Robots can't kill you – claiming they can is dangerous

I didn't do it! Jiuguang Wang/flickr, CC BY-SA

Robots' involvement in human deaths is nothing new. The recent death of a man who was grabbed by a robot and crushed against a metal plate at a Volkswagen factory in Baunatal, Germany, attracted extensive media attention. But it is strikingly similar to one of the first recorded case of a death involving an industrial robot 34 years ago.

These incidents have happened before and will happen again. Even if safety standards continue to rise and the chance of an accident happening in any given human/robotic interaction goes down, such events will become more frequent simply because of the ever-increasing number of robots.

This means it is important to understand this kind of incident properly, and a key part of doing so is using accurate and appropriate language to describe them. Although there is a sense in which it is legitimate to refer to the Baunatal incident as a case of “robot kills worker”, as many reports have done, it is misleading, verging on the irresponsible, to do so. It would be much better to express it as a case of “worker killed in robot accident”.

Admittedly, putting it that way isn’t as eye-grabbing, but that’s precisely the point. The fact is, robots, despite what one might be encouraged to believe from sci-fi, and despite what may happen in the far future, currently lack what we consider real intentions, emotions and purposes. And contrary to recent alarmist claims, nor are they going to acquire those capacities in the near future.

They can only “kill” in the sense that a hurricane (or a car, or a gun) can kill. They can’t kill in the sense that some animals can, let alone in the human sense of murder. Yet murder is likely to be what springs to most people’s minds when they read “robot kills worker”.

High stakes

Insisting on getting this language right isn’t an academic exercise in pedantry. The stakes are high. For one thing, an unwarranted fear of robots could lead to another unnecessary “artificial intelligence winter”, a period where the technology ceases to receive research funding. This would delay or deny the considerable benefits robots can bring not just to industry but society in general.

But even if you’re not optimistic about the benefits of robots, you should still want to get this issue right. Since robots don’t have responsibility, humans are the ones responsible for what robots do. However, as robots become more prevalent, it will increasingly appear as if they actually have their own autonomy and intentions, for which it will seem they can and should be held responsible.

Meet your new colleague Shutterstock

Although there may eventually come a day when that appearance is matched by reality, there will be a long period of time (which has already begun) when this appearance will be false. Even now we are already tempted to categorise our interactions with robots into what we are responsible for and what they are responsible for. This raises the danger of scapegoating the robot, and failing to hold the human designers, deployers and users involved fully responsible.

Moral robots or morally made robots?

It’s not just those reporting on robots that need to get the language right. Policymakers, salespeople, and those in research and development who are designing the robots of today and tomorrow need to keep a clear head. Instead of asking “what’s the best way to make moral robots?”, we should ask “what’s the best way to morally make robots?”.

This subtle change in the language, if adopted, would result in big changes in design. For example, trying to give robots moral laws to follow would require us to provide them with a human-like level of common sense to apply those laws, something that would be far harder. Instead of following such a design dead end we could aim for machines that are a results of the designers' own morals, just as we try to ethically design non-robotic technology.

In the Volkswagen accident, a company spokesperson reportedly said “initial conclusions indicate that human error was to blame, rather than a problem with the robot”. Other reports spoke of it being human error rather than the robot “being at fault” or “accountable”. This implies that, in other circumstances, the robot could have been considered to blame for the accident.

If there was a “problem with the robot”, be it faulty materials, a misperforming circuit board, bad programming, poor design of installation or operational protocols, that problem – or not anticipating it – would still have been due to human error. Yes, there are industrial accidents where no human or group of humans is to blame. But we mustn’t be tempted by the appearance of agency in robots to absolve their human creators of responsibility. Not yet anyway.

New method could help estimate time of death for a ten-day-old corpse

Murderers should fear the recent advances in forensic science. EPA, CC BY

In any murder investigation, one of the most crucial questions is when the victim died. Accurately pinning down the time of death helps forensic teams to track down the whereabouts of their suspects – and whether they had an alibi.

Despite the value of this information, it is currently not possible to estimate time of death in a reliable way after about 36-72 hours. But now a new test for calculating the exact time of death after as many as ten days has been developed. However, the method, which works by tracking the degradation of protein in muscles, has only been tested in pigs so far.

In forensic investigations, the time since death is known as the post-mortem interval. Forensic pathologists can use the physical and chemical transformations that occur in the body after the death in order to estimate it.

The measure of body temperature is one of the most important indicators that forensic pathologists use to deduce the post-mortem interval. Other approaches include how much the blood has settled or how much the muscles have stiffened (an effect known as rigor mortis). However these factors are only useful until about 72 hours after the death.

Old autopsy room at Indiana Medical History Museum. Huw Williams /wikimedia

In addition, the precision of the measurements depends on several factors related to the external environment – such as temperature or the exposure or concealment of the body. Other variables include body weight and the presence of wounds or pathologies on the body.

A lot of research is being carried out to improve such tests. One promising tool is the study of insects and their developmental stage, which is particularly useful in highly decomposed bodies. This is because insects colonise a body in predictable waves, so the study of insects on cadavers tells us something about the minimum time since death. Microbiome, the study of the succession pattern of microorganisms like bacteria, is another up and coming approach.

Revolution or baby steps?

The new study looked at the degradation of the muscle proteins in pigs, the closest animal model to humans when it comes to post-mortem studies. We know that proteins degrade after death – this is already used to understand the tenderness of the meat served on our tables. But what was not known was the rate of the muscle protein degradation and how applicable it would turn out to be in the field of forensics.

The researchers used a method called gel electrophoresis, which can be used to separate proteins according to molecular size. In this way, they could track a number of proteins according to their sizes over time. The found that some proteins disappeared very soon after death (such as titin and nebulin), whereas others degraded more slowly (desmin and SeRca1). Some never degraded (a-actin and tropomyosi) – at least not within the 240 hours of the study. In this way, the team generated a completely new approach for determining time of death, and it worked for up to ten days after death.

The precision of this approach was surprisingly high. In certain cases, detecting how much a protein has broken down allowed time-of-death estimations within 8 hours. In other cases, however, the precision range was higher, around 24 hours.

However, the method is not yet ready to be introduced into real police investigations. The next step will be to transfer the information from the pig model to humans. However, that shouldn’t take too long as there has been a surge in the number of volunteers that donate their body for forensic studies.

A number of advances in forensic science could together transform time-of-death measurements. EPA

But there are also other variables that need to be considered. The study did not take the effect of temperature and the age of the victim into account when tracking protein degradation. These are things that will have to be considered to develop a working method for real forensics teams.

But the study is still a big step forward in a rapidly evolving field. Combining this new method with standard time-of-death estimation, entomological evidence and microbiological clues will allow us to pinpoint the time of death of a person with a precision unbelievable few years ago – and it will do so in the very close future. The advances will significantly boost out chances to identify suspects and reducing judicial mistakes related to error in time estimations.

Why it makes sense for BT to shut down its telephone network

The telephone network is dead, long live telephone calls! guy_hatton, CC BY-NC

As the telecoms regulator Ofcom embarks on its next strategic review of the UK’s telecommunications services, BT has called for it to be allowed to close down its telephone network. Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, this actually makes sense.

As Ofcom’s studies confirm that landline and mobile telephone call use continues to fall, telecoms companies have faced mounting pressures to find other ways of making money.

BT, like many others, has sought to diversify by offering so-called “quad play” packages, common in the US, which bundle together telephone, broadband, mobile and television services. So it could be said that BT is as much a television company as it is telephone company these days. The world has moved on, and BT with it.

However, BT and KCOM Group (formerly Kingston Communications, serving Hull) are alone within the industry as they are designated by the Communications Act 2003 as “universal service providers”. This means that both companies must provide basic telephone services on request and at the same price to all customers throughout their areas of influence.

In the 12 years since the world has changed dramatically: in 2003 people were starting to switch their internet access from dial-up modems to the new, speedier connection called “broadband”. The UK’s first, relatively primitive 3G mobile phone network opened, the Freeview digital television service turned one year old, and BBC iPlayer was still many years in the future.

Today in 2015 the internet is everything; the average UK adult now spends more time per day interacting with connected digital technology than sleeping, and the average household has at least three internet-connected devices.

BT’s argument is that the future is not telephones but digital services over the internet. BT has an entire network built to handle the telephone calls of the last century (and the century before that) - the so-called Plain Old Telephone System (POTS). The rest of its network is a modern telecommunications network that’s digital right up to the cable that connects the exchange to the home, which carries both voice and data signals. Today telephony is just another service that can be delivered over the internet – why do we need a large and expensive network dedicated to offering telephone services?

POTS and kettles

The answer is we don’t. Telephone services can be provided in what’s called an “over-the-top” service running on a data network. The mobile industry has already recognised this and re-designed its networks accordingly. While first-generation, second (2G) and third (3G) networks provided both voice and data, today’s fast 4G networks are data only. Voice calls are just another form of network traffic like web browsing, social media or streaming video.

BT (or more accurately its arms-length Openreach division which provides the infrastructure), argues that it wants to do the same, but its hands are tied by the legally-binding requirements of the “universal service” clause of the Communications Act.

However, we need to be very careful here with our terminology. According to Ofcom, 16% of UK adults now live in a mobile-only household. This means those people rely solely on their mobile phones for making telephone calls and don’t have a landline telephone. Does this mean Openreach has removed their telephone line? No, because that same line is what provides broadband services to our homes – you can have a telephone line without connecting a telephone to it.

BT’s argument is that today the concept of a universal service has become a millstone around its neck that forces it to maintain a large and outdated telephone network at great cost to support telephone exchanges that fewer and fewer people use.

Despite the growing trend that sees people using apps such as Skype, Viber or Whatsapp to communicate through the internet, the companies responsible have no requirement upon them to build or maintain their own networks – they rely on those provided by telecoms firms. Why should BT be lumbered with offering a basic telephone service to all, when the same thing can be achieved via broadband? Scrapping its network that is solely responsible for providing a telephone service would allow BT to re-invest in the further development of its broadband and internet provision and so compete more freely with other “over the top” providers.

There is of course an obvious caveat to all of this: the concept of universal service is to ensure that every household has access to basic telephone services. This remains an important and worthy obligation, it’s just that there are now other ways of achieving it. That’s the point that Ofcom really needs to grasp: scrapping the telephone network does not mean scrapping the telephone.

Married at first sight: latest reality TV show poses as 'social experiment'

Getting hitched, or stitched up? Ray Burmiston/Channel 4

Married at First Sight, Channel 4’s “social experiment” reality show which asks whether “science can help to create a successful relationship and if the act of marriage itself helps create a psychological bond that leads to true and enduring love” is about to air in the UK.

Like its sister shows in Denmark, the US and Australia, it’s the latest in a series of reality television programmes to use the format of arranged marriage to place lovelorn singles in hothouse situations for our entertainment.

But this time, instead of simply being offered romantic suspense, emotional stress and gendered humiliation, we’re being asked to view this as a legitimate social experiment. This is scientific research – and the show’s producers have hired relationship experts to oversee and legitimise it.

For each series, the relationship experts match up heterosexual couples using various forms of psychological and neurological testing – basing their selection on their personal and social history. The couples they match will marry, go on honeymoon and move in together while being recorded continuously – with the option of deciding to separate if they change their minds within five weeks. The television channel recently announced some of the volunteers who will shortly be getting married.

Entertainment guinea pigs

Channel 4’s experiment is one that would be highly unlikely to pass muster with any human research ethics committee.

The experts, who gather data from participants to match couples and then interpret their ongoing interactions, come from a variety of disciplines including evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience, psychotherapy and clinical psychology. All of these are professions that require members to uphold standards of human research ethics that include preventing social and psychological harm and avoiding conflicts of interest.

But as per the formula of most reality television, participants are deliberately stressed and exposed, with the data gathered by each researcher publicly interpreted for our entertainment. There is a conflict of interest between the needs of the show’s producers for the largest audience possible and the needs of the participants to be protected from psychological harm.

Discovery’s Naked and Afraid goes wrong – dramatic scenes for your entertainment.

There is also a conflict of interest between the role of each expert as scientist, consultant, and television performer.

While the contestants will have undoubtedly signed detailed consent forms, this in no way overrides the experts' own professional obligations to conduct research that complies with the ethical guidelines set for their industries. That’s what guidelines for ethical research practice are there for; to protect participants from voluntarily consenting to experiments that may prove to be harmful.

It’s arguable that much of the show breaches common guidelines for ethical conduct in human research, and the ethical codes of practice for psychotherapy and psychology.

Harm can be done

There’s no question that the social and psychological sciences have made significant contributions to both violations of ethical research practice and general human misery. Among several humanitarian crimes, anthropologists have worked for natural resource industries against the interests of first peoples. Psychologists have participated in so-called conversion therapy and the design and implementation of torture.

In the case of reality television, because it’s marketed as “light entertainment”, sometimes masked as social experimentation to give it an air of credibility, we can be persuaded to see it as a matter for ethical debate rather than professional sanction.

Professor Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist known for the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment in the early 1970s and past president of the American Psychological Association, has had significant input in the design of reality television programme the Human Zoo. According to Zimbardo, shows such as Survivor, where contestants are marooned on an island and have to feed and shelter themselves while competing in challenges, promote “the worst aspects of human behaviour and the wrong human values.” Human Zoo, however, which used candid-camera style filming to observe human behaviour and social interaction between a group of strangers, was a more responsible and positive demonstration of psychological ideas.

Zimbardo has described the role of the media as a “gatekeeper between psychology and the public”. I’m not sure how we can expect the media to act as a gatekeeper for the public. Aside from dubious ethical standards, what about the people who have experienced significant negative impacts from appearing in such shows and the poor track record for research ethics in reality television to date? It appears that when it comes to televised radical social experiments, both participants and the public are to be left to protect themselves.

As reality television begins to position itself beyond the realm of simple voyeurism and ventures into the territory of legitimate social research without the ethical oversight, perhaps the place for complaints about the process is not only the television networks themselves but also the various member associations of the contributing expert consultants, who are accountable to the public for the ethical practice of their members and have dedicated professional conduct committees whose role is to hear and respond to complaints about the practices of their members.

Participant complaints could have a significant impact on the process of making experimental television. But in the case of the current crop of new reality shows, we have yet to find out.

How horror games give us the fright we're looking for

'I hate to say this but he, uh, it's behind you.' EA Games

Why play horror-themed videogames designed to shock and scare? As with horror films or novels, they provide a means to indulge in the pleasure of frightening ourselves. Freakish, monstrous characters programmed to challenge and destroy the player gratifies the fear-induced thrill-seeking that drives gamers to immerse themselves in such virtual worlds.

Until now there had been no investigation into how the immersive nature of survival horror games frightens us, and how our individual traits can affect the degree to which they scare us. Researchers Teresa Lynch and Nicole Martins from Indiana University published a study of fear response in 269 college students playing popular survival horror games such as Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, the Dead Space and Silent Hill series, and the formidable Amnesia: The Dark Descent. They applied a method used to measure viewer perception of fear in film and television to survival horror games.

Participants were asked questions about the games they played and how often, their perception of survival horror games, and how sound, image and presence influenced the fear they felt. Over half of the gamers experienced fear during play and just over forty percent reported that they enjoyed this fear. The study is a fascinating enquiry as to why we play video games, and how they make us feel and what they make us feel.

The role of empathy

Empathy is when we share the thoughts and feelings of others; when we see someone scared or upset that evokes the same emotional response in us. This allows us to sympathise with others and be compassionate. Lynch and Martins found that overall, players with low empathy were more likely to play and enjoy horror games than those with high empathy levels. Those that can relate to negative emotions in others such as fear may seek to avoid feeling those negative emotions in fear-induced games. Fear and anxiety may be increased in empathetic individuals so they feel helpless and overwhelmed and are less able to disengage in the real world.

While men and women players experienced the same frequency of fear and felt scared at the same times in a game, as shown by the monitor readings, men were less likely to admit to being frightened. Instead men emphasised how much they enjoyed playing horror games, putting on a brave front. Women were more likely to describe how scared they felt, being less rational and stoic about their fear-response. Lynch and Martins concluded that this may be due to typical gender stereotyping.

The welcoming committee will see you now. Valve

Presence and realism

The element of unexpected, ghastly surprise heightened the fear experience, especially when the player felt immersed in that unpredictable environment. Participants described panic at their lack of control, as if they were a hunted animal desperately trying to escape their predators.

The effect of presence, the immersive feeling of being “in the game”, was a factor in how scared people were because the player is the decision maker, unlike a film when the viewer only passively observes the action unfold. Rather than simply watching a person being chased by mutant zombies, the player was the person pursued, their life in their own hands, and consequently the outcome relies on their skill and quick thinking.

The level of detail and realism of the enemies the player faced increased player fear – the more realistic the appearance and behaviour of a (for example) zombie assailant, the more frightened players felt. These uncanny representations of realistic, non-human zombies enhanced the fear factor as a morbid reminder of death. This fills players with dread as they frantically try to escape their own demise and mortality.

Lynch and Martin’s findings offer some support for the significant amounts of money and time invested by game developers in creating virtual life-like worlds and populating them with life-like characters that allow the player to suspend their disbelief. As for the future, the exponential increase in computer processing power and improving rendering techniques for creating game graphics, alongside ever more convincing interactivity with characters suggest that video games will continue feeding players the frights they’re looking for.

Virtual reality tech may make 'going shopping' in real life a thing of the past

'Too much Call of Duty, not enough shopping'. pestoverde, CC BY-SA

High street shops are well-established online these days and provide new opportunities for interaction between shop and shopper. Consumers have become accustomed to shopping using a range of devices and the immense popularity of smartphones and mobile devices has led to the rise of mobile or m-retailing, with new communication and distribution channels created with these in mind. Perhaps this mix of the real and online worlds are helpful precursors for what may be the “next big thing”: virtual reality shopping.

Virtual reality (VR) experiences are typically provided through wearable headgear or goggles that block out the real world and immerse the user in a virtual one. This is distinguished from augmented reality (AR), where layers of digital content can be overlayed on the real world, providing access to both. For example, the digital information displayed on the visor of Google Glass.

Apps can provide ‘live’ augmented reality to try on superimposed accessories and clothes. Eawentling, CC BY-NC-SA

While AR can work with mobile devices and is already included in some apps, for VR to succeed the headgear needs to be comfortable, stylish and powered by sufficiently capable software so that the immersive visual effects are credible – and useful. It’s possible to add deeper engagement with the virtual world by incorporating other senses, for example tactile hand controls for handling and manipulating objects.

In-store tech

Magic mirrors, where how you’d like to look is projected onto your actual appearance. Intel, CC BY-SA

However, the use of technology by retailers in-store has been patchy. The availability of in-store Wi-Fi has increased, and some stores offer touchscreens and tablets for customers to browse and search for items and look up information. More common are video screens displaying fashion collections, often connected to apps offering inspirational looks. However more cutting edge tech, such as magic mirrors that overlay the image of the shopper with the clothes they’ve selected, allowing them to switch style and colour options, are less widespread. Sometimes they’re also less than reliable.

In any case, shoppers tend to appreciate functionality over more playful or whimsical means of interacting with the retailer. New additions are welcome when they are informative and save the shopper time, helping them locate products in the store or at another. Not surprisingly consumers would rather not pay for these services, and prefer to be engaged rather than marketed to. Young fashion shoppers simply use their phones to share photos of potential purchases through Snapchat and Instagram. Image is everything, with the retailer providing the backdrop.

Present trends point to the expansion of interactive shop window displays and in-store communication that uses a combination of GPS, transmitters such as the Apple’s iBeacon and other devices using Bluetooth transmissions to interact with shopper’s smartphones. These will take personalisation and micro-marketing to a new level with real-time offers and information dispatched to their phone as they pass near product displays.

To support their brand, retailers will increasingly look at their customer relationships, so stories, images, videos and news – fashion and cosmetic blogs have been particularly successful – is where many new opportunities will arise. However, while creative and technologically novel, these are all at best examples of augmented rather than virtual reality.

Making a (virtual) impression

Where does this leave the use of virtual reality? We can expect to see trials as retailers become more comfortable offering content through them. New VR headsets such as from Oculus Rift and Sony will offer more and more realistic immersive environments. Sony, drawing on its Playstation expertise aims to to add movement to the user experience. Some brands have already piloted virtual stores, where VR-equipped shoppers could one day have the same experience of browsing through racks and shelves waiting for something to catch their eye – without needing to leave their home.

VR will provide an opportunity to re-visit and experience retailers' and desigers’ fashion shows of the past, events and exhibitions. For example, Top Shop recently transmitted London Fashion week as it happened through Oculus Rift headsets to customers in its Oxford Street store. It may also provide a means for retailer to extend the lifespan of certain promotions to individual customers.

Immersion is particularly promising in the creation or re-creation of 3D environments, which could be especially helpful for those buying furniture, furnishings, paint and decoration for their homes to envisage how it would look. The recently developed Virtuix virtual reality platform provides a motion controller that translates the users physical movements into equivalents in the virtual environment – a means to, literally, walk around a virtual world.

However, any major step forward will need to make the retailer’s investment worthwhile, and as neither the technology nor shoppers' complete acceptance of VR is where it needs to be today, there’s some way to go before VR becomes the next big thing in shopping.

Celebrity selfies helped us to uncover how memories are formed in the brain

Memorable man. Josh Brolin has done his bit for science. Siebbi/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

In the science fiction movie Inception, Leonardo Di Caprio and his gang set out to implant specific memories into individuals' brains in order to pull off the perfect crime. But in the real world of science implanting memories is actually quite easy – the challenge is tracking the brain cells involved in the process. Our research has now started to unveil some of the basic mechanisms of how new memories are encoded in the brain, simply using selfies to implant the memories.

Obstacles to reading the mind

For centuries, philosopher Rene Descartes inspired other thinkers with his famous thesis that mind and body are two separate entities. Today, however, most neuroscientists hold a “materialistic” view of the mind in relationship to the brain: the “mind” is the activity of neurons, as electricity is the movement of electrons or temperature the kinetic energy of molecules.

So, if the mind is nothing more than the firing of neurons, we should be able to alter their activity to influence behaviour. Or conversely, we should be able to alter behaviour – like implanting a memory or a thought – and track down how this is matched by changes in the firing of neurons.

So how do we go about implanting a memory? We just need to give subjects some new, memorable information, like telling them, for example, that a specific person has been seen at a specific place. The more salient and relevant the memory, the more it will be rehearsed and consolidated, and the longer it will last. However, incepting memories is one thing, tracking the firing of the neurons encoding them is another. In fact, it involves implanting electrodes in the brain, something that is in principle out of the question for humans.

There are, however, very special occasions when this procedure is done. One example is in patients suffering from epilepsy that cannot be controlled with medication. These patients have electrodes implanted in the brain that can record information to delineate the area starting the epileptic seizures to eventually be taken out surgically. This procedure is quite successful – in many cases stopping or largely reducing the number of seizures – and it gives neuroscientists the incredible opportunity to study the firing of neurons in awake humans.

The Jennifer Aniston neuron

Using these type of recordings, we have previously shown that there are neurons in the human brain that represent specific concepts, like a person, an animal or a place. Researchers in the field sometimes refer to these as Jennifer Aniston neurons, because the first of these neurons we identified fired to seven different pictures of Jennifer Aniston but not to any other pictures of actors, persons or places. Later on we found another one that fired only to different pictures of Halle Berry and even to her name written in the computer screen, and yet another one that fired selectively to different pictures of Oprah Winfrey and her name on the screen, and so on.

Known to get some brain cells firing. Andres Useche/wikimedia, CC BY

In the last few years, we have shown different aspects of how these neurons encode information in a very abstract, conceptual way. The cells are located in the hippocampus and its surrounding cortex, an area that has been linked to memory processes – patients with hippocampal lesions lose their ability to form new memories (as Leonard, the main character in the film Memento).

It makes sense that we have neurons encoding concepts in the memory-related areas of the brain, given that we tend to remember specific concepts and links between them. For example, if you remember meeting a friend at the pub, you probably forget myriads of irrelevant details like the clothes your friend was wearing and the exact time he or she showed up. This is because remembering too many details would distract us from processing the essential information to elaborate thoughts.

However, you are likely to remember the concept of meeting your friend X and talking about Y. For these reasons, we view these neurons as the “building blocks of memory”. They are a representation of concepts that we link to each other in specific ways to form and recall memories. But how this is done?

The selfie solution

The experiment started with the assumption that some of the neurons initially firing to a certain concept would also start firing to a related one, once the subject had made an association between the two.

Who could ever forget seeing this image? Matias Ison, University of Leicester

To test this, we started by creating composite images resembling a “selfie” of a specific person in a specific place. The person/place pairs were carefully chosen so that the studied neurons initially fired either to the person or the place but not to both.

The striking result was that, seeing these images, the neurons started firing to the associated concepts at the exact moment the subjects learned the associations. For example, a neuron that originally fired to actor Josh Brolin but not to the Eiffel Tower, started firing to the Eiffel Tower from the moment the subject remembered that Josh Brolin was there.

These types of associations are the skeletons of how we construct our memories – meeting a person in a place, having a chat about a specific topic, drinking a glass of red wine, and so on. Our team has now shown how these memories, these specific associations, are encoded by neurons in memory-related areas. In humans, we still can’t selectively activate sets of neurons to incept specific memories, but we are starting to disclose the basic mechanisms of how new memories are encoded.