Kaveh Akbar
I'm a pacer when I talk on the phone, I'm obsessively wandering around in circles. I read once that researchers think people do that because the unconscious is confused by hearing the presence of a voice whose body we can’t see. There's nowhere in our evolutionary history when that would have been the case, so our unconscious is just pacing around trying to find the body of the person to whom we're speaking. That feels very sad and also beautiful to me. I just think about what dissociated speech does to our brains, which we know about, and what does Zoom do?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Now that I'm walking and hearing you—you know how there are different types of memory and then different ways that we process information? I think right now, as I'm walking, listening to you, I'm also making spatial memory.
KA
Of having spoken with me on that walk?
IRC
Yeah, if you're not seeing a body, then you make it physically palpable this way.
KA
That's beautiful. This path will indelibly be marked by this conversation, and you'll be able to touch that when you walk that same path again.
IRC
I'll remember where I was and what I was looking at.