Memory And Forgetting By Jad Abumrad And Robert Kru

“Memory and Forgetting” is a podcast hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich on the Radiolab network, and even though it was broadcasted in June of 2007, the topics and information that they discuss are still relevant and intriguing today. The podcast examines where and how memories are stored and accessed as well as how they can be potentially erased or how false ones can be planted in a person’s mind. They speak with numerous guests and share a multitude of interesting stories ranging from laboratory experiments to an amnesiac almost completely lost to the world.

To start off the podcast, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich discuss common memories metaphors, such as a filing cabinet and a hard drive, that experts say aren’t actually accurate.

He allowed the rats to form the memory of being zapped after hearing the tone, but then after a two month period, Nader played the tone and, while the rats were remembering being zapped, he gave them the drug. The next day, he found that the rats who had been the drug acted as if they had never even formed a memory about being zapped. LeDoux and Nader had some concerns about this experiment; mainly they wanted to know if they were actually erasing that specific memory or if they were just damaging the brains of the rats. After conducting more experiments, they concluded that the drug was, in fact, erasing the memory. Following these discoveries, Nader and a clinical psychologist have been trying anisomycin on people with PTSD and have found that taking the drug while remembering these traumatic events makes the memories less painful and easier to deal with. Rob and Jad bring up the point that “really what [we are] is a string of memories” and that by eroding your painful memories, you are effectively “deleting” parts of who you are, considering the fact that some trauma can assist in shaping the people we are today (Memory and Forgetting). Jad later reveals that because this drug can erase

Now that the hosts have established that we can, in fact, erase memories, it’s time to wonder if we can add false memories as well. Jad and Rob speak to Dr. Elizabeth Loftus about being able to implant memories into someone’s head and found that it was disturbingly easy to accomplish. She explains that the mere power of suggestion can lead to a person forming an extremely real memory that is actually fake. Loftus’ work and opinions about adding memories were extremely controversial, and she garnered thousands of enemies and threats. Moving on to finding lost memories, the hosts of Radiolab played a clip of a story produced by Neda Pourang. Pourang narrates the story of Joe Andoe in a slow, calm voice, sometimes intermixed with Joe’s own voice talking about his paintings and the thoughts behind them. He started painting familiar fields from his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma and then started adding horses to those pastures for reasons unknown to him. Andoe also began to paint girls and found that he was painting the same girl over and over again from different angles. He soon realized that he had been unconsciously painting a wonderful memory of his first girlfriend, Kay, and their magical interaction with a