Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett. Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences,

and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too.

But new work shows how and why they're different.

That's next.

Space travel depends on clever math.

Find unexplored solar systems in Quantum Magazine's new daily math game, HyperJumps.

HyperJumps challenges you to find simple number combinations to get your rocket from one exoplanet

to the next. Spoiler alert, there's always more than one way to win. Test your astral

arithmetic at hyperjumps.comptumagazine.org.

In the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during

the recall of memories. Sam Ling is an associate professor of neuroscience and director of the

visual neuroscience lab at Boston University.

It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from perceptual

representation at all, right? Is it just a completely blurred boundary? And when we're remembering

something or recalling something or storing something in memory, is that effectively just

recreation of the thing that you've seen or are remembering.

For example, could our memory of a beautiful meadow in a forest glade be just a recreation

of the neural activity that previously enabled us to see it? How people have thought about this

has changed a lot over the years. That's Christopher Baker, an investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health.

He runs the learning and plasticity unit.

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