How Thinking Shapes Us: Information Processing Theory (South East European University, SEEU)

Okay, good morning survivors.

Last time your representatives, because there were only two of you, your representatives, I told, I gave them some optimistic news that only one in three people grow up in, especially in industrialized societies, in the West, but not only in China, in Egypt, in Israel, their studies all over the world.

And only one in three people become adolescents and then become adults. The other two don't. They remain stuck in early adolescence.

So we live in a world where the majority of the population are adolescents, regardless of the age. These are the recent studies.

And this is a bit, this is frightening news, I think.

Yeah?

It's pretty frightening.

You are surrounded by adolescence age 40 and adolescence age 50 and adolescence age 60 and some of them are professors of psychology and some of them are just professors and some of them are politicians and some of them are politicians and some of them are actors and some of them but there's no one you can trust actually because the majority of them are adolescents and you are very likely to come across adolescents much more than across adults.

How do we find how do we define the wisdom of maturity? What do we put into this formula when we decided someone is mature or is not mature?

We discussed adulthood in one of the earlier lectures when we were all much younger, but today I would like to discuss the wisdom of adulthood very briefly.

I would just give you the formula how to decide if someone you meet is a grown-up adult.

So the first thing is this kind of person has had critical life experiences.

This is not someone who lived in the basement, his mother's basement all the time, playing guitar or whatever it is that you're playing today, and playing video games. This is not a critical life experience, of course.

So someone who has had a critical life experience. Anything could be a critical life experience, of course.

So someone who has had a critical life experience. Anything could be a critical life experience, the death of a loved one, falling in love, having children, getting married, and happily getting divorced.

So anything could be a critical life experience and people who do not have a critical life experience are not wise. They're not wise and they're not grown-ups and they're not adults.

Today as I told you in a previous lecture about 35% of people under the age of 35, that's the 35 rule, continue to live with their parents. 42% of adults are lifelong singles.

And the majority, already majorities in some countries, for example, the northern part of Germany, big part of California and so on, already the majority are childless. They've made a choice to be without children.

This is the world we live in.

People are adolescents for life. They like to play video games, they like to travel, they like to drink, they like to have casual sex, and nothing's wrong with any of this.

But this is the entertainment. This could not be life. This is the spice. This could not be the main dish.

And yet today this is the main dish. And it's a major problem.

So life experiences.

The second thing that goes into wisdom, I'm reminding you, I'm telling you what is wisdom.

So the second thing is memories, having memories, but not memories in the passive sense, I remember, but reflecting on the memories, processing the memories, trying to make sense of the memories, trying to put the memories together in a narrative, trying to create a story of your life, you know, that would make sense of who you are, where you're going, where you came from, and why you're doing what you're doing, if you're doing anything at all. So, reminiscences.

Next thing is openness to experience.

This is the formula that we use when we teach as to what constitutes a mature adult.

Openness to experiences. Openness, by the way, is a factor in the theories of personality. We have theories of personality that are known as factorial theories of personality, and one of the factors is openness.

So openness to experience is very important.

People who are closed, people who are defensive, people who think they know everything, there's nothing for them to learn. There are many such people. These kind of people are not open to experiences and cannot grow by definition.

What is to grow up? To grow up is to experience conflict with reality.

Reality is not pleasant. Reality is harsh. Reality is brutal.

And coming across reality, conflicting with reality, friction with reality is what makes you grow up.

So growing up is about losses. It's about losses and about mistakes. But losses first and foremost, we grow through losses.

We love someone, we lose them. We break up with them, they die. Or we break up with them and we hope that they die. We lose money. We lose opportunities. We lose.

All the time, all of life is about losing. It's a mistake to think that life is about gaining or about making something or about, we grow through losses.

So openness to experiences, even when the experiences are not pleasant, even the experiences are sad, even when the experiences are depressive, openness to these experiences, are the only engine of growth.

Next thing is emotional regulation.

Now that sounds like majority of people are emotionally regulated, that is quite untrue.

Emotional regulation means that you don't give in to your emotions, you don't surrender to your emotions. You don't let your emotions dictate to you how to behave. You don't let your emotions make decisions for you. You don't establish your choices based on emotions. We call this emotional thinking.

So we avoid emotional thinking.

Now there are mental health disorders, there are mental health issues, for example borderline personality disorder, where emotions are not regulated. This is known as emotional dysregulation, where any emotion overwhelms the individual. The individual drowns. The individual cannot cope with the emotion. The emotion destabilizes the individual. They lose control. They go crazy.

So this is called emotional dysregulation, and it's a sign of immaturity or mental illness, dysfunction.

So emotional regulation is very critical, but we are eight people in this room. I would be surprised if one of us is emotionally regulated. I'll be very surprised. That would be a major statistical aberration.

The last two things actually.

Sense of humor. Sense of humor is a major sign of maturity, which makes me a very mature person, a major sign of maturity.

People who are immature, are very defensive. If they have a sense of humor, it's sadistic. It's a sense of humor that is intended to hurt people. Or they laugh at other people's pain. They're sadistic.

People who are immature, they are insecure. They know that they're immature and so on. They're insecure. They've had many failures.

So when you're insecure, you cannot laugh at yourself.

Sense of humor, the first test, can you laugh at yourself? If you cannot laugh at yourself, you don't have a sense of humor. Never mind how many times you laugh, you don't have a sense of humor. That's the first test.

So, sense of humor.

And finally, creativity. Creativity is a key factor in wisdom and growth and growing up.

Adults are creative. You could be creative in cooking, you can be creative in gardening, you can be creative in many ways. You don't need to write books or symphonies or whatever. Creativity is everywhere. It's an extensive property. We are creative in the way we solve problems, even tiny problems, small problems. We bring creativity to the table.

But there are people who are rigid. They are not creative. So they follow established algorithms and procedures. They cannot think outside the box.

And these people resemble robots or, you know, now you know that there are activities which are automatic. For example, driving. When you drive, you don't think about driving. If you think about driving, you have accident. You need, there is a process known as dissociation. You need to dissociate from the driving so that you let your mind take over and it's totally automatic.

And so these people who are not creative, they are constantly on automatic pilot, on autopilot. They are constantly not thinking. They're constantly dissociating. They're not here. They're not with us.

So, of course, they cannot be mature or grown-ups and so on.

So these are the tests of wisdom and by these tests only one in three people is an adult in today's world that is unprecedented and the situation is becoming worse by the day.

So fewer and fewer people are becoming adults.

For example, the generation of 2020 is a lot less adult than the generation of 2000 and 2000 were a lot less adult than the generation of 1980.

So there are studies by scholars like Twenge and Campbell about these topics. Those of you who would like to learn more about it and frighten yourself, and these are these studies.

Now, today I'm going to wrap up Piaget. It's easy to wrap him up because he was a small person. So I'm going to wrap him up and we're going to move into information processing theory.

Now for you to understand in the West, I'm teaching in Cambridge, there are other places in the West, information processing theory is all the rage. That's the latest. That's like the hot topic.

So, okay, that's the Taylor Swift of lifespan development.

So when you go to study lifestyle development in any of these prime universities, it will not be taught, Freud and Jung and so on, but you will be definitely taught information processing theory.

I will not go deeply into it. It's a very complex theory and you are not postgraduate. But I will give you enough. I'll give you enough taste and I'll give you like 90% of what the theory is in headlines.

But first we have to get rid of Piersé and his bicycle.

So you remember the last time I told you that the work of Pierrés has been refuted. That nothing Pierre said, I'm sorry to say, is correct. Pierre got it all wrong.

Piaget, though, is a super critical figure in human development or child development theories because Pierrés was the first to observe children, together with Mahler, Margaret Mahler and Piaget were the two who were actually observing children. Piaget was the first to experiment with children, which sounds very bad.

Piaget was the first to propose a theory about a theory, I mean in the West, they didn't know about Vygotsky. Vygotsky preceded Piaget by a few years. So he was the first to propose a theory.

Never mind, he got it wrong, but he suggested something, you know, came up with something.

And he was the first to propose a theory that took everything into account.

Because before Piaget, there was a guy called Sigmund Freud. And Sigmund Freud also proposed a theory of childhood development.

But Sigmund Freud's theory was based on sex, of sexuality.

While Piaget's theory took everything into account, sexuality, interactions, so everything was there, although Piaget did not emphasize or de-emphasize society, education, culture, he said these are much less important.

But it's still a holistic approach, whereas Freud was focused on some part of the anatomy, which I unfortunately cannot go into details in this class.

So, where was I?

When I think about that part, yeah.

Okay, so Piaget came up with a few organizational principles.

And while the details of his theory did not survive well, yes?

He said, children at this age do this. And we found out it's wrong.

So the details were wrong. But the principles that he came up with are used to this very day.

So his theory was right, but he got the details wrong. And these are the principles.

He thought that there were two processes. He thought that there were two processes.

He suggested that there are two processes.

One is organization and one is adaptation.

Organization is the way the child organizes knowledge.

The child is absorbing information all the time, all the time.

By the way, in the first few years, huge amounts of information. Huge.

Everything you study at university, three years, everything, every class, every professor, every, everything you're exposed to, textbooks, everything. A typical baby absorbs in less than one month, less, 20 days, something like that, every 20 days.

So the amount of information is enormous.

And so Piaget said what the baby does, or later the child and so on, they organize, they create organizational structures.

And he called these structures schema.

Now, do not confuse Piaget's schema with schema therapy or schema theory, Nazdavia. Do not confuse. These are not the same.

In schema therapy and schema theory, a schema is a combination of beliefs, emotions, cognitions, memories, so it's all internal.

In schema theory, it's all internal. We organize everything, and we make like a cake. We take some memory, we sprinkle some beliefs, we add some, you know, and then we get a schema. Emotions, cognitions, we get a schema.

In Piaget's theory, a scheme or schema, which is the multiple of scheme, the plural of scheme, a scheme is a combination of mental representations, internal processes, and behavior.

So in Piaget the scheme includes behavior, while in schema theory it does not include behavior.

Okay, so don't confuse the two.

He said that we use schemes, when I say sorry, not we, children. Children use schemes to organize behaviors, knowledge and behaviors together.

So the child absorbs knowledge, the knowledge changes the child's behavior, and then the child connects the behavior to the knowledge and creates a scheme.

And the schemes are therefore both physical and mental.

He said that once the schemes exist, the child is faced with one of two choices.

By the way, you have everything on the board.

So he said that once the scheme exists, once the organization process is finished, then there's a scheme. The child has two choices.

The child can use the scheme as it is and say, this is the scheme. The scheme makes sense of the world, makes sense of everything, and that's it. That's my scheme.

And that is the process of assimilation.

Assimilation is when the child accepts the scheme, uses existing schemes to make sense of the world.

It does not change. There's no growth. It's just the existing schemes.

And the other option is accommodation.

Accommodation is when the child is faced with new situations. The child tries to use the old schemes and they are not working. They're not working.

So the child is forced to adopt the old schemes. This is adaptation, to adopt, adapt them or to create a totally new scheme.

So this is a process of growing up you create schemes if they work great if they don't work you adapt them if they they don't work adapted you create new ones again and again and, thousands of times.

And this is the process of growing up and transitioning from a child to adult.

He says that sometimes as the child is engaged in process of organization, sometimes reality intervenes, reality intrusion.

engage in process of organization, sometimes reality intervenes, reality intrudes, reality confronts the scheme building process, the organization, assimilation, accommodation processes as they are ongoing. Sometimes reality attacks these processes. There's new information, and this new information doesn't allow the child to adapt, to organize, the child is completely in a state of confusion and so on. At that point, there is something called disequilibrium. So this is the famous Pi something called disequilibrium. So this is the famous Piaget disequilibrium. And then what the child does is known as equilibrium. Equilibration is when the child goes back completely, a process known as regression. The child regresses and starts from zero, basically. And that's a process known as regression. The child regresses and starts from zero basically. And that's a process of equilibrium.

So this is the general approach of Piaget. The child confronts information. The child organizes this information in a hierarchy, information, meta information, meta information. This is done through schemes. The schemes are used in assimilation when they're useful, accommodation when they're not useful, and sometimes there is a major crisis known as dis-equilibrium, there is regression, the child goes back to square one and starts new.

So, generally speaking, this was his approach.

Today, there is a school known as Neo-Piergeians. Neopiagetians.

These are people who claim that they follow the work of Piaget. They claim that they have improved Piaget.

But actually, the neo-Pierzician's work has nothing whatsoever to do with Pi-Jet. You should know. It's a very misleading title. Very misleading. It reminds me that once in the 19th century, there was a guy who opened a printing house, a publishing house. And so his first book was, William Shakespeare's plays, updated and improved. So like he improves Shakespeare. And so it's the same with the neo-Pierge's work. They took Piage's work and then they updated it and then they improved it and then they improved it again and updated it again until nothing was left of Piaget. Absolutely nothing was left of Piaget. What the neo-Pierreysians did, they introduced attention, they introduced memory, they introduced information processing, they introduced the role of education, culture. So the neo-Pijsians are actually followers of Vigotsky. That's and they would be shocked if you if you meet a scholar or you meet a professor or you meet a student and they say I'm I'm follower of Pejjay I'm neo-Piergician you go deep, you discover that they're actually following Vigotsky, not Piage, because they believe in the role of education. They believe in the role of culture, and Piage didn't. Because they claim that growth has to do with attention and with memory and with information processing, which Piaget did not agree with it. Piaget said the growth is coming from inside. It's biological. It's not a reaction to the outside. The growth of the child is innate. It's coming from inside. And cannot be stopped. It's inexorable. While these people are saying, no, the growth is reaction to the environment. Reaction to information, reaction to this, to that.

So this is not Peuge. Now, to finish this segment, I will tell you about a few studies that proved Piaget wrong, and refuted his work.

This is important for you to understand because in many, many academic institutions in the world where they teach Piage, they teach Piersier as if his work is valid, as if, you know, what he said was correct, and what he said was not correct. So I'm going to give you a few names of the scholars that refuted Pierre-J and these are very famous scholars. There's a Harvard professor's and so on.

And you, again, if you're interested for some unclear reason, you can go online and look it further.

So we start with Eleanor Gibson, Gibson, like Mel Gibson, but she looks better. And Elizabeth Spelke. Elizabeth Spelke is a very, very important figure in lifespan development psychology.

I'll write the names down so that you can look them up if you wish.

So Elizabeth Spelke and Eleanor Gibson said, let's test the theory of Piaget.

And they started to work with infants. And they tested the perceptual abilities of infants, how infants are able to perceive things.

Piaget said, for example, that the infant is able to focus only on one thing. Infants cannot focus on two things. A little like students, you know. So they focus on one thing.

The experiments by Gibson and Spelke proved that this is completely wrong. Infants can focus on two things, at least. Even tiny infants, even like six months old, they're able to focus on two things, and they're even able to focus on two sensory inputs from different sources. Like they're able to, a child, even tiny baby, they're able to focus on, for example, sound and a visual.

Piaget was definitely wrong about this.

Now this is a very critical component of Piaget's work because Piaget's unmodal approach, Piaget said that only one source can, is at the foundation of Piaget's work. Without it, a lot of Piaget's work doesn't make sense.

Another thing, there is another scholar, her name is Baillargeon, actually. Baillargeon, she's Canadian. She works in America.

And Piaget said that children perceive objects and the qualities or properties of objects only when they reach the age of two, three, and some properties when they are four or even seven. That's what Piaget said.

Baillargeon conducteda massive series of studies on children, on babies aged three months and four months. These are known as the Baillargeon studies.

And she succeeded to prove that babies aged three months and babies age four months perceive objects perfectly. Piaget was wrong completely about this.

The children perceive all the properties of objects. For example, the children age three and four, when you give them two objects, like that, they know that this object cannot penetrate the other object.

When you give a child who is one month old or two months old, two objects, the child will try to do this. It will try to push.

But at three or four months old, the child already understands that you cannot put one object through another. This is known as object substantiality or object impermeability.

And Piaget said that children understand this when they are three years old. And Baillargeon proved that they understand it when they are three years old. And Baillargeon proved that they understand it when they are three months old.

Children understand that objects have boundaries. Babies, babies age three monthsunderstand that objects have boundaries. The object stops here.

Now this sounds funny to you, but actually, newborns don't know where they stop and the world starts. They don't make this distinction. The newborn is merged or fused with the world, especially with mother. As far as the newborn is concerned, mother is the world.

So the newborn doesn't say, that's me, that's mommy, that's the world. There are no boundaries.

But already at age three and four months old, babies realize this is me and this is my thermos. They realize the distinction. Babies realize at this stage that objects are unitary, that objects are solid, that objects are separate, objects are permanent, da-da-da-da-da.

So on that score, Piaget was very wrong, of course.

But these are not minor issues. These are major issues in Piaget's work. And if they're wrong, then his entire stages theory is pretty wrong.

Spelke, today we don't use Piaget today, I mean, in the universities that I mentioned, but many more of us are using the work of Spelky, actually.

So Spelke is the new Piaget.

So Spelke said that children are born with knowledge systems. They're born with templates.

I will try to explain it to you by using a metaphor or a simile of a smartphone.

The child is born the same way a smartphone is produced in the factory.

Okay, so there's a smartphone, there's a child.

Not every child is smart, but okay.

So here we have, and now she says, the smartphone of the child comes with inbuilt systems. There are systems ready to study language, ready to observe space, ready to count, ready to accept the existence of objects, ready. So all these are knowledge systems.

These knowledge systems are actually the operating system of the smartphone.

If you have an iPhone, your operating system would be iOS, and if you updated it recently, iOS 18.

So the child is born with iOS, with an operating system. Now, if you just have a smartphone in an operating system, there's nothing much you can do with the smartphone.

But the operating system allows you to install apps. And that's what the child does.

The child uses the knowledge system, which is like the operating system, the child uses the knowledge system to install apps.

One app is language.

One app is perception of space.

One app is counting things. One app is solid objects.

These are all apps. And these apps allow the child to create a picture of the world, an image of the world.

And even Spelke says that morality is such an app.

We install an app based on the operating system.

There is a famous experiment conducted by Spelke. It's called the helper puppet experiment. It's a very funny experiment.

She tried to prove that babies are born with morality app, with a template to install morality, like operating system that allows to install morality.

So she took babies and she showed them two puppets, two puppets.

One puppet was very nice puppet. It was helping other puppets. It was kind puppet, people pleasing puppet.

And the other puppet was like me, vicious, sadistic, torturing you with unnecessary knowledge at 10.30 in the morning. I'm horrible person.

So these were the two kinds of puppets.

And then she left the puppets and she left the room. And the babies played with a helper puppet, with a nice puppet, ten times more than with a bad puppet.

And these were three, these were very young babies.

So it's clear that the baby had a foundation for morality, good, evil, good, bad. And the baby definitely preferred good, not bad, you know, which was an amazing experiment.

So she showed, babies are born with all this.

There was another guy, Noam Chomsky, he's very famous. Chomsky suggested that babies are born with an engine, an application, a software to process language. He called it the universal grammar.

And so babies are born with universal grammar, and then they use this app, they use this to learn language.

So the view today is that babies are born with potentials, with operating system. They are not a blank slate. They are not tabula rasa, which was the assumption of Piaget actually.

So babies are born with a lot, quite a lot.

And then these are containers, that's like the thermos, and then you pour coffee, wine, vodka, whatever.

So this is Spelke's view.

Mark Johnson is another scholar in the field, and he agrees. He says the same, and now there is a new field in life span psychology. There's a new field and it is known as developmental cognitive neuroscience.

And we are trying to, what we're trying to do, we're trying to find in the brain the locations of this operating system, the templates, the ready to study, ready to learn, ready to experience places in the brain.

We are discovering new things all the time. Actually last week there was another discovery of a normal system in the brain, which is ready for study, ready for learning.

But all the time we're discovering new things.

We don't know the brain at all.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is arrogant and ill-informed and ignorant. We don't know the brain at all.

Ten years ago we discovered that there is a cleaning mechanism of the brain.

We didn't know that. That's ten years ago, not like a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. Ten years ago.

We discovered there's an enormous cleaning mechanism at the brain.

When you go to sleep, when you go to sleep, it happens only during your sleep.

When you sleep, there is a valve that opens between the spine, your spine, and the brain. And the spine pushes fluid into the brain. And the fluid washes the whole brain.

It's like, you know, in office buildings where the cleaning ladies and cleaning guys come with a...

That's what happens at night.

So the spine washes your brain with fluid, with real fluid. It's not metaphorical. And the fluid with all the garbage and all the trash and everything comes back to the spine for processing.

We didn't know that. We discovered that 10 years ago.

Similarly, we're discovering that there are pathways for learning, there are preparation in the brain for learning.

We also thought, we also assume, that until the baby is born, nothing happens, like the baby is born in a state of zombie.

But that's completely untrue.

We know, for example, that babies are very reactive to language and music in the womb. We know that very early on, three or four months old, in the womb, I mean, three or four months old fetus or embryo, we know that there are definite reactions to specific stimuli.

For example, if you decide that the baby's name is going to be Sam, that's me, then when you say Sam, the baby reacts, it jumps.

So the baby identifies its name. That's three or four months old. When the brain is just starting, it's nothing. It's like, you know.

So there's a lot we don't know about embryology also.

It seems that when we are born, we already have a lot going on here. A lot.

That's why I told you. The human beings are the only animal where the pregnancy continues outside the womb.

The real pregnancy of human beings lasts minimum, five to six years. That's the pregnancy. Nine months inside, the rest outside.

But inside, many, many things are happening. By a few weeks time, you have a heartbeat and you have an operating brain by three months old when you're inside.

For you to understand, there are even animals with outer brain or even animals with a single neuron, one, we have something like 10 billion neurons, 10 billion.

They're animals with one. Even these animals can do a lot.

Like there is a famous one-cell organism and it has one neuron. This one-cell organism, when it comes across an obstacle, it kind of drifts in the water.

When it comes across an obstacle, it stops, and then it changes, it goes.

That's one neuron.

And it's reacting to light, it's reacting to temperature, it's reacting to viscosity, it's amazing. All this with one neuron, you know.

Have you ever seen a cockroach? Cockroaches are amazing animals. They are the most amazing animals ever. Like if I had a pet, it would be a cockroach. No, sorry, okay. Not to go too far. But they're amazing animals.

They are the most amazing animals. Trust me, a cockroach can compress its body by 70%.

Cockroaches are stunning. They have layers and layers that protect them against nuclear bombs.

Nuclear.

They will survive a nuclear war. They have the most incredible things you can imagine.

And they have a brain which is nothing.

Nothing whatsoever.

It's like tiny, tiny thing, you know, barely visible.

They can kill you?

Yes.

Why?

Oh, it's my biggest fear.

I don't know, I think it can come to my ear.

No, that will never happen.

But because cockroaches are highly reactive to movement and to, so even when you try, and in mosquitoes as well, even for example you try to kill them or something, they feel the air.

When you move your hand, they feel the air and they run away.

So that's extremely unlikely.

But cockroaches spread disease.

So that part is true. They spread disease.

But I'm giving you this example for you to understand.

A typical baby, age 3, has thousands of times more brain than the cockroach.

Thousands of times more brain.

By the age of, when he's born, it's like millions of times.

We have enormous brains. We have huge brains, not in terms of size, but in terms of complexity.

Our brains are by far the most complex brains in the world.

So it's very likely that we are born already with a lot of preparation for the world.

Otherwise we would not survive.

And this is where Piaget also got it wrong. He also got it wrong.

He said that development is internal, is biological, and he didn't much connect it to the brain. He said, yeah, it just happens. It's biological.

But information processing theories and so on tell us that the brain is the key.

Is the key.

We can literally ignore the rest.

And we need to focus on the brain, which leads us to information processing theories, which are, I remind you, what students are taught in the West.

So that's what they're taught, they're taught information processing theory.

Those of you who would like to... Maybe.

That's a woman who conducted experiments with babies and find out amazing things, how babies perceive objects.

So, let me know when I can delete by Arjean.

My pleasure.

Okay, information processing theories.

We start with the basic units, with basic ideas of the theory.

So I'm trying to arrange it for, because these are very complex, Vygotsky, each of them had another magic solution to explaining growth.

Vygotsky said it's culture and education. Piaget said it's biology. Everyone comes up with that.

And information processing theory is no different. Information processing theory says it's biology. Everyone comes up with that.

And information processing theory is not different. Information processing theory says it's the brain. It's the brain. Forget everything else.

Growth, maturation, transition from one life stage to another. They're all mediated via the brain. The brain is responsible. It's all happening in the brain.

So, focus on the brain.

And the information processing theory believe that the maturation of the brain is a result of interaction with the environment.

Mainly in early childhood and adolescence and in this sense of course information processing theory is classic theory it's a classic theory now how they treat the elements of the maturation is the novelty that's what's new about information processing theory

we start with stimulus stimuli information processing theory. We start with stimulus, stimuli.

Information processing theory says that you constantly are stimulated by the environment, except in this lecture, of course.

You are constantly stimulated by the environment. There are all kinds of stimuli.

Light, I mean, colors, sounds, I mean, these are all stimuli. It's coming from the environment.

There is no organism that is not reactive to stimuli. No such thing. From the smallest protozoa to the largest elephant or whale or whatever it is, dinosaurs, every organism is reactive to stimuli.

Actually, reaction to stimuli may be the foundation of life itself.

So stimuli are very important.

But forget now information processing theory, although what I'm about to tell you is part of information processing theory.

Let's talk logically.

What's the first thing you have to do when you have a stimulus? You as an organism.

But the first thing you have to do, you have a stimulus. You have...

Yes, you have to notice it.

If you don't notice the stimulus, in some cases it will have no effect on you.

That's the first point where I disagree with information processing theory.

Information processing theory says, for a stimulus to have impact on you, it needs to be noticed.

There I disagree.

I think there are stimuli that have an impact on you, even if you don't notice them.

And I think in many cases, you don't notice the stimulus because you're preoccupied, and the stimulus still has impact on you.

So I think the theory should be enlarged and all stimuli, whether noticed or not noticed, should be taken into consideration, into account.

Information processing theories, it's a family.

In their current form are too limited, because they require the conscious, active participation of the individual, of the organism.

And that's not always true.

If you stop to think about it, I'm sure you can come up with a list of stimuli, many stimuluses, yes, that you are not aware of, and yet do have impact on you somehow.

If I reduce the level of oxygen in this room, initially you will not be aware of it, but your body will react from the very beginning of the process.

Your body will react, of course. If you are exposed to a virus, initially you have no idea. You don't, but then there is a reaction.

It's counterfactual. It's, I think, very wrong to say that all stimuli must be noticed.

But I agree that stimuli that are noticed have a multiple effect, not only bodily, but also psychological, mental, they have much stronger and systemic effect.

Okay? Next thing. You come across the stimulus and you notice it. You have two options.

To accept it, but you have the option to reject it.

This is called inhibition. Inhibitory response.

So sometimes you are exposed to a stimulus and because the stimulus is unpleasant or because the stimulus contradicts something that you know or you think you know you reject the stimulus you ignore the stimulus you pretend it's not there or you reframe the stimulus it's not this stimulus it's that stimulus so we have option to reject

so now we have conditions. We need to notice the stimulus and then we need to accept the stimulus. We need to embrace it.

The next condition is we need to encode it. Once you notice the stimulus and you accept it, you need to remember it. You need to remember it, or you need to relate to it, or you need to interact with it, you need to do something with it. It's not just something passive. So you need to encode it.

How do we encode it? We encode it in neural networks.

Do you know what is memory in the brain? Do you know what it looks like?

You do realize that memory is a physical thing. In the brain, every time you're exposed to a new stimulus, accept it, and remember it, the brain creates two things. It creates special proteins. These proteins are specific to the memory that you created, and it creates a special pathway. It connects neurons in a specific way, and that is your memory. The combination of the neural pathway and the proteins.

So this is encoding where the stimulus is encoding.

You could have semantic encoding, visual encoding, auditory encoding. There are many types of encoding, verbal, otherwise, but there is no situation that you notice the stimulus, you accept the stimulus, and your brain doesn't react. No such thing.

Even the act of noticing and the act of accepting affect the brain.

So what information processing theory says is that it's probably wrong to create well-defined stages, like the child between zero and two is doing this, and then between three and five is doing this.

They said this is completely wrong. It's a fluid situation. It's like a river. All the time things are happening. All the time you're exposed to stimuli. All the time you're creating memories.

So all the time something is happening. You can cut it artificially up to here, up to there.

They say it's a completely wrong approach.

You store these memories and then you process them.

When the memories are stored, you know the difference between...

You know... Any problem?

No, no. We just talked about the big terminated, sorry.

Okay, no too.

Mmm.

Mmm.

That's a stimulus I'm not going to reject.

Is it a Turkish coffee?

Turkish coffee, no, I'm too old for that.

So let's talk a bit about memory.

Do you know that when you're exposed to a memory it is first in the shape of shorter memory, whatever happens, even this lecture, even everything is short term memory, and then the brain takes the short term memory and physically, everything is physical. Don't think that memory is some abstract concept. These are processes in the brain.

So the brain takes the short-term memory and transfers it to a warehouse, magazine. This warehouse is known as the hippocampus.

So, shorter memory are created in the brain everywhere, basically, and then transferred for storage in the hippocampus.

Now, have you heard of blackouts?

Yeah.

Yes.

Brownouts, blackouts? When you drink a lot?

Yes.

Not a lot, by the way. It's common mistake. It's not the quantity of alcohol that creates a blackout. It's how fast you drink it, that you should know.

So you could drink the same quantity of alcohol over a long period of time, you will not blackout. But if you drink it over one hour, you will black out.

So blackout is when the short-term memory are not transferred to the hippocampus. They are not transferred to the storage.

So when you wake up after a blackout or when you come, you don't have long-term memories. You don't have memory. Because there was not transferred to the hippocampus.

So, short-term memories are transferred to the hippocampus.

Now, there is a mechanism in the brain to withdraw or to retrieve. This is called retrieval, to take these memories out of the hippocampus and put them back in the short-term memory.

So when I ask you, what is my name? What is my name?

Do you know my name, by the way?

Yes.

Okay. So what is my name when I ask you this?

What you do is your brain goes to the hippocampus, looks for, you know, old professors of psychology.

Wait a minute? Yeah. Yeah.

Then you take out the folder with all professors of psychology, you opened it, Billion and no, this, Sam, and you take this and you transfer it to the short-term memory. And then you answer, your name is Sam.

Now all this is happening in micro, micro, micro, nanoseconds. You don't feel it.

But that's exactly what's happening.

Okay?

We have two types of memory. We have semantic memory and episodic memory, which gives me an opportunity to get up, stretch my bones, and write on the board my favorite activity, semantic and episodic.

Semantic memory is memory of how to do things. How to open this, this is semantic memory. I have memory how to open the thermos.

Now you think it's funny. There are diseases, physical diseases of the brain where people forget how to open the thermos. They just don't remember. They lost the semantic memory.

So this is semantic memory. How to? How to memory.

But you have another type of memory, episodic memory. Episodic memory is your personal history. Your autobiography, what happened to you? Your experiences.

I was in a class with this guy, he was talking, I got bored, I surfed the internet.

You know, this is episodic memory.

Now, don't confuse semantic and episodic memory. There are disorders, mental health disorders, where people have huge semantic memory. They are very qualified, they're skilled, they're educated, they're amazing, but they have very poorepisodic memory. They don't remember many events in their lives.

So, for example, we have this problem with borderline personality disorder, with narcissistic personality disorder, with some psychotic disorders, and with dissociative identity disorder, used to be known as multiple personality disorder, and so on.

So there's no connection between the two types.

Actually, there have been cases, documented cases, where people were injured in the brain, lost their episodic memory completely. They had what we call retrograde amnesia. They forgot who they are. They simply forgot who they are. They didn't know their names.

This kind of person didn't know his name. Didn't know where he lives. Didn't know if he was married or not married, which is the happy part, and so on and so forth.

So this kind of person had no episodic memory, but the same person was able to play the piano without any problem.

We see this also in Alzheimer's and dementia, where a lot of the semantic memory is preserved actually. So these people know how to clean the house, for example, or lie in bed or whatever, but the episodic memory is gone completely.

And people with dementia and Alzheimer don't remember the names, don't remember the loved ones. All the episodic memory is gone.

Okay. So these are the two types of memories. They are both stored in the hippocampus, and there is a retrieval system.

Back to short term, after you finish, I asked you what's my name, you took me out of your hippocampus to your short term. After you finished with this, you answered me, you put it back in the hippocampus.

It's a beautiful system, actually.

But it also explains growth. It also explains how we become adolescents and how we become then adults and so on.

What happens is the more memories you have in the hippocampus, the more memories you have stored, the more you change.

What is important to understand about memories, memories change you.

Think about the following. If I take away all your memories, would you have an identity?

No. Of course not. There's no identity without memory.

But what is your identity?

Your identity is also about growing up. Your identity is about you.

I was a child and I became a adolescent, now a student.

You know, this is, identity is a dynamic process. You update your identity all the time. You update. You no longer think that your children.

So it keeps being updated.

Updated with what?

With memories.

Memories are the fuel. The car is the identity. The fuel is memories.

But memories accumulate over time.

So information processing theory says that memories accumulate, as they accumulate, they change identity, and that is growing up. That is lifespan development.

And because it is a continuous process, not incremental, not regimented, but continuous, growth is lifelong and is continuous.

This is a little like Erickson, but Erickson still had stages. Erickson said it's lifelong, but he had stages.

Okay, so this is stimuli.

Now we said that the first thing with stimuli is you have to pay attention to the stimuli. You have to notice the stimuli.

If you have a stimulus without attention, you have nothing. Attention.

There are various types of attention. Would you agree? There are various types of attention.

For example, there is selective attention. If this lecture is boring, you would tune out the lecture and you would focus on your smartphone that is selective attention right right selective attention is when you can divide your attention not pay attention to something and pay attention to something it's one example of attention. Multitasking attention. Multitasking is when you're doing a few things simultaneously. You're cooking, you're surfing the phone and talking to your child. That's multitasking attention. We have alternating attention, paying focused attention, very high level of attention, intense attention, and then wandering off, and then waking up and yeah, coming back. So this is alternating attention. We have sustained attention. Sustained attention is when the attention is stable all the time throughout. And so on.

So you see that attention is not a single entity. It depends crucially on many, many things.

We discovered that attention, for example, the capacity to, or the types of attention and the capacity to pay attention, they depend on temperament. They depend, attention depends on temperament, on character, on personality.

Now you've all heard, I assume, of attention deficit, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, ADHD, ADD, yeah. There's a big debate if there is such a thing at all. Quite a big debate, but the pharmaceutical companies are making a lot of money on it, so I think it would be difficult to argue. But it's clear that some children are capable of focusing. They're capable to focus. Some children cannot focus. Some children have hyper focus. Hyperfocus is when you focus on a single thing and you cannot focus on other things. You've heard of autistic children? Autism. In autism, there's hyper focus. The autistic child focuses on a single thing, a small detail, goes very deep and he becomes compulsive, obsessive, cannot let go, is fixated, but does not pay attention to anything else. This is a form of hyper focus. So there are many, many things that are influenced by temperament, character and personality. Why is this important? Because the personality evolves. Personality is a process. You develop it. It grows with you. It's not static. You're not the same person that you were five years ago, I hope. You're not the same person.

So your personality changes all the time. If your personality changes all the time, your capacity for attention changes all the time.

Children have a much more limited attention, span than adults, for example. And then there's a question of how automatic what you're doing is. You remember driving? I told you driving. It's automatic. You don't. You know, your mind wonders. You don't pay attention. You don't pay attention to the wheel and to the brake and to the clutch. Your mind wonders.

So, how automatic, how dissociative the task is.

There is a question of complexity, the more complex the task, the more attention you're likely to pay.

There's a question of type. For example, some people absorb information much better if it is visual. Some people absorb information much better if it is auditory, if they hear it. I'm thinking with myself, for example. if they hear it. I'm thinking with myself, for example. I think I absorb information much better if it is in text. I think I react, I don't react as well to hearing and to, even to visual. So there are various types of stimuli that people react to differently.

And finally, are you able to ignore background noise? If there was music right here, reggae music or hip-hop or whatever, would you be able to focus on me? Why would you do that? I don't know. I mean, music is much more.

But okay, would you be able to focus on me? Why would you do that? I don't know. I mean, music is much more. But okay, would you be able to focus on me? Or, alternatively, on the music and ignore me. So you see there are many, many dimensions. You should know the following, though. You should know the following. Everyone tells you that multitasking is good. You should be able to multitask. You should be able to do a few things simultaneously. All the studies, there is not one exception. All the studies show that multitasking is a seriously bad idea. Seriously bad.

First of all, it is full of errors. The error rate in multitasking is much higher. It is much slower. When you multitask, you perform all the tasks much more slowly than if you focus on a single task. And multitasking degrades, degrades the capacity to pay attention. Your attention span, your attention level degrades over time.

So if you multitask all the time, after a few years, it will be extremely difficult for you to pay attention, even when you need to and want to. Of course, digital natives, you know what is digital natives? You heard the phrase, digital native? These are people who are born with gadgets. They are born, two-year-old who is playing with a laptop. So this is a digital native. Digital natives multitask all the time. On a typical laptop you would have two, three, four, five tabs open. That's multitasking. And so younger people have much greater difficulty with attention, with focus. Consequently, young people 20 years ago read on average 6.5, 6.5, 6 and a half books a year on average. Young people nowadays, the same age group, they read less than one book a year. And one of the main reasons, they cannot focus, they cannot concentrate. There is serious problem with the ability to concentrate after exposure to multitasking as you know personally probably

Okay, so this is attention stimuli and attention and now when you pay attention to stimuli What you do is you create information We understand you do is you create information. We understand that. You do?

Yes. We understand. Yes.

Yeah, you make sense of it. You make sense of it. So you create information. By the way, you should distinguish information from knowledge. Information is raw, so often. It's raw material. When you organize the information, it becomes knowledge. That's why there is a big debate if what you have on Wikipedia is knowledge. It's probably more information, not so much knowledge. You need to come to the information with some framework. If you don't come to the information with framework, it will never become knowledge. I can tell you now a hundred facts in physics, a hundred, and you will memorize these facts. You will remember all 100 facts. It will not make you physicists. To be a physicist, you need to make sense of these 100 facts. You need to organize them so that they interact with each other and create knowledge. So there is, in today's, we are exposed to information, but not to knowledge. We don't have context, we don't have frameworks, we don't have theories, we don't. It's a big problem. Anyhow, oops, what have I done? Right. So stimuli plus attention equals information and memory. When we have information, we put it in our minds, it becomes memory. Let's talk a bit about information. And there is this acronym. There is this acronym in information in information processing theory. What do you do with information? You perceive it, yes? You perceive it. You analyze it. You manipulate it, yes, you perceive it, you analyze it, you manipulate it, you use it, and you retrieve it. Perceive, analyze, manipulate, use, retrieve. In information processing theory, this process of pamo, this process of interacting with information, is growth. This is growing up. This is the process of transitioning from child to baby to infant, to child, to adolescent, to adult and so on.

They say there's nothing except this. Yeah, the body is changing and everything, but as far as the mind is concerned, it's just processing of information. It's just more information, which becomes more memories, which becomes more.

And this is what changes you and your personality and your mind, So you become adult and so.

So the information processing theory is like a theory of a computer.

It's like human beings are computers or their smartphones or laptops, you know. And they're like machines. And the more they're exposed to the environment, the richer they become.

You know, I got this tablet and initially it was very basic and very poor. I installed well over 200 apps on the tablet. Now it's a rich tablet. It's an adult. Now it's an adult.

When I got it, it was a baby. Now it's an adult. So that's what they're saying.

They're saying, all that matters is how much stimulus, stimuli, how much information, what you did with information, how many memories you created, how it affected your personality.

Focus on this and you will have the secret of lifespan development and so on.

I would like to talk about memory.

Because memory in information processing theories is by far the most crucial building block by far.

How much of the information you're exposed to today would you forget by tomorrow, do you think?

In numbers? How much? In percentage.

Like you're exposed today to information. How much of it would you forget by tomorrow?

Give me a number.

Nothing, I promise to be nice.

40, 50%?

Exactly. Yes?

Yes.

You forget 50% of all the information you're exposed to, and this is the conscious information.

How much of the information you're exposed to you become aware of, you become conscious of. How much? Give me a number.

Percentages. You're exposed to a million bits of information, yes? You see something on television, you see something on your smartphone, you watch, I mean, you're here in a lecture, you're talking to your friends, these are all bits of information.

How much of this information becomes conscious? How much of it? You become aware of.

Give me a number.

Any number.

Why are you so afraid? What's going to happen to you if you give the wrong number?

I will just throw you out of class. That's all.

That's what you become aware of?

No. Go down.

10. No?

Five. Yes. Again, yes.

You've been stealing my work. You've been reading my work.

Yes, of every hundred items of information, 100, only five become conscious. 95 are denied, inhibited. 95 are inhibited, denied, rejected.

And most of these 95 end up in the unconscious.

So we are aware only of 5% of our environment.

Even when we think that we are fully aware, like in a Taylor Swift concert, and whatever, even there you're absorbing 5% only.

That's the best case scenario, because if you are drunk, or if you are confronted with an unpleasant person, or a situation which challenges your self-image, how you see yourself, you reject a lot more information.

So it could go down up to 1%, and so on. But 5% is the average.

So let's understand.

5% of all the information you become aware of.

And of these, you forget 50% the next day. Of this 5%, you forget 50% the next day.

Okay, how much do you forget, let's say a few months later, up to a year later? How much of the information do you forget?

Again, you can all guess. Nothing will happen to you, I promise.

Give a guess. It's a number how much of all the information you're exposed to do you think you forget within one year butyear, but I mean forget like you have no access, never happened, it cannot be revived, retrieved, nothing like nothing ever happened. How much do you think one year?

You're very very optimistic person. 90?

So this is known, this is a graph, a famous graph of memory. Discovered, by the way, 120 years ago.

So, you're exposed to information on a typical day. 95% of it, you deny, you reject, it goes to the unconscious. You have no access to it. You never heard of it. Not processed. Nothing. Nada. 95%.

Of the remaining 5%, what you are aware of, what you are conscious of, of this remaining 5%, 50% is forgotten completely within 24 hours. You have no access to it, no memory of it, nothing. And another 40% is forgotten within one year.

So let's make the calculation. 5% multiplied by 0.1, because you forget 90%, yes, multiplied by 10%. 5% multiplied by 10%.

Do you understand that all your memories, all your identity, all who you think you are, is 0.5% of everything you've been exposed to. That's who you are. You are 0.5% of your life.

Now, there are mental illnesses where the situation is even much, much worse.

And this is known as dissociative disorders or dissociation. It's when memories are suppressed and forgotten completely and so.

For example, trauma. If you're traumatized, you know, something really bad happens and so on. And you are young enough, you will forget the event, you will delete it completely.

And this is known as dissociation or dissociative response. And it's very common in some mental illnesses, such as borderline personalities.

So these people, they don't remember 0.5% of their lives. You remember 0.5% assuming you're mentally healthy, you remember 0.5%. These people remember like 0.01% or like they vanish. They're gone. There's nobody there.

Indeed we say that these people at the core have an emptiness. We use the word emptiness. It's called the empty schizoid core. They have an emptiness, a black hole. There's nobody there.

So, memory, as you are beginning to see, memory is super crucial because even the little that you have defines who you are and without it you cannot grow.

Because it's a foundation. If you have no memory, you have no identity, no identity. What is there to grow? What will evolve if there's no identity?

So memory is very crucial.

And that's why I would like to dedicate what's left to memory, to discuss memory, within information processing theory.

Because there are other theories of memory. There are amazing experiments with memory. I will tell you about one of them.

It has nothing to do with information processing theory, but it's nice to get to know other fields in psychology.

So there was one very famous experiment about memories.

So the experimenter, a woman, she did it with students. She talked to students.

And she said to them, do you remember that when you were two years old or one years old or whatever, you lost your mommy in a shopping mall? Do you remember that?

And people, the students, most of the students said no. Actually at the beginning, all of them said no.

And then she said, well, you did. You lost your mommy in a shopping mall. It was a Thursday. You went to buy groceries. She went there. She was wearing a yellow dress.

So she gave them a lot of examples. Her name was Loftus, by the way. She did amazing experiments with memory. Amazing. You will not believe what this woman did.

Loftus.

Oh, I thought you wanted to be the camera. I thought Marian resigned finally. There's a limit to every suffering, huh?

So she told them this story, you were lost, and she gave them many details and so.

Okay, a fewevery suffering, huh?

So she told them this story, you were lost, and she gave them many details and so.

Okay, a few weeks later, brought them back. And she asked, do you remember that you were lost as a two-year-old in the shopping mall with your mommy?

And one third of them said, yes, we remember.

And then she told them, I invented it. It never happened. And all of them insisted that it did happen and that she's wrong.

It's a fact. It's a famous experiment.

So this gave rise to the concept of false memories.

There was a whole big scandal with false memories.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a group of therapists, and these therapists convinced their clients that they have been sexually abused as children.

So the clients went to the police and they complained that they've been sexually abused as children. And many people were arrested, they went to prison and everything.

And only much later it was discovered that these were false memories, planted memories, because it never happened. Like the shopping mall story.

Now you think that you are strong, you're resilient. It will never happen to you. This will never happen to you.

Actually, many of our memories are not real. They're mistaken. They're implanted somehow. We told ourselves stories and then we began to believe the stories.

This is known as confabulation. When there is a gap in memory between one event and another, we try to make sense of the gap.

And we create a story, a narrative, and this process is known in confabulation.

And then we believe the confabulation.

So sometimes you make coffee, if you drink coffee, you make coffee in the morning, and your mind is elsewhere, you're thinking about something and so on so forth, and then you kind of wake up, and the coffee is ready. But you don't remember anything. You remember that you went to the kitchen, and maybe you remember opening the tap, and that's it, and then there's a coffee there but it's terrifying it's frightening so you invent a story you say ah probably I probably I made the coffee probably I prepared the coffee well and then if someone asked you what did you just do you would would say, I made coffee. You have no memory of it. But you convinced yourself that you made coffee.

This is confabulation. This is known as dissociative gap compensation.

Okay. Let's talk a bit about memory.

Memory, we said, is intimately linked to...

It's okay. No problem there.

Memory, I said, is linked to identity formation.

You cannot form an identity if you don't have memories.

If I take your memories away, you will not know who you are. You will not have a sense that you are. You will not have a sense of I.

Of course, memory in this sense, in the sense of identity, can be very misleading.

Because for example, if I ask you, are you the same person that you were 10 years ago? Are you you? Like 10 years ago and now, are you?

Yeah, of course it's me.

Ah, that's me. No. For example, you see a photo. Photogram. Ah, that's me. You see this baby, that's me.

In which sense is it you?

First of all, physically, 95% of the cells in your body change every five years. They're not the same cells. So physically it's not you even.

But of course, you're different. You grow up.

What's the connection between you and this baby?

The only connection between you and this baby is the memory.

Now until age three, two, depending on the person, there is something called infantile amnesia. We don't remember.

If I ask you, what's your earliest memory? It's likely to be age one and a half two.

No one has memories age six months or age 12 months.

So no one has identity. No one has an identity until age two, more or less. You don't have an identity before then.

Identity formation is outcome of memory.

You're beginning to see that information processing theories are not wrong. They're not wrong because clearly memory has impact on development.

Memory gives you your identity. And identity is part of development. Memory gives your identity. And identity is part of development. You develop identity.

So memory has something to do with growth and development.

Now, memory is important part of learning, of course.

So another element in growing up in transitioning from child to adolescent, adolescent to adult, is that you are learning.

You're not only learning skills. Skills are very important how to write, how to read, how to pretend that you're listening to the lecture. These are important skills.

But you're learning many, many other things.

For example, you are learning who you are. You are learning how to relate to other people. This is known as social script. You're learning all the time. All the time you're learning.

Can there be learning without memory? Of course not. There's no learning without memory.

But can you grow up and develop without learning? You cannot grow up and develop without learning.

And there's no learning without memory.

You are beginning to see that information processing theory is very right, or partly right at least, because they say what the brain processes, and what becomes memory and knowledge, these are critical for growth and development, because without them you will not have identity. Without them, you will not learn. Without learning, you will not change, etc., etc. It's all connected. It's all connected.

Just let me see some of the things here.

But I read to you a text, a segment from an important text in information processing theory. And this is what the author has to say.

As mentioned when discussing the development of infant senses, within the first few weeks of birth, infants recognize their caregivers by face, voice, and smell. Sensory and caregiver memories are apparent in the first month. Motor memories by three months.

And then at about nine months more complex memories, including language.

There is agreement that memory is fragile in the first months of life, but that improves with age.

Repeated sensations and brain maturation are required in order to process and recall events.

Infants remember things that happened weeks and months ago, although they most likely will not remember it decades later.

From the cognitive perspective, this has been explained by the idea that the lack of linguistic skills of babies and toddlers limit their ability to mentally represent events, thereby reducing their ability to encode memory.

Moreover, even if infants do form such early memories, older children and adults may not be able to access them because they may be employing very different, more linguistically based retrieval cues than infants use when forming this memory.

Now, allow me to translate this into language, into English.

What the author is saying basically is that even very, very, very young babies, two months old, three months old and so on, they already form memories. This is based on experiments. This is not speculation. They made the conductive experiments. I mentioned by Rovee-Collier, but there were many others.

So they form memories. They made the conductive experiments. I mentioned by Rovee-Collier, but there were many others.

So they form memories. They even form complex memories. And babies are able to recall the memory a few months later.

Now that's not surprising. We know, for example, that animals, when we teach animals to find food in a maze, in a labyrinth, you know, the animal has to go like that, like that, likethat, and at the end there is food.

So this kind of animal, a few weeks later, the animal will remember the path. It will not again try, but it will go directly to the food.

So memory is a very powerful thing, even in very basic animals like mice or rats. It'sa very powerful thing, and animals maintain memory for weeks. Same with their babies. Babies are able to maintain memories for weeks and so on.

But what the author says, we cannot access these memories. The baby creates the memories, everything, and after that they're gone somewhere, they're stored somewhere. We cannot access them, we cannot retrieve them.

And the author asked why. Why the memories when you're six months old or the memories when you're one year old? Why can't you remember them now? What's the difference?

You remember what happened yesterday? Well, most of you. You remember what happened yesterday? Why don't you remember what happened when you were six months old?

And he suggests that the reason is language. He says the memories of children, babies, are pre-verbal. They don't involve language, while the memories after that involve language.

So what's the difference? The difference is that language allows you to encode, to create what Piaget called operations. Memories allow you to create mental representation in your mind.

Let's understand this concept because it is a very crucial concept for growth and development in general, even as adults, not only as children, not only as adolescents. In all stages of life, if you don't have good language skills, you will have memory problems, identity problems, and you will not be able to grow.

Language is crucial to memory. Memory is crucial to grow.

Okay, so let's talk a bit about preverbal.

When the baby has a memory, when the baby creates a memory, baby is confronted with mother and mother smiles at the baby, okay, if she's a good mother. And if your baby is not ugly.

So most babies are ugly. Mother smiles at baby.

Baby at that moment creates a memory.

Again, remember, all organisms react to stimuli, period. So baby creates in its brain a memory trace, creates something.

But there is no representation of mummy. There's nothing in the child's brain that says, this is mother, mother is smiling. This is mother, mother is smiling.

It's not about mother. It's about language. It's a way to create an internal mother, an introject.

So the language allows the baby to represent the world, allows the child, I'm sorry, to represent the world.

Babies don't have language, so they cannot represent the world. They can just interact with the world, but not represent it.

Let me give you an example. If I were to show you on this beautiful television, big, if I were to show you a movie in my language, Hebrew, you would, of course, be stimulated by the visuals and the sounds, but you will not be able to use language to create a mental representation of the movie, because you will not understand one word and what's happening and whatever, and you are much more likely to forget the movie, consequently.

Much more likely, or at least the movie will have no impact on you. It will not be part of your identity, will not drive your growth, you will not change your mind, will not make you think. Nothing. There will be zero impact.

In the absence of language, there is no representation of the outside world inside your mind.

Now, we are coming to the really frightening part.

We all live under the illusion, we're all under the illusion, that we're interacting with the outside world.

I'm looking at Marian, Marian is looking at his camera, his camera is looking at me. We're all looking at each other and we think that we are interacting with the world out there.

We don't. We are not interacting with the world out there.

Stimuli that are coming from the world are translated into sensa, sensory inputs, auditory inputs, visual inputs and so.

These are electrochemical signals.

So number one, whatever information is coming from the world into your eyes, into your ears, is converted into electro-biochemical signals, is converted into a language.

Electro-biochemical signals are signals. They're not reality.

When I look at Marian, Marian triggers in me electro-biochemical signals.

You didn't know that, Marian. See?

He triggers in me electro-biochemical signals. I am converting Marian, which is not easy, but I'm converting him into a set, a set of signals.

These are symbols. This is not reality.

Wait a minute, that's on the end.

These electro-biochemical signals, they travel. They travel to the brain.

So in the eye, you have the optic nerve. This is the eye, you have an optic nerve. The nerve goes into the brain.

The signals go through the optic nerve to the brain.

When they reach the brain, the brain refuses to accept them.

What the brain does, the brain activates a mathematical model, which is exactly like software, exactly like word, exactly like Excel. The brain puts the signals that Marian created in, puts them in the mathematical model, the mathematical model recreates Marian in my mind and it is what I experience is not Marian, I experience the model in my mind, the activity of my brain.

So, none of us is interacting with reality. We're interacting with models inside our brains that recreate reality.

Recreate reality.

So, when I'm looking at Marian, if you want another metaphor, when I'm looking at Marian, I'm not interacting with Marian. I'm interacting with a video of Marian in my mind. I made a video of Marian in my mind. I'm interacting with this video.

Why is that a problem?

Because as you can understand, with so many levels of transformation, signals, model, there could be many mistakes. There could be many mistakes.

And there are often many mistakes.

So what we do, we do not expose ourselves to reality on a continuous basis because it's too much information.

If we are exposed to reality continuously, there will be too much information and huge huge number of mistakes, and we will get run over by a truck, and we will die, which sometimes is better.

But what we do, we sample. We have a sampling device.

So, for our eyes sample the environment 24 to 30 times a second.

We do not see a continuous. For example, if Marian is moving his hands, I am not seeing Marian moving his hands.

I am sampling. I have 30 photos, 30 stills. And I animate them in the mathematical model. I animate them.

That's why we can watch movies, because a movie is made of 30.

So, same with sound. We sample sounds, we sample sound, same with text, we sample, everything we sample.

So actually, if we did not have the mathematical model in the brain, we would see, when I look at Marian, I would see 30 still photographs of Marian. That's what I would see.

And none of it would make sense, because these are still photographs, it's not dynamic, I don't understand the connection between them and so on.

It is the model that makes this.

Same thing applies to relationships with other people. Same thing applies to your self-perception, how you perceive yourself, how you see yourself.

You are creating models, you are creating theories about who you are, about other people, what makes other people tick.

This is called a theory of mind. You are creating theories about relationships.

That's the internal working model.

It's all theories. It's all sampling. It's all imaginary. You live in an illusion. It's an illusion that you believe is the world, but it's not.

So what he was trying to say in this text is that the child has no language. Because the child has no language, there's no possibility to represent the external world inside the mind.

So the child doesn't have these models. The child doesn't have these models.

So it's very difficult for the child to make sense of what's happening. And it's even more difficult to form memories in the long term, long term memories. Very difficult.

Language is crucial. We are creatures of language. We are creatures of stories. We don't live in reality. Each one of us is trapped in a narrative, in a story.

When I ask you who you are, you give me the story of who you are. When I ask you what are you experiencing, you give me the story about you.

These are all, it's all story construction, narrative construction.

And this is the core insight of information processing theory.

We are not creatures that rely on flesh and blood. We are not creatures that rely on observations like laboratory instruments. We are creatures that rely on information.

And it is information that drives growth and development.

So today I decided to be extra nice, and I'm going to give you 20 minutes instead of 15.

Okay, thank you for being here.