and there's a famous man, a case study in neuroscience, he was studied by alexander lauria, and he remembered everything and could memorize massive quantities of text in a foreign language and mathematical formulas he didn't understand and could regurgitate these in perfect detail years later. but he was somewhat impaired because, again, there was no background and foreground, right? everything was remembered. so what was meaningful was just remembered as what was inconsequential. and and so he was really burdened by this. >> host: yeah, yeah. >> guest: i think it's really useful for our ability to function. >> host: right. let me press you on something you said because i want to see if you'll stick to it. is it really true that not having to remember all the phone numbers that we used to have to remember like, you know, you used to have to remember dozens of phone numbers just to stay in touch with people, you know, we'd have little books, but still -- and now we don't. i can remember maybe one or two phone numbers -- [laughter] you know, that are old phone numbers like, you know, that i gre

and there's a famous man, a case study in neuroscience, he was studied by alexander lauria, and he remembered everything and could memorize massive quantities of text in a foreign language and mathematical formulas he didn't understand and could regurgitate these in perfect detail years later. but he was somewhat impaired because, again, there was no background and foreground, right? everything was remembered. so what was meaningful was just remembered as what was inconsequential. and and so he was really burdened by this. >> host: yeah, yeah. >> guest: i think it's really useful for our ability to function. >> host: right. let me press you on something you said because i want to see if you'll stick to it. is it really true that not having to remember all the phone numbers that we used to have to remember like, you know, you used to have to remember dozens of phone numbers just to stay in touch with people, you know, we'd have little books, but still -- and now we don't. i can remember maybe one or two phone numbers -- [laughter] you know, that are old phone numbers like, you know, that i gre