What is memory in the brain? How is that different from the way a computer stores information?

How do you put together billions of specialized cells and you store your home address in their activity?

And what does any of this have to do with the happy birthday song or with and you store your home address in their activity.

And what does any of this have to do with the happy birthday song or with squirrels hiding acorns

or with bards memorizing epic poems

or with people who cannot forget any of the events in their life?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about memory. What is memory? How does it work? How do details get stored in your brain such that if I say, what was the name of your fifth

grade teacher, you can retrieve that name, even if you haven't thought about it in decades?

And how is this totally different from the way that computers store memory?

So in this episode, I'll give you a foundation into understanding the landscape of memory.

Now, this is the first of a three-part series about the way that our brains constantly unhook from the here and now, and they go somewhere else.

We are time travelers.

And only because we do this so constantly,

we don't even notice how amazing this is.

I mean, everything you might study in a textbook about the brain

has to do with, okay, here's how vision works.

Here's how the visual cortex analyzes photons captured at the retina and makes an assessment

of what's in front of you.

...