K.C.’s major problem was that he could not remember anything that happened to him personally. He had problems making new memories of any kind, but there was a specific type of old memory that he could not pull up. Facts, like statements from Trivial Pursuit, were there; but personal experiences were not. K.C. could not recall anything that he had witnessed, done, or felt himself. For instance, two years before his accident, he surprised his family the night before his brother’s wedding by having his hair permed. For the rest of his life, he knew his brother had married. But he could not remember himself being at the wedding, or how his family reacted to his curly hair. He also knew that he and his family along with 100,000 other people had evacuated their home for ten days to escape a chemical spill in his neighborhood, but couldn’t remember if he was scared or anxious. He knew of the accidental death of his brother, with whom he was very close, but he had no recollection of where he was when he heard about it, who told him, or what it was like for him at the funeral.
K.C. also couldn’t plan for the future. When doctors asked him what he thought he might do in the next fifteen minutes, later that day, the next week, or with the rest of his life, he said he didn’t know. He described his mind as being blank, the same kind of blank as when he tried to think back on his past. K.C. suffered an inability to mentally time travel into his own past and his own future.
Many neuropsychologists have studied K.C.’s brain, and those of other patients who have experienced similar accidents and memory impairments. These scientists also use neuroimaging technology to measure the activity in different regions of the brains of individuals who have not suffered any injuries. The results converge, and the evidence is clear. The neural circuitry involved in remembering episodes from our past is nearly identical to the circuitry involved in planning for the future. Regardless of whether we are using our minds to travel back in time or predict the future, the prefrontal cortex and parts of the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, are active.
Interestingly, these brain regions happen to be the same ones that respond when people watch their videos from the 1 Second Everyday app. I heard about a remarkable neuroscientist, Wilma Bainbridge, who has been studying users of the app. Bainbridge is smart, of course. She got her PhD in brain and cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She’s also incredibly busy. She worked on a team to make robots act more like humans. She taught computer programming to high school students in Jerusalem. She can speak English, Korean, Arabic, and Japanese. And Bainbridge created the subtitles to a television show called Reset, a psychological drama about how people would change their lives if they got a do-over. Now she conducts research at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, and she is discovering what makes certain things easier to remember and others easier to forget. That she had time to chat with me about her work must have meant that I caught her while she was waiting in line for a coffee or something.
When I asked Bainbridge what got her interested in studying people who use 1 Second Everyday, she told me that she herself had been using it for about six years. She went on to explain that she had scanned her brain while watching her montage. The result? “I found where I process time.” When she looked over the movies she’d made of where and when different regions of her brain were active while looking at the videos, Bainbridge could tell from the silhouetted and ghostly X-ray-like images whether she had been watching footage of her life from long ago or one that was relatively more recent. That got her interested in the idea of mental time travel and what thinking about the past does for us in the present.
Bainbridge told me that she gathered a group of people who had been using the 1 Second Everyday app for a few years or more. Some of them hadn’t missed a day in six years—like her, in fact. She had them watch five minutes’ worth of their own videos as they lay still in the bed of the fMRI machine. As she watched the different parts of their brain respond on the monitor, Bainbridge saw what neuroscientists might expect. The part of the brain that specializes in making sense of faces lit up when the clips portrayed people. The part of the brain that specializes in processing houses and places lit up when the clips included those kinds of images.
But what Bainbridge was particularly interested in was whether there was something special that happened when people watched their own videos. So she had her participants also watch five minutes of someone else’s daily videos. Participants saw people and houses and places in these videos too. The people were strangers and most of the settings were unfamiliar, but brain activity was generally the same. The face parts lit up, and so did the building parts. But a few regions of the brain were particularly active in response to personal videos, but not to others’ videos. When people watched their own 1 Second Everyday videos, a specific part of the hippocampus and a specific part (the frontal pole) of the prefrontal cortex were uniquely sensitive. These areas are the same brain regions that were damaged during K.C.’s motorcycle accident.
When you put all the evidence together, Bainbridge’s work tells us that when people review their personal cinematographic creation, they are remembering their own unique past that no one else could possibly re-create. But, even more interesting, when they watch their own 1 Second Everyday videos, people are also engaging the same brain systems that are necessary to plan for the future.
I dedicated a month to the 1 Second Everyday app and gave it the chance to inspire me. Each time I played, I nabbed a clip of my solo gigging. Toward the beginning of the month I caught the first part of the tune on film. Toward the middle, I turned the camera on partway through the song. And as the month closed out, I waited to hit RECORD until I felt the song nearing its end. At the end of the month I compiled my one-second clips and reviewed my camerawork. If I’m being perfectly honest, the 1 Second Everyday app did not do for my percussive practice what I thought it might. I had hoped that it would show me how I’d changed, whether for better or worse, but after the fact I realized that a one-second moment in time would not be enough to really showcase any change in my abilities. I did happen to memorialize the time that I caught the crash from below rather than via the more conventional placement of stick-meets-topside-of-cymbal. I saw myself fall off the chair after a hasty attempt to hit RECORD on the camera and make it back in time to catch the snare hits that open the song. And I was reminded of my tendency to sit on the front end of the beat when I practiced on Saturday, followed by a swift transition to my love of the backbeat on Sunday, a stylistic choice that I can assure you was not intentional. But with only a musical beat or two recorded for each day’s single second, it was easy enough to explain away the rhythmic imprecision as anomalous. The thin slice the app captured wasn’t enough to clue me in to any meaningful developments in my abilities. Even when I let it memorialize my worst practice sessions alongside some of my more glorious riffs, a one-second snippet didn’t show enough for me to really chart the course of my waxing or waning aptitude.
But those one-second moments did correct my faulty memory, just as Powdthavee said they would. I’d thought that I had fallen into a consistent practice routine. A review of my clips assured me I had not. I’d believed myself to have been practicing each weekend that month. That wasn’t true. The blank days on the app’s calendar marking where I should have practiced, and thought I had, served as evidence of that. And I shared the experience that Bainbridge’s participants had when she was scanning their brains. As I watched my own footage, as minimal in length as it was, I too was planning for the future. I didn’t feel proud of what I heard myself doing yet. It wasn’t good—though it was certainly better than when I’d started. But the reason for the stagnated progress was a lack of consistent or frequent attempts to better myself. Using a wide bracket to review the time I spent at the kit over the previous month led me to redouble my intentions and efforts. Back to the kit I went.