00:01What's very exciting about this study is it's the first to demonstrate exactly how these
00:06memories are encoded in the brain, using a very translational approach that first started
00:14by asking people about how they experienced early memories, how those memories were formed,
00:20and then translating that into a preclinical study with mice to really understand how those
00:28memories are regulated in the brain, and so it's the very first time that this has been done.
00:34That's what's I think very interesting about this study is that when they interviewed over 600 adults
00:41to better understand these memories, they found that they were very strongly associated with
00:48positive smells and positive memories. So this positive recall, as you mentioned, the smell of
00:57freshly baked bread or perfumes perhaps associated with a loved one, a carer, a grandmother, or
01:04a parent are laid down and trigger that positive emotional recall later in life. So the brain
01:12certainly does encode more negative memories, but maybe doesn't rely as heavily on smell for that,
01:20but likely integrates other sensory processes as well. But here this was very elegantly able to
01:28demonstrate that those positive smells and positive environmental influences trigger a positive emotional
01:36memory later in life. Think of the brain really as an encoding sort of predictive modeling system. So a system
01:46that
01:46is really is really trying to take the load off our cortical network so that we can use that for
01:52higher
01:53functions and become more efficient in the way that we understand our environment. So smell is one of those
02:00that those stimuli that the brain then tries to take offline. So it's something that's very important for survival.
02:07And early life memories tend to take these environmental cues such as smell, but can also be things like sound,
02:18and will lay down these memories that don't necessarily require our thinking regions of the brain to recall and to
02:28remember.
02:28So it's a way really of making us more efficient at predicting what's going to be safe for us versus
02:34what's going to be threatening in our environment. But it's important to have these sort of rhythms and
02:40consistencies in in our our lives and so that we can sort of maybe focus more on valuing the
02:49everyday aspects of our of our lives and just maintaining a consistency rather than always searching for
02:56novel experiences or new experiences. Actually, there's a lot of value in having something that we can
03:03reliably predict to be associated as safe and positive.
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