GPS for the Soul has just posted a clip from the Rubin's Brainwave series from 2012. Broadcaster Jane Pauley and MIT's Sebastian Seung come together to talk about memory.
And in particular the memory of their first kiss. (Well, not a kiss between them -- Jane is married to cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and Sebastian mentioned a girlfriend at the time -- but rather the importance of first impressions.
The focus of that whole season of Brainwave was on memory. And what had preceded that exchange was a little experiment on the steps of the Rubin's elliptical spiral staircase which leads up to the galleries above. We did something called "the karma chain." It's a Buddhist-infused version of the game of telephone. Participants of that afternoon's program lined the stairs, each on a step. Jane Pauley thought of a phrase, a sentence to start it off with, and whispered it into the ear of the person on the first step.
That person then turned round and muttered what she thought she heard into the ear of the person on the second step and so on... until it reached the third or fourth floor which is where Sebastian Seung was standing. The resulting transmutation (read: karmic mangling) of the phrase was not to be revealed until everyone was assembled in the theater. So Sebastian read out what he had heard: "There are no drugs allowed, just lies." Jane doubled over and guffawed at the garbling, because the phrase was drawn from the last line of her own book Skywriting, "There are no charmed lives, just lives."
I understand Jane Pauley has a new book out: Your Life Calling. I wonder what the last line of that book is.