third in that. Um what then throws all that into into difficulty is when you have episodic conflicts and wars in different parts of the world for instance the Middle East which then you know dislodges the strategy and you and
to do things, procedural memory; what's called semantic memory, memory of facts, the fact that Paris is the capital of France. And episodic memory is memory of what happened to you, of experiences. And the kind of memory that you were describing as very sort of distinctive to human experiences is that kind.
This is one that I have yet to see implemented well in any computational tools yet. But this episodic memory allows us to learn uniquely information that occurs at a particular time and place. And all of these forms of memory interact in interesting ways in the brain to allow us to think and reason and understand
So the kind of memory that I study, in fact, is called episodic memory, which the person who coined the term, the famous psychologist Endel Tulving, he argued that episodic memory is a form of mental time travel. So one of his observations was he studied a patient who had very, very bad memory for his past.
And that would be semantic memory. But in episodic memory, information is indexed according to time and place. So two things that have nothing to do with each other, they're just there by coincidence, can be encoded into one memory because of that.
In the process of that, I saw that while we could improve attention very well in these patients with mild Alzheimer's disease, I couldn't really get a good signal, a good improvement in what's called episodic memory, which is the kind of memory we use every day. So ever since then, I've still been looking for good treatments, pharmacological treatments, for episodic memory.
or trying to remember where you left your mobile phone in the house. That's episodic memory. And we can see that there's activation in areas like the hippocampus when we asked people to do these memory tasks.
So Christmas and Valentine's Day primarily, where traffic goes up. And the episodic spikes are when either social media or a traditional media coverage of our program. Traditional media, typically when our team was involved in a scientific discovery and we could issue press releases or talk with the press about the story and how we supported it.
That card stack generated a tremendous amount of inbound linking, which led to a sharp rise in the Google rankings. It is episodic . It is, in many ways, modular.
If we're not delivering excellence. If we're delivering episodic excellence it is that we have designed the wrong jobs for our employees. The argument we make in the book, and we believe it in our hearts is that it is our obligation to set our employees up to thrive casually.
But that's what brains do. It's what people do because of episodic memory. Wow. That's so powerful.
So two things that have nothing to do with each other, they're just there by coincidence, can be encoded into one memory because of that. And so that's why episodic memory is so powerful, is that I think many of us can relate to hearing a song, for instance, from our childhood, and that song brings us back to a place in time.
And then, all of a sudden, that triggers all these memories that we have from that time. And that's the beauty of episodic memory. It's a form of mental time travel.
That's fantastic. So just to go back to the process a little bit, I'm curious-- the way that, obviously, "Modern Love" is done, it's not a non-episodic approach. Did you have a lot to do with the rest of the arc of the season?
And Will was very cheap. But it was too choppy and episodic .
And Broadway and the stage was kind of the only arena I thought I was going to pursue. And then I started doing episodic work because almost every actor, at one point or another, gets an episode of "Law and Order." It's inevitable.
How did this come together? How did it go from an episodic to a movie? And did your agents reach out to you, or did you guys actually audition?
They felt like it was different. They liked that it was episodic , because everything is serialized now. And on a network, I think, look, if it's Netflix, if it's Amazon, if it's Hulu, and you're getting everything in one big chunk,
Yeah. I mean, "Blade Runner" seemed to suggest that the difference between replicants and humans was sort of the emotional, empathetic side, right, and this idea of memories and having episodic memory and memory of your past. And I guess another thing it seemed to suggest was that the longer the replicants lived, the more emotions they would sort of develop,
He becomes this childhood friend of Cecil, who just builds back story. What's interesting about doing this episodic show is that a joke, literally a one sentence joke from episode 3, all of a sudden can turn into an entire plot line that
But the punch line was that ocean currents would have flown from west to east. And there would have been these episodic storms, where rafts could have been moved very rapidly across the Mozambique Channel. So it kind of provided the mechanism that I'd been searching for for much of my career.
A lot of brand leaders will evolve episodically when they need to.
Sometimes they would do it episodically.
Which is why you tend to see a lot of episodic series, say, in crime fiction.
But that was the whole idea behind the sort of episodic replacement theory.
And the book is-- the story is told in a very episodic way, where each chapter is essentially a snapshot
though it's more generally involved in what we call episodic memory, the ability you have for remembering what
And when "Fuller House" posted some of those episodic still photos of me wearing the donut purse, Betsey Johnson herself actually chimed in and was
And the other part of it is that the decay implies that there's some perfection in being young, between the ages of 20 and 30, basically, because as you get from 30 and older, episodic memory tends to change. But semantic memory state or knowledge about the world remains very solid into old age if people are aging in a healthy way.
So we can actually detect that in the scanner. And then again, we talked about episodic memory which is your everyday sort of memory. It's kind of trying to remember where you left your car in a multi-story car park when you parked it there several hours ago
But how is that process from doing TV, episodic TV, or one-off roles compared to live theater?
Remember, our lives in some ways are episodic .
I've always been a huge fan of sci-fi in many different forms. And it had been a while since I had seen something on television that was episodic from start to finish, like "The Twilight Zone," like "Star Trek," where I was being told a story, a brand new story that had a beginning, middle,
I mean, it shouldn't be an episodic thing.
about thinking that it would be a Trilogy I had this insane episodic screenwriter thing since writing
I think not hiding the ball becomes a lot more important in the episodic structure than it is in novel length prose
And on the bottom, the corresponding number of star adoptions during that same period. Now, there are periodic spikes and there are episodic events in this time series. The periodic spikes come during the popular gift-giving holidays.
It's not like he said, an episodic .
And this is very similar to the kind of information that LLMs and other generative AI tools learn, is this kind of knowledge about the world. And then humans have a very special form of memory, which is called episodic memory. This is one that I have yet to see implemented well in any computational tools yet.
But they can be anything, really, people, too. Oh wow. OK, so we can basically trigger our episodic memory and trigger time traveling with all of these sensory cues? That's right. That's exactly right.
But the point is those are events, and they're episodic .
different chemicals change ability to attend, or plan, problem solve, what we call executive functions and also the more posterior functions dealt with by the hippocampus, such as episodic memory. Now in the course of doing that work and publishing on cognitive enhancing drugs in different areas, it became clear to me
And that's when all these folks come into play. It's based on the character Uncle Drew some of you may know based on a Pepsi-created digital episodic that was very popular and ultimately became a movie with our friends at Lionsgate.
This was-- Wil Wheaton is a character on our show. What's interesting about doing a show that is ongoing, and episodic , and epic is that you always get a chance to change things as you go. So the characters in episode 10 are not the same characters that are in episode 100.
And the kind of memory that you were describing as very sort of distinctive to human experiences is that kind. So a good question is, which animals might have something like episodic memory, memory not just of facts-- where things are-- but of what experiences I had when I was in that place?
I had when I was in that place? And recently, some work that's been used to study episodic memory, or rather episodic -like memory in birds, has been also applied to cuttlefish. And I won't describe all the details of the experimental design, which was very clever and subtle, but the upshot of it
um I did the CBS show and I you you just keep plugging away in in episodic television there's not a not very much
So coming to Serial Box, where we have a sort of episodic structure, where, for example, in "Bookburners," we have sort of supernatural secret agents working for the Vatican
Yeah, well for the witch series it's very much-- it's a lot less episodic .
And so I wanted to write in the way we consume media nowadays as well, like episodic versions, and ultimately the Mantras