Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science Of Memory: How To Get Better At Remembering And Be Okay With Forgetting | Charan Ranganath

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

A neuroscientist’s strategies to help you remember what really matters, and how mood, multitasking and other people can impact our memoriesCharan Ranganath is a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis.  He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters. In this episode we talk about:The different kinds of memory that help us function day to dayThe impact mood has on memories - not just making them, but recalling themWhy forgetting is not only useful but essential - even if it doesn’t always feel like itPractical tips to help us remember better, including distinctiveness, meaning & organization, planting cues, and chunkingWhy making errors is actually one of the best things you can do for learning and memory  Related Episodes:How To Prevent Dementia | Lisa Genova — Ten Percent HappierHow to Actually Be Present | Matthew Brensilver — Ten Percent Happier  Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/charan-ranganath/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? How worried should you be if you have trouble remembering names or words or where you put your keys? Could these be signs of incipient dementia?

Many of us want to know, can we improve our memory? And if so, how? My guest today is a memory researcher who argues that instead of remembering more, we should be focused on trying to remember better. And he's got a lot of practical strategies on this front. Charan Ranganath is a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and Director of the Dynamic Memory Lab all at the University of California at Davis. He's the author of the bestselling book, Why We Remember, Unlocking Memories Power to Hold

On to What Matters. We talk about the different kinds of memory that help us function from day to day, the impact mood has on memory, not just on making memories, but also on recalling them, the times when we should challenge our own memories. Why forgetting is not only useful, but essential. How other people can influence how we remember. Practical tips for remembering better, including concepts such as distinctiveness, meaning and organization, planting cues and chunking.

I'll let him explain all of those. Why doing two things at the same time is never a good idea if you want to remember. And why making errors is actually one of the best things you can do for learning and memory. We'll get started with Charan Ranganath right after this. But first some BSP. As you've heard me say before, the hardest part of personal growth, self-improvement, spiritual development, whatever you want to call it, the hardest part of personal growth, self-improvement, spiritual development, whatever you want to call it, the hardest part is forgetting.

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And I'm Steph Guerrero. And we're convinced that our podcast, The Socially Distanced Sports Bar, is going to be your new favourite comedy podcast with just a little bit of sport thrown in. You don't have to love sport, like sport or even know anything about sport to listen. Because nobody has conversations which stay on topic and it's the same on our podcast. We might start off talking about ice hockey but end up discussing, I don't know, 1980s British sitcom Alo Alo instead.

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and you have to say that's magnificent. Ha ha ha. Dr. Charan Ranganath, welcome to the show. Thank you, I'm super excited to be here. This is a ridiculously obvious question, but how do we define memory? Oh, that is anything but obvious. In fact, actually, researchers spend a lot of time sitting around arguing about this topic. I guess the simplest way you can think about it is the way that our cognition changes through experience.

And what I mean by cognition could be anything from the things that we do, the things that we perceive, or the things that we think. But that's a very, very broad definition. I mean, to some extent, you can say that even single-celled organisms have some kind of learning and memory. But on the other hand, humans obviously have a

particularly interesting kind of memory, which is what I specialize in, which is episodic memory, that ability to mentally time travel back to events in your life. So there are several different kinds of memory I'm picking up. There's episodic that you referenced and also there's something called semantic memory? CB Yeah, semantic memory is our knowledge of the facts that we have at our disposal to understand the world. And episodic and semantic memory are different, but pretty heavily related to each other. So for instance, the big example that everyone likes to give is that you have a lot of knowledge about, say, Paris, France, right? You know, that it's a city in France, you know, that they have like the San River running through it and people eat croissants and drink

wine there, whatever it is, right? But you might have a special memory of having visited Paris, and that's a completely different thing. It's something that you can be very sure of, but at the same time, it feels very different and it's associated with a singular place and time. What about working memory? Working memory is something else and that's something I've studied too in my career. It's the ability to keep information in your mind at a given time, but also to manipulate it

and to work with it essentially. And so that's a capability again, that's different but very strongly related to episodic and semantic memory. So for instance, you can keep, when you recall an episodic memory, you can use working memory to build a story about what happened in the past. And likewise, if you're trying to pay attention, say to a book that you're reading, you're going to keep a lot of semantic information in working memory, just to keep track of what's going on. So as I was saying, these kinds of memory are different, but in the sense that you

can experimentally pull them apart in the lab. But in the real world, when you're doing complicated activities like navigating through a new place, reading a book, watching a movie, maintaining a conversation, these forms of memory are highly interdependent and interactive. CB That makes a lot of sense. You make an interesting argument about the role of memory. What in your view is the role of memory? RL The role of memory, in my opinion, and in many researchers' opinion, is to make sense of the present and to navigate an uncertain future. And I think this contrasts with the common view,

and one that even I think memory researchers like myself get caught up in when we're in our daily lives and we take off our work hat, which is we have this assumption that memory is supposed to be this comprehensive archive of the past, and that we should be able to replay anything that happened as it happened. So I think that's really interesting and worth staying with for a second.

The assumption that many laypeople and even you're saying experts is that the function of memory is to be able to go back and either remember specific events from our past or facts and figures. But in fact, it is actually designed to help us navigate the present and the future rather than spend a lot of time in mental movies of the past. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And even when we recall the past, it might feel like a movie, but it's not. It's really bits and pieces that we pull up and then we can make a story out of it in our heads, but it's not a replay of the past. And I can unpack that a little bit more for you, which is that our memories are extraordinarily selective. That is that if you take an average day of experience, if you just look at the details of the day, not the gist of what happened, but the details, the majority of that information will be lost.

In fact, actually, when you have a particular experience, about 40% of those details or more will be lost within two hours. So the forgetting is fast and the forgetting is quite pervasive. So really the issue is not why we forget or why we're so forgetful, but really what makes an event memorable in the first place and why do we have this weird capability to remember some things and not others. But I'm picking up from what you just said and from some of the research I've done on you that forgetting is not bad. It actually is useful because you're clearing out bandwidth for the shit you need to remember. AC That's absolutely true. Yeah. So I mean, and I think as somebody who's into, I mean, well, we can talk about meditation. I think it'd be really good to talk about that. But maybe I'll

just step back and just say, I could go to your house and maybe you have some furniture there and maybe it's set up in a very nice open floor plan. And I could say, you know what, this is a complete disaster here. Why do you have all this open space? You've had so much stuff that you've come into contact with over your lifetime. You could easily store all the stuff in your house. Why in the world would you have all this open space with nothing there? And of course, the answer is that it would be ridiculous because you'd be a hoarder if you just held on to everything you ever encountered, right? And yet this is the expectation that people have about their memories, that memory is supposed to be a hoarding of information about the past. But if you were hoarding memories, you'd never supposed to be a hoarding of information about the past.

But if you were hoarding memories, you'd never be able to find the information that you need when you need it, right? You'd just have all this clutter of people that you ran into while you're in line at airport security or temporary passwords or just numerous things that we deal with, especially in modern life, that we really shouldn't remember and shouldn't hold on to. I have a lot more questions about forgetting and whether we should be worried about our forgetfulness, but I'll hold that for just a second because you said something a moment ago that I think is also worth dwelling on, which is that I think you were saying something like when we remember something, it's kind of a rough facsimile of the actual events.

And in fact, we're kind of remembering the last time we remembered it. That's exactly right. So that's actually two key points, two different chapters of my book on this topic. So one key point is that when we remember, it's a very, very restricted view of the past. And what I mean by this is that let's say if somebody walks away from this interview that we're doing right now, they've listened to it fully attentive. They would tell themselves, I've got a great memory. They could describe, let's say the hour or more that we're going to talk in about, let's say 10 minutes, 20 minutes.

And you'd say as listener, they have an extraordinarily detailed memory of what they just heard, but that's only about a fraction of the amount of time that we would be spending talking. Right. So we already know that in fact, our memories are not as comprehensive as our actual experiences are. And what we think happens is, is that in fact you pull up little bits and pieces of that context from which the event took place. Little bits of sights and sounds and smells and your sense of where you are, thoughts and feelings. But then you build a narrative, a story around it, right? And this is something that I think we should definitely talk about when it comes to the kinds of things that come up when you're meditating, actually. But we build these stories, these narratives to make

sense of thoughts that we have in our head to try to explain the past. And so memory researchers generally believe that we don't actually replay the past, but rather we get some data and then we imagine how the past could have been, which is just crazy. But then the second part of it is that every time we remember an event, the act of remembering it actually changes the memory. So if you have a memory that you've revisited over and over and over again, what can happen is that the memory is no longer just the memory of the event, but you have a bit of the last time you remembered it and the time before that, that you remember it.

So you have memories of remembering. And so that leads us to have memories that are actually dynamic and they change over time and they morph based on our current beliefs and knowledge. So in some sense, memories reflecting the past, but it's also reflecting who we are, what we believe and what we know in the present, as well as all of the times in between that we've recalled those events. I don't know if this is going to make sense as a leap of logic, but as I hear you talk about this and as I prepare for this interview, I started thinking a lot about intellectual humility. I think we live in an era where we have a surplus of confidence about our views and our perceptions.

And, I mean, I think this has been with us for a long time, but it seems particularly pronounced to me right now. But the fact that our memories are so unreliable, as well as the fact that we're seeing things in real time through a whole thicket of biases and personal histories and et cetera, et cetera. I'm rambling at this point, but it really does get me thinking about how wild it is that we're ever able to understand each other at all and how humble we should be about our convictions about anything we believe. CB Well, I'm a big believer in intellectual

humility when it comes to our capability to remember. But I also want listeners to know that our memory serves us pretty well most of the time. That is, it is incomplete and it can be biased and it can be corrupted. But for the most part, we do pretty well in navigating the world with memory. We generally remember what happened pretty well. And in certain cases, you can remember a lot of details. But memory tends to sift away the stuff that's a little bit less important. And what I mean by this is that when we remember things, We remember the events that were associated with particularly strong emotions, desire, lust, anger, love, fear, stress. And each of these emotional states are associated with chemicals called neuromodulators that basically promote plasticity. They also change

our attention in interesting ways, but they promote plasticity so that the memories that are formed during those experiences can stick around and they're fairly resilient. But those memories are still incomplete. We don't remember everything better from an emotional event. We tend to focus on the information that's most relevant to the emotion and the stuff that's stuck out to us. But a lot of the stuff that stuck out to us. But a lot of these stuff that's in the background, we don't remember any better if it's emotionally significant. So what I would say is that you're

going to remember the car accident. Well, assuming you didn't have a head injury, you're going to remember the car accident that you were in. And you'll probably get a lot of those details quite right. But you tell the story over and over again, and some of those details might become corrupted. Some of those details might also become strengthened, which is a good thing, right?

But often the stories we tell about those experiences, like the car accident, will change over time. You might say, well, I experienced it as if it was in slow motion. When in fact, at the time you might not have experienced it in slow motion, you're just remembering it in slow motion. And so this is the tricky nature of memory is that we don't have access to as what Danny Kahneman called the experiencing self. We're only really the remembering self once we reflect on our feelings. So once we reflect on our feelings, once we reflect on

our thoughts, because it's all in the past by that time. Yeah, we really are storytelling sense-making animals. And so I'm interpolating back to my own life and thinking about, you know, I'm sure everybody listening is doing this. Any memory that's popping up in the story, I've told myself about it over time and how that's changed over time, perhaps in ways that suit me, perhaps in ways that don't. Yeah, actually, one of the fascinating things is in general, most people, and a big exception to this is people with major depression, but most people tend to have a positive bias in memory. That is, they tend to remember more positive events and they tend to have a positive bias in memory. That is they tend to remember more

positive events and they tend to remember the events in general more positively than they really were or remember themselves more positively in those events that they really were. And so that optimism bias actually increases over time on average again. On average, as people get older, they will tend to be more optimistic and rosy when they view the past. And that doesn't necessarily mean anything bad. One of the things that I say in the book is that memory is more like a painting than a photograph. There's some information in the painting that might be true to the subject, some information that might be distorted or inaccurate, and then there's some information that just reflects you, your perspective, your belief.

And that is neither true nor false. It just reflects the way you view the world. I think you say in the book also that the mood we're in right now may affect the kinds of memories that are flooding through us. The mood that we're in now and also the beliefs that we have in the present and our goals in the present. But let's start with mood and I'll stick with that for the question, which is if you are

in a happy mood, on average, you'll be able to remember events from your life that are fairly positive. And as I said, you'll reconstruct those events in a way that's biased towards the positive things and sometimes distort our memories in the positive direction. If you're in a negative mood, say if you're angry or if you're scared, you will remember events that are more consistent with those moods. If you're sad, you'll tend to remember sad events. And so as much as this might seem like a foreign idea to some, when I say it in this abstract way, I think we can all relate to the idea that, you know, let's say you've been in a fight with someone that you love and you can think of all these terrible ways in which they've wronged you

and all of these terrible things that have happened in your relationship. And then one week later, you've made up, everything's good. And not only can you not recall all of those negative things that happened, but you can't even remember what you fought about. And so that just shows the way in which our moods are a filter or a spotlight that orients us towards some memories, but it also obscures other memories that we have. Because our experiences have good and they have bad in them, right? Most experiences have a mix of both of those things. And some are just very, very negative and some are more positive. But our moods in the present both filter what we can find in memory and they filter the narratives that we make out of what we find.

Yeah, because I can think of times where I'm in a bad mood, I'm angry, I'm seeing the whole world through garbage colored glasses. Anybody I encounter, I'm remembering our past conflict or whatever it is. Yeah, I do that too. And it's very hard not to. And in fact, this is a big reason why people's assessments of what they would do in the future are also a little bit off because I think sometimes people when they're in the cool light of day and they're feeling good might project, Oh yeah, if I were in this situation,

here's what I would do. I would be a good person. I would never yell at someone on the road. And then in the heat of the moment, when it actually happens and we're in this negative mood state, we can then all of a sudden access all of these ideas and thoughts and desires that we wouldn't have when we're in this more cool,

calm state of mind. You've mentioned meditation in memory a couple of times. What is there to say about that? Well, there's quite a bit. What I would say first of all is I love memory. I think a lot about it in my daily life as a researcher and as a human being. But we don't always want to be in the world of memory. And what I mean by that is to me, I actually did a mindfulness-based stress reduction practice. I know you had John Kabat-Zinn on, and so it was his course basically, but it was taught by a local practitioner. And I would come back from a day of work and I would try it out and I was so tired and I just felt like I am failing at this. This was really stressful to me. I'm doing so badly because I'm constantly

getting in my head and thinking about things, but I should be focusing on my breathing. Eventually, and I'm sure you're just listening to this and already seeing 10 steps ahead to where I'm going, but eventually I realized this was actually a victory because I was noticing what I would be doing anyway, which is going into this world of memory and just actually catching it, but viewing it from the perspective of an outsider. And I think that practice is valuable for a number of reasons. One is that we can catch ourselves when we get in the world of memory. Another is we can change our perspective as we view our memories. And I think this perspective is an enormously powerful tool that we have to take what's in our past and use it in the right way.

And so I think that aspect of viewing memories from an external perspective is also very important. And finally, I would say the more that we can tune ourselves to being in the present, the more we can focus our attention on what's happening in the moment so that we can remember what matters, whether it's where I put my keys or that feeling that you had when you picked up your child for the first time. Okay, so there are two things I want to follow up on there. Remembering what matters. I keep teasing that we're going to go into that in a deep way in a second. But before we do that,

the second thing you said there, at least the second thing I remember you saying there is something about the metacognition that we develop through meditation, the mindfulness, the ability to see what we're thinking in meditation that can help us have a better relationship to our memories. Is that roughly accurate? Yeah. Yeah. I would say first of all, just if you start off with the assumption that you can get into a mode of remembering. And when I say mode of remembering, I'm actually being kind of loose because what I really mean is that that mode of remembering could be reflecting on the past, it could be ruminating, but it could also

be anticipating things that can happen in the future as we do when we're anxious, for instance, and thinking about, okay, what am I gonna do after this meditation period is over, what do I have on my schedule? And that's also a way in which we use memory to project into the future. And so being aware of when we enter that mode can be very important because that mode is very useful to us. It's very important to us.

There's a reason we evolve that capability, but it's not the mode we want to be in all the time. And I'll say personally, I struggle with this in my daily life because I go into that mode far more often than I would like to. But I think this is where I practice. If I had more discipline, I would probably be doing this. But a practice could really help you in terms of being aware of flipping into that mode. Because sometimes I think what happens is if you're not aware of it, you don't have any way of managing it. And so rather than being a resource that you can dip into when you need it, memory is actually in the driver's seat. And that's not what we want. So that's part one of where I was going with that. And part two, if you'll indulge me, is this idea of perspective and the relationship that we have with memory.

And I think this is super important too. There's lots of research showing that the way that we view the past, the perspective that we have, can change what we remember. So I talk about in the book, a very simple experiment where people listen to a story about two kids who are cutting class, they go into one of the kids homes. And the people in the experiment listen to the story either from the perspective of a thief who might want to steal something from the house, or a prospective homebuyer who might want to steal something from the house or a prospective home buyer who might want to buy the house. And so people who listen to it from the perspective of a thief might remember all of the valuables that could be stolen in the house, but not the things that might affect whether or not they would want to buy the house. But later on, if you tell those people, okay, now I want you to remember it from the perspective of a home buyer. People remember all of these things

that they didn't necessarily recall the first time around. So changing your perspective can change what you remember. And in my time doing clinical practice before I actually went into the neuroscience of memory deep, what that was actually a big, big part of cognitive therapy was basically giving people an external perspective. And the idea would be if you share your memory with me, I can help you view that memory as an outsider. But I suspect, and I don't know this, I think you could tell me a lot more about this. I mean, I'd be very

curious to hear your perspective. But my sense is that practices like meditation can give you a way of cultivating that external perspective within you. Yes, I think that's true. It's not often brought up that way. I mean, it's a, this is maybe a rabbit hole. We don't want to just give the caveat that I'm a little bit out of my depth here, but you sometimes think about meditation as dealing with the process of the mind and therapy as dealing with the content of the mind. And so what you're pointing at is a kind of a mixture. So the metacognition, meaning the knowing what we know that can happen, the mindfulness that can happen in meditation, which allows you to view the contents of your consciousness with some nonjudgmental remove can supercharge this process that you're describing of putting a top spin, a different top spin on the content of our memories. Does any of that make sense?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think this is key is that content and process and memory are really interrelated. And we've already touched on this. In fact, that it's like, if you are recalling information that is let's say from a traumatic period in your life, you will feel worse in the present. And being feeling worse in the present will affect the memories

that you recall from the past. And so you can get stuck in these vicious cycles where your mental context affects what you remember and what you remember affects your mental context where you could, and so that can lead you to get sucked into this vortex of negative thought. But to the extent that you can remove yourself, I think you can avoid getting stuck in that path because you could essentially, if you can observe what you're recalling from an external perspective in a non-judgmental way, it doesn't necessarily have to shift the way that you feel in the

present as intensely. And I say this with full awareness that this is easy to say, but it's hard to do. And I need as much work as anyone else to practice this. Well, let's talk about at least two ways that I'm thinking of that we could do what you're describing. One is, you know, from a pure mindfulness, Buddhist meditation standpoint, one way not to get caught is just to see clearly what's happening right now and label it. So if you're recalling difficult memories, just noticing, Oh, aversion or sadness, just labeling it quite consistently until you're kind of no longer underwater your water skiing, right?

You're on top of it. You're not sucked into it. The other thing I heard you say from your days as a therapist is that you can, and this is more content than process, you can add what I was calling a top spin or a different perspective. So if, for example, you're remembering a traumatic period in your life, instead of thinking about the pain and horror of it, you could say, yeah, but why don't I remember it all

from the standpoint of my own personal resilience? And that sheds a whole new light on it and can change not only the way you're seeing the past, but the way you are in the present. Absolutely. And this was what we would really work on with therapy. I think there are different schools of thought of therapy at one school of thought is insight will set you free. And I found that in fact,

insight could sometimes send people further down the hole. If you just simply wallow in the negative memory, it really has to be the, I mean, I guess maybe where we're headed is the real insight is to be able to view that same information and consider different perspectives. And when I say consider, you don't want to force feed it to somebody, but you want to give them alternatives and think about, as you said, if you had this traumatic experience, how is that giving you strengths that you have in the present? What is the resilience that you showed in getting through that period? How did you survive it? And I think that many cases people underestimate their own strengths in that process of thinking about these traumatic events.

But as an outsider, you can see it in a way that's a little bit more unbiased, or at least from a different bias, because we all approach these stories from our own biases, right? I think, I think, and I want to model some intellectual humility here, but I think that from the perspective of a Buddhist meditation teacher, and I'm none of those things, although I spent a lot of time with them, that person would agree with you that it is a powerful insight to be able to have a different perspective on your memories. But the real liberation is in not clinging to anything that's coming up in your mind and seeing that it's all impermanent and impersonal.

And so that's more on the process tip. Does that land for you? It makes sense to me and I definitely can see that. I mean, I'm no expert in liberation or anything, so, but I would love to be able to do that. And I think you're right. I mean, I think here's the thing. When we remember, the same data can be interpreted with an infinite number of theories. So there is data in memory, but that data reflects a very limited degree of perception, a very limited view of what's happening in the moment. And then the

theory that we use to explain that data is based on a lot of beliefs, goals, motivations that we have in the present. And so I think that you're right in the sense that the more that we can approach that experience from a very neutral point of view and not become attached to those theories, so to speak, the better. And I guess, again, I'm not like a teacher in any way, aside from teaching memory research. I'm not much a spiritual teacher. But what I'll say is that this idea of intellectual humility is hugely important because what can happen is that we can get so sucked up in our interpretations of memories that it can really lead us to become divorced from reality. And that the more we can be skeptical in our recollections, not skeptical in the sense of

saying this is all false, but being skeptical in the sense of how much do I know? Well, I think I have a very good confidence that this happened. Well, why is that? What's the data there in memory that really gives me that sense? But I think we can question those beliefs, especially when something resonates with us too well from memory. That is, if something corresponds too closely to your beliefs, I think that's when we need to be the most skeptical. Here's a quote, I think it's a quote from your book or just an, or maybe it's just a note I made, but you say, understanding how memory works can help us make choices freer of bias. Yeah. So we have many different ways in which memory can creep into our decisions.

So one is just easiness. What I mean by that is our brains are constantly tweaking themselves in ways to make certain information that we're processing constantly to make that flow more quickly, right? So if you hear a word in a foreign language, initially that might require a lot of trouble just to hear the word. But what can happen is over time the more you hear that word, your auditory cortex will tweak and tweak and tweak to the point that you'll be able to hear it more easily and you could produce that word more fluently later on. And so that tweaking happens often under the radar of awareness. And in some cases, maybe it's inaccessible to awareness altogether. Those

kinds of processes by which we learn just through experiencing things can creep into our behavior as biases. And those biases could be something as simple as watching a commercial a hundred times and be just slightly more likely to choose Budweiser over Coke. Or it could manifest in more insidious ways like stereotypes that people might have when making decisions about someone's intentions or even whether or not somebody committed a crime. Coming up, Charon Ranganath talks about why you probably don't have to panic if you can't remember words or where you put your car keys.

His practical tips for improving your memory, including such strategies as distinctiveness, meaning and organization, planting cues and chunking, and what happens to our memories when we sleep. Hello, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford, and we're the hosts of Wondrous podcast, British Scandal. Where we tell you outrageous tales

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Okay, let's talk about what I think a lot of people are worried about, which is why we keep losing our keys and finding ourselves walking into a room and not wondering and not remembering why we're there. I meet people all the time and I've had these thoughts myself of, wow, maybe I'm getting more forgetful as I get older. I'm having a little trouble remembering words. Am I losing it? Am I, is this incipient dementia? What say you to those kinds of concerns?

Because I'm sure you hear them all the time. I do hear them all the time. And in general, it's totally normal. This happens to everyone, but it happens more and more as we get older, especially. A lot of those experiences that you describe, like misplacing your keys or being like, why am I in this room?

And not being able to remember why you came to the kitchen, say, are related to changes with age in an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. And at the risk of oversimplifying, basically what the prefrontal cortex does is it allows us to take what we know and connect it to our goals and our actions. So it's basically to link what we experience in the world to information and memory and to actions and to put it all under the umbrella of one common goal. Right. And so what happens as we get older is the prefrontal cortex declines in function. And so we become a little bit less capable of guiding our thoughts and our actions by intention. And instead, our attention is grabbed by things in the outside world, right?

So I'm putting my keys somewhere, but I'm thinking about the fact that I have an email that I have to respond to. And so when I put my keys down, I'm not even aware of the fact that I put it down because I'm just doing it out of habit. But I'm not really there in of habit, but I'm not really there in the first place. I'm actually in my head. And so a lot of our everyday forgetting comes because we are shifting between one thought and another or one mental context and another. And in the case of why it came to the kitchen, it's a natural consequence of shifting literally from one room to another. And the way our mental context shifts as we change our sense of even where we are. And so that's why as we get older, especially, we just have all of these memory

problems because what happens is as we get older, the first thing is, is that our sense of mental context becomes more disrupted. It becomes more unstable, I should say. And so what that means is, is that our episodic memories, the ability to go, why did I come to the kitchen or where did I put my keys, are more fragmented. And we have trouble pulling up the information we need because we have essentially so many earthquakes in our mental landscape, right? But then the other part of it is that it also becomes harder to pull up, use a strategy, say, to pull up the information we need when we

need it. And that effort involved, it just takes longer. We're also worse at detecting when we've made a mistake. And so all of these factors conspire against us as we get older. And yet it's thoroughly normal. Hmm. Should we be trying to improve our memory? And if so, how? I think yes, but I would say that you need to think about what it means to improve your memory in the first place.

So if your idea of improving memory is just remembering more, I would say that's not improving your memory. I think really improving your memory is what I would call remembering better. And what I mean by remembering better is being able to say, what is the memory that I want to take away from this experience? And tuning yourself up to be able to optimize your ability, not to remember everything, but to remember the thing that matters to you. And this is something that we've come back to a few times in this conversation. So it could be as simple as where I put my keys, right? I'll say that using a strategy in the right moment requires a little bit of

executive function. That is it's not something that's obvious unless you just develop a very strong skill or habit, which people do. So this could be as simple as a basketball player who's just naturally good at being able to encode what's happening in the court as it unfolds in real time. Or people who are remembering events that are very common to them, like, you know, what happens in a wedding or something like that. But a lot of the stuff that we struggle with are the more arbitrary, non-meaningful things. There's nothing that connects your name with your face.

Totally arbitrary. There's nothing that necessarily tells me where I put my keys, unless I have a habit of putting my keys in a particular place that makes sense. So the key that we need to think about is how can we pull out the memory that we need? Well, there's a few different principles that help. So one is distinctiveness. That is that we tend to forget because memories for what we're looking for are too similar to memories that we're not looking for. So my memory for where I put my keys an hour ago is competing with another memory of where I put my keys eight hours ago.

And that's the problem. So what makes an hour ago fundamentally different from eight hours ago? What was happening in that moment? What were the sights, the sounds, the feelings, the thoughts that I had in that moment that made it different? the feelings, the thoughts that I had in that moment that made it different. If I'm focused on what makes this moment different, I will have a much better shot in remembering it later on,

just as it's easier for me to find a hot pink Post-it note if it's on a desk with a bunch of yellow Post-it notes, rather than trying to find a yellow Post-it note on a desk full of yellow Post-it notes, rather than trying to find a yellow Post-it note on a desk full of yellow Post-it notes, right? So the more this moment sticks out in memory, the better. And that reflects a certain degree, a certain kind of mindfulness in the present, right? So orienting ourselves to what's happening

in the moment is very important. Another factor is using the power of meaning and organization to reduce what you have to know. For instance, we can take information that we're trying to memorize and be able to lump it in with things that we already know, and that makes it a lot easier. This can even be things that are quite arbitrary. For instance, I'm terrible with remembering names and remembering faces, but I know something about you through your work as a journalist and through your work in this world of meditation and communication and wellness. And so that makes it a heck of a lot easier for me to associate your name with your face, right?

Now I could do even more than that if I could think about some arbitrary way in which some feature of your face links up with your name, think about some way in which there's a meaningful link between the two. So meaning can be hugely important, even if it's just attaching something arbitrary onto some knowledge that you already have. And part of the reason for that is that it gives you another path to finding that information

in memory. It gives us a way in which cues that we can have right in front of us help. As it brings me to my third tip, which is what I would say is planting cues. So sometimes you'll hear people talk about imagine your future self. And this relates especially to trying to remember to do things in the future, which is one of the hardest things to do in memory, right? Remembering that I have a doctor appointment in two hours, remembering to take out the trash or something like that. And what they used to do back in the olden days, I don't know that anybody does this anymore, is you used to tie a string around your

finger. And it was this weird thing that people used to do as a reminder to remember something. And so the idea there is that you have a cue that you're not trying to pull up in your head, but it's something that's going to be right in front of you. So if I'm trying to remember, hey, I've got to take out the garbage and say, if you happen, I don't have this, but if you happen to have a statue of a garden gnome right in front of your house, imagine yourself walking up to the house and then seeing that garden gnome and then the garden gnome telling you, hey, take out the garbage and then walk up to the garbage can and take it out.

Now this is all happening in your imagination for something that's going to happen in the future. But now, seeing that garden gnome will automatically be likely to cue that memory of the thing that you imagine. And once that imagined scenario is in your head, it'll serve as a reminder to actually take out the garbage. All right. Let me just go back through those. The first thing you're saying about losing your keys or whatever is try when you're placing your keys down to be as awake and aware as possible and maybe even to remember something distinctive about where you've put them. Yes. And when I say the distinctive, what I mean is the sights, the sounds, some particular thing that was going on in your head at the time.

particular thing that was going on in your head at the time. The second thing you said is about names and faces and providing some sort of meaning that can help you connect the two. So if I meet you, I might say, oh, he reminds me of X or Y friend. And that is a little, uh, a little hack that means that if I see you in a crowded place in two years from now, my, you know, that, that would allow the memory of your name to surface in a way that would prevent some embarrassment for me. That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. And then the third thing was about, uh, the garden gnome and creating meaningful cues in your environment so that as you're trying to remember anything, can you in this is in you talk about this in meaningless artifact in my environment that could help me remember this thing I need to remember to do?

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I'll notice what you did there, which is you're struggling to remember the third thing. And then you thought of the garden gnome and it popped in your head, right? So that was like very meta, what you did there. A common complaint I hear from my wife is that I don't remember anything she tells me. What's going on there? Oh, at the risk of you answering in a way that results in my getting a divorce. Okay. Well, I won't say,

although it is a potential explanation is that our motivation and our interest will play a role in helping us remember certain things, say, although it is a potential explanation, is that our motivation and our interest will play a role in helping us remember certain things. But I'm sure that's not it in your case, right? Another thing is though, that it depends on our expertise, what we know about, and sometimes that can be a factor. It can also be that your wife, again, no offense to her, I'm sure I can come up with many other reasons, but it may be that she's remembering the things that you've forgotten, but she's not remembering all the times that you've remembered what she told you. So it's a little bit more of a

selective memory for your memory failures. And this is something that we actually do a lot is, I think sometimes we focus on our memory failures and we're not aware of all of our memory successes when it's actually working properly. That's a great point. I'm going to use that. That's going to surface in our next contentious discussion. But it does kind of go, it reminds me, you talked before about distinctiveness. And if you live with somebody, their voice and their presence starts to become less distinctive because I've been together with her for 17

years. We're about to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary. So she's not as distinctive and this has nothing to do with her qualities, but she's just going to not be as distinctive as the new neighbor. Yeah. I think what I would say is, is that on the one hand, our brains are prioritizing information that's novel and surprising. And to the extent that we tend to repeat ourselves in close relationships, and we didn't say a lot of the same things over and over again, your brain is less likely to encode that information in part because you already have a memory

for it in the first place. So information that's surprising or information that's brand new, something that you didn't know about her before is going to be the stuff that's more likely to be memorable for you later on. But that's something that you can cultivate too. We've done a lot of research on curiosity, which is I'm sure a topic that you'd be very interested in too. And curiosity can allow you to find those gaps, those prediction errors, so to speak, find the unpredictable. Cause we are always changing, right? I mean, anybody who's managed to successfully have a long-term relationship knows

that it's an ongoing process because we grow and you want to be able to grow together or not grow apart so being able to see What's new is a big part of that process and being able to remember those experiences a little bit better Right does that make sense or is this just a free association? No, no that so that's on me in some ways I'm sure all of this is is on me I mean, I guess I could argue, you know, baby You got to just pizzat, you gotta add some pizzazz if you want me to remember anything,

but that doesn't seem like a good recipe for success. Rather the curiosity route of yes, whoever you're with, anybody in your family, any long-term relationship, any long-term work, a relationship, anything, they are constantly changing. We tend not to notice it because we're not mustering as much curiosity with folks that we're around all the time as we might do when we're around somebody new.

And so you can make that a practice. What's coming to mind for me is something that long time listeners are probably gonna get annoyed with my bringing this up again, but reflective listening is a practice that I was taught four or five years ago by some communications coaches who have appeared on this show, Mudita Nisker and Dan Clurman. And they, it's a very simple technique where somebody's saying something to you and you

just, you really have to go into a kind of an active listening mode so that when they're done talking, you can repeat back to them the bones of what they've said in your own words and that is basically a deliberate curiosity. Yes, yeah, yeah and that prompts you then to that actually has a number of interesting qualities. So one is it can it can prompt you to attend more to the meaning of what someone's saying and to see what you might have missed if you were not actively listening, right, or not reflectively listening. There's another interesting facet of that, which is the act of being able to generate that story actually will help you remember it better. That is that there's a lot of work and this is a chapter in

the book that I really enjoyed writing, but there's a lot of work that suggests that just putting in the effort to pull up a memory is going to strengthen your ability to remember that event later on. So rather than for instance, just trying to, assuming that you have this conversation and it will be remembered, if you do this active listening practice, you have to reconstruct what this person just told you. And that process will now modify the memory of what they said and allow you to actually have a more accessible memory for that event. Mm-hmm. In the book, you on this on the subject of how we can remember better you talk about attention and intention which I believe you've referenced in this discussion.

You also talk about chunking and can you just unpack these terms and how we might apply them? Yeah there's somewhat related. There's a lot of research on attention and one of the things that we know is that we're only capable of actually processing a very limited amount of information in mind at a given time and so attention and working memory have a limited capacity and so Where does that attention go? That's the key question Well often our attention is grabbed key question. Well, often our attention is grabbed. So if you have an Apple watch and it's telling you you got a text message, my attention is grabbed by this alert that I got on my watch, right?

But in an ideal world, we would often balance that with intention, which is my saying, I've got to pay attention to my conversation with Dan right now, because my goal is to have a meaningful interaction with Dan. And so many times we want to be able to use our goals to focus our attention and to eliminate these distractions. Often we don't have the mental resources to do that because we're stressed or we're tired, sleep deprived. But once I do prioritize and once I do manage to be able to focus on the fact that I want to have this meaningful interaction with you, I can start taking the things that I want to memorize and applying different strategies to help me be able to keep that information in mind or to help me remember it better. Shunking is a little bit of a narrow strategy.

It's something where you can take information that you're trying to keep in working memory and you use your knowledge, use meaning to reduce the amount of information that you're keeping in mind. Right. So if I have like a phone number, like 530-555-1717, you'll notice that I grouped that into three chunks. And what that allowed me to do is take 10 digits, which is actually a lot to keep in mind, and I reduced it down to three pieces of information. So this is one that we use every day. And you can see this in common practice, people who are

listening to a song that they've listened to a zillion times will be able to chunk the lyrics based on their feeling of the song that's going on in the rhythms, and so forth. And so these kinds of practices of using knowledge to reduce what we have to remember, can have this micro scale or it can have a much bigger scale. A chess player for instance, who has seen so many games of chess that they can take a pattern of pieces on a board and link it up to something that they already know and take essentially let's say 20 pieces

that are on a board of different colors on different spaces and put that into one chunk of knowledge. Really interesting. What's the connection between sleep and memory and what should we know about sleep if we're worried about losing our memory? So sleep has a number of benefits for memory.

Let's start with the most obvious one, which is when we're sleep deprived, our attention suffers, our stress tolerance goes down, we become more stressed out, we become more grouchy. And so we're just not able to function as well. And you can see this manifest in terms of reduced functioning of the prefrontal cortex and some of the studies of sleep deprivation. So that's going to adversely affect your memory. But let's talk about the positive effects of sleep. So one positive effect of sleep is

that there's a lot of the brain's housekeeping that's being done during sleep. So for instance, we know now, it's a fairly recent observation, that amyloid protein, which is one of the sort of, I guess you could consider it like a toxin that accumulates throughout the day in the brain throughout its normal housekeeping, so to speak, and it accumulates in the brain and during sleep it gets flushed out of the brain. So sleep is giving our brain a chance to effectively restore a lot of the functions that

might be compromised if we didn't have this kind of housekeeping functions taking place. Another key function though, is what happens in memory during sleep. So there's pretty good evidence that memories are replayed during sleep. And when I say replayed, I don't mean literally they're played moment by moment, but you get little bits and pieces of information from different memories that are brought online.

And one idea that's out there is that those memories become strengthened as they're reactivated over and over. I actually think that it's more interesting than that. I think there's pretty good evidence that our ability to take information that is in memory and convert it into something that's actionable improves with the course of sleep. So for instance, sleep will improve people's ability to take an event like learning to snowboard or something and help them be able to be better the next day at snowboarding. or something and help them be able to be better the next day at snowboarding. But it also can be like you're trying to memorize a bunch of words in a foreign language and after sleep it's easier to produce those words in a sentence than it was before. There's also some evidence, this is a little bit more controversial, but that sleep allows the brain to take information that was experienced in very different times and very different places and free associate, put the information together into a big

picture. And so what that can allow you to do is say, Hey, I met Dan in this context, I met Dan in that context. And over the course of sleep, you can start to put together this little bit of wisdom of what's Dan like as a person, what can I expect from him in the future? And so it can transform episodic memories into new semantic knowledge, but it can also give you insights sometimes into new ways of thinking about old problems. Okay. So if we care about our memory, we should care about our sleep.

Another practical point you make in the book is if we care about our memory, we should care about our sleep. Another practical point you make in the book is if we care about our memory, multitasking ain't a good idea. No, it's not. I think that people, especially, you know, I'm in Northern California and so you hear a lot of tech bros take pride in their ability to do five different things at the same time

You typically don't do them at the same time, but you flip back and forth between them If you want to for instance destroy people's working memory, you basically have them do two things at the same time and what happens is a blast people's working memory because every time I switch from one task to another What happens is there's a cost. I actually have to shift gears and pull up the goal, pull up the context of my new task. And then when I shift back to the first task, I have to shift gears again and pull up the goal

and pull up the context. And so what happens is every time I shift, I'm behind schedule, I'm getting a little bit behind, I'm slower, but I've also taxed a lot of my executive function in the process of getting caught up. And I switch back and forth between two different tasks. And every time I do, I'm creating a little boundary between my memory of what happened in the beginning of our conversation versus the next time I come back to our conversation. So let's say we're talking, and then I get an alert on my phone.

I look at my phone and go, oh, someone texted me. Now I come back, I'm behind schedule, but now my memory of what we're talking about now is also kind of distinct from the memory of what happened right before I checked my phone. And so what I'm getting is a lot of fragments of memories from moments where I wasn't even in the conversation at all. I was behind schedule. And so I wasn't there. I wasn't understanding it. I wasn't

processing it meaningfully because I was using so much of my executive function just to get caught up. And I've got all of these little fragments that are competing with each other instead of one coherent memory that is actually organized enough and thoughtful enough that I can pull it up with ease. Coming up, Charan talks about how memories are influenced by other people, the power of error-driven learning to improve your memory, and what the science actually says about repressed memories, amnesia, and deja vu. Divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived.

We know the six wives of Henry VIII as pawns in his hunt for a son, but their lives were so much more than just being the king's wives. I'm Arisha Skidmore Williams. And I'm Brooke Zifrin. And we're the hosts of Wondry's podcast, Even the Royals. In each episode, we'll pull back the curtain on royal families, past and present,

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In August 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And a little bit more. Sam looks to his fellow students. They just as mad as he is. He can't stop thinking about the tragic war in Vietnam and the violent backlash to the civil rights movement. It's like the whole world falling apart. And ain't nobody ready to make it right.

The school board could do something to change it, but they'd have to listen first. Follow Black History for real on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. Another aspect of memory that you talk about in the book that I'd love to hear you expand upon is how our memory is intertwined with the memory of other people. Yeah, yeah. And this relates back to this principle that our memories are constantly being updated. So let's think about first, just the fact that so much of human communication, I think by one estimate, it must be, I think it was memory serves and it might not have some intellectual humility about that. I think it's something like an estimate was 30% of human language is storytelling.

Storytelling is mostly sharing memories, right? I mean, I would argue that probably one of the biggest evolutionary advantages of having language is to be able to share memories. If I went to a cave and I got attacked by a bear, you don't have to go into that cave to realize that there's a bear there. I can just tell you that. That memory of my being attacked by a bear, you don't have to go into that cave to realize that there's a bear there. I can just tell you that. That memory of my being attacked by a bear is your memory of hearing me talk about being attacked by a bear, right? But then you tell me, oh man, being attacked by a bear, that was really courageous of you that you managed to escape that bear. And I'm thinking to myself, oh, I was so scared, but now you're telling me I'm courageous. And that's transforming my way of thinking about the memory. And so what can happen is, is that rather than having these individual memories, we start to develop this collective memory, right?

And you can see this in families as people talk about brothers and sisters and parents, and you tend to get these shared memories of your experiences. Now, sometimes they're different and that actually causes problems too, but often they're shared. And in fact we tend to feel closer to people with whom we have shared memories in ways that give us some kind of a sense of personal connection. And I know as I get older I value that more and more. I value the people who I have had experiences with that, I value that more and more. I value the people who I have had experiences with that we can both look back and remember. My friend Glenn recently said,

"'It's hard to make old friends.'" I like, but it's important to make old friends. I'm jumping around a little bit in our remaining moments here because there are a few other, I don't want to call them odds and ends, but interesting threads I'd like to explore. You talk in the book about error-driven learning, which really struck me because many of us don't want to make mistakes. We live in an era where perfectionism is on the rise, but actually screwing up can help us remember

better. Can you explain? Yes. and this was something actually that it was my own process of error-driven learning, something that I became more aware of fairly recently as we started working with computer models of memory. So if you were to just encode every memory of every experience that we have, that's brand new, you'd be using up a lot of space. It's very inefficient. What can be much more efficient is let's say,

if I'm trying to memorize something, if I tweak the connections between the neurons that are basically formed the basis of the memory, so that I allow that set of neurons, that network to come alive more easily. Sometimes you weaken the connections that are useless, that are just adding noise, and you enhance the connections that are adding signal. But the way to do that is to actually stress test the memory in the first place, to actually try to pull it up and compare, giving your brain a chance to compare

try to pull it up and compare, giving your brain a chance to compare what you pulled up in your memory versus what actually happened. Because our memories are always going to be noisy approximations of the things that we're actually trying to remember. So there's actually two parts of this story. So one part of it is the intellectual humility part, which is that people are extraordinarily overconfident that they will remember what's happening in the moment later on. And so many cases testing yourself or pushing yourself in ways that strain your ability to remember exposes those weaknesses at a metacognitive level. So you go, aha, I don't really know this material so well, I better double down and really get into it. I don't really know this material so well. I better double down and really get into it.

But the deeper level is that actually reactivating that memory and giving your brain a chance to compare the reactivated memory with what you're actually trying to remember when you get the answer and you get the correct answer for what you're trying to remember. Comparing those two can allow the memory to be transformed and updated in a way so that it's better able to pull up the memory you need when you need it. I don't know if that makes any sense, but just to give you an idea, even testing yourself before you know what it is that you're trying to memorize could be very helpful. So if I were to give you, let's say a word that's in Italian or something, and I were to say, okay, here's this word I'm trying to think of now, blanking age related cognitive deficits, but I don't give me an Italian word. Pizza, buongiorno. What about aperitivo? Aperitivo, yeah, cacio e pepe. Apparativo. Apparativo, yeah, cacio e pepe. Okay, cacio e pepe, that's a good one, right? So let's say if I say cacio e pepe, what's that? I think it's something in pepper. It's cheese and pepper, and I think it's actually in an

Italian dialect. So cacio e pepe, great. So you get cacio e pepe, and you think to yourself, okay, I think it's coconut. And then they say, Nope, it's actually cheese and pepper. That's the direct translation. Well, now what's happened is I produced this guess, the guess is wrong. And I get this feedback that here's the correct answer. And one of the basic principles of learning in computer models, and likely in the brain too, is when you have reality, and you have this prediction that you've generated, and they mismatch with each, is when you have reality and you have this prediction that you've generated and they mismatch with each other. Now you can tweak the memory, tweak the prediction to de-emphasize the wrong answer and to emphasize the right answer. So later on, you've got fewer

competitors in the space of possibilities for what Cacio y Pepe could mean. So giving yourself the chance to be wrong can actually help you learn more in the long run. And I think this is counterintuitive because we often want to feel like we remember everything and it should be effortless. But in fact, putting in that effort is the best way to learn as much as possible. as much as possible. Okay, continuing with my jumping around here. What about the kind of catastrophic memory stories that catch on in popular culture, amnesia, repressed memories, etc, etc. How real is this stuff? Well, let's talk about repressed memories, because I think this is one that really gets a lot of attention. So Freud talked about the concept of repression, which is that you have these urges that are just so unacceptable that they become locked out of the conscious mind and pushed into

the depths of the unconscious. He at one point, I think, linked that concept of repression to memories that if you've experienced something that's traumatic, that it will be pushed into this unconscious mind. Now from what I understand, Freud actually later on rejected that idea, but it definitely took hold in a lot of the psychoanalytic literature that when we experience an event that's especially traumatic, it can be repressed so that it's in our unconscious, but it expresses itself through ways in which we're not aware of. So there was a period of time, especially in the 80s, when repressed memories gained a lot of attention, in part because of a

book called Michelle Remembers, where a woman described her own experience of recovering a repressed memory in therapy. And it was a memory of ritual satanic abuse. And she describes this whole thing and the memories become more and more rich and vivid, but also more bizarre. I think at one point, Satan gets involved or something, it becomes extremely detailed and bizarre. And so this led, I think, a number of people to really think of repressed memories as a real problem. And so there would be people who would come into therapy and the therapist would say, well, you have low self-esteem, you're engaging in self-harm,

your moods are all over the place, very unstable. I am pretty sure that you've experienced a traumatic memory. And so what we need to do is root out that traumatic memory. So I'm going to ask you some questions and I want you to think about it. What was your relationship with your parents like? What was going on with your teachers when you were in school? Oh, here's something that you told me. Well, do you think this could have been where the trauma occurred? Well, imagine how it could have happened. Maybe use hypnosis to get people a little bit farther along. And so what happens is people might remember a little bit of something and then they're imagining how it could have happened.

And then they have a memory that's confusing the stuff they imagined with the stuff that they actually remember. And so now they get a richer story of this thing, and then they keep imagining and adding on more and more embellishment. And every time they remember this experience, they're remembering the act of trying to remember. And so you can construct a very rich false memory for something that never happened out of bits and pieces of real memories and imagination. And researchers have simulated this in the lab a number of times. Now in the real world, what we know is that in fact, most people who experience traumatic

memories actually have trouble getting rid of them. About I would say eight out of 10 people when I give a talk will tell me, my memory's bad, make it better. And about 20% of the people will say, hey, can you help me forget, I need to remove a traumatic memory that I've experienced. So that's more of the average experience. But sometimes people have an experience of a recovered memory because they had a memory of something that happened to them, but they didn't really put two and two together in a way that it made sense to them. And then 20 years later, they're back in their childhood home and this thing pops into their head because they're in the right context and it comes into mind all of a sudden because they didn't have those rich reminders before and they have this aha moment. And that doesn't mean that the memory

was repressed, but they just didn't have the right cues for it. Or some evidence suggests that maybe just the act of trying to push it out of your mind over and over can transform the memory, make it a little bit more blurry, make it a little bit more distant. But those are quite different than this idea that we have this automatic repression mechanism. And what's worse that once we repress a memory, that it's going to manifest out in these kinds, you know, bleed out in these unconscious behaviors. And amnesia? Amnesia is something that does happen.

There's different kinds of amnesia, of course. So the amnesia that we often see in the clinic, especially like in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, is one in which people have an inability to form new memories and they have trouble remembering information in the recent past. But typically in those kinds of amnesic syndromes, people still have knowledge of who they are and they have childhood memories that might be a little hazy, but they have those memories of things that they experience. And that's very different from other kinds of memories, like what's called psychogenic amnesia.

I don't like that term because it implies it's all in the mind, but everything's in the brain. So basically, if it's in your mind, it's in your brain. It's also called dissociative amnesia or fugue. It's very rare. It's triggered often by severe stress and it's associated with a complete loss of memory, not only for things that have happened fairly recently, but even sometimes memory for who you are. And so people will just pop up somewhere and have no memory for who they are. We don't know much about it. And it's, as I said, it's exceptionally rare, but it does happen.

And there do seem to be some links with severe stress. And we do know that severe stress and chronic stress can have weird effects on the brain, uh, including areas like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex that are pretty critical for memory. Last question. What is deja vu? Deja vu is the experience of feeling like you've experienced something before, even though you're pretty sure that you haven't experienced it before. So you have this kind of a feeling of remembering but without an actual memory. There's a number of theories about it, but one theory which has some really good evidence

supporting it is that deja vu is an exaggeration of our normal sense of familiarity. So there are certain things that we have a very high degree of familiarity for. So for instance, if I ask any of your listeners, what's more familiar to you, the name Dan or the name Charan? Most of your listeners, unless they grew up in the state of Punjab, will say Dan. I'm not actually from Punjab. That's a long story. But most people would say Dan because it's a name they've heard many times and so it feels familiar, right? And likewise, we can have experiences that match up in some way with something that we're very familiar with and can give us this partial sense, this sense of familiarity,

but we have no episodic memory to latch onto to explain that sense of familiarity. So my friend and colleague Anne Cleary has done some great research on this topic, where she had people go through these environments in virtual reality, giving them these virtual reality glasses, for instance. And so you go through, let's say, a video arcade in this virtual environment. Then later on, you might go through a museum and unbeknownst to the person, the museum has the exact same layout as the arcade.

All she did was she went into her VR program and would change, let's say, the video games with a statue or something like that. But they're in the same places. The walls, the rooms are exactly the same shape. It just looks different on the surface. And what she found was that people could have this intense sense of deja vu when they were in a room that was exactly like another room that they'd

been in, but it just looked different on the surface. So there was a partial match with something in memory, giving you the sense of familiarity, but it mismatched enough that they couldn't figure out where that sense came from. And what's interesting is people with epilepsy have electrical activity in certain parts of their brain that come spontaneously right before a seizure.

And those parts of the brain are very important for generating that sense of familiarity in memory. So they'll have this intense sense of deja vu right before a seizure. And in fact, researchers who were trying to do surgery on epilepsy would electrically stimulate this area of the brain called the peri-rhinocortex and find that people would get this intense sense

of deja vu when they would stimulate it. And in fact, this has even been done in studies with rats where they stimulate this area of the brain and a rat will act as if this thing that's totally new to them seems really familiar. This has been a fascinating discussion. I said last question when I referred to Deja Vu, but there are actually two questions I habitually pose at the end of the show. One is, is there a place you were hoping to go that we didn't get to? I guess the big thing that I just want listeners to just take away is this idea that memory is this tool. It's this beautiful resource that we have for making sense of the present and for imagining

the future and imagining possibilities that are not right out in front of us. And I think if we're aware of that purpose, we can mindfully use it in a way that helps us without having it actually take the driver's seat and direct our actions. Finally, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and any other resources you've put out there? My book is called Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters.

And yeah, if people want to know more, you can go to my website, charnrunganath.com. I'm in the process of getting a mailing list together where I can give people more updates and thoughts about memory. And also you can follow me on Instagram where I post updates and I share different events and so forth. And that's at The Memory Doc. Jaren, great to meet you.

Thanks for doing this. Great to meet you too. It's been a great conversation. Thanks again to Jaren. Wrong enough. Great to have him on the show. Go check out his book. And before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on the show.

Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. We get additional pre-production support from my old friend Wanbo Wu. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. And DJ Cashmere is our managing producer. Oh, and finally, Nick Thorburn of the great band Islands wrote our theme.

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