Dean Buonomano is a professor of psychology and neurobiology at UCLA, and the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives, as well as the newer, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. He says it's impossible to overstate how important associations are for cognition, behavior learning and decisions.

We’ll learn in this episode about memory capacity, creating and breaking those important associations, reward learning, and why we think about the brain as a computer.

Episode Quotes:

Breaking associations:

It's not forgetting. I think maybe, maybe a hundred years ago, it was thought that extinction was a type of forgetting, but it's best seen as a different type of learning and suppressing a previously existing learned response.

Comparing human memory with harddrive data:

When we retrieve information from our computer hard drive, it doesn't alter that. Nor does it store that information that it was retrieved. But in the case of the human brain, every time we retrieve information, we're also sort of rewriting it or reconsolidating it. And again, this makes sense in the sense that every time you see your nephew every six months or every year, you're not only recalling your niece or nephew - his or her face. But you're rewriting it as well. So you're continuously updating it. So the process of writing information down and recalling it is not independent, but interacting in the case of the brain, which is very different in the case of the computer.

Memory and Capacity:

I do take the position that one of the reasons we forget, and one of the reasons that our memories are not perfect is because there is a capacity issue. Now it's extremely hard to quantify. you said some people have a better memory, some people don't and it seems, like, well, how can you reconcile that?

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of California, Los Angeles
• Dean Buonomano on Twitter
• Dean Buonomano on Talks at Google
• Dean Buonomano on TEDXVienna

His work:

• Buonomano Labs
• Dean Buonomano on Google Scholar
• Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time
• Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives