Robert TaFounder & CEO, Clarity · Building Hyper-Personalized Agents

What If Your Memories Could Change With You?

25 Jun 2025

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The speaker (Robert Ta) discusses Michael Levin's research on "improvisational memory": a lab observation where a trained caterpillar, after metamorphosis into a butterfly, retained learned behavior but repurposed it in a butterfly-specific way. This example motivates Levin's philosophical idea of "self-improvising selves," framing memory as a communication to one's future self and suggesting that memory structures can adapt across drastic bodily/organizational change.

I have to bring up Michael Levin's work on improvisational memory. He based it on his observation in a lab of, like, they trained a caterpillar to do something, and then it metamorphosized into a butterfly. And it retained the memory, but it used it in sort of like, a different way that was, like, more butterfly specific. And so it led him to this, like, philosophical theory of he calls self improvising selves, where, like, you think of the actual structure of memory is a communication to your future self.