Who are the Sharks? They're entrepreneurial leaders in the North Texas Conference Churches with a passion for reaching new people for Christ. The Reverend Debbie Lyons serves as the senior pastor at First United Methodist Church, Winsborough. Her passion for community engagement has earned her the mayor's key to the city. Phillip Neely, a lay member at Whaley United Methodist Church in Gainesville, has more than 20 years of experience in business development. And currently serves as president and CEO of Trident Process Systems. The Reverend Sylvia Wang serves as the senior pastor at First United Methodist Church, Archer City. As chair of the conference's journey towards racial justice coordinating team, she helps develop strategies to create an equitable future for all people in the North Texas Conference. Greg Hickman, lay leader at Whitesboro United Methodist Church, is the owner and CEO of First Texas Home Health, a leading home health care system. The Reverend Dr. Andy Stoker is an interfaith leader who has served as a United Methodist pastor for more than 20 years. Today, he is chief engagement officer at the Thanksgiving Foundation. Jessica Vargas, mission coordinator in the North Texas Conference Center for Church Development, supports leaders across the conference as they identify new ways to engage their communities for Christ. First into the spark tank is Pastor Doris Smith of Mount Zion United Methodist Church in Paris, Texas. Their bridging the gap ministry seeks to connect seniors in the church with students in the community in need of tutoring and after school engagement. Well this idea came to me because of the new generation and I feel that the older generation need to be able to understand where the new generation is and a new generation need to be able to understand where the older generation has been and how can we bridge the gap in between? We have to listen and learn from one another. Our hope is to be able to bridge the gap with the older generation with the younger generation through technology. Look at the new shorts. I am Doris L Smith from Mount Zion United Methodist Church in Paris, Texas. I'm the pastor of the church and here with me are several of members who came in support of this bridging the gap is the name of our proposal that we are going to present to you all today. And so we are asking for $10,000 for bridging the gap if that consists of technology, that consists of asking for tablets, that consists of putting a app on these tablets for reading comprehension, also being able to take the youth and children on special trips in order for them to see some things that they have not seen before. Even also asking and requesting for a license. Camsor would come in and sit and talk to these kids including food and snacks that we have to give them in order for them to be there to make sure that they're okay. Also we're asking for bibles to be able to give to the children because most come they don't have a Bible and even Bible and biblical literature such as the John Wesley literature that I am pushing so hard and heavy because we don't want to lose the children to the street we want to bring the children within the church. And I do know that the John Wesley three super rules do no harm to the state and love the God is one of our profound principles that we have within the United Methodist Church. Also to promote any swag or literature or t-shirts, anything that says bridging the gap, the unit that Malzahn can have that will help these kids and people within the Calimbrith that surrounds the church would know that that's what Malzahn is about. So I also know that Malzahn building the gap program aims to help close the learning gap for the children and students within that community and to also bring a safe and supportive place for the kids to come at Malzahn United Methodist Church in order to grow academically with volunteers within the church and even the people within the community. Also the reading comprehension portion that we'll talk about putting on the tablet. It is positively affecting when students are motivated and engaged and encouraged to be able to learn because we have been faced with several children that are not on their reading level, they're not where they need to be, but the church is a support group and in our building the gap proposal promotes a multi-generation approach to reach the children and the youth. And also our proposal vaguely not only the internal but also the community outreach with children and youth, whether they are already connected to faith, community or not, but Malzahn building the bridge proposal aims created, creativeness that which it will support the children and youth academically, even with discipleship and it helps them to develop a spiritual sense of what the church is doing. You have to be able to read to be able to understand and when we preach and teach within the church we want no one left behind. So that is our mission, that is our goal, but most importantly for us is that we want the children and the youth to associate the church with someone who cares about them. We want to be that place that makes them feel like they are being seen, they are being heard and that they can experience the love of God. Anything juncture with expanding their horizon and that's really our hope at Mount Zion United Methodist Church and we are also looking forward to building something new within the community and bringing everyone aboard.  I didn't hear in your proposal as much about the educational foundation of this, the field trips that are going to expose the kids. In your proposal I think it's also important that you are giving them a place to vent and talk about bullying and their fears and their worries but I think what you've just shared with us today will definitely take you from zero to hero. I believe in you. I believe in you Doris, what you've done, where you've been, so I'm just going to start out with a partial deal for you and hopefully some of my co-sharks will also buy in after they've asked their questions. I'm going to start with start you with 2,500 and my big question to you is to do this every single day after school and you said it's a Wednesday, right? We will do it Wednesday, we can do it Wednesdays and then also make it more effective when I'm there for Friday from Sunday, make it on a Saturday and I realize that people want to keep their weekends but I am one that wants to stand out front and do what it takes to help these kids get where they need to go. So what day are you going to do this? Are you doing it two days or one day? If there'll be two days. Two days, yes. I see all your lovely volunteers here that are willing to support this ministry. Where are the rest of your volunteers going to come from? This is a big job. Well what our proposal is is that we're going to reach out to other churches within the community that has problems and issues with being able to give the kids on board and keep them on track. We have churches that sit around our church on every corner so that is not a problem at all. Matter of fact we have united with one of the bigger churches like the Peeblocks during our church anniversary and that past is on board with what we're doing and think that this is an excellent idea but again they're limited with resources as well so if we can pull in some of their people to come and help us they will be excellent. Have you been in touch with the NAACP in the Northwest Texas workforce? They are members of our church and they are willing to help. Okay good good. Doris it's so nice to meet you in person. I think we've some time ago met on zoom on another meeting. You have wowed me with your presentation. I'm going to contribute invest $2,500 from my fund into the bridging the gap and I just want to applaud all of y'all for showing up and just supporting supporting God's work in your community for the children and youth. There's so many things we want to do for our kids and help them out but take concrete small steps at a time so as to prevent burnout of laity and clergy and it's also the partnering with other community organizations and other churches just awesome so thank you so much for your passion for all of your passion thank you for showing up that's that's tremendous support for God's work here and just stop your love for your pastor thank you so much so I will commit $2,500. I serve on the school board in Gainesville and we have a section of low performing students and the thing that you the thing that you said that really hit home with me is the reading gap if there's a statistic and I don't know know it exactly but we focus heavily on it if a if a child can't read by the time or in third grade they're behind forever they can't catch up on math or anything else so it's it's so important and I think it's great that you guys are doing it in your church the other thing the other thing the questions I add was the the involvement by Paris ISD do you have commitments there or will this help you get a commitment this will help us get a commitment and based on the reading proficiency but Paris ISD was at 38% and that is in the bottom 50% of Texas schools so we've done some research on that but this will give them to assist us especially with their curriculum how they they teach which is a lot different from how I learned and and many people learn but we have people that are within the school within our church that will be helpful to help us be on line with the with PISD Paris Indian School District. The thing I would like to see us do because I'm going to invest $5,000 in this I'm going to get your full $10,000. Wow. I think what I would like to do as we help and resource wise is is find a similar type of program that you can kind of either go look at or talk to to see hey are these guys doing it because it exists and they're very successful programs and I think what what someone said before is a small step is a huge step so I'm excited to invest $5,000 with you and thank you for your time. Thank you. Doris I want to jump in here I we're we're we're you're maxed out on sharks I'm wondering if I could be helpful from a public education advocacy space I think like Phil was mentioning I'd like to walk along with Phil and offer any further conversation as part of my work with pastors for Texas children and that larger network to figure out who else is out there doing this type of work so you don't have to create from nothing there's something for you to build on and really and really expand this in a holistic way and make this $10,000 expand and grow and be shaped for not only this coming school year but the school years to come so I want to offer my my help to you as as needed as well we definitely will reach out because we definitely need it and we don't know everything and and that's why we have to work together to breach the gap amen amen amen this will teach me for talking last because there's no more money to give out I know what you got my proposal I said $2,000 we want to go over and I will tell you I'm on the school board here in white sprawl as well I've raised four boys uh and I know that's over what it's hard to raise kids around and these kids not only I personally think what these kids need more than anything is compliments they need to know that they have people that believe in them that they can do whatever it is they want to do and and we as a church community we as just society need to build those kids up again all the money's been given but I'll be more than happy to do whatever it is that you guys might need I have a business in white sprawl that we have a lot of technology a lot of laptops some notebooks some things like that that we really can't use anymore because our software is it's gotten too big for these computers and it's I would much rather have them go to a good use like that than just sitting in a closet so I can go through that inventory to see what we've got maybe some we might have a couple of TVs that are flat screens that we're not using anymore that I'd be more than happy to throw that in we will we will come back and pick it up you think it two weeks I will go through it on Monday you guys are doing a great job and and our kids need more people like you so I applaud all of you yes thank you good job well um pastor Doris this is the first in our spark tank we you got your full funding ten thousand dollars and you got the five charts that are committed with time and efforts to help you out and technology to help you out and get this space and become a reality well I have to thank you the members yeah absolutely a lot of this was there are absolutely so thank you thank you thank you so much thank you for being part thank you for your time thank you for your time and effort in putting this together and and helping all the kids thank you we appreciate you've been here today thank you all congratulations I didn't create you all very excited very thrilled that they saw what we see as a need for our church we're so anxious to get started and to let our children know that we care we're so anxious to bridge the gap we and we think that with the help and with the mentoring that they're going to give us that we can do this and we just say to God be the glory for what he is allowing us to do it yes and I am excited about all five sharks they are each one of us very supportive each one had a step to offer Mount Zion in our efforts to put on the bridging the gaps with the children in the community and the and the elders of the church so we are over over jealous about everything so we know which is over the top about everything and we know that with their support and their words of encouragement on today and the funds that they gave us that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens them amen pastor Dallin Morgan of the gathering Anna is next into the spark tank she's seeking shark support for taste of Anna which will leverage the church's unused property that has been vacant since a 2020 fire to host food trucks and serve as a new community gathering site so two months ago we were given the opportunity to use the old personage for Anna UMC as a new ministry center for the gathering and a group of us came together and we looked at the space which is the space that the burnt down church was once in and we looked at it and we prayed over the space of what could be and one of the most interesting things that came out was this food truck park um and part of the 2050 comprehensive plan for Anna was to have a food truck park and so we thought what a great place it's really close to our brand new city hall and it's going to be right next to our library this would be a great place to be able to have community and have all the trip food trucks together hi my name is Dallin Morgan and I'm the planting pastor of the gathering at EMS I'm also serve as a division or I'm sorry the diversity and inclusion board of the city my name is Michelle Clemens I am a lady planter work with the youth at Anna UMC um I serve as a commissioner on the planning and zoning board for the city of Vienna um and also builds a business plan for a non-profit that's been going two years strong now where is this place currently Anna UMC has a large lot located spack dab in the middle of Anna um one block away is the beautiful new city hall and right next door is where the state of the art library will be directly across the railroad tracks in our most coveted play area surely heritage park and we're in the next few months we're getting our train placed um it's also where we have our annual Christmas tree lighting and it's right in the middle of Anna why we chose here um we don't have any a lot of sit down restaurants in Anna not a place for people to meet we don't have event centers so really we thought what a perfect place to have it in downtown Anna somewhere where they can go Anna's comprehensive 2050 plan and Catesburg thriving downtown area with a lifestyle with lifestyle areas and so we wanted to be able to bring that lifestyle area through Anna UMC so the biggest question that I know is a church that we often ask is how will the taste of Anna create discipleship so for me there's two ways to create discipleship one is knowing who's leading the discipleship so first the people who lead this discipleship path will actually be the lady who are responsible for having the food trucks who show up and are doing the work in the ministry of the church uh so the whole food truck park which is the taste of Anna is led by the lady of the food trucks so we are simply a host site for them to come but also we have a discipleship path which is our three C's which is connect with relationship connect with God and connect with community obviously through the food trucks we are connecting with community not just those who own and run the food trucks but also those who come the children the youth the adults the seniors all who come connecting with God we actually have a way that we want to start to have worship at the food truck park one of our sites that sits right next door has an enclosed plate area where we intend to put really pretty tables and lighting it's enclosed so so children can play while we have worship we want to start with messy church it's outdoors it's perfect for the spring early summertime uh to kind of give a taste of what the gathering will be um but it creates that intentional community so what do we need to bring this to happen we don't need much but we do need your money okay we are asking for ten thousand dollars for the initial cost of the grading and crust concrete but their door so if you'll turn the page the major cost is to put the grading and crust concrete down so we are working with the new business grant through the city of yana we've already gone and had business meetings with them they've actually said three different places have come to them wanting to do this and we have the best site available because we're on the northern end um and we have the parking everything's kind of there um and so the initial cost is set up we think it's thirty thousand dollars so with your help and with the grants that we are expecting and get through the city and falsely the other grant through the conference we're hoping that it is paid for and once it's set up it's maintained by food truck owners themselves as a part of the nonprofit lease agreement that we'll have but it's also a way for the church to have um income revenue to help sustain the ministries of worship of children of youth gathering and such so together this is how many food trucks do you have commitments for to park in the space well we have none with commitments because we don't have the space yet but i uh spoke to about 13 of them that are from anna and they were all very excited for the opportunity to have that as a place that they could stay so you're leasing the space to them or providing it to them free so that is something we're working out with the conference uh we want to make sure that we're working with them the correct tax realm uh and so it will probably be a non-profit space agreement where they donate a portion of their revenue cost back to the church one of our just being the gathering one of our tenants is generosity where we take 10 percent of our uh income that we receive our regular offerings and give back to the community so part of that is that we're going to ask them to do a similar percentage of their profits to give right back to the church obviously you guys are versed in how the city of anna's working and you already are working on the grant so it's very impressive that you're taking this to to turn that into a lot bigger deal a lot bigger uh project so i think that's great um this this project isn't for me but i hope i wish you all the success and i think you did a great job on your presentation thank you it's great people abide by the use of the space but also there might be people who might come into the space and maybe damage the space and so so i don't just bring up some of the risks involved in in creating new property sure that's something i'm already working with the conference on is what kind of insurance would each good truck holder need to hold but also name just what type of insurance would the conference need to hold on that space so something was to happen um the effort trucks on their own would be insured specifically by them so we the church would not be responsible for that the most damage that they would do to the outdoor space might be the lighting that happens or the grading of the crushed concrete um so we would make sure that that is covered i think anytime you take church outdoors you have kind of that risk of what would people do with that space we would ask for extra patrol but the nice thing about it is the police station is one block away so we are in the downtown area that they're already highly patrolling um and so we're not concerned as much about that as just making sure that we have posting signs like what is allowed when does the park open when does that close so that there are people out there after hours when there's not people visible that the authorities are alerted like hey something might be going on there is the cost of portable toilets built into this so the city right now is not requiring that because we have the ministry center right next door that has bathrooms accessible to them also the city building is within less than a walk walking distance that has that so you would open the church for people to use your restrooms right so they're okay right now at this stage that might change later but at this stage they're okay with us having designated bathroom times like the building is open and the restrooms are accessible um they know we're not going to be open from morning tonight that we can't have that house um if it is something because i have talked to the conference about that as well if we need to have portable bathrooms the actual cost of portable bathrooms is not a lot it's the expense of maintaining them so that is a part of what we're working on with the city um would they maintain it like a public restroom at the parks that they're already having to maintain uh this site for right now for the next few years with the place for us to do ministry but we are trying to move to our permanent location the city said if we invested in something like this they would be really interested in buying this in a few years even if it's not for a boot truck lot but as the parking area of the trail that they are getting ready to put in so putting crushed concrete down and doing something with that space is something the city is interested in purchasing in the future which is always the nice bonus yeah and i i can tell you too i i served on the parks um board first and then i said uh served on the planning and zoning board and the parks is really big and uh we have matching grants to do the trail system through anna and this spot is just it's like prime so i have a feeling that in a couple years uh while i don't think we should though um it would be perfect for the city there's just not a whole lot of land left in anna to buy have y'all been to jake's place in uh north shaman between shaman and then it's a very similar situation you know i think go back to where you were talking about the each vendor would be an agreement that they would then give back part of their profits to the church and and is that that's going to be well understood by them and will there is there a mechanism to i mean make sure that happens so everything we do because we are actually listed at the north texas conference would be managed by the north texas conference okay the bookkeeping is all done through the north texas conference and so i we have not worked through the specifics of how it would be managed other than i would probably receive a report of what's been paid and then at the managing pastor make sure that hey if they haven't been paid to follow up with them at their lease agreements so i would be the interim of that i think it's a great idea food trucks and we've got some here in white swirl that i mean you go out there any day at lunch and there's you know there's 15 cars in a parking lot and people lined up so uh you know that i'm willing to give $2,500 uh to this project i think it's good i think it's an opportunity to get outside and meet people maybe that aren't coming to church i think that it's important maybe somehow get your youth involved in it to where they're going out and it's a good place for them to you know to gather they can bring friends uh you know and have youth functions there where maybe they're not inviting people to school hey once you come to church with me hey you want to go to the food trucks you know and and do things like that i think that's a good way to reach those you know that that population but you know with that i'm willing to give $2,500 well congratulations thank you so much for coming in thank you for bringing this idea just know that you'll have a shark was giving you two hours and $2,500 and um you get all our prayers for this to continue to grow and serve as a connecting to the community thank you so much thank you for being here thanks gash go excited very excited yeah i'm excited that means there's some energy behind what we're doing so to see it from the community to see from the lady to see it from those who aren't even in the community support this idea it's really exciting it allows me to go back to this city and say we have a little bit of stake in what we're doing so that we can further the grant that they're willing to come alongside us with


Thank you all for coming here. I don't know how to give a formal talk of presentation, so I do my best to be formal, but we are very honored to have Dr. MacGuff here. He is, I call him, the father of member consolidation. He did his PhD in psychology for Minouza Berkley, a postdoc with Daniel Bowett in Nobel Laureate from Rome, and then later on he moved to University of California, Irvine to fund a Center for Memory and Neurobiology when he was 32 years old. That was the first Center on its own in the world actually, and after that from 1982 for 22 years he founded the Center for Learning and Memory in New York, California, Irvine. Dr. MacGuff is a member of National Academy of Art and Science in the US and also a member of National Science in Brazil and Mexico. He has been for 57 years an active scientist. During that time he published 560 papers, so based on calculation he published one paper per month. Again, as I said, he's the father of member consolidation, but also he's the first one who started a very rare almost science fiction people that they have highly superior memory, so we are glad to hear his new research on this subject. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much. I thank you for coming today and I thank the people who are responsible for bringing me here today and I have an opportunity to tell some of you the story for the first time and some of you you're going to get a bit of a story that you've already heard a couple days ago and I'm not going to apologize because repetition is very good for memory and so if you hear part of the same story twice it's even better and so don't say oh he said that before I know all about it it's just good for you so it's like taking medicine you don't like it makes you healthy and well and that's what I'm trying to do here. So you see the title up there that's what I want to talk about that's not how I got started in life. I got started in life by investigating the neurochemistry of memory and in order to do that I started investigating the influence of drugs on memory, stimulant drugs and that got me into studies of memory and got me into studies of what's going on in the nervous system and as you'll see my story segued from that into more the neurobiology of memory particularly the conditions that create strong memory. So here's a very important question that was proposed by the most famous psychology in our history and that was William James at Harvard University and he said why do we remember so little? That is we have experiences all the time and yet we remember little of all the experiences that we do have why is that? And the other question that he raised is despite the fact that we remember so little why do some of our experiences leave lasting memories? So this was a question that he proposed in 1890 in his very famous book and with my youth and an experience many years ago I decided to tackle these questions. Assuming that I had the honor of pursuing a question was raised by the famous psychologist, philosopher William James. Now the clue to an answer to both of these questions that were raised by William James comes from Francis Bacon in 1620 and I want us to think about it for a second. He said memory is assisted by anything that makes an impression on a powerful passion inspiring fear for example or wonder shame or joy. Now there are two assumptions in here one is that memory is weak to begin with because it says memory is assisted memory can only be assisted if it's not very strong. So it takes care of it responds to an issue that William James raised previously but it suggests that that the passion or will substitute emotional arousal plays some role in providing an opportunity for some memories that would otherwise be weak to become strong. So there are two things in this that speak to the William James concern or questions that he raised. So what does it mean to say that passion powerful passion well I interpret that to mean emotional arousal and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal which leads to activation of the brain and then you follow the pathway down on one side you get release of epinephrine from the adrenal medulla and on the other side you get to release the the synthesis and subsequent release of cortisol from the adrenal cortex and both of these go into the bloodstream and it's something over which you have no control at all. So if you are excited right now if you should get excited about something the adrenaline will increase and you start the synthesis of cortisol a half an hour later both of them will be high and you have no control over that. This is an automatic physiological response to the conditions that you are exposed to in life it just goes on. Now the question is is Bacon right that turning on these physiological responses have something to do with the creation of a strong memory. That was his assertion back in 1620. I've just translated into physiological terms so let's take a look. So to investigate this many years ago I started using this task right now which I call inhibitory avoidance. It's a very simple task. Remember I'm interested in the strong experience strong memories of a unique experience that's what I'm interested in. So in order to do that I have to have a unique experience. So I take a rat that has been living in a cage doing nothing but I suppose using its imagination or whatever for approximately two months I take it out of the cage bring it in here and put it in the white part of the apparatus which I can't see and you can right here. So the rat is just sitting there we open a door a door slides down and the rat can explore and go out into the other part of the apparatus when it meets reach the middle part of the gray region that's a metal metal floor when it reaches there gets a mild electrical shock to its feet. That is it that is the experiment. Walk through get a shock to its feet we take the animal out the next day put the animal back in the white area and simply ask would you like to go back into the other region and we measure the time that the animal spins in the starting chamber before it goes back in and we determined that if an animal has no memory the animal will walk right through if the animal has good memory the animal will stay out for a minute or two minutes or even ten minutes depending upon the condition and demonstrate that it remembers what happened the previous day. So here's an experiment to investigate the influence of a hormone that we released to ourselves when we got excited and in this case we gave it to the rat and an amount which would be equivalent to that that is produced by a very high foot shock but the animal gets a low foot shock we just give it a big dose of adrenaline or epinephrine. So their controls are shown on the left in the white and these controls stayed out when put back in for about a minute first day they walked through in about five or ten seconds the next day they say out for a minute and we infer that they stay out because they remember having been in and receive the shock we have controls we use to make sure that is the case. Now the question is what happens if we give immediately after the training trial at a time that the animal would release epinephrine to itself if it were a high foot shock but if we supply the epinephrine will the animal remember better. Think about yourself if I were to give you if I were to say something very exciting to you right now frightening for example would you remember what happened more than if I didn't do that well this is like the rat except we supply the excitement directly with the needle and we give a lot of epinephrine we see what happens well what happens is those animals don't go back in for four minutes got the same training the only thing only difference was that immediately after training they got a dose of epinephrine that's all that happened after the training then we can ask well does it have to be immediately after the training well yes for a big effect because if we delayed the injection the longer the delay of the injection after the learning the less the effect so this is a the first ever but also a clear demonstration that epinephrine enhances the memory of an experience that just occurred and of course that's the way it works works in real life you don't really release epinephrine before something exciting happens you release it after it happens and so we modeled that in the experiment give it a mildly exciting experience and then have the animal remember it as a terribly exciting experience just by a little dose of epinephrine. Now we decided to look at the place or places in the brain that might be involved in enabling this influence that we had just observed and we chose to look at the amygdala this is many years ago and we chose to look at the amygdala because in other work we had accidentally found that if we stimulated the amygdala electrically after an animal learned something we could enhance memory it was just a pure accidental finding but we said if that's case maybe the amygdala would be a region of the brain which would be important in mediating the influence that we had just seen so we did experiments in which we first implanted animals with a cannula aimed down at the specific region of the amygdala the basolateral region a subdivision of the amygdala and the cannula is sitting there so that when we trained the animal immediately after we trained the animal we could inject the basolateral amygdala with a little bit in this case not of epinephrine but norepinephrine because epinephrine doesn't pass the blood-brain barrier but we knew that epinephrine turns on the release of norepinephrine so we said the candidate here might be norepinephrine in the amygdala so we did that experiment and here is the result first we replicated the earlier experiment these are animals that stayed out for almost two minutes that's the white bar there in their memory and now we see what happens once again with epinephrine huge enhancement of memory given by a post-training injection of epinephrine now another group was given a very low dose of the beta adrenergic antagonist that is a blocker of epinephrine and norepinephrine a very low dose and that didn't do anything this injection is into the amygdala into the amygdala but what happens with that dose injected into the amygdala when we gave epinephrine in the periphery the effect was blocked so this gave us our first clue that the the action of peripheral epinephrine in influencing the storage of memory involved in some way this region of the brain the amygdala and so we pursued that in a really a great many experiments so I'm going to show you just to show you the limits of this I'll show you one task which I rather like because it doesn't involve any shock it's much more like our personal experiences of just going through daily life so here is a rat going through daily life goes in a box and there are two objects that look just alike and we study what the animal does in there and it turns out the animals explore the objects but they spend equal amounts of time on the two object boring I mean what could be less exciting than to be locked into a box with two light bulbs right so on the next day we put them in the box and it has one of the same kind of objects and another object is different and we ask where does the animal spend its time the animal spends its time on the object it is not seen before so it's a very nice test of memory that's built on the rat's curiosity that's clearly it's a memory test of what other interpretation there could there be that the animal selects the object it hasn't seen there's no shock in here at all now we ask the question can we make a strong memory of this event where there is very little emotional arousal involved can we turn it on so we gave a training with very minimal experience in the box on the first day and you can see that over here it was so little that there isn't any significant evidence of memory however if we followed that exposure with the dose of norepinephrine in the amygdala then we had huge enhancement of memory that was dose dependent enhanced memory of something as boring as looking at objects so we could make a strong memory of something which by itself did not elicit strong emotion simply by this kind of injection procedure and on the other side you see that we can block the memory over here by injections of perpranolol so here's good memory and poor retention if we put into the basal lateral amygdala we'll put some perpranolol so the the learning itself does not have to be exciting the learning can be pretty boring and we can turn a memory of a boring experience into a very strong memory by manipulating the system which ordinarily regulates the strength of memory for exciting experiences we can gain experimental control over that and that gives us an increased evidence that this region of the brain is in control of regulating how strong our memories will be of various experiences that we have now all of this presumes that norepinephrine is in fact released in the amygdala I mean up until now what I've shown you is that we can we can influence by injecting it but what about the normal release well let's take a look at this this is the the release norepinephrine release in this region of the brain that we measure using high-performance liquid chromatography what we do is we put a probe down in there and that probe samples the solution which is being released within this region of the brain we analyze that for norepinephrine so if you look at the look at what's going on here these are resting conditions these are individual animals that are just resting and you can see this is the base level here and at this point they get trained in the inhibitory avoidance task they're put in and they get a shock and then what you see is the increase in the release of norepinephrine induced by that at various times afterwards and these are all individual animals so here's an animal with a huge increase in norepinephrine in the amygdala and here in between in between and here's an animal that should know hardly any increase at all so there's wide variability and now we can ask the question does what does that have to do with memory and to answer that what you do is to look at the numbers up there the numbers are the latency to re-enter the place in the box where they had received the shock so the animal that has the highest release of norepinephrine never went back to the place where it received the shock never was set out for 10 minutes and that's when we stop measuring that's not when I stop measuring that's when the graduate students in postdoc stop measuring because they're bored watching animals do nothing if you look at the lowest here this animal walk through in 10 seconds and what you see then is a relationship between the amount of norepinephrine released and the retention for performance tested the next day the more norepinephrine is released the less likely are they are to go back where they got the shock so yes norepinephrine is released under emotionally exciting experiences number one and two it predicts retention behavior does both of those things now we we think as I have been implying all along with the examples I've given you we think that this applies to humans as well this is not just rat work but it's using rat work to get some principles which we think will apply to us as well so we've tried to figure out some experiments that we could do which would relate to this issue or maybe even support the conclusions that where I'm trying to explain to you and so I'll show you just a couple of these to illustrate the principle here's one experiment so we we told human subjects a story and I'm showing you right here the memory for different phases of the story here's the story it goes like this and for everything I say there is a picture that illustrates it so in a boy and a mother leave their house there's a picture they cross the street picture they see a car that has damage picture so on they go to the hospital and they see it's a disaster prepared in a stay and so they see people wrapped up as though they've had injuries and then the mother makes a telephone call and goes home picture picture picture and we test them then two weeks later for their memory of these pictures and what you see is there are three phases of the story the beginning the middle and the end and they remember all of it equally well another group saw the same pictures but with a different story boy and a mother leave home they cross the street the boy is hit by a car rushed to the hospital surgeons work frantically to save his life a distraught mother makes a telephone call and goes home same pictures and then two weeks later they are tested for memory of the picture and that's what their memory is in red up there and the middle of part of the story is the emotional part of the story and that's what they remember so emotional arousal increases the memory in the human subjects for this period so then we did the same thing and we said what if we give propranolol that is a beta adrenergic blocking agent to the human subjects who are in this experiment so here is the percent correct on the left for the neutral story in subjects and on the right is the percent correct for the arousal story this is a replication of our earlier finding if they got the arousal story they remember better what happens if they're given propranolol it does nothing to the neutral story but it blocks the enhancement that is induced by the exciting story so we can turn a memory of an exciting event into an average memory rather than a strong memory simply by giving propranolol which blocks beta adrenergic activation so the data although there are different kinds of experiments the results are the same we also did experiments in which we trained human subjects and injected them with epinephrine and we got facilitation as we did with the rats we had to stop those experiments because the human subjects committee required that we tell our potential subjects you must understand that there is a very slight possibility that this injection may kill you and so we had to stop those it's not going to kill them but that's what they said we had to do so we quit those experiments and we learned from pharmacologists from the cardiologists we learned that you can also increase epinephrine release by putting your hand in a bucket of ice water they do that routinely to check cardiovascular conditions so some of our experiments involved training human subjects on material to be learned and then having them immerse their hand in a bucket of ice water afterwards and believe it or not that enhanced memory so there was a rumor on the Irvine campus that undergraduate students were going to buy buckets of ice to take to class this is another study done by Larry Cahill my former student in which they simply showed emotional pictures to human subjects that's all they did they looked at emotionally arousing pictures and then afterwards they got samples of saliva so that they could measure alpha amylase which is an indirect measure of norepinephrine release and what you're looking at is the correlation between a cell salivary alpha amylase that's measured immediately after learning and retention as that was assessed one week later and as you can see there's a pretty good relationship it's not perfect but the correlation is plus seven two which is not bad it says that the alpha amylase measure is a predictor of retention of memory assessed one week later and of course the findings are consistent with the animal research even though there are different kinds of experiments and then finally on this series we also did pet imaging to assess the effect of emotional arousal and in this condition we injected subjects with a radiolabel glucose and then we put them in a room and had them watch some emotionally arousing film clips and then we put them in a scanner and a pet scanner and measured the activation of the vengdala and and oops I don't show that the vengdala gets activated when that's done and they got a surprise memory test three weeks later and you're looking at the relationship between the pet score which is at the bottom and the number of films recalled which is going up the side there and the correlation is plus point nine three it says we can predict performance on the memory test several weeks after subjects are exposed to these movies simply by looking at the pet image scores very very strong predictor extremely strong predictor so here's a cartoon which summarizes this part of the talk of what we think we have found you have a learning experience and this learning experience is going to activate the storage processes going on and a lot of different brain regions that stores that underlies the representation of the memories that are initiated by the learning experience at the same time it's going to initiate contact with all of those regions the brain is going to turn on the basolateral amygdala and it's going to turn off the adrenal glands for both cortisol and for from epinephrine if those are turned on those are modulatory influences coming from the basolateral middle amygdala and the adrenal gland and those modulatory influence will come up and influence the storage that's taking place in other regions of the brain where the memory is being processed so that's our interpretation of the influence of epinephrine cortisol and the involvement of the basolateral amygdala because they work through that and that's the way we look at it now back to earlier thinking I showed you what Bacon had to say about this thirty years later Descartes said the usefulness of all of the passion consistencies in their strengthening and prolonging in the soul thoughts which are good for it to conserve so the importance of emotional excitement consists in its strengthening memories which are good to conserve and he knew that in 1650 and I did not know that when we started this research and matter of fact I'm embarrassed about it because I should have known what philosophers thought about this and what I did was simply work on a problem that they drawn a conclusion to a long time ago they said memories are good for you make strong memories if you may have an emotional excitement that's what both of them said and all I did was to get some data which support that in the rat and the human and provides them additional information about what it means to get excited it's emotional arousal and to release of cortisol and epinephrine and it influences a particular region of the brain which is the basolateral amygdala which is in communication with all of the rest of the brain so I think we provided a little bit of information that was not available to Bacon and Descartes now I'm going to turn to the second part of this talk and I would like to say that it fits beautifully with everything that I've already said I can't say that because I don't know whether it does or not but I'm going to tell you about it anyway it's happened this way 16 years ago a woman sent me an email and she said I have a memory problem and I want to see you now what would you think if somebody told you they had a memory problem and say well they're not doing so well well I said this is not a memory clinic I'll direct you to one and she said oh no no it's not that kind of thing she said I don't forget and it was a problem to her because she can remember every bad thing that has ever happened to her in life and it was driving her nuts and she wanted to learn about it I think she wanted me to help her in some way assuming that I was a clinician which I am not so at any rate I agreed to see her and she came and I'm going to tell you about her and as we were investigating her I was claiming this was the first individual in history ever identified to have this ability and I learned that I was wrong because there was a man who was identified in 1870 who claimed to have ability of being able not to forget and he was tested and the results were published in a very obscure journal in 18 a philosophical journal in 1870 I had never even heard of the journal but somebody was kind enough actually not kind enough they sent it to me with a bit of nastiness saying you know you were not the first after all look at this study I found in the literature well I was not offended I thought it was wonderful to have something to refer to so here is Daniel McCartney age 54 tested in June of 1870 this person found the individual and decided to test him now he was tested many many many questions many questions and I've just selected a few here just to illustrate the point and I want to draw your attention to two things one is when asked a question is gave you details about what happened on a particular day and he responded very quickly two second latency between the question the response so he was asked he was asked October 8th 1828 and in two seconds he said it was Wednesday it was cloudy and drizzled rain I cared dinner to my father where he was getting out cold two seconds all right he claims that he remembered that here's another one February 22nd 1829 the next year to answer in two seconds Saturday was cloudy in the morning and clear in the afternoon there was a little snow on the ground an uncle who lived near us sold a horse beast that day for $35 so that was 41 years earlier remembers the day and he remembers something to happen on that day April 4th now this is now a shorter time April 4th 1841 three seconds a long delay three seconds Sunday it was rainy and muddy General Harrison died that day then the next one February February 2nd 1856 it was most awful cold it was the coldest day I ever see in my life he said now I checked the records for Iowa myself I went into the records to see what it was and the temperature records for Iowa indicate that February 4th was the coldest day in 1856 and that's two days away from the day in which he said it was the coldest day and so on now here's what the issue is he responds very quickly and so we assume that he has very good retrieval processes we might assume that he has very good memory but we have no way of validating most of the claims here they sound perfectly reasonable but we need validation if he says that it was cloudy and drizzled rain on October 28th 1828 we can look to see if it rained but we don't know whether his father took something to his father who was digging coal we don't know that so a validation problem we have to take it pretty much at face value but I have to say that I checked several of these things and several of them checked out that is there was another one in which he said it just rained terribly so I checked the rain records for Iowa for that day and I found that that was a rainiest season in a long time in in Iowa so the little checking I did do tended to validate what he said but that is a problem for understanding autobiographical memory you need to be able to validate it in some way if you really think it is really remembering what actually happened and that's the sense in which I'm interested in it all right I didn't know this when this young woman came to see me I didn't know anything about it so I just improvised my own method of examining her I had gotten for Christmas remember this is 2000 the turn of the millennium so I'd gotten a big book that had a day-by-day newspaper clipping clippings of articles of each day of the preceding century so I was able to look at events that occurred in the 1970s 80s and 90s this one was 34 years old so I could go back some years to do some testing and I would just open the book and find something on the book that would have been on CNN or front page newspaper magazine some everybody would know about it everybody would have been exposed to it and I would ask her about it I'll show you a couple of examples here so I asked her name it was Jill Price I asked her there was a plane crash in San Diego tell us about it and her response was well September 25th 1978 and that is of course accurate one of the Gulf War start and she says correctly oops Wednesday January 16th 1901 how many of you heard about the OJ Simpson trial any of you old enough to remember that when the one was the verdict rendered and she said immediately October 3rd 1995 and then so on so I had a large number I'm just giving you some examples so she could tell me the day and the date and she told me very quickly and it was more than that because for every one of these there was a narrative it wasn't a factoid she say oh yeah that Simpson verdict that was terrible because I was sitting with my family and we were so upset about it and it's a story about so she's not she hasn't just remembered that it was October 3rd 1995 she's telling me that she remembered where she was and what was going on the matter of fact she's very loquacious so I had to turn her off while I was testing because she wanted to tell me too much so that's asking for an event and her her response was indicated on the right now we turned around the other way and I gave dates so what happened on August 16th 1977 and she said Elvis Presley died right just like that and her latency is about two seconds the very very similar and so on you can see some of the these things here I tried to pick as you will see events that at least in California West Coast United States everybody would know about now my favorite here is the third one down I asked her what happened actually I asked her what happened on November 7th 1979 because I was looking at a newspaper article and I said November 7th 1979 and I asked her what happened and she said nothing and so I gave her a clue I said international that was the kind of clue I would give and she said well I can't think of anything but she said our our the Iranians took over the US Embassy on November November 4th 1979 I said well you got the right thing but you're off by three days and she said no the book is wrong and then I checked and I found that I was looking at the date that the article was written and down in in the article it gave the true date and she gave me the date on which the Iranians took over our embassy well I got my attention because she could do that so to stretch it a little bit I asked her to give me the dates of the last 22 Easters how many of you can remember the date of the last Easter and the way the year before raise your hand if you remember well she gave me correctly all but one all but one of the dates of the of the last 22 Easters and then she corrected it she made a mistake on one and she corrected it and she also without asking wrote down because I asked her to write it down she wrote down what she was doing on that day not only did she remember and she Jewish so why would she care about Easter anyway interesting so raises a lot of questions we had to ask if the for the for the public events it's very clear she's right or wrong and she was right generally when she wrote down her private events there's no way of knowing whether she was right or wrong so far as autobiographical memory for the most part we have to take her word for it however she kept the diary and so we were able to spot check the diary for a number of her claims and look at it to see if they were correct now what's interesting about that as she had kept diaries and she tied every one of them up to every of the diaries that the diaries each one of them was about that thick and then she was finished with it she would tie it up with a little pink ribbon right and she had a stack of these diaries each one tied with a pink ribbon so we had to dust them off like that to get the dust off the diaries open them up and she claimed that she did something on a particular day we would find a day and check it out and in every case it turned out that we were able to validate her claims of things that had happened to her now she we treated her as AJ because she didn't want to go public and then later on she decided to so we appeared on a radio station public radio and then she appeared on briefly on a couple of television stations and little by little we began to accumulate subjects and by 2010 we had accumulated five very very good subjects and we appeared how many of you have heard of the the US television program 60 minutes have you heard about well on the night that we appeared on that 18 million people watched that program and of those 18 million 600 of them and more sent me an email within 10 minutes after that program claiming that they had the same ability so then we had a potential pool of people but I'm going to tell you about one of the people who was on that television program her name is Louise Owen she is a professional violinist in New York she's a very good violinist but I don't think it's because she has good memory it's because she started playing the violin when she was three years old and her parents are both professional musicians so I think she grew up in a musical environment and the talent as well so here's Louise Owen and I want you to notice the speed of response and and the accuracy of the response I hope you can hear this McGaw says this type of memory is completely new to science so he and his colleagues have had to devise their own tests like this one on public events October 19th 1987 it's a Monday that was the day the big stock market crash and the cellist Jacqueline Dupre died that day the Berlin Wall falls on what day November 9th 1989 which was a Thursday Christopher Reeves accident occurred on what day it was Saturday May 27th 1995 and when were the Oscars held in 1999 1999 Sunday March 21st yes perfect what do you think we deliberately ask about a lot of topics Christopher Reeves we ask about the Berlin Wall we ask about the Oscars we try to cover a range of topics so that we can find out if they really knew what happened and and she knew she knew the other thing is you see how quickly she responded now if if somebody asked me questions like that if I even thought I might know I would look at the ceiling let me see I'll think about that don't you do that somebody asked you a difficult question that I don't know what the ceiling is such a choice but it is well the answer is up there I see it it's on the ceiling shouldn't do that just just very politely and friendly she just gives the answer like that now these are all factoids these are all things that happen that I have a particular date she was interested when the cellist died she knew that she's a musician but she also knew about Christopher Reeves and she knew about everything that we asked there now I think it's on the next one I'll check a second here yeah on on on this one I ask her something which would not be a factoid I ask her about a weather question let's move back in time now to 1990 it rained on several days in January and February can you name the dates on which it rained believe it or not she could let's see it was slightly rainy and cloudy on January 14th 15th it was very hot the weekend of the 27th 28th no rain we check the official weather records it rained very hard on Sunday February 4th and she was right there was 20 years earlier and she could tell me the days on which it rained in New York where she lives 20 years ago and she was absolutely correct on that so it's not just a factoid it's not something which is a a deep interest of hers it just she remembers that and we could validate it so here is a an autobiographical memory the only fault there is that she did she did close her eyes when she was looking it up and I we gave her we took off points for that because we also by luck have discovered some children who have this ability and why is that important it's important because some people may think that they have this ability just because they've acquired the ability as they have aged they've learned more and more about how what to do in order to retain memories they develop some skill learn the skill so we started looking at children because they would not have had either the time or inclination to develop this they're busy growing up so I'll show you some children whose parents claim that they have had this ability ever since they were young children unfortunately we didn't get them until they were about eight years old so they are elderly children for our interests and I'll just let them speak for themselves Osler age 10 what day of the week was Halloween 2011 Monday that one I didn't even have to think about New Year's Day 2010 Friday I remember that because I was up all night at the blues game that's when Jake was six he lives in St. Louis loves sports and he is in most respects a typical ten-year-old what happened related to school on January 30th 2013 that day I'm pretty sure oh wait that's a true question yeah there's a huge lightning storm that last night we didn't have school that day that was a trick question we didn't have school that day and the results are with a lightning storm all night so it's not a factoid talking about his life I went to a blues game and all of that and that's just oh the weather is like that and that you know it's just you ask him a question it's not like somebody memorized it it's apparently is recalling that day and then saying what has happened and he was six years old when that was first observed now in addition we've discovered a set of twins so I'm gonna show them to you and I'll let you decide what you think seventh 2012 do you know what day of the week that was that was a Sunday you're right there is exactly one child in the world other than Jake who's been identified so far with this ability 11 year-old Tyler Hickenbottom and in a fortuitous coincidence Tyler happens to be an identical twin he and his brother Chad share the same jeans I think I might have worn an orange shirt but surprisingly not the same memory how would you like to be his brother that was 2010 I tested them again just this summer and they're just like that they're really good kids they're just normal kids and just talking with them there's no difference between the two they're just identical twins and they're a lot of fun I test them individually and the one just answered correctly on every question and the other one is I don't even know what you're talking about and I he's clueless absolutely clueless so it raises a question they're identical twins one of them has the ability one of them does not what does that mean now in the course of this I told you we we were on this TV program on December 19 2010 and it was a Sunday it happens this program is always on a Sunday so it's helpful that's helpful so it's on it's on a Sunday I didn't see the I didn't see the program because I was at a concert but I recorded it and I got back about three hours after the program had aired and by the time I got back I had over 600 emails from people who claimed that they had the same ability we tested them all either by Skype or just on the telephone and we identified people who responded well and we gave them a lot of tests I'm going to show you something about the characteristics of these other people all right this is I think very interesting at least it is to me if you look at what colors are going to be there yellow orange yellow orange are controls and that is their performance on a 30 question quiz and it shows the percent correct and the number of people who get that percent so you can see nobody gets over 35 percent correct in the orange and the the modal point is 15 that's controls these are people who do not claim to have the ability if you look over to the right then you see that there are people who score 50 percent correct all the way up to 75 percent correct now the blue are people who are really very good but if you follow that distribution you see that as it goes left all of a sudden the people who claim to have the ability look just like controls so those are people who claim to have the ability but in fact do not that's these white men's here matter of fact there's some people who claim to have the ability who are worse than controls over here right so we have two distributions and the point I want to make here is that these people are not at the tail end of a normal distribution they are a different distribution they're a different distribution they're different people they're way different on the scale and we have worked primarily with the people who are marked in blue and we brought them to the laboratory and they got better than 55 percent correct on the questions that that we asked and I'll tell you a little bit about them so first we gave them a 10 dates quiz and they are asked to provide for each of 10 dates the day of the week a verifiable event something that happened around that period of time and an autobiographical event now the verifiable event means that we could check it to see if it really happened in the world but we couldn't check the autobiographical we had to take their word for it and here are the results in blue we have the what we call the potential and HSAM is highly superior autobiographical memory we call them the H. Sam's look on the left the day of the week the H. Sam's were almost at 100 percent and the controls are down about 15 percent which is you know what is one seventh they're probably less than they probably gets wrong more often than than than chance for the verifiable event that occurred that the our controls are at zero and the potential H. Sam's subjects are at about 80 percent when they're asked for an autobiographical event which we could not check at that time there the the H. Sam's are at about 75 percent and the controls way down and if you look at the total average across there it's about 75 80 percent versus 10 percent this is a huge differences these are not slight differences it's almost either have the ability or you don't it's it's that different when you're working with the extremes now then we pursued the autobiographical memory a little bit differently we asked them to tell us things that we could verify the first day at the university first day of elementary school their 18th birthday celebration the address of the first place they lived after leaving their parents the last final exam in college and we had to get verification for the H. Sam subjects now we're asking you something which we can verify by looking at records the H. Sam subjects gave 145 details which were verified the controls gave only 24 details which we could not verify so that's the clear difference between them so here's some here's some characteristics that I put up here for you they are highly accurate and autobiographical remembering not perfect not perfect but they're highly accurate they're slower to forget we did another experiment in which we gave them some experiences and then we measured their retention their memory of the experiences that we gave them now the controls are just like these people for 24 hours or put it another way 24 hours after an experience our memory is as good as theirs so that's at their very best they're like us for 24 hours then sadly we begin to forget and they don't so the way I like to put it is they are they are not good learners they are bad forgetters they simply forget slowly and we forget rapidly and that's the basis of the difference so they're not magical learners of anything they're they're not super learners as a matter of fact in laboratory experiments they are generally no better than controls in learning laboratory material but in the real-life situations they remember well for 24 hours as we do and then we gradually forget and they forget if at all very slowly that's a basic thing the one feature that they all appear to have in common is compulsiveness obsessive compulsiveness both by them telling us what they do and I'll give you a couple of examples but also on tests that we give them there are tests that measure obsessive compulsiveness and they're significantly higher on that scale and comparison with our controls and we think that that may ultimately turn out to provide a clue we don't know what that clue is yet but we do know that they are different what are the signs of compulsiveness well some of them report and we saw it happen that if they draw something drop something on the floor it has to be washed before they touch it one of the reports he's very careful not to drop his keys getting into in his apartment because if he drops the keys they have to be washed before he can use them again he doesn't wear shoe laces because shoelaces touch the ground and the ground has germs on it so he's very careful so germ avoidance is one of them and it takes different forms another one when I was interviewing him I looked over and and I asked him to tell me something about him and he said well I do have this and he reached over and he grabbed a napkin he says I carry this with me because you can never tell who's touched the object before you and so when he goes to a restaurant he takes his own napkin so he can handle the salt shaker and the pepper shaker and all of that because you can't be too careful and so he's germ avoidance one of our subjects who is a Hollywood actress Mary loose Hinner is a an organizational person the first time I met her she came into my office stood in the doorway now if you saw my well you saw my office because the twins were being interviewed in my office it's relatively neat you know there's nothing terribly messy but she stood in the doorway like this and she said well I could organize your office in 15 minutes and I wanted to say hello could we be introduced you know those were her first words to me she wants to organize and I found out later that she has as a hobby organizing the the closets of her friends so and her own her own closet is organized in terms of last worn date of purchase and she does that for all of her dresses and for all of her shoes everything has to be in a tidy thing now she's a wonderful person she's very sweet and jovy and all the rest but she does have this organizational thing all of our subjects have something like that and there's got to be a link somehow and we haven't figured out exactly what that is and finally there are some differences in brain regions we have done structural imaging of all of our subjects and we found a number of brain regions which differ in comparison with age and set sex match controls we our most interesting one is the insinid fasciculus which is a pathway that connects the back part of the brain with the front part of the brain and it is more active in our subjects as DTI assessment and structural imaging and so that's of interest and possibly a clue the hippocampal per hippocampal gyrus a region of the brain which is involved in memory is different in our subjects and a region of the stratum is also different and we're interested in this because that's also a region that has been implicated in obsessive compulsiveness so maybe there is a link there that we can follow up we have not done any any structural imaging I'm sorry in any functional imaging as yet but we intend to do that to see what happens when they are asked to remember things but it's a delicate problem because it may be that what happens when they try to remember something is what we all go through when we try to remember and that may not be no different in them as in comparison with us but we need to find that out so here's some questions that faces memory is is essential for our survival we are our memories that's we are our memories and where they're not only our past but they're our future we need them in order to get along in life so why is the ability to have strong memory so rare why don't we all have memories like that I mean that's serious question evolution made a serious mistake they left us with miserable memories and they gave a few people who don't need them very strong memories so that's a very serious question is there a genetic basis of this well we have identical twins one of whom has the ability and the other one does not we are rechecking by the way to make sure that they are identical twins we're doing a double check on that and we're also doing genetic studies larger studies what can we learn about memory from this in one question we wonder do they have this ability because they have stronger processes involved and storing and preserving memories or do they have mechanisms for retrieving memories which are better I mean we all have memories that we can't think of right now and later on the answer will pop in you've all had the tip of the tongue memory problem just cannot think of it and you try very hard and then 20 minutes later it pops into your head that says the retrieval processes that you said in motion are still working even though you you're not doing it yourself the brain is doing it by itself do they have better mechanisms in their brains to pull out the information notice that they're responding with Louise Owen immediately after the question just like that so that she have retrieval mechanisms I mean even with something that you and I know very well we probably would take more than two seconds and yet she reaches in and grabs it out and then finally what are the neurobiological implications what would it is suppose we understand a lot of the above what does it mean for understanding the brain and is it just understanding their brain or is an understanding our brain as well let me take it to the extreme you probably all know that some autistic savants have extraordinary memory there's this young man in the UK who has flown over London Rome and Tokyo and in each case after he was flown over by helicopter came back and drew the rooftops of the city in remarkably accurate detail just with one and he's autistic one flower something's going on the brain of that individual which is remarkable and wouldn't it be interesting to understand the memory processes that enable that kind of memory be just truly remarkable to understand that maybe if we could understand the brains of these people we would get a remarkable understanding of what our brains can do and what can't and what the mechanism of underlying it so it's worthwhile thinking deeply about the implications but there's obviously a lot of work to be done and with that thank you


The best online businesses to start for beginners, part one. Hey, have you been looking for a business to start online?  Hey, we're all there. I was, I know in 2009 I hadn't sold anything online and I started my business. Since then I've sold millions of dollars in both digital and physical products. In this video, this part of the video, actually there's two parts to this video, I'm gonna show you the first five types of businesses. And then in video two, I'm gonna show you the other five businesses.  And we're starting right now. Okay, so you're on my channel now, okay? And I'm gonna show you this stuff here, but you gotta do me a favor, okay? Since you're on my channel, you need to subscribe. Hit the subscribe button right there. If it's red, that means you haven't done it. It's red for a reason, that's caution. If you click it, it'll turn gray, it kinda just blends in. And as soon as you do that, you gotta ring the bell. There's a bell that's gonna pop up next to it. You gotta click it and then turn on all notifications. When you do that, you'll be notified every single time I do a new video. Every single time I go live, you'll be part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that always gets notified. Pretty cool stuff, right? I also have a course below. It's a $97 course, you can get it absolutely free. Click and learn. And we're gonna get started right now. So here's the deal. Are you tired of your nine to five job? You're tired of commuting? You're tired of having somebody tell you what to do, where to go, when to have lunch, when you can have off, how much vacation you're allowed to have a year.  So you gotta start your own online business because that was me. I was tired of all those things. I didn't like those things. I didn't like when somebody told me I had to work when I didn't want to. I didn't like when somebody told me when I could go get something to eat. I didn't like not spending time with my kids. I was a single dad. I didn't like that stuff. So I changed it and you can too. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you 10 of these things you can do. This is video one, once again, I wanna remind you. We're gonna do five in here and then I want you to go to video two. I'll have a link below. You go over to video two and watch the other five. Okay, first I wanna get to the why. Why do you even wanna start an online business? I'm gonna give you two reasons. Two reasons that are really important. The first is robots and automation. Robots and automation are gonna wipe out a lot of jobs. We've seen this happening over and over again. We see it in restaurants now where there's order pads there where you don't need the waitress. Somebody just brings out the food. We see it in automotive industry. They're having self-driving cars soon. I don't know how soon it's gonna happen, but pretty soon you won't have taxi cabs. Maybe you won't have bus drivers. Maybe you won't have truck drivers. I don't know. But the point is automation is creeping into all the different parts of our lives and it's just gonna decimate some jobs. It's gonna decimate some people if they're not prepared for it. Now fortunately, you're watching this video so you get it. You know these things are coming down the road. The next thing is a good thing. It's time, location, freedom. If you have your online business, you can work when you want. You can work where you want. I can't count how many times I was on a cruise ship or sitting in a nice hotel on a beach or in a foreign country enjoying their food and I was making money. I was making money because I could hook into the internet or I already had it set up where it automatically made me money while I was there. That's a really cool feeling guys. So those are really good reasons to start a business but understand that look at your occupation as to what it is right now because it may change. It may go away altogether. It may be farmed out to another country where it's cheaper. So you gotta get prepared now. It's super important that you do that. Now I will tell you to start an online business you don't need special skills. When I started my online business, I had no skills. I couldn't type. I was a single dad. I had no skills selling anything online. So if you know anything more than what I knew, you're in better position than I was when I started. Now the one thing I'm gonna tell you what you're not gonna wanna hear is it's gonna take time to develop these skills. It's gonna take time to learn these things but believe me, it's well worth it. The first thing I'm gonna tell you is sell information products. I have a lot of information products. Information products can be a simple download. It can be a video. It can be a course. It can be a membership. But selling information products is a great way to make money online. There's so many ways to do it. I would suggest Cartra. If you look down in the description, you'll find a link to Cartra. It's a great place to put your course. The second way is affiliate marketing. I love affiliate marketing. Through affiliate marketing, you can sell other people's products. You don't have to come up with any products. All you have to do is drive traffic to a product that's already proven to sell. I mean, it's pretty simple. I like to use ClickBank for that. It's a great platform and anybody can start out there and there's no investment. The third way is coaching and consulting. You know, maybe you have some skills. You know, maybe you have skills in sales. Maybe you have skills in the language. Maybe you have skills in running a restaurant. People wanna know how to do that. You know, I have skills on making money online so I actually do some coaching to coach people on how to make money online. But whatever skill you have, you can actually sell that through coaching and consulting. I know I've done it. I've generated a lot of money doing that. I started off charging about $500 a month and ended up getting $2,000 an hour. I don't really wanna do it now just because it takes up too much of my time. There's too many other things I wanna do. However, it's certainly an area where you can make some money. Number four is membership websites. Oh my God, these are so great. I have several of them myself. And the way it works is you put together a course or a program or whatever with 20, 30, 40, 50 videos, whatever it is you wanna do and you charge a membership fee. That membership fee could be $17 a month, $27, $97 a month. Now, understand that the more you charge for it the more the people are gonna expect. I have one that's $497 a month. Every now and then I run a special where it's $197 a month. But they get a lot of stuff there. They get a lot of my courses. They get access to a lot of stuff. They get access to training. They get access to us as a support team. Then I have one that's $27 a month. They don't get all that access. They get access to just that one course. But understand that $27 a month, you'll have a lot of people sign up. Imagine if you have a course at $27 a month and 1,000 people sign up for it. Well, there's $27,000 a month right there. And once you've done the course there's really no cost outside of hosting that course somewhere which I would recommend Cartridge. You'll see a link down in the description. You can watch a free video on it. If you decide you wanna get Cartridge, it's a dollar trial so it's really cheap. That's a great thing to do. Number five is selling digital marketing services. Now you may say, well, I don't have any skills in digital marketing. Well, I'm gonna tell you to get them, okay? Because everybody who has skills in digital marketing has learned that from somewhere, from somebody, they've taken a course, they've done something. I have videos on this website but I also have courses too if you wanna learn one of those courses. I have a course on Facebook ads. A business owner doesn't have time to learn and do Facebook ads. They just don't. They have to hire a company to do that. So understand who's gonna have a need for Facebook ads. Well, you've got dentists and you've got doctors and you've got restaurants and you've got chiropractors and you've got beauty salons and nail salons and the list goes on and on and on. There's thousands upon thousands of businesses out there that need your services on running Facebook ads. If you wanna learn how to do that you could take my course on Facebook ads. Once you take that course, you'll have the skills and you could go out and sell that particular product. Now, how much can you charge for that? Some people charge 1,000 a month, some people charge 2,000, 5,000, 10,000. It's really up to what they're doing and how many clients they have. If you don't wanna do a lot for them and you wanna run a couple ads a week, it may be 1,500 bucks a month. But what's to stop you from getting eight or 10 clients? So you can get as many clients that you want once you get the skills. If you want those skills, check out my Facebook ads university course and you can learn how to get those skills also. Now, keep in mind digital marketing services is not just running ads. It's building websites. Maybe you know how to do that. It's doing SEO. It is doing social media marketing where you do posts for businesses. There's so many things you can do that falls under that digital marketing umbrella. Now, like I said, that is the first five of 10 things you can do online to make money for beginners. All of these things you can do, doesn't matter what your expertise level is, you can learn any of this stuff. It's not that hard. And there's definitely a market out there for all of these things. Now, what you wanna do is you wanna look in the description below and there's a link for video two. This is video one and you wanna go to video two, watch video two and you'll learn the other five ways. Don't forget, if you haven't subscribed already, hit that subscribe button there. Turn it from red to gray and then turn on all bell notifications. You gotta do that because if you don't, I won't be able to let you know every single time I do a video. Every single time I go live, you won't know about it. You'll be left out in the cold, dark. You don't want that. You want to be part of the Fisher family. The VIP group that gets notified every single time I do a video. Don't forget to grab my course down there. It's 97 bucks, but you can get it for free for a limited time. It's click and learn, no credit card required. Thank you so much for listening to this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.