[NOISE] So the question is, can this lost language be found? Can we recover a language that's lost? Now notice, lost doesn't mean gone forever. It just means it's not found at the moment. And this fits in nicely within the memory literature. There's some interesting literature within memory. Of course, very controversial issues such as do repressed memories exist? Is that possible to have a repressed memory, to recover a lost memory? And these can have very, very profound consequences on legal cases, situations where people's lives are at stake and where possible incarceration could result from the results of these cases. And in considering this, Bjork, Robert Bjork has really talked a lot about retrieval and what it means. And of course, within the memory literature what retrieval is defined as is the ability to recall a memory, to bring a memory back, right, to retrieve it from some long term store. At my high school reunion, I ran to a great number of people that I'd seen before, many of whom I knew very, very well, and some that I hadn't seen in the ten years that had passed. In one case, a young gentleman approached me and began to say, Arturo, how are you? God, it's so great to see you, remember me? And for a second, I really had a blank. I mean, I really did not remember him. Now of course we have to consider that within those ten years I had gone to college, I had been to Brazil for two years, I had been back onto graduate school, TAed many classes. And so I met lots of different people in different contexts. And so I had all these different people I'd met. And at that moment, I did not remember this young gentleman. I had no memory of him. And then he told me, yeah, we used to talk in the locker room before swimming class. And I, and I had a small glimmer of a memory of him. And it troubled me because he remembered me quite well and I didn't remember him. And so I thought about it some more, and then over time I began to remember that yes, of course, we had seen each other in the locker room. I hadn't thought about the locker room before swimming class for many, many years. And I had a slight recovery of this memory. And over time, I began to actually remember him better. And in fact if I met him today, many years after high school, I would probably remember him better than I did ten years after high school. And that indicates something very interesting about memory, right? That a recovery of a memory at some point can actually solidify that memory later. And so maybe one simple type of thing that arises from Bjork's research is that, if you really want to remember something, you should almost forget it.
