Your Brain Might Be Lying. The Scientific Explanation for Cellular Memory, Why Universal Intelligence Can Be Found In Nature and How Past Memory Is Actually Changeable | Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin

Summary

Podcast Summary: Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Episode: "Your Brain Might Be Lying. The Scientific Explanation for Cellular Memory, Why Universal Intelligence Can Be Found In Nature and How Past Memory Is Actually Changeable"

Guest: Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin
Date: November 25, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the science and philosophy behind memory, consciousness, and what makes human existence unique. Neuroscientist Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen to discuss the molecular mechanisms underlying memory, why non-brain cells can “remember,” the evolutionary creativity inherent in nature, and the fluid and subjective nature of memory. The conversation draws together neuroscience, psychology, molecular biology, philosophy, and even practical mental health perspectives, making complex science accessible and deeply relevant to everyday life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Makes Human Experience Unique?

[07:42]

• Dr. Kukushkin highlights the human capacity to recognize ourselves as distinct—from other people, other species, and from non-life—as our core uniqueness.
• It's not the brain's size or the number of neurons that makes us unique, but our ability to conceptualize and reflect upon this distinction.

"I think that what makes us special is the very ability to recognize that. It's the very ability to see yourself as being distinct from other people, from other species, from non-life… That is what makes us special."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [09:54]

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2. Materialism vs. Mysticism: Can They Coexist?

[09:59, 11:08]

• Mayim and Dr. Kukushkin discuss whether scientific (materialist) and mystical or spiritual worldviews can be reconciled.
• Dr. Kukushkin uses the analogy of DNA and genes to illustrate how different perspectives (the arrangement of stuff vs. the stuff itself) can coexist. He views consciousness as more about the arrangement of information than just the matter itself—bridging scientific and philosophical interpretations.

"I think it is a process that's happening with information rather than with matter. But to me, it doesn't seem to disagree with a materialist point of view. It's just another way of looking at it."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [12:54]

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3. Universal Patterns: Carbon, Oxygen, and the “Essences” of Life

[16:30, 17:48]

• Dr. Kukushkin describes how even the most fundamental elements, like carbon and oxygen, have properties that shape life—and how these patterns scale up to everything in biology.
• Carbon's unique ability to form stable yet flexible bonds makes it the backbone of life, while oxygen's energy-releasing capacities support life's dynamic aspects.
• These foundational relationships are both scientific fact and, intriguingly, have parallels in mystical thought.

"Not ideas that we humans come up with, but ideas that are inherent in the patterns of the world."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [18:01]

"Our entire metabolism... at its core, it's the same dichotomy of taking and giving, these elemental essences of carbon and oxygen."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [19:12]

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4. Nature’s Creativity: Evolution as Distributed Intelligence

[21:30, 22:22, 23:58]

• Evolution isn’t uncreative or blind: it’s an ongoing, distributed intelligence.
• The spectacle cobra (snake with “eyes” on its back) illustrates how nature, through selection, generates inventive survival solutions—even without conscious awareness by animals.
• Nature “knows” what works via natural selection, leading to creative biological outcomes at all scales.

"Darwin didn't cancel creativity. Darwin magnified it. He injected it into every part of the natural world."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [24:41]

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5. Intelligence and Consciousness: From Cells Up

[25:52, 27:36]

• Dr. Kukushkin prefers a “bottom-up” approach—defining intelligence, mind, and memory from molecular building blocks and simple life forms like sea slugs.
• Sea slugs (“Aplysia”) provide an abstraction of the animal kingdom more typical than mammals, and are excellent models for studying the molecular and cellular basis of learning and behavior.

"Sea slugs... are much further away, and if you compare sea slugs versus us, mammals, mice, humans, what kind of animal is more normal in the animal kingdom? That's the sea slug."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [29:30]

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6. Cellular Memory: Not Just in the Brain

[38:40]

• Recent research from Dr. Kukushkin's lab: Even kidney cells in a petri dish can “remember” experiences by changing in response to patterns of stimulation—the same molecular tools as neurons use!
• The “spacing effect” (learning spread out over time is retained better) is true even for non-neuronal cells.

"We've shown that kidney cells, kidney cells grown in a petri dish, also form memories. And they use the same tools, the same molecules, the same genes as brain cells do."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [38:53]

"Turns out the same is true for any other cell... the spaced repetition creates a stronger memory, more of that glow of that memory gene protein than if you cram it all in one go."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [43:27]

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7. Implications: The Body Keeps the Score—Literally?

[44:46, 45:56]

• Mayim asks if this research “proves the body keeps the score” (i.e., trauma and experiences being physically stored in the body, not just the brain).
• Dr. Kukushkin: Initially skeptical, he acknowledges the possibility that bodily tissues can store patterns with psychological meaning—opening the door to scientific mechanisms for body-based trauma memory.

“Maybe it's not as woo woo as it sounds... now we know that the body can store patterns of experiences that are happening to these body cells.”
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [47:35]

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8. Trauma, Memory Patterns, & Practical Takeaways

[49:05, 51:06]

• Spaced (repeated) trauma is likely to produce deeper effects than single, isolated events, given what’s now known about cellular “memory.”
• This has implications for understanding developmental trauma, PTSD, and perhaps why recurring stress or pain can have lasting effects.
• Practical advice: Patterns matter, and individuals should pay attention to routines and how repeated patterns may be affecting them—biologically and psychologically.

"Patterns matter. That's the main message... everything you do on a schedule might have a lasting effect on your body."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [52:02]

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9. Memory Is Not a Snapshot: Impressions, Not Recordings

[54:25, 57:17]

• Memory isn’t a static recording; it’s a change that outlasts an experience, making the brain work differently in the future.
• Memories are subjective impressions, not factual “snapshots” of the past, which explains why memory is so malleable and often unreliable.

"Memory is not a reflection of reality. I think the simplest definition of memory from first principles is memory is a change that outlasts its cause."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [54:50]

"You're creating your own impression of what you experienced. And you're storing that impression. You're not storing the actual thing that happened in the world."
— Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [56:50]

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10. Habit, Muscle Memory, and Behavior

[58:23]

• Procedural memory (like learning piano or forming habits) builds via reinforcement, with dopamine “reward” guiding these patterns into automaticity. These changes persist, shaping future behavior—sometimes for a lifetime.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We think of evolution as canceling God. ...Darwin didn't cancel creativity. Darwin magnified it. He injected it into every part of the natural world.”
  — Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [00:00, 24:41]

• "That's nuts."
  — Mayim Bialik reacting to the idea that every cell makes its own memory [01:05]

• "Patterns matter. That's the main message."
  — Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin [52:02]

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Important Timestamps

• [07:42] — What’s special about the human experience?
• [12:54] — Reconciling materialism and information as consciousness
• [17:48] — Carbon, oxygen, and the essence of life
• [22:22] — Spectacle cobra, evolution, and creativity in nature
• [29:30] — Sea slugs as model organisms for the brain
• [38:53] — Non-brain cells can form memories
• [43:27] — The “spacing effect” in cellular memory
• [45:56] — “Body keeps the score” implications
• [52:02] — Practical advice: patterns matter
• [54:50] — Redefining memory as change, not a recording

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Tone & Language

The discussion is rich, warm, and accessible, blending scientific rigor with wonder and humor. Dr. Kukushkin is thoughtful and precise, yet poetic in describing the beauty of life’s patterns. Mayim brings enthusiasm, relatability, and personal curiosity, regularly referencing both academic research and lived experience.

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Summary

The episode fundamentally challenges listeners to reconceptualize memory, intelligence, and even their sense of self. Dr. Kukushkin’s research shows that memory is a universal, deeply biological phenomenon, embedded in all cells and shaped by patterns—not limited to the brain. This holds surprising implications for mental health, trauma, daily habits, and even the perennial human search for meaning and belonging. Where science and mystery intersect are where our deepest insights into being human are found.

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Stay tuned for Part 2: AI, technology, the future of consciousness, and what humans may gain—or lose—as we offload memory and meaning-making to our inventions.

Transcript

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

We think of evolution as canceling God. God was creative and God, this infinite imagination. Darwin didn't cancel creativity. Darwin magnified it. He injected it into every part of the natural world. It's the ocean that decides that seals need to be gray and their skin needs to be smooth. That is the pattern of the world that shapes biological reality. That's true for any cell. We've shown that kidney cells grown in a petri dish also form memories. And they use the same tools, the same molecules, the same genes as brain cells do.

[Mayim Bialik]

Did you just prove that the body keeps the score? Dr. Nikolaj Kukushkin is a Harvard and Oxford trained neuroscientist specializing in cell biology and memory processing. His description of our existence will change the way you look at the world forever.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

We tend to think of memory as the snapshot of reality. But memory is not a reflection of reality. You are creating your own impression of what you experienced, storing that impression, changing the brain for the future.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's nuts.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

But humans need a very, very deep level belonging to something that's bigger than you. We know enough to make an origin story that would give our life meaning. Patterns of the world unfolding through our consciousness.

[Jonathan Cohen]

You're speaking to an intelligence across every.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

You usually keep talking.

[Mayim Bialik]

Oh, okay. Today we're going to be talking about many aspects of what makes us special as humans. And in particular, have the things that we have evolved to create actually led to a decrease in our ability to do the things that actually make us uniquely human.

[Jonathan Cohen]

There's a very exciting outro to this episode and you may get there, but one thing I forgot to add to the outro is the idea of evolving our consciousness outside of our brain to be augmented by technology. Now that's not the whole episode by any means, but it is this very interesting idea that as we gain more technology, whether be learning to write, having television, radio, now with social media and artificial intelligence, what is the trade off that we're going through? The loss of memory and what are the benefits? That we get more access to information, more connection to other people. But can they be weaponized against us? Is a really fascinating part of this.

[Mayim Bialik]

Conversation that is, as Jonathan said, just a part of what we're going to talk about today. We're also going to talk about some of the the building blocks of what makes us even able to process that we exist and how even the smallest molecules and atoms actually hold information about some of the largest questions we have about our purpose here, our existence, and how we can literally thrive as humans. We're talking with Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin. He's a Russian born neuroscientist. He's an associate professor at NYU and he was trained at St. Petersburg State University in Russia as well as Oxford University. He did his postdoc at Harvard and he has a book that is loosely based on a course that he taught at NYU called Life Science. The Book is called One Hand Clapping. Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind and the way that I describe this book and we're going to talk about certain elements of it. It is the greatest description of our existence on a scientifically based planet for people who may not necessarily be scientists. So it's a terrific book if you're a scientist. But all of the things that we talk about here on Mayim Bialik's breakdown, we talk about DNA in passing, we talk about chemistry, we talk about electrophysiology, we talk about, you know, evolution and how consciousness evolves. It is all included and detailed in One Hand Clapping. It's a terrific and really, really beautiful book. He has so much research he's going to talk to us about regarding memory. Does the body keep the score? How did memory evolve? What is its purpose? And how do we use it to make better decisions and have a better understanding of why we're here and who we.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Mayim asks specifically, how do we trust memory? Because he talks about how our memory is actually the perception of the event, not the event itself. And he talks about how we store memory, how we change our memories. Really fascinating implication to how we should live.

[Mayim Bialik]

We go deep into cellular and molecular biology, and we also go deep into conversations about consciousness, reality, perception, and the philosophy of our existence. A pleasure to welcome Dr. Nikolai Kukushk to the breakdown. Break it down.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Thank you. It was great to be here.

[Mayim Bialik]

There's so many things that we want to talk to you about. We have a particular interest in one Hand clapping, which is really, really fantastic. But before we get started and before we dive into some of the fascinating memory kind of perspectives that we can gain from also your research, I wonder if we can start with this. What is special about the human experience?

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Well, it is a fundamental question of our life, right, because we always experience this tension between myself and the rest of the world. And I think most people would say it's a problem of consciousness, but I think it's a broader problem than that. Yes, we're puzzled by this fact that my experience, what I see from my eyes is different from what I see in other people. I look at all the people around me, I know that they have the same brain, they have the same brain cells, same molecules happening, Everything is the same. But it's a completely different thing looking at someone else versus experiencing something on your own. So that's one part of the puzzle. But I think it goes deeper than that because it's the same exact puzzle that we have when we look at our species compared to the rest of the. For the rest of the living nature, we are special. But it's very hard to put your finger on exactly what makes the human species special. Is it the brain? Is it the number of brain cells? It's the size of the brain. Once you start looking for it, it sort of all disappears and dissolves. You can't really draw a line. And I think the same tension exists when we look at life versus non life. People have very strong opinions about this process of life appearing from non life because it feels like if that's possible, it somehow dilutes this specialness. We feel special being alive, different from rocks. And it's very important for us to hold on to that specialness. So anytime you zoom in on it, it dissolves, it disappears. Science tells us that it's all a continuous process, that life and non life and humans and non humans and my consciousness versus other people's consciousness. It's all one thing, and yet we experience it differently. We experience myself as something fundamentally different. So what is special about it? I think that what makes us special is the very ability to recognize that. It's the very ability to see yourself as being distinct from other people, from other species, from non life being able to understand it. And the fact that we can hold in our brain, in the configuration of those neurons, that conceptualization of that distinction, that is what makes us special.

[Mayim Bialik]

Spoken like a true neuroscientist. And you know, whenever people, whenever people would ask me why I chose to study neuroscience as opposed to biology, psychology, theater, right. What I would say was that the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that we are engaging in any interaction of my consciousness and yours, and that's the level that I want to study, that's what neuroscience is for. Right. So I really, I, I love that response and I resonate with it deeply. We talk a lot here about the difference between a materialist worldview and whatever another worldview would be. I don't really want to call it a spiritual worldview. You know, there's so many things we could call it, and many people say it's religious or it's mystical or it's transcendental. Given what's unique about the human experience, does it help to view it from a non materialist standpoint? And how do we view things from a non materialist standpoint while still acknowledging the scientific and physical basis of our reality?

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

I'll be honest with you. I am a cell biologist and biochemist, and whenever I step into all the isms of philosophy. I feel really out of my comfort zone and I feel lost in them. I understand, I think, what materialism. But once we get into those other things that are not materialism, I start getting lost. You know, I've watched Bernardo Kastrup's interview on your podcast, and I think we overlap in many different ways, but I also don't understand some of the things that he is saying. So, for instance, the idea that consciousness might tap into this universal informational resolution, that consciousness is not generated by the brain, but the brain taps into it, that really reminds me of the relationship between genes and DNA. It seems to me that it's equivalent to saying that, well, DNA doesn't really exist. It's only genes exist because, well, it's the genes that are the information and they're organizing all the atoms in DNA to conform to that informational pattern. Over generations and generations and generations, atoms change and genes stay. That's completely true. I just think it's strange to say that DNA doesn't exist because of that. I think it's the same thing with consciousness. Yes, we can look at it from the informational point of view, not the stuff, but how the stuff is arranged. I think that's how we should look at it. I think it is a process that's happening with information rather than with matter. But to me, it doesn't seem to do disagree with a materialist point of view. It's just another way of looking at it. It's not that or this. It's just what are you paying attention to? The stuff or how it's arranged?

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

That really is kind of the hidden and not so hidden beauty of one hand clapping. Because what you're doing is you're really taking us from the origins of our existence, right, all the way through evolution, all the way through sort of also a social evolution. But the fact is, the appreciation for our experience cannot be separated from the appreciation for the carbon molecule. Right. Like. And the way that you describe it is that a kind of artistic way would be to say everything's fractals. You talk about the matryoshka, you know, the. We're a Russian stacking doll. Right. We're the stacking doll of experience. And the smallest thing is the same as the biggest thing. Right. Which is also a religious concept. But that's just a coincidence for now. But the notion that, for example, carbon gives and oxygen takes away, that's actually a description of properties of, of physics, of properties of. Of molecules and electrons and all of these incredible things. But you're also saying that inherent in the structure of the universe itself is a metabolic relationship. Can you talk a little bit about this beautiful framework that is incredibly scientific but also beautifully mystical?

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Yeah, that's where the book starts, because you're right, it is the foundation for everything. This is as elemental as it gets. When we're talking about chemical elements, it's sort of both, even in the language we call them chemical elements because they are so elemental. And, you know, when people say, well, surely life is not just atoms and molecules, surely consciousness is not just neurons and circuits. What I think they're missing is that those just atoms and just molecules, they're a lot more than you imagine. They're not just bricks. They have inherent in them these fundamental ideas, or what I call in the book essences, nature's ideas. Not ideas that we humans come up with, but ideas that are inherent in the patterns of the world. And so carbon, for example, why are we made of carbon? Really? Our body is carbon with a few things stuck to it. Why carbon? Well, because it is a unique element in how cooperative it is, in how many chemical bonds it can form.

[Jonathan Cohen]

4.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

That's a lot. And also in the fact that it can bond with other carbons. It's also pretty unusual that carbon can link with another carbon and then the next carbon and then the next, and pretty much to infinity. You can make scaffolds, rings and chains and circles and helices.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's stable, right? When we talk about stability.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Stability, yes, absolutely. But it's not too stable because it were too stable, like a noble gas, well, it would be useless for biology. It wouldn't cooperate with other atoms. So it's just right there. With the right stability, with the right cooperativity, it has a. You know, you could say it has a character. You could go as far and say it has a soul, if you want to use that word. Not in any additional metaphysical meaning. Not that there's some human, like, ghost sitting inside of that carbon atom determining what it does. No, just the very chemical nature of that atom gives it a particular superpower. Call it whatever you want. You can use any word you want. Oxygen is very different. Oxygen is almost the opposite of that. Oxygen, in its nature is to rip everything apart. It's this greedy element that sucks in electron clouds from other atoms, breaks apart molecules and releases energy. And that's also important for life, because for anything to be created, whatever carbon, does, it require the supply of energy. And that means that something needs to be destroyed. And that's what oxygen can bring into the picture. So the cycle of carbon and oxygen, taking and giving, that is the foundation for everything that grows out of it. And our entire metabolism, which is a very, very complicated system, it's made out of these hundreds of complex enzymes, these large molecules that are tuned to specific nutrients and balanced with each so that we can put anything in our mouths, that we can digest and somehow have our bodies work on that. It's really a miraculous thing that our bodies do. But really, at its core, it's the same dichotomy of taking and giving, of taking and giving these elemental essences of carbon and oxygen. And I think every element of our body, every chapter of our evolution, is a development of these essences, of these nature's ideas. Everything that we are means something from the point of view of nature, regardless of what we think about it. There is a pattern in what we are, in how we evolved and where we came from, a pattern that distinguishes us from all the other ways to be alive and even not alive.

[Mayim Bialik]

You keep bringing me back to consciousness. I'm not doing it. You are. But this, this also this notion of kind of purpose and. And, you know, awareness, right. And it's interesting because, you know, Jonathan, And I have so many conversations that do kind of dive into the philosophical, the neuropsychological, right? What's the difference, right, between awareness and consciousness? And what does it mean to have, like, a conscious experience? You know, you give this example of a snake. I can't remember which kind of snake it is, but this snake, this particular snake, has what looks like, you know, eyes on the back of its head. Right, that. Right. So describe. Describe the specialness of this snake. And the question that you propose is, does the snake know that it has eyes on the back of its head?

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

I use this example in class when I start talking about Darwinian evolution, when I start talking about the creative power that natural selection brings into the picture. I don't think biology classes talk about that enough. What you learn in the biology class is that evolution is blind. It just stumbles into the future. There's no rationality, no thoughts. If you think that there's any thought, then you are unscientific. But the example that I use is this example of the snake, the spectacle cobra. That's the specific snake. It has, like you said, the eyes, what very much looks like eyes on the back. It's very clear what this is for. It's very obvious strategy. There's very little vertical symmetry in the natural world. If you go to a forest, there's basically nothing that is vertically symmetric. We don't think about this because we have bridges, we have buildings, we have lots and lots of symmetrical things in our built environment. But in nature, it's very rare, really. In the forest, the only thing that's symmetrical like that is an animal that looks straight at you. And usually that means that it's about to eat you. So, great evolutionary idea. The snake gets up in the grass, whoever is lurking from behind is startled and runs away. But does the snake know that it has eyes in the back? And the answer to that is pretty clearly no. The snake has never seen that. It can't look in the mirror. And even if it did, you kind of need two mirrors, I guess. Or if you need to meet another snake, it can't discuss that with another snake. It doesn't know what a species is.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It could discuss it.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

It's a very complicated idea to look at another thing and decide, you know, we are the same biological species, and therefore, whatever I'm seeing in the back of this animal's head is the same thing that I must have in the. No, no way. There is no way that a snake knows about this. But then the next question is, if you Once you've established that, then, well, surely someone must, right? It's such a great idea that it's just unbelievable that it would come from nowhere, from this blind nature. And the solution to that is, nature is not blind. Nature knows very well what works and what doesn't work. And that is what natural selection is. We think of evolution as canceling God. God was creative and God had this infinite imagination. And once we've established that it's actually all evolution, well, okay, now there's no imagination now. It's all just boring and mechanical. But no, it's not mechanical. It's not boring. It's just as creative. It's just that creativity is not in the mind of one being, but is distributed through the structure, the patterns of the world. It's the water, the ocean, that decides that fish need to be oblong and that seals need to be gray and their skin needs to be smooth. That is the pattern of the world that shapes biological reality into particular form. I think Darwin didn't cancel creativity. Darwin magnified it. He injected it into every part of the natural world. And I think it makes the world not more dull, but more interesting, more beautiful, more easy to understand.

[Jonathan Cohen]

You're speaking, though, or alluding to an intelligence across every aspect of life.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Sure, you could put it that way. It hinges on the definition of the word intelligence. If we define intelligence as a process that leads to irrational results, well, why not call nature intelligent? If we define it as the thing that I, a human, have in my mind when I close my eyes and think of a math problem, well, then it's a different kind of intelligence. But I don't think that we need to define intelligence from this top down. That's really my tension with, I think much of neuroscience and psychology. And it's because I come from a different perspective. I think that most neuroscientists start from the top down. It's natural. You start with yourself, and then you start thinking, okay, this thought or this emotion or this memory, where does it live? How does it work? What is it at the level of brain and neurons and cells and molecules? You go from the top, you go down. But I come from the other side. I am a biochemist. I started with molecules. Then I moved on to studying sea slugs. Very simple. And then from there I started thinking about, well, how will you extend this trajectory? How do you go from a molecule to a cell, to a simple brain to a more complex brain to a human brain? So I approach these questions of consciousness and mind and intelligence from first Principles. For me, if you can't define what these words mean from first principles, well, maybe there isn't anything else.

[Mayim Bialik]

I learned a lot about sea slugs in my undergrad and also my graduate work. And whenever you would mention to people something about a sea slug, they'd be like, what? Ew. That's not a thing. It's not important. And I learned to really, you know, love the sea slug. And there is so much information that we have gathered from the really elaborate and intricate beauty that is the sea slug. I would like to give you the opportunity to wax poetic about what is it about the sea slug that makes it such a significant, important, captivating, and valuable resource, and also one that does inspire, really, a beautiful reflection on our experience.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

There's several answers to this question, and I've practiced them all because, like you said, usually when you say you study sea slugs, that ends the conversation. So I've learned to start with, I study memory, and then maybe a few minutes later, bring in the sea slugs. There's a simple way to answer it. There's a very simple way to answer it. Sea slugs are cool. They are just beautiful animals, and it's fun to look at them. That's a very simple answer. Simple answer is that they are simpler than mice, than even fruit flies, definitely than humans or monkeys. And so. Well, if you want a simple system, if you want a memory that's handled by just a handful of neurons that you can understand deep, at the level of individual molecules moving around, that's your go to animal. The simpler it gets, the better your understanding would be. It's one of the simplest ways to get from molecules to behavior. This path, the number of steps that you need to pass, the number of levels that you need to get through in order to get from the molecular makeup to actual situation that this animal would experience in real life, this gap is much shorter, it's much smaller than. Than for other model systems. But I think there is a more nuanced answer to this question, and that's what I really think about what makes slug special. It's not that they're simpler animals, even though they are. But that's not the most important thing. The important thing is that they are abstract animals. What I mean by that is we tend to think that a mouse is halfway between us and bacteria, that it's so simple that you can. That you can basically break it down into molecules and understand it. But that's not true. Mice are 99% humans. They're practically the same animal With a few modifications. Sea slugs though, sea slugs though, they are much further away. And if you compare sea slugs versus us, mammals, mice, humans, what kind of animal is more normal in the animal kingdom? That's the sea slug. The sea slug is a much more standard animal. Typical animal is cold blooded. Our warm bloodedness is a crazy evolutionary idea that's just absolutely insane from the perspective of a sea slug. A normal animal is cold blooded. Normal animals about that size, maybe even some smaller. We are giant, we don't perceive that. But vertebrates are the largest animals in the world. We are much faster than a normal animal. I've learned that by analyzing hours and hours of sea slug videos. Even if you speed them up 20 times, still a pretty boring experiment. But if you speed them up 20 times, it starts to make sense. They wave their head and you sort of understand what they're trying to do. They move, they have some goal directed behavior. If you watch them just with your eyes, without any speeding up, it looks like a plant. Nothing is happening. It's just kind of aimlessly waving around. But that's because we are so fast. It's not because of them being so slow. So really our perspective of what an animal brain is and what life is and how processes work in a body is really skewed by us being these extremely unusual animals. If you want to understand specifically a human, then a mouse is a good research model because it's so close to a human. But if you want to understand brains or animals or memory in general, as a concept, as a biological process, as an evolutionary trajectory, then sea slugs are much better because they represent the animal kingdom much more faithfully than mammals.

[Mayim Bialik]

How many different kinds of Aplysia are there? Like, which ones do you work with?

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Aplysia californica is what our lab, Tom Carew's lab, works on. I was lucky enough to be mentored by one of the pioneers in the field of Aplysia. I consider myself the third in line from Eric Kendall, who is of course the founder of all the Aplysia science. And Tom Carew, my mentor. He was mentored by Eric Kandel himself. So I'm a third generation Aplysia scientist. So Aplysia californica is what we work on. There's also Plesiochoridae in Japan, Some Japanese scientists work on that, but Californica is the standard. But there's lots of gastropod mollusks around and there's nudibranch mollusks that are structured very similar to Aplysia and we care about all of them. We have a chat in the lab where all slug related jokes and images and anything snail related goes there. We are unapologetically snail people.

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

That's code m a y im at incogni.com mayim myimbialx breakdown is supported by.

[Mayim Bialik]

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[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

I think that what you're saying is that's exactly right, that's. But I don't see it as a constraint. I see it as something that liberates you from the confusion brought about by us being so unusual. Let me give you an example. So we work on sea slug memory, and even these days we work on memory in non brain cells. So for example, we've shown that kidney cells, kidney cells grown in a petri dish also form memories. And they use the same tools, the same molecules, the same genes as brain cells do. For any cell, experience is a pattern of chemicals in time. That's true for a brain cell. All that any neuron in the brain knows about what's going on is which other neuron sent it a neurotransmitter, from what side, at what time point. That's all that any cell knows. And from that, our brain, this combination of brain cells calculates everything that we know, everything that we remember, everything that we experience. So really it's all time patterns, time patterns of chemicals landing on the cell at different times. But that's true for any cell. Any cell has chemicals landing on it at different times. They might be not neurotransmitters. They could be called hormones or paracrine factors. If they're sent from a neighboring cell, it could be nutrients floating through a cell, salts, liquids, mechanical pressure. It's different experiences, cellular experiences in time. So what is memory in the brain? From a perspective of a neuron, a neuron experiences these neurotransmitters at different times. Some of Those patterns it ignores. But some of those patterns make it change, make it adjust some connections, make it reconfigure its genes, make it produce long term changes. And that is what we experience as our mental memory. So what we have shown is that other cells in the body, we used kidney cells and neuroblastoma cells. But we believe that you can use any kind of cell, I accept bets on anybody's favorite cell line to work the same way. What we've shown is that if you create experiences for these cells, any cells that you grow in a Petri edition. What do I mean by create experiences? Giving them chemicals at different times, chemicals that stimulate within those cells. What we know is stimulated in a neuron when we learn. So we know how brain memory works to some extent in part from Aplysia. We can look at the same exact molecules in a non brain cell and ask does activating those molecules at different times produce changes in those cell? Distinguish some patterns from others. And turns out that is true. So for example what we used was the so called mass spaced effect. It's a well known property of memory of any memory in any animal. If you study for a given amount of time, let's say you study for an hour, if you do it all in one go, you will produce a worse memory than if you split this studying into four sessions.

[Mayim Bialik]

And this is something every parent tells their kid. Don't cram for the exam, space it out, start a couple days before. That's actually not just like an old wives tale. Like the brain actually prefers repetition, consistency and it needs breaks to consolidate information.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Turns out that the same is true for any other cell. Turns out that if you give a kidney cell an experience that lasts 12 minutes, you stimulate in that cell a particular molecule that the neurotransmitter would have stimulated in a neuron. We artificially turn it on in that cell for 12 minutes and then 24 hours later. So we remove that stimulus, we leave that cell B, we let it rest for 24 hours and then 24 hours later we see that it's changed. How do we know it's changed? Well we have this particular reporter protein, we have engineered this glowing protein actually taken from a firefly which I think is so cool that is produced anytime the cell activates its memory genes. And what are memory genes? Well we also know them from neurons. We know what genes are activated in the brain when you learn. So we look for those genes, we put this glowing protein under the control of those genes. And anytime the memory genes are activated you also get this glowing protein. So what happens is we treat cells with those pulses of chemicals for a few minutes. We wait 24 hours and then we measure the glow, how much of the glowing protein we get. And so it turns out that if you do these four spaced trials of three minutes separated by 10 minutes. So if you give that chemical four times very, very short periods of time versus you give it at one in one go over 12 minutes. So the spaced repetition creates a stronger memory, more of that glow of that memory gene protein than if you cram it all in one go. So that proves that these cells can distinguish between minute scale patterns. The difference between those two patterns is just a few minutes. Everything else is the same. The total duration of stimulation is the same. The only difference is those 10 minutes of gap between sessions. And nobody expected that a cell like a kidney cell, non brain cell, would parse patterns on such short timescales. We usually think of non brain cells as slow operating on maybe hours, timescales, days maybe, but minutes, that seems like something that's more neuronal. But it turns out that not necessarily.

[Mayim Bialik]

First of all, this is a very, very significant finding. Very, very elegant. It's a beautiful finding, but the first thing that Jonathan would think of and that many of our listeners are probably thinking of. Did you just prove that the body keeps the score? Which is, you know, a very common notion in, in trauma research in particular, which implicates things like immune functioning, recall, you know, it. It has implications for post traumatic stress disorder, for complex ptsd. What you're proposing in theory could extrapolate out to say, when people say, I feel this in my body and doctors tell you, I don't know what you're talking about, you're fine. Or the work of Peter Levine and Somatic experiencing, that if the body had a desire to run from a predator, from a threat, from an abuser, that your legs will hold the memory of, I need to get away. If they couldn't, that you will have chronic pain, inflammation. Right. Is that where we can take this?

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

I have to say that this was exactly the first comment to this paper that immediately was asked by everybody, and that took me by complete surprise. That's not how I thought about this at all. But it really made me think. And my first reaction to this was, no, that's not what we're talking about. No, surely the psychological trauma is contained within the brain, and that has nothing to do with what your organs would be storing. And the fact that you feel that something is in your body does not mean it is actually in your body because you're feeling your body with your brain. So that was my first thought. But then as I thought about it more, I think I started softening up on this idea. Maybe it's not as woo woo as it sounds at first because we know that there is an impact of the brain on the body. That's an established fact. No question. Cortisol, for example, stress hormone, can affect peripheral tissues, can affect your metabolism. That's just one example. So we know that's true.

[Mayim Bialik]

For thousands of years, alternative practitioners, yogis, mystics have said this and it wasn't until science quote proved it that we could acknowledge that the, the mind can have that power over the body. Whenever people say to me like, I don't know about that, what's mind body syndrome? I say if you've ever lost the contents of your stomach before a big date, an exam or your wedding, that's the mind having an effect on your body. So just wanted to give a nod to thousands of years of yeah, well.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

You know, that was also part of the conversation. And while I have deepest respect for tradition, it is also a tricky part to gain scientific knowledge from because, well, a lot of traditions were wrong. But in this particular case, I'm not sure that that is wrong. I think it is very reasonable. So one part of it is brain acting on the body, another part of it is body acting on the brain, which we also know to be true, like the gut brain axis for example, and you know, exercise, another example, that affects your well being and your anxiety. So we know that that works as well. And now we know that the body can store patterns of experiences that are happening to these body cells. So if you put 1, 2 and 3 together, it doesn't seem that unreasonable that the body would keep some score if whether that is what people are reporting when they're saying that I feel that my body stores this trauma, I don't know. We don't know enough yet to say that that's true. But I think at the very least it opens the theoretical possibility that that is, you know, not science fiction and not pseudoscience, but might actually have real biological mechanism.

[Jonathan Cohen]

The few things that came to mind were if you're going to experience trauma, it's likely better to experience it all at once versus repeated and continued experiences if the cell is adapting in that way.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Well, I think that that is probably true regardless of whether it's stored in the brain or the body because, well, the spacing effect is true for any kind of Memory that we know about in any kind of animal. And now we know it's a property not of the brain, but of a cell. So wherever it would be stored. Yes. I think that a repeated trauma would probably have a worse effect than a single time trauma. Not to say that something that happens once cannot bring about ptsd.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Of course. Caveats all across the board. Because one intense experience is going to be intense and it can have its impact.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's in my thesis, so I have to jump in. Potentiation of trauma is a thing. And there's. There's very significant and important research that we know. Trauma builds on trauma. So, yes, one salient, highly emotional experience can absolutely create trauma. That's usually capital T. But other kinds of traumas are potentiated in the memory system and in the body. So that one person who is experiencing small traumas, I mean, we all know those people. I'm one of them. It's like, why does everything seem to keep building in a. Like an asymptotic curve?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Wanted to say asymptotic curve.

[Mayim Bialik]

I always want to say asymptotic curve.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I'm also thinking about how this can apply for people's benefit. Right. So obviously we know studying in micro increments. I'm thinking about myself, who likes to eat all the time. Right. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that because I'm actually training the cell to constantly be in digestion versus resting and having a little break. I'm thinking about exercise. Is it better to have little micro doses of exercise so the body adapts versus working out for four hours a day?

[Mayim Bialik]

The question is, what does the aplegia do? How does it eat? How does it move and metabolize? That's what Jonathan's goal is.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Okay, well, let me. Let me address the. The. What's the practical benefit first? Yeah, so I. I mean, I think there's a reality in which we do learn all the patterns and their effects and what part of the body parses what pattern? And then we start exercising at precise intervals and consuming carbohydrates and proteins and lipids at specifically designated time patterns, and then take medicine not once a day, but at a given time and the day, and then space it in a specific way. I just think that that would ruin our lives to such an extent that it would be unlivable.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's what my life is like. He just told me my life is unlivable.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It sounds great to me.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Well, in that case, give us another three to four years and we'll give you a list of patterns to internalize and recreate in your life six times a day.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I tell you, doing a great job.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

But I think, personally, I think that what our research really shows is that patterns matter. That's the main message. We may not know what those patterns are, but patterns matter. And everything you do on a schedule might have a lasting effect on your body. I don't think that anybody's going to be a better judge of that effect than you yourself. So I guess my advice to people would be not assume that that's fiction and just listen to your body. It does recognize patterns and it can store them. And you are the best judge of what it stores.

[Mayim Bialik]

I wonder if we can dive a little bit more into some of the human implications of what we know about memory. And something that comes up a tremendous amount on our podcast. And I think in many people's lives, if anyone's ever been in therapy or has been asked about their childhood, some really interesting things come up regarding memory. So one of them is about perception. And you talk about this a little bit in one hand clapping. We don't always remember things accurately. And we had Amir Raz, Dr. Raz talks about the misremembering people do and also the kind of social contagion, you know, components of memory and remembering. But something that comes up a lot with trauma is people do often report memories that surface, memories that come back to them. Obviously, there's a lot of controversy when I was an undergrad about repressed memories. And it was kind of the beginnings of these conversations. What's admissible in court? Right. A new memory that has surfaced. How do we decide which memories get to be valued? Right. How do they matter? I wonder if you can talk really more from kind of a molecular and cellular perspective. What do we know about what the human experience of memory can do to certain kinds of memories? And are they just hanging around waiting to be plucked? How are we finding memories? And I've had this happen where it's not that I'm told something, it's that I re embody a memory that I can also verify happened but was not in my conscious experience. Talk a little bit about memory and trauma in this way.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

I think that what limits us in this conversation is again, we are rubbing against this tension between the top down view and the bottom view on memory. Because I think we tend to think of memory as some, maybe distorted, maybe incomplete, but a reflection of reality. We think that somehow we're taking the snapshot of reality and putting it somewhere in the brain and then we can access it, or we can modify it, or we can distort it. But somehow it is there. And maybe it will surface, or maybe it won't surface, but it's there. But I don't think that's the right way to think about memory. So what we're thinking about when we're talking about this kind of memory is just one type of memory. It's episodic. Memory Skills, for example, work from a perspective of a neuron very similarly. They are wired differently, but the neuron doesn't know exactly how it's wired. Those cells that are responsible for skills get modified as a result of us learning that skill. And then they perform that skill better. So in this case, that's the recollection. You're not really recreating some state of reality before you're doing something different. You've modified your brain, and now it's doing something new. That's how we need to think about memory. Memory is not a reflection of reality. I think the simplest definition of memory that I can think of from first principles is memory is a change that outlasts its cause. Anytime you're experiencing something, there's some change happening to your brain. And that change persists after you've stopped learning. That is what memory is. Sometimes. Sometimes the changes that are produced in the brain, they reflect some aspects of reality. And that's what we experience as episodic memory. But that's not necessarily true. What is in common across all types of memory is that something changes, and the brain starts working differently. And it's really unpredictable how the brain will change. Maybe what we memorized is different. Maybe what we're outputting is different. Maybe multiple memories combined into a third memory. That really depends on every individual experience that a human has. But I think if you think of memory as not bringing you back to a moment in time, but the past changing the brain for the future, then I think the tension disappears. Memory is from the past, but it is for the future. That is, I think, what we need to understand about memory to resolve this tension. Why is my memory not the same as it was before? It's never meant to be the same as it was before. It's a totally different thing. You're creating your own impression of what you experienced. And you're storing that impression. You're not storing the actual thing that happened in the world.

[Mayim Bialik]

If we're not remembering, let's say, something that happened, but more the impression of it. First of all, how do we trust any memory? And secondly, if we're not talking about episodic memory, but if we're talking about, you know, more procedural memory. Yeah. Like, I think of muscle memory. You know, I. I play the piano, right. And if you ask me to play the chorus of a particular song that I play, I usually have to start at the beginning to get there. Right. Or if I'm fumbling with a song and I haven't played it in a while, all of a sudden something clicks and then the whole piece is there, and I'm like, right, that memory comes from elsewhere. So what does that also mean, especially when we think about emotional memory, when we think about these complicated memories, is that its own kind of procedural memory as well? I behaved this way when I was a child. So when I'm with my parent, even as an ad, I'm still behaving like that child. Right. Can we look at memory also in terms of what we're possessing as we function, in psychological terms?

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

Yes, of course. I think that our brains are constantly being modified by every experience and of course, by childhood experiences and. Yeah. So the way that skills would be formed of the piano skill is first you control each motion. If you're playing a piano, each finger consciously using your cortex, you have to drive each muscle to a particular location. You're trying to achieve a goal, and you have to guide each muscle to do that. But if you do that successfully, you get a jolt of dopamine. Dopamine gets sprayed on those basal ganglia, and it tells them whatever the brain just did, whatever just happened, remember that, store that, and those cells preserve whatever passed through them, whatever motions were just executed, they preserve those motions in a strengthened time configuration of synapses between them. So next time you would be trying to execute that task. If you have that goal in your mind, that combination of motions would just unfold more easily. You do that multiple times, you get the jolt of dopamine every time it's successful, and this combination just becomes a unit, a chunk. And then all you need to do is, like you said, just invoke the goal or the melody, a part of a song, and it just unpacks itself. We call it muscle memory because it feels like muscles remember itself, but actually it's basal ganglia memory. It's not really stored in the muscles. So, I mean, the same could be true longer term for habits, for preferences. I always end up choosing the same lunch spot to go to, even though there's like a hundred more around it. And it's not like they wouldn't be maybe even better But I don't know that because my behavioral pattern has been optimized by this one successful spot that I go to, and my brain just naturally leads me there. It's very hard for me to get out of that pattern, extend that to many years and to other more and more deep habits. And yeah, I think it's the same thing.

[Mayim Bialik]

I not only always go to the same restaurant, I order the same thing every time I go to. There's one thing that I always get at this place. There's. I'm just a creature of habit. We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with Dr. Kukushkin. There's so much more. In part two, we get deep into a conversation about AI. Is it part of our evolutionary trajectory? Should we see the outsourcing of creativity and organic thought as just the next step in our evolution? And what does technology do that real life experiences can't? And what does real life present that technology will never be able to match?

[Jonathan Cohen]

We also discuss the danger and potential implications of forming relationships with synthetic robots or chatbots that is on the rise lately. There are people falling in love with their artificial intelligence systems and it has a huge implication. We also talk about the very human need for connection and belonging to and how an absence of that in the world today is driving an enormous amount of people to seek it elsewhere.

[Mayim Bialik]

This episode also has a spectacularly fleshed out outro, so please stay tuned for part two. We can't wait for you to listen to it. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

[Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin]

It's Maya Bialix, Breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or 2, 1, 4 fiction. And now she's going to break down. To break down. She's going to break it down.