Radiolab

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Rat

What is a memory? Science writer Jonah Lehrer tells us is it’s a physical thing in the brain… not some ephemeral flash. It’s a concrete thing made of matter. And NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux’s research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD.

LeDoux's lab at NYU
Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
Karim Nader, "Trauma Tamer"
Buy File Cabinets
Buy Hard Drives

Buy LeDoux's book: The Emotional Brain

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Adding Memory

We start this section off with a question from writer Andrei Codrescu: "where do computers get their extra memory from?" And then we take it literally. Can you add memories? Dr. Elizabeth Loftus says yes. She’s a psychologist in the department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California at Irvine, and her research shows that you can implant memories—wholly false memories—pretty easily into the brains of humans. Her work challenges the reliability of eye-witness testimony, and is so controversial that she once had to call the bomb squad. Then, producer Neda Pourang brings us the story of finding a lost memory. Painter Joe Andoe incessantly paints huge canvasses of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and - more recently - a girl with a particular about-to-say-something look on her face. He didn't realize until recently that he'd been painting a day from his past, a fragment of an afternoon 30 years earlier.

Slideshow: Joe Andoe
See Painter Joe's paintings
Buy Painter Joe's book
New Orleans, Mon Amour by Andrei Coderescu
Elizabeth Loftus can make you hate ice cream

Read more stories from Rosen's 101 Damnations

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Clive

The story of a man who’s lost everything. Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” Clive’s wife, Deborah Wearing, tells us the story along with Oliver Sacks. And they try to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers two things: Music and Love.

Thanks to Uden Associates Productions for excerpts from the 1986 film about Clive Wearing, "Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness."

Deborah's book about Clive: Forever Today
Oliver Sacks' new book: Musicophilia
Oliver Sacks' website
Sacks' article about Clive in the New Yorker

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