again." "Brokeback Mountain. I was a stupid teenager the first time I saw it and thought it was boring. I saw it again in my early 30s and cried my eyes out. I still can't believe it didn't win the best picture Oscar the year it was nominated. That movie is a masterpiece." "Moulin Rouge. I didn't understand, is it a period piece? Why are they singing modern music? The fu** is happening? Are we all just pretending he isn't shuffling around on his knees? That's the sexiest tango I've ever seen and tango is literally dancing sex! Wait did she just die? When I saw it a second time it all clicked. I love that movie. It's funny, tragic, emotional, and beautiful. Also the fact that Clone Wars' Obi got a 'girlfriend' named Satine because of this movie is crazy." Have you hate-watched any of these back in the day? Maybe it's time to give them another shot — you might be surprised! If you've ever rewatched a movie you HATED the first time, and ended up LOVING it after, we want to hear about it! Drop it in the comments, or share it anonymously in the form below! And if you like what you see, take a look at BuzzFeed Canada's Instagram and TikTok socials!
USA Today
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
The early 2000s movie that actors and directors call one of the best of the 21st century
What are the movie makers' favorite movies? The New York Times posed that question recently, polling some 500 notable directors, actors and Hollywood players to compile a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century. The result – a polarizing and comprehensive tour of modern movie magic – was published this month. Among the varied titles that made the list, one 2000s flick emerged as a favorite among actors and directors alike. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Michel Gondry's 2004 heartbreak epic, landed at No. 7 on the list, just behind No. 1 pick "Parasite." Is this the best movie of the 21st century? 500 Hollywood power players think so. Among the big names who voted for it were Australian actress Toni Colette, "Succession" star Brian Cox, and horror film director Robert Eggers. The movie, which stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, turns the classic rom-com formula on its head, imagining if a recently split couple had the power to erase all memories of one another. The resulting film is a heartwrenching exploration of how we are shaped by love and the inevitability of pain as an accompaniment to vulnerability. "It's really smart. It's deeply moving. And it's funny. You can get all those three, which is rare," author Dennis Lehane wrote of the movie alongside his vote for the list. Our 40 favorite movies of the past 40 years, from 'Back to the Future' to 'Get Out' "It's very much about how love finds a way. And I don't mean that in the sunny Hallmark way. I mean that in the messy, sometimes destructive, sometimes self-destructive way," wrote Lehane, a novelist and screenwriter whose books, such as "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island," have been adapted into popular films. Other stars who cast a ballot for "Eternal Sunshine" included "The Help" star Bryce Dallas Howard and "Barbie" actor Simu Liu. Rachel Zegler, who was born just three years before the movie was released, also listed it as one of her favorites, as did novelist Curtis Sittenfeld. That the film has a cult following among even A-listers is no surprise. Since its early 2000s release, it has become an unbreakable part of the cultural vocabulary. Pop star Ariana Grande's most recent album, "Eternal Sunshine," drew heavily from the themes of the film, her music video for one of the tracks even recreating scenes from the movie. With Carrey in a rare serious role, and a star-studded supporting cast including Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo, the movie's grasp on the bodily violence of heartbreak continues to earn it new fans.
Atlantic
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Cure for Guilty Memories
If literature and pop culture are to be trusted, many of us are drawn to the idea of eliminating memories—cordoning them off, storing them outside ourselves, or getting rid of them completely. In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a former couple pays to have their memories of each other erased after a bad breakup. Jennifer Egan's 2022 novel, The Candy House, features a technology called Own Your Unconscious, which extracts and packages characters' memories to be revisited, or not, at will. And most recently, on the television show Severance, a corporation offers its employees a procedure that splits their consciousness in two, creating workers untroubled by their outside self's emotions. All of these narratives rely on the sense that memories—good and bad—are a burden. Implicitly, they ask their audience whether they'd like to be free of their recollections too. Often, such stories suggest a real personal cost to getting rid of one's memories, and The Candy House and Severance both have broader dystopian elements as well. But the acclaimed short-story writer Karen Russell's second novel, The Antidote, takes a much more sweeping and historically minded approach to the idea of memory erasure and its pitfalls. Set during the Dust Bowl in a small Nebraska town called Uz, the book is named after a so-called prairie witch, one of a number of women in the area who perform a mysterious service: For a fee, they store memories for their drought-stricken neighbors, who whisper their secrets to the witches while they're in a trance. One of the Antidote's clients confesses to resenting their chronically ill child; others store beautiful memories 'like bouquets preserved under glass,' not wanting them to lose their bloom; still others, prodded by the town's corrupt sheriff, use her service to lock away details about crimes they've witnessed. Awake, the Antidote has no idea what she's heard. She operates, essentially, as temporary remote storage for the townspeople's recollections, making them inaccessible to anyone until the sharer chooses to retrieve the memory. But the Antidote and her colleagues aren't the only memory-erasers in the novel. When a huge dust storm (the one known as Black Sunday, which, Woody Guthrie famously wrote, 'blocked out the traffic an' blocked out the sun') hits Uz, it somehow eliminates the Antidote's cache of memories. On realizing what has happened, she panics. Of course, this is an existential issue for her—prairie witching is how she supports herself—but her response also has a moral dimension: Although she doesn't know what secrets she's lost, she suspects that justice won't be done until many of them are aired publicly. But not even Black Sunday can erase Uz's founding shame: the theft of land from American Indians, and the devastation that ensued. One of Russell's narrators, a kindhearted farmer named Harp Oletsky, puts this bluntly to his peers, telling them that the 'land is blowing because we stole it from the people who knew how to take care of it. Before we uprooted the prairie, we uprooted human beings.' Of course, to Harp, this uprooting, of which he is deeply ashamed, isn't history. His parents, Polish immigrants who fled German conquest and discrimination, took Indian land—and felt shame over doing so, having been uprooted themselves. But rather than changing course, they used prairie witches to get rid of their guilt toward the people whose homes they'd stolen. The Antidote has her own complex relationship to this history. The daughter of poor, urban Italian immigrants, she tells herself that she and her family had nothing to do with the land theft—that, in fact, its wealthy perpetrators are her enemies too. But over the course of the novel, she comes to understand that her magic—her ability to bank ugly memories so that families such as the Oletskys can prosper without pain—is a form of complicity. The Antidote comes to this realization as she befriends one of the novel's other narrators, a photographer named Cleo who comes to Nebraska through the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program designed to address rural poverty. On the road, Cleo buys a camera that seems to be able to see through time. Its images, once developed, show the future or past of the site Cleo meant to photograph. Often, she can tell she's looking at a time other than her own, but can't begin to guess when it is. By collapsing time, Russell yanks her audience into the book. Cleo may not recognize the 21st century when she develops a picture of it, but we do. Some of the novel's agenda—it very much has an agenda—is to create a history of the prairie that, in the Antidote's words, is one not 'of Manifest Destiny, but Invisible Loss.' Russell clearly wants to complicate John Steinbeck–type tales of the Dust Bowl, ones that tend to concentrate on white farmers' suffering without considering the pain their arrival in the West caused. For Americans to forget the latter, Russell seems to argue, would be a loss of identity on a national scale—something worth grieving and, indeed, something dystopian. But The Antidote doesn't stop there. Its true project is to defeat the very fantasy it starts with: that of getting rid of the past. In the novel, memories, like money, need to be kept in circulation for the health of society. They don't do anybody much good in a vault. The Antidote 's characters tend to struggle with describing their memories to anyone but the Antidote—and to the reader. Russell writes in what can feel like a series of monologues. As in her first novel, the highly inventive and fun Swamplandia!, her prose is just dense and unusual enough to insist on being read slowly. At the same time, it's direct and intimate. Especially in the first half of the novel, her narrators seem to be pouring their guts out to us in order to avoid talking to one another. Harp, who is raising his orphaned niece, Dell, after her mother is murdered, never reminisces with Dell about his sister; the Antidote and Cleo both do their best not to have meaningful conversations with anyone at all. Only when Russell puts these four characters into proximity do they start getting some of their memories out into the air. For Dell, Harp, and the Antidote, talking is straightforwardly healing. Dell and Harp get to grieve Dell's mom; Harp gets to work through his unsettled feelings about his family's acquisition of its land; the Antidote gets to reckon with the nature of her work. For Cleo, the book's outsider, however, things are more complex. Her explicit duty as a government photographer is to contribute to 'public recollection, 'a rich fund of memories' for every present and future American,' but even before her camera begins showing her scenes that aren't there, she has little faith in the veracity of photography. As an artist, she knows that she can manipulate the images she makes: 'People are wary of my camera,' she admits, 'with good reason. Each flash ran a stake through your heart. Now you were nailed to one spot, wearing this forlorn or broken expression. The wrinkling ocean of human thinking and feeling that ripples across a face, over a lifetime—the camera cannot capture any of that.' In fact, it's Cleo's assignment to catch her subjects looking pitiable, though without letting them know she's doing so. Her images are meant not only to become memory but also to get Congress to give struggling farmers money. For Cleo, who is Black, this is a fraught mission; she knows—and her boss often reminds her—that it is likeliest to succeed if she makes portraits of the 'faces that carried the most weight with Congress. The need that triggered avalanches of compassion was White need.' Russell includes real images from the Resettlement Administration in her book—the sorts of images that were by and large taken to represent white suffering, even when, as in the case of Dorothea Lange's famous ' Migrant Mother,' their subject was not white. Their presence is a reminder that public memory can hide as much as it preserves. The Antidote, in part, is a reaction to the hidden history of the Dust Bowl, an effort to return to circulation the fact that the land 'blew away,' as Harp puts it, because white settlers stole it from its stewards. By the end of the novel, Russell's characters are all on a mission to get people talking not only about this painful collective memory but also about all the bits of their past that they've tried to stifle or pack away. The more we share our memories, they realize, the less they burden us—and, crucially, the more we can know ourselves through them. This is especially true for Dell: As she begins to allow herself to talk about her mother, whom she misses acutely, she grows more able to feel happiness in her new life with Harp. Russell makes this point about memory in other ways too—through an exhibition of Cleo's photographs and a subplot concerning Uz's sheriff, who is both the Antidote's enemy and one of her biggest clients. Sometimes he deposits his own memories with her; more often, though, he uses her to hide evidence, hence her moral distress after Black Sunday. If the happy memories some people deposit in the Antidote's vaults are treasures, then so, in a sense, are the ones that could have brought justice. Taken together, these lost stories demonstrate that in The Antidote, hiding memories—whatever the reason—is never a good thing. The poor farmer who deposited his first kiss in the prairie witch loses it forever on Black Sunday. Dell, meanwhile, loses her chance at knowing who killed her mother, due to the sheriff's machinations. These are very different losses, but both suggest a cost in refusing to engage with the past. If a person or a group of people can't look back on the ills they've perpetrated, they can't undo their damage or aspire to do better in the future. And if they can't summon the joys of their life—well, then what's there to hope for?
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The neuroscientist working on ‘zapping' away unwanted memories
Think of your happiest memory. A wedding, your child's birth, or maybe just a perfect night out with friends. Sit with it for a moment. Remember the details. What were you wearing? What did it smell like? How did it make you feel? Now do the opposite. Think of a sad memory—the loss of a loved one, getting laid off, or a painful breakup. Sit with this one too. Which would you rather keep? Of course, you want the happy memory, the one that made you feel good and joyful about life. Yet, the painful ones linger for years and sometimes decades, like bruises beneath the surface. If you could choose, would you keep them—or delete them entirely? If this is all starting to sound like something out of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Inception, you wouldn't be too far off—and Steve Ramirez would agree with you. Ramirez is a neuroscientist at Boston University and National Geographic Explorer whose research occurs on the bleeding edge of memory science. He's perhaps best known for studies he helped conduct that showed that it was possible to implant a false memory in mice. The findings were published in the journal Science in 2013 and the Royal Society in 2014. His research is built on a central truth: Memory is fickle. It changes and morphs every time we recall it. Ramirez compares it to hitting 'Save As' on a Word document. Everytime we retrieve a memory, we change it slightly. Ramirez is exploring whether we can harness that 'Save As' process—intentionally rewriting our memories instead of letting them change by accident. So far, he's figured out how to do something even more surprising: not destroy a bad memory, but create a new one. 'We know memories are malleable, and susceptible to modification,' says Ramirez. 'Every time they're recalled, they're being saved and edited with bits and pieces. We wanted to see if we could do that in the lab. Because if we could do that directly in the lab and brain, then we can really get a higher resolution snapshot of how memories work when they're being warped or when they're being modified.' The team's foundational study came in a 2012 paper published in Nature where they identified and activated a cluster of neurons in mice brains that encoded a fear memory—specifically, a mild foot shock. To do so, the researchers genetically engineered the mice so that memory-related neurons become light sensitive. The creatures were then placed into a box and received a foot shock—resulting in the memory of that shock becoming encoded in the light-sensitive brain cells. The team then surgically implanted a tiny fiber-optic cable into the skull of each mouse that they could use to shine a laser into its brain. When they turned it on, it activated the bad memory on command like flipping a switch. Next they wanted to see if they could create a false memory. For this, they put a mouse in a safe box and let it explore. The next day, they placed the mouse in a different box, triggered the memory of the safe box by shooting a laser over its brain, and simultaneously gave it a foot shock. When they later returned the mouse in the first box, it froze in fear—even though it never received a shock in that box. The team had, in effect, implanted a false memory in the mice. 'The key thing with that experiment was that we showed that we could artificially activate a memory while the animal was experiencing something. Later, that new, updated version was the animal's last recorded version of that memory,' he explains. 'The mouse was scared in an environment where, technically, nothing bad happened.' Between the lasers, false memories, and shocking experiments, you'd be forgiven if you thought this was getting pretty sci-fi. Ramirez embraces the comparison as his work often brushes up against science fiction in big ways. 'I think science fiction and science reality are in lockstep, often influencing each other in surprising and unpredictable ways,' Ramirez says. 'What sci-fi can get 'wrong' sometimes is inevitable, but the work it inspires and the dreams and visions sci-fi can conjure up in people is practically limitless, and I love it for that very reason.' Still, it can seem scary, especially when you consider the potential applications to humans. But Ramirez says that memory manipulation would take a decidedly less invasive approach for people—no brain lasers required. Instead, if you want to activate a happy memory in another person, all you have to do is ask them about it. (Remember the beginning of the story—or did you forget?) 'We can update a seemingly safe memory into something negative,' he says, referring to the foot shock test. 'But what about the opposite: Can we turn a negative memory into a positive memory?' Despite the pop-culture comparisons to Inception or Eternal Sunshine, Ramirez's real-world applications are far less cinematic—and arguably more profound. Instead, his work is laying the groundwork for helping people with PTSD process harmful memories, or those with neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's and dementia live longer, better lives. In a forthcoming paper currently under peer review, his team claims they were able to identify where exactly a memory will form in the brain days before it even happens. It's like being able to predict where lightning is about to strike before the storm even gathers. This might allow future clinicians to anticipate the effects of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and dementia before they occur. 'Imagine being able to make a Google Maps for memory, but with the level of individual brain cells,' he says. 'You could say, 'This is a positive memory in the brain. It's located here in this 3D web of activity. We can zoom into it here and it looks like something is misfiring, and that might be the remnants of some kind of cognitive decline or memory loss, or amnesia, or Alzheimer's.'' We're still a long way away from a Google Maps for memory. However, Ramirez is quick to point out that his field of research is still in its infancy. He puts it this way: the study of neuroscience is roughly 100 years old—whereas physics is more than 2,000 years old. 'Relative to physics, neuroscience is still in its Pythagorean Theorem stage,' he jokes. There's still a lot we don't know about the brain and, as a result, how memory works. But Ramirez and neuroscientists like him are turning science fiction into science reality, which may allow us to one day edit and manipulate our own experiences. More importantly, their research helps us understand the profound ways that memory shapes us—and how we might begin to shape it right back. This article is part of Your Memory, Rewired, a National Geographic exploration into the fuzzy, fascinating frontiers of memory science—including advice on how to make your own memory more powerful. Learn more. The nonprofit National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funded National Geographic Explorer Steve Ramirez's work. Learn more about the Society's support of Explorers.
