See Memory

- [Announcer] This program is made possible by... - [Announcer] The Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, committed to advancing mental health, research, education, and emotional wellbeing while empowering our youth.

- [Announcer] The Charles E. Kubly Foundation, committed to improving the lives of those impacted by depression.

- [Announcer] Erase PTSD Now, restoring hope and healing to trauma survivors and their families.

(poignant music) - [Contemplator] To put yourself back together.

Can you know who you are if you can't remember things?

How do I figure that out?

(heart beating) What's the truth?

How do you know?

If something... - [Viviane] Memory is one of the most magical capabilities of mind.

Without it, life is made up of disconnected fragments that don't have any meaning.

Memory is the glue that binds our mental life together.

We are what we remember.

(gentle contemplative music) Memory is a dynamic process, and each time you retrieve a memory, it may change.

So something you remember when you were little, when you remember it later, you add to your understanding of what you are remembering.

(gentle contemplative music continues) People tend to be absolutely sure that their memories are the way that it happened, but memory's not a recording device.

And the truth is that every time you remember, it's an act of imagination.

You are imagining and reconstructing something in the moment about how it was then, and things can change along the way.

(footsteps tapping) (gentle music) Memory is visual.

They're images that we add a story to.

We add the drama.

We add the dialogue.

We add the meaning.

(gentle music continues) (water drops plopping) One way to freeze a memory may be through the art of storytelling.

A story gets to the essence of the emotion and revives the memory like a visit to the original event.

Most of the brain's processing is unconscious and unavailable to us, and a lot of it is influencing the very little we are conscious of.

(water drops plopping) There are experiences that we have that control our behavior and our connections to people.

We're not usually aware of those things.

We can understand them.

We can learn them.

We can make the unconscious conscious.

(soft music) Explicit memories are memories that you have a story for.

You have words.

You have images.

The images are part of a narrative already, so it's any memory that we already have.

When people generally talk about explicit memories, they don't talk about the memories that don't yet have language.

(soft plaintive music) Implicit memory is memory the body remembers.

There are body sensations.

There may be moods that wash over you.

You have the feeling, but you don't know what it's connected to.

Sometimes you're operating on automatic pilot.

You don't really get what happened.

So the trauma or the emotional response to it can happen even years later.

(soft pensive music) Any two people can come together and out of their two separate stories can create a third story that's bigger, different, not anything that either of their own stories is alone.

- [Contemplator] Somebody help me.

Somebody help me.

I don't want this anymore.

I don't wanna be alone.

- [Viviane] Listening is one of the most important things we can do for each other.

But listening shapes telling.

The question is, how have people been listened to in the past that may get in the way of their telling their story?

- [Sufferer] Somebody help me.

Somebody help me.

I don't want this anymore.

I don't want this anymore.

- [Viviane] Life has been, for most people, suffering, and that suffering is a dismembering.

(heart beating) There have been stoppages that have been put in the way, discontinuities.

(poignant music) We can't force change.

We can only do it at our own time.

And the pain that we have to face to change is different for everybody.

(poignant music continues) Sometimes, at the right time and the right place, someone tells you something very important, and you're able to change.

People have post-traumatic stress because they don't know it's over.

The body and the brain still believe that it's happening right now, even though people consciously know that it's not.

The brain hasn't yet laid down that experience as being in the past.

That's where the body is remembering more than the mind is remembering.

We may remember it more or not remember it at all, and that's where there is a fault in the lack of memory.

We may remember it and feel something about it or not remember it and not feel anything about it, on and off, just like a light switch.

(rain pattering) (rain continues pattering) People live with memories that they've never shared with another person, so they live with those memories in a very lonely way.

And the memories have a very particular quality because they're alone.

Someone letting me in to be with them and really allowing me to connect with them transforms the memories.

They're not alone in having those memories anymore.

I'm there with them.

(gentle plaintive music) (wind howling) Emotional memories feel like the past is happening right now, as if the past is the present.

These memories are very strong and very persistent, and you're constantly subjected to them.

And we usually think that this is just the reality, and we are stuck with these emotions.

But it turns out that our memories are flexible.

We are not a slave to our past the way we think we are.

People come in with life, and life can't be fixed.

Life happens, and it's trusting in listening.

Listening is a gift, focused, conscious, present listening in the moment, with no distraction.

(gentle plaintive music continues) (gentle plaintive music continues) (gentle plaintive music continues) I strongly believe for all of us that no matter who we have in front of us, they have something good.

And it's finding that positive thing and saying, "I see this.

Don't you see it?"

So, helping the person to hold on to the good thing, to the good part of self, and then build on it and grow from it.

(gentle plaintive music continues) We are in a constant investigation of the past, trying to make sense of it, trying to remember, instead of letting it be and listening to who we are now because all of our emotional experiences are carved into our emotional reactions.

(gentle plaintive music continues) People develop a story that describes how they became who they are.

So we rewrite our stories from a different perspective.

We tell a different story (gentle hopeful music) like an artist would discover something new when you have your palette, your easel, and your canvas, and you start.

And something new begins to emerge out of that emptiness.

(gentle hopeful music continues) So you can look at any story of the past and tell it multiple ways.

You can think of there being a dominant narrative to people's lives.

You find other stories that compete with that narrative.

You support the non-dominant narratives and strengthen them so that people have many different stories that they start to tell.

You're not only an angry person.

You're an angry person.

You're a joyful person, an envious person, (child laughing) a childlike person.

You've got all these different parts to yourself, and you can tell stories about each one of those parts.

When you remember, you think you are remembering the past, but you're actually telling a story about the present, of how you became who you are.

In a way, it's liberating.

If you're not bound to your past, you're left with listening to who you are now.

There's something about being able to experience joy, and it's the joy of the moment, of just being alive.

(gentle hopeful music continues) (birds chirping) (poignant music) (poignant music continues) (heart beating) (contemplators speaking faintly) - [Contemplator] I need to know how.

- [Contemplator] How does it work?

(contemplator speaks faintly) Where is it?

- [Contemplator] Can I make it go away?

- [Contemplator] Can I erase it?

Can I erase it?

- [Contemplator] Can you help me understand?

- [Contemplator] Can I change it?

- [Contemplator] Can you help me find out more?

- [Contemplator] Can I make it come back?

- [Contemplator] I need to know.

- [Viviane] I was born in Hong Kong, and I lived there till I was 10.

I moved to Brazil, where I lived until I was 15 before coming to New York.

(train whooshing) But I've never been back to Hong Kong.

My relationship to those first 10 years of my life, to those memories, they're very much out of my reach.

And I think that when we're in our own private experiences of memory, especially a difficult or painful memory, it can feel really dark.

When I read about Daniela Schiller's work, I knew I had to interview her.

She was talking about memory the way I was thinking about it.

I decided to reach out to neuroscientists and therapists who were asking the same questions I was asking and actually finding answers.

The narration for "See Memory" is made up entirely of their words.

The insights they shared with me illuminated my journey, and I felt lifted up by their discoveries.

I wanted everyone to meet them.

- Yeah, I think art and science are very much the same.

Artists and scientists ask questions that they try to explore.

My research is focusing on emotional memory and learning how we form memories, how the brain is representing them.

What is the fate of these memories?

Are they changing over time?

How can we change them deliberately?

- My ideas of memory have changed dramatically.

When I worked with some people early on that had horrible trauma, there was no talk about the body, and memory is locked in the body.

We didn't know that, and it would just come up and be flooding the body again.

- [Viviane] I started the project trying to work with actors, and I shot footage to express my relationship to memory, but I realized I wasn't getting to my real thoughts.

So I turned to a more intimate medium to figure out the way my mind works, which is painting.

But I knew I needed to translate my paintings into moving pictures to convey the sense of time passing and memories changing.

While I was making the stop motions, I realized that painting is the closest I can get to dreaming.

When I paint and take a photo and then make another stroke and take a photo, I'm letting images arise as I'm painting.

I don't know what stroke I'll make next or what the picture will turn into.

So a balloon or moon appearing is as much a surprise to me as it is to the viewer.

Each scene takes me about a month to paint.

- Many psychotherapies speak to the idea that we are like an onion, and that if you just peel away the layers, you'll get to the deep self deep inside.

Internal Family Systems is based on the idea that we're more like a garlic, and we're made up of different parts.

When people have traumatic memories, sometimes they are sequestered so much in their bodies that they don't even remember or know.

And so part of the work is for that memory to be able to surface and they themselves to be witness to their own memory.

But more important, I think, is when other people can enter the memory with them.

And that requires, it requires delicacy on both people's parts.

It requires a real generosity and openness to let you in to see my traumatic memory or to be with it and a sense of just being really aware of what you're being invited to witness.

But when people share traumatic memories with someone else, they enter the memory, and it changes the memory.

You have lived with this memory alone for your whole life, but if you can just bring your presence to the memory and really be there with them and feel with them, something happens to the memory.

- The film has lots of ambiguity.

You don't see faces.

It's not crystal clear what the environment is.

It gives you the ability to project what you think, what you remember, what you feel.

- So you can make these inflexible memories that come during trauma more malleable.

We first have to understand that they're in several parts of the brain, and a lot of it is not explicit.

- So one of the most exciting things that happened in research from my perspective is a discovery that we had just recently that traumatic memories and regular sad memories are actually represented differently in the brain.

We didn't know if traumatic memories are just an exaggeration of a regular memory or a different beast altogether.

So we invited people who has PTSD, and they told the clinician about a traumatic memory and a regular sort of standard sad memory.

We created a recording of that, and we played it to the PTSD patients in the fMRI scanner.

And we found that actually traumatic memories differ substantially in how the brain is representing them.

The state of the brain while they listened to the sad memories was engaging a brain region that is called the hippocampus, and this is a brain region that is critical for memory.

Without it, you cannot form new memories.

So it's involved in the consolidation and retrieval of the memories.

But in the traumatic memories, the brain was in a different state.

If you look at the brain, it doesn't look like it's in a state of memory.

Where we found it was in a different place.

That place is called posterior cingulate cortex.

It's part of a network that is not for memory, per se.

It's actually for internal experience whenever you have some sort of introspection.

You think about things.

You're daydreaming.

It is more that you're in the present moment.

When we undergo a traumatic memory, it is likely that it's encoded in a way that will influence how it is being retrieved later.

Whether it's coherent, whether it's accessible, whether it's resistant to change, all of these are likely to be determined during the experience itself.

It's very intense.

Sometimes it's hard to verbalize it.

Sometimes you're dissociated from it.

So all of these conditions lend to the case that the memory wouldn't be the same as a regular memory.

And the fMRI scanner, it could maybe provide a sort of like a marker that you look at the brain activation before treatment and then afterward to see if that representation has changed.

Or I can envision treatment with specific drugs.

Maybe this is what psychedelics do.

They kind of put the brain in a certain plasticity level that could help making that experience in the moment into our memory.

- MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of trauma has really shifted my perspective very much about bringing a sense of safety.

Like the moon, for me, that's a benevolent presence that's always watching over, and the person who's in the painting is going through whatever they're going through.

But there's always this benevolent presence.

And you could think of it as spiritual, or you could think of it as a self that is unencumbered by pain and trauma that just gets to witness the memories that normally would trigger a bodily reaction but doesn't in the same way.

And that is where the healing takes place, is being able to do that.

- I think a great deal of research is approaching traumatic memories as experiences that you want to turn into a memory because memory is about something that is remote.

It's distant.

It's located somewhere in time and space that is not now, and you know that when you retrieve it, and that's why it's tolerable.

- Even though the painting process is very solitary, the whole project of making "See Memory" was an incredibly collaborative process.

And I was learning really incredible things about new development in the science of memory, the new experiments they were doing, research that could have clinical applications for people struggling with memory.

- I would never imagine that I would think about memory in the way I think about it now because before I started the research, memory was who you are.

It defined you.

It was our whole being.

There wasn't much freedom in it.

As we talked more and more, I saw the types of questions that you're asking and eventually how you put these insights into art.

A lot the findings that we have are sometimes difficult to put in words in terms of what they mean.

This is where art comes in.

It actually explains it best.

- Oh, I think art could indeed help someone feel more motivated to examine painful feelings.

- Even though we call it science, it is still an art, and it is about being able to extend beyond the limits of what we know and be able to be open to what we don't know.

We tend to think of rational linear thought as where the real work happens.

And places like dreams, you know, those are just on the side.

And I think that what art does is it values those experiences.

It values the non-ordinary, and that's where a lot of healing can take place.

So I think there's tremendous value in bringing art to science and have them speak to one another and inform one another.

And I think the boundary is much less rigid than we make it.

- I really found that the way that you were describing what is known about memory now that's so different than it was is helpful for everyone to know and for people in my field to know.

People need to understand it from very different perspectives to be able to really absorb it, to be able to use the visual, to use the emotion, to use the cognitive.

And this film does that.

- [Viviane] This journey is about darkness and light and coming out of the darkness into the light.

It's about illumination.

The science of memory is a way to shine a light in the dark corners of the mind.

Speaking about memory with neuroscientists made it seem magical and hopeful because understanding the flexibility of memory transformed memories that I saw as dark into full of possibility.

It's an intellectual illumination because you gain an understanding, but with that understanding comes an emotional illumination.

And I find myself thinking of feelings I had when I was a kid, when I had direct access to my imagination, which is why I've always loved "Harold and the Purple Crayon," the book about the little boy who discovers he has the power to create just by drawing.

The neuroscience made me realize we don't have to be victims to our difficult memories.

We can change our relationship to them, and in that way, we can create the world we want to live in.

(uplifting music) - [Announcer] This program is made possible by the Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, committed to advancing mental health research, education, and emotional wellbeing while empowering our youth.

- [Announcer] The Charles E. Kubly Foundation, committed to improving the lives of those impacted by depression.

- [Announcer] Erase PTSD Now, restoring hope and healing to trauma survivors and their families.