Shownotes:
What if your memory could be the key to unlocking greater happiness, productivity, and resilience? In this episode, Dr. Charan Ranganath, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC Davis and author of Why We Remember, takes us on a fascinating journey into the science of memory. We explore why some moments stick while others fade, the pitfalls of multitasking, the power of learning from mistakes, and how gratitude can transform your emotional well-being. Tune in for actionable insights and science-backed strategies that will inspire you to rethink how you approach memory, focus, and thriving in everyday life.
Thrive Global Article:
Charan Ranganath on Why We Remember: The Memory Science Behind Productivity and Thriving
About Our Guest:
Dr. Charan Ranganath, a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, has spent over 25 years uncovering the mysteries of memory. As the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab, he studies how our brains remember past events using advanced brain imaging techniques, computational modeling, and research with individuals who have memory disorders. His book, Why We Remember, provides a compelling look at how memory works and how it can enhance our well-being.
About Lainie:
Lainie Rowell is a bestselling author, award-winning educator, and TEDx speaker. She is dedicated to human flourishing, focusing on community building, emotional intelligence, and honoring what makes each of us unique and dynamic through learner-driven design. She earned her degree in psychology and went on to earn both a post-graduate credential and a master's degree in education. An international keynote speaker, Lainie has presented in 41 states as well as in dozens of countries across 4 continents. As a consultant, Lainie’s client list ranges from Fortune 100 companies like Apple and Google to school districts and independent schools. Learn more at linktr.ee/lainierowell.
Website - LainieRowell.com
Instagram - @LainieRowell
LinkedIn - @LainieRowell
Twitter - @LainieRowell
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Transcript:
Lainie Rowell: I really want to talk about your beautiful book. I love it. Like, okay, now, you know, I get credit for, there's a lot of post it notes at the two thirds because the last third is the research, the bibliography, oh my gosh, there is so much in here and what a gift this book is.
Charan Ranganath: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Lainie Rowell: I'm so excited to talk to you about this. Like I literally. did not do a good job of editing down my questions, but I'm going to just hope that you'll bear with me as we have a great conversation
Charan Ranganath: yeah, yeah, of course.
Lainie Rowell: There's so many universals, there's so many things in the book that just apply to our everyday lives and kind of the themes that I picked up on that I'd love to talk to you about today.
One is learning, one is productivity, and the other is kind of well being and memory. My first question for you and this is kind of like one author to another, is did you come up with the title of the book, Why We Remember?
Charan Ranganath: No my publisher suggested it, I think I was finishing the book, and she suggested it, and it just all kind of came together, because so much of what made it happen.
You know, the reason I wrote this book was not, I didn't want to write a self help book, you know, I wanted to write a bigger picture book about, like, the science of memory, and so much of science is about why, right? But even in the science, it's easy to get sucked up in these assumptions about the way things are supposed to be, and one of the things that writing this book really attuned me to, and when that title was suggested, it just crystallized everything, was I mean, in a deep level, we'll never know why our brains are the way they are, right?
I believe that you can look at the way the system works and make statements about what's not the reasoning behind it, so to speak, and I think it's fairly obvious memory is not about storing every experience we have. Right. And the analogy I like to give is, is that I have to travel a lot for work.
And when I travel, I don't like literally take every possession that I own and bring it with me. I try to anticipate what I'm going to need and I bring it. And sometimes I'm going to miss stuff that I should have brought. And sometimes I'm going to bring stuff that I don't use, but I'm definitely better off doing that than trying to carry every piece of junk that I own.
And life is a journey like that. Right. And there's a cost to having too much stuff that you carry around with you. I think there's a metabolic cost. I think there is a a cost in terms of being able to find what you need when you need it. And so when the the title of Why We Remember was suggested.
It was like, it just crystallized all that for me. Sometimes you write about these things, but then it's like, something happens and you realize, I mean, for me, it's not like a top down process. I just write, and then it really kind of comes together as I'm, writing it and that really crystallized it for me.
Lainie Rowell: Well, kudos to your publisher because as I saw the title, I was like, gosh, what a great way to spark curiosity, why we remember, because I think a lot of people would approach the topic of memory of how do we remember? And that's actually not the most important first question. The most important first question is like, why do we remember?
Because if you come at it from how do we remember, then you do get into that, like. How can I just have the biggest suitcase possible and shove as much stuff in there as humanly possible? And me and a friend have to sit on it to get it to close. And then you do get to your destination and you don't need half of those things.
So I do think it's so beautiful to ask yourself, like, why do we remember?
It kind of continuing on that like why we remember one of the things you talk about in the book is You can kind of think of neurons working as a democracy, and I might be butchering this analogy.
Charan Ranganath: No, no, no, no. I mean, that's what I said in the book for sure.
Lainie Rowell: That really helped me understand how the things that do stay with us in the example you're giving kind of win that battle. And so could you explain that for someone who hasn't had a chance to read your beautiful book yet?
Charan Ranganath: Yeah, so basically, the idea is that we don't just have all these pure slots in memory that everything can just go into, right? Part of the reason why we're so economical in terms of the way our brains function is, we use Neurons in a way that's like basically neurons can be part of multiple memories, right?
But what that means is, is that there is this competition between what kind of a memory can be formed and activated at a given time. And so the analogy I gave is that neurons function like democracy, right? Except maybe I didn't quite make this clear in the book, but every neuron can potentially vote more than once sometimes, you know, or they could change their vote.
And so, so that's a little bit of a twist, but if you just think of the more simple story, right? In a democracy, there are these competing factions, and what happens is there's of course winners and losers in a vote, and if you're a child or something like that, and you have basically a lot of, you know, memories in terms of just our general knowledge of semantic memory, for instance.
You have a lot of competition because nothing's really solidified very well yet. The brain is very plastic and susceptible to reorganizing. And so if you're a baby, for instance, it's like some cue in your environment could activate multiple memories. And there's this little fight. And it t takes time to sort out which one is the winner based on which neurons are the ones that are the ones that will win the competition.
And just if you're recording from neurons, that would be just in terms of like the overall rate of activity, we think is how that happens. And so some ensemble, some group of neurons, a faction, which we call a cell assembly is going to be the one that sort of sticks out and that you can think of as the winner of the election.
But where learning happens is that you get this reorganization of the factions after the election so that the winners start to remove the weak elements of the party and there's a little bit of a shake up. But then they also amalgamate. You can think of learning as also an amalgamation of resources.
So once a winner gets entrenched in there, then it's like, they're more likely to win the next time around because they've become leaner and meaner after winning. And so you have this ecosystem of memories. Sometimes memories can form different coalitions and you have organized bodies of knowledge where if you remember one thing, it helps you remember other parts of the same faction.
But sometimes they could be in deep competition so that you're trying to remember the name of some actor. And instead you activate the wrong name, and then it just wipes out your ability to remember the right name. And so, so that's why I wanted to give people a sense of how this works in the brain, because I think people can sometimes think of memory as if it should be a free resource that you can just store as much as you can until you run out of space.
But when you have this competition, what's happening is that competition is emerging from the fact that we can take a small number of neurons and use them to encode a multitude of memories. But then the downside is, is that you always have this fight in this reorganization and this trade off between forming new memories and maybe damaging old memories.
And so that's why we can't always remember everything. There's a cost to forming new memories as well as a benefit.
Lainie Rowell: I don't have the neuroscience background, but in the book, and just now, you explain it in a way that makes it simple for us to understand.
You mentioned semantic memories. Can we talk a little bit about just the basics of what is episodic versus semantic memory, and how does that lead to learning?
Charan Ranganath: So, there's definitely a school of thought, and it's, it's especially in kind of the older generation memory research that, memory is kind of like a lump of here's what I've experienced, here's what I read about in a book, and so forth, here's what I know.
But there's another school of thought which I subscribe to, and I talk about a lot of the evidence for this, that we have different kinds of memory, and one is our knowledge about the facts that we've encountered or beliefs even our general kind of idea of how the world works. And separate from that is these singular experiences that we've had at a particular place in time and we call those latter ones episodic memory.
Now these are kind of the extremes and of course they interact in funny ways and there's a whole kind of gradient in between, but those are the two kinds of basic. Kinds of memory, and the examples that I give would be along the lines of, you know, I can tell you all sorts of stuff about, say, Washington, D. C. And I can tell you, yes, the government is, the president of the United States lives in Washington, D. C., the Pentagon is in the Washington, D. C. area. I can tell you that the District of Columbia is not a state, it's a federal territory or whatever, I don't know. But separate from that is my memory for the last time I was in Washington, D. C. visiting my friend. And that's a event that's localized to a place at a time, and I was there, and so I don't have any confusion between those two. They're just fundamentally different things, and so you can have multiple memories that have the same content in them, but the context can be different.
Right. So you put your keys. In one place in your house today, but you put your keys in a different place in the house on a different day. And the main reason that you can get by is because you have different episodic memories for those two experiences. But if you're just relying on general knowledge, then it's like, okay, where do I generally put my keys?
Sometimes I put it on the counter. Sometimes that can help you too, but sometimes you don't put it in the usual place, right? Or just another example of this is. You have a usual route you drive to for work, or to pick up your child, or whatever it is, and one day you find out that the road is under construction and you have to take this detour, right?
If you rely solely on semantic memory, it's going to take you a while to overcome belief that, you know, you don't want to lose your knowledge of how you usually get to work, but you want to be able to save that singular memory for the fact that the road is closed. And so, having a fast context specific kind of memory, is very useful as well as having a general knowledge that you can apply over and over and over again.
Lainie Rowell: So that episodic memory actually helps us adapt faster, helps us understand like, okay, yeah, we always go that way, but in this situation, we're going to need to go a different way. Is that?
Charan Ranganath: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And you can see, this is why this is one of the big weaknesses that you see in artificial intelligence.
Everybody In the AI field talks about this phenomenon called the continual learning problem. And so it's like, literally you train up chat GPT. And if you want to incorporate new information, you got to start from scratch and train it up all over again, because what can happen is learning new information can impede its ability to generalize based on what it previously worked, right?
Like having your understanding of how you get to work. So your memory that something has changed temporarily and you don't wanna lose your idea of how you'd usually get to work, but you wanna also not be guided by that for the next week while this construction's taking place. Right? And so those are two competing goals and you wanna have slow learning to be able to kind of get the general gist of where everything is and how you get there.
But you want to have a fast, context specific memory that allows you to override when it's necessary. And that second kind of memory is what's lacking in a lot of modern AI, and that's actually something, I think, that makes us especially relevant, you know? And there's efforts right now to incorporate it in AI, but I think what gives humans our edge is We still have a very unique episodic memory.
Your episodic memories are very different than mine, based on your lived experiences, you know, you had a roommate in college who was an eccentric art major or whatever. I had a roommate in college who was pre law and really into philosophy and, we've got all sorts of memories that we've acquired from those weird, unique experiences that make us different from each other, right?
Lainie Rowell: Yeah.
Charan Ranganath: And that's something that you just can't simulate very easily in you know, in an AI system.
Lainie Rowell: That's good to know. It reminds me of, have you heard of that website? Will a robot steal my job? It's basically like, which are the jobs that AI could do better. And so that's a really helpful insight is like, well, this is what we as humans do outperforming machines for sure. So that's lovely. I want to ask you from an education standpoint, we can even think in the K 12 setting, when we're thinking about semantic versus episodic, I'm thinking like, semantic would be, here's the three branches of government, here's how the government works, versus a simulation, which would be more of an episodic memory creation, and maybe that's not a great way to phrase that, but more about episodic memory, because you're going through this thing that's lived, and it's not just like, I can tell you what's in a textbook, like, I have a real sense of how this would play out in real life.
Is that kind of fair to say?
Charan Ranganath: Yeah, yeah.
Lainie Rowell: I mean it sounds like you're making the case that both are really important, so it seems like for learning to be optimal, we would want both.
Charan Ranganath: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I would say that for learning to be optimal, episodic memory is very useful because it allows us to get new information very quickly, but at some point you want to be able to generalize it. For instance, you know your child is like learning something in the classroom, but ideally as an educator, you want them to be able to apply that knowledge outside of the classroom, right? And so that's where semantic memory really comes in. And so part of that interaction between the two comes in learning in different places and spacing out your learning and expressing that memory in different contexts. And sleep plays a role, too, in helping that memory become more generalized. Now, it's not like you can't learn just on the basis of semantic memory. As I talk about in the book, there are kids who've had amnesia because they have brain damage, say from nearly drowning or some kind of a thing that happens during birth, let's say.
And so they can still learn. They can still go to school and graduate high school and so forth, and even sometimes go to college. But they don't have that sense of their own lived experiences. And so as a result, what happens is, is that they are, you know, they, they learn more slowly. It takes them longer to do it.
And that's I think the key is, is that we have this ability to learn very quickly, but there's a tension between this kind of learning very quickly in terms of remembering, Hey, I remember studying, here's the date of this war that took place, or here's like the Spanish word for style or something like that.
Versus being able to use that knowledge and being able to express it in different contexts. And so, at some point you don't want to sit around if you're trying to speak Spanish and recall every time that you heard that word. You just want to be able to say it.
Lainie Rowell: That makes a lot of sense.
I really hear you in like what they both bring to the table episodic and semantics. So that's super helpful. As I was reading the book, I kind of had these teaching strategies come to mind because I kind of felt like what you were sharing with me was reinforcing that.
So I will say, Formative assessment was something that came to mind. And like we call, you know, formative assessment is frequent, low stakes assessment, and that is meant to drive learning. So you could use the analogy of physical exam versus autopsy, which like summative assessment would be the autopsy, right?
It's just like, well, the learning is done. Like, this is how it is and as I was reading, You were talking about you know, testing yourself or these low stake tests that really challenge us do we know what we think we know? And so a little bit about that.
Charan Ranganath: Yeah, yeah. So first of all, almost everyone tells me, how can I remember more? You know, why am I so forgetful? And yet in the moment, people are overwhelmingly, overly optimistic or overly confident about how much they've learned or how much they will remember from an experience. And so people have this kind of belief that learning should be effortless.
And one of the points that I make in the book is, is that in fact, there's a little bit of pain involved in learning, right? And so testing yourself actually creates a little stress test, so to speak, on those cell assemblies that we talked about, right? And so, If you struggle to pull up a memory and eventually get the right answer, or if you struggle like in a test , or if you struggle to pull up a memory and you don't get the right answer, and then you as a teacher give it to me.
Now what happens is I have an opportunity for my brain to reorganize so that I can be optimized to produce the right answer the next time around. And especially to be able to pull up the right answer In a range of different places and situations. And so that's an absolutely crucial part to, in my opinion, to successful education.
And students will, if you ask them, feel like they are learning more by just studying over and over, meaning like read, reading the textbook or something like that, or hearing, you know, now it's like. You can see videos of the lectures or read the notes that are on a discord for my classes and stuff like that.
And it's like they feel like they're learning more, but in fact they're able to retain it much more poorly than if you test yourself, right? And so, and that's just what the data show. And in fact, it's like, even though it's counterintuitive in some ways, it's like, Everybody knows that if you are driving around in a new place, you'll know where things are much better than if you're sitting in an Uber.
Everybody knows that if you're trying to be in a play, you don't sit around and just read the script, you act it out, and, You give yourself a chance to do it from memory and give yourself a chance to screw it up and you get better at it. Right? So I think where what we're missing in education is this idea that being wrong is an opportunity for learning.
It's not. Like somehow, like, because we use assessments, I think is in the autopsy. I like the way you put that, you know, we use it as this kind of an end point or some kind of a yardstick, then it's like, well, getting things wrong is a sign that I failed. Right. And if we want to go back to this example of AI, this concept of error driven learning is huge. Without error driven learning, you have just basically massive problems with a bunch of noise that comes in. And so what you want to be able to do is optimize the memories in the system so that there's as little noise, as little competition as possible, basically.
You want to clamp down that competition. So error driven learning does that. And I think the thing for human learning that we need to really emphasize is this idea of stress testing your memory in using tests, not as a yardstick, but like you said, as a tool for learning. Right. And so, I mean, in theory, if you're just doing perfectly, you're not really learning all that much, you know?
Lainie Rowell: Yeah. And when I was reading, you talk about error driven learning, it reminded me of, are you familiar with Dr. Eric Mazur? When I met him, he was at Harvard, I'm not sure if he's still there, but he did this peer instruction model, and it's this very lovely, you use a digital tool, where you do some instruction, maybe 10 minutes, you poll the group, see where they are, and he has done the research, and there's this whole mapping of like, okay, if, Somewhere between 70 75 percent of people get the answer right, like, don't waste your time talking about it, there's a lot of knowledge in the room, I don't need to spend more time teaching this there's other ways that the ones who don't have it can get there.
And then if there's like, I think it's 30 percent or below get it right. It's like, oh my gosh, there is not a lot of knowledge in this room. Like I got to figure out a way to say this in a different way. I got to reteach it in a different way. But there's this magic, like between 30 and 70 percent getting it right, where you turn and explain your answer to the neighbor without the right answer being revealed.
And they have to make the case for what is the correct answer. And to me that, that kind of fell in line with this error driven learning once we're, once we're like forcing people to commit to like, do you think it's this, it's obviously multiple choice and then, and then like, okay, now could you defend it?
And sometimes people will just talk themselves out of it, just trying to defend it to the person next to them, but more often than not, the person who understands it will explain it to the person who didn't in a way that maybe the teacher wouldn't. So I don't know, I just wondered if that kind of jived with like error driven learning in your mind.
Charan Ranganath: Absolutely, absolutely. , and I think there's one key, which is when you get the answer, you have to really think about it, you know, it's like, you can't just blow it off, but you have to really think about it and process that as new learning that's going against what your brain generated.
And I think this is a huge thing or just processing it in terms of thinking about, yeah, I really struggled to pull that out the last time, but now it's correct. And so, and one of the interesting things that we find is, is that you can get an effective testing before someone has learned anything. And that's one of the most counterintuitive findings that's out there is you haven't learned anything yet.
And I give you a chance . I test you on it and you almost certainly are going to produce the wrong answer, but in many cases, that act of generating the wrong answer can actually help you learn a lot more when I do give you the right answer.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, that feels very counterintuitive because you would worry they're reinforcing the wrong answer, but that's not actually the case.
So, curiosity and dopamine, and as I read your book, as I listen to you talk, there's this joy of curiosity that comes from you that's very infectious, I love that, and you say in the book, "our findings suggest that when a question stimulated curiosity enough to get a shot of dopamine to the hippocampus, people could also take in information that they weren't particularly motivated to learn."
So I think teachers want to know more about this because there's oftentimes where we're asking people to learn things that they might honestly not care about. And so is it fair to say that maybe Some of the, the nice ingredients to get that dopamine coming, novelty, curiosity, struggle are things that could help activate that learning.
Charan Ranganath: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. There's no doubt that neuromodulators like dopamine really promote plasticity and promote lasting memory. There's decent evidence to suggest that those neuromodulators are just kind of, once they're released, they sort of sit around. So, for instance, there's a really cool study that was done by a scientist named Richard Morris and Dorothy Say.
Actually, Dorothy, I think, was the first author. I'm not 100 percent sure that's the study, but I think it is. But basically, it's like they put a rat in a box that had never been before and this rat was exploring the box, right? And so what happened was you get this release of dopamine in the hippocampus, and that was enough to save memories for things that happened before the rat was in the box.
And likewise, our work was suggesting that this curiosity that we elicited with trivia questions was enough to give people a tiny but measurable improvement in their memory for not only the answers to the trivia questions, but just random faces that we showed to people, right? I think subjectively, we can all relate to that feeling of being curious, whether you're watching something that has commercials and you're waiting for the end of the climax of a movie or TV show, or you know, see something and it just makes you go on Wikipedia and then you look up something and you look up something else.
You go down this wormhole and so forth, and so there's a feeling, but it's not necessarily pleasant, right? It's sometimes it's like unpleasant. It's like an itch that you're trying to scratch, and that's what dopamine is all about. It's really, in my opinion, energizing you to seek rewards or to seek information.
Lainie Rowell: That's so fascinating to me. I mean, this whole conversation has given me a hit of dopamine, but when you're talking about like, you actually remember the things before, which to me, that's bananas. So wait, like I was capturing stuff before I didn't realize necessarily, and it could have gotten filtered out.
But because I have that hit of dopamine, now I am like, Oh, wait, no,, that's with me now, too. Is that fair to say? In very layman's clumsy terms.
Charan Ranganath: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair to say.
Lainie Rowell: You also talk in the book about attention and memory hygiene, and I am very transparent about this.
I have spoken on stages about this, I am a recovering task switcher. Being intentional with that phrase, task switcher, I would, with a lot of hubris, say I was a multitasker before I came across the work of Dr. Amishi Jha, who I know you're very familiar with, I believe you're even friends with. Tell her I'd love to talk to her.
But at any rate that multitasking doesn't really exist. And so can you talk to us a little bit about just attention and memory hygiene?
Charan Ranganath: Yeah. So basically our ability to hold information in mind is limited. We have this limited capacity. And our ability to focus attention on what's going on around us is limited, and so I think it's fairly intuitive that if I'm paying attention to something, that's what I will remember.
Now, I think the thing that's maybe a little less intuitive for people is that switching attention has a cost, meaning it's like if I'm having a conversation with you. And I mean, actually I kind of did this just now where like, I was trying to find the exact author of that article on the dopamine thing, and I just couldn't stop myself.
Right. And then I come back and I'm like, wait, what were we talking about again? And that switching has a cost. It taxes, our executive function, our ability to load up the rules of what we need to do to accomplish our goals. And so that cost really adds up when we try to multitask, because the fact is we don't multitask.
We basically shift between tasks. That's how the system works because of our limited capacity. Now, sometimes people will go, Oh, well, blah, blah, blah. I can do this. And sometimes what people are talking about is if you have things that are basically part of the same task, then yes, you can do it, right?
Like, learning to drive. It's kind of a transition between multitasking and eventually when you become an expert, it all becomes one task, right? So there is a part of that. But in general, what's been shown over and over and over again is that there's multiple costs in our attention that happen when we shift from one thing to one task to another, and that, although I'm using the word task in kind of a sciencey sense, it's like, yeah, checking email is a task.
Like checking social media is a task in that sense, right? Looking at a text message is a shift. I believe even the shifts in thinking about things like thinking about checking email. is going to have a cost. It doesn't have to be what you overtly do. It's really the change in your mindset that happens, right?
And so that cost means that you have to reload the whole thread of what you were doing when you shift back to whatever it is that's your Primary goal, like maintaining this conversation and not screwing up in the interview for me, let's say. Right? And so I'm gonna be slower, I'm gonna be behind schedule.
I'm not in sync with you until I catch up. And that cost can be even just, you know, a hundred, few hundred milliseconds. But it's a measurable cost. And that gets me behind. What we're also starting to figure out is, every time I make one of these switches, it's looking like you get this little snapshot in memory of what was happening right before that switch.
Now the problem is, is that, ideally in memory what you want, is you want to build a little coalition of pieces of information that all play well together, right? But what can happen is, is if I switch too much, I get a lot of these blurry snapshots where I was kind of still behind schedule and trying to pay attention, and then I switch, and now I've got a little snapshot of that, and then I've got another little snapshot where I'm not, processing things very meaningfully because I'm still catching up.
And so rather than having one cohesive memory, I have a whole lot of little bits and pieces that are actually fighting with each other. I say this in the book that I've sat in conferences and scientists like myself will be checking email during a talk and then we walk out and we're like, Oh yeah, that was a boring talk.
I don't remember anything from it, but it's really that we were, you know, on email and thinking that we could do everything at the same time. But we can't.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, it's, it's costly in a lot of ways. I think for me, it's also emotionally exhausting. Like I find that when I'm doing that. I just walk away like, oh, I'm exhausted versus if I can just single task, or get into to flow. I feel like that's, that's better for me.
Okay. I want to ask you, these might turn into rapid fire questions here,
so One of the questions that I have for you is about gratitude and memory, and what is that relationship like, because I'm fascinated, I've spent years writing and talking about gratitude, and so now here's my big shot. Tell me about gratitude and memory.
Charan Ranganath: Absolutely, yeah, so I've tried to do this, and especially in, tough times the past few days, I've tried to do this, and the reason it's such an important thing to do, at least from a memory perspective, is that remembering events specifically from particular moments in our life brings back that context, brings back that mindset, brings back those emotions from those particular events.
And we know from many, many, many studies that remembering a time in our life when we were sad can make us sad in the present. Remembering a time that we were happy can make us happy in the present. Research has even shown that remembering a time when you've been altruistic and helpful to people can make you feel that way more in the present.
So in other words, remembering can change your mindset. Remembering times that we were impulsive can help us prevent being impulsive in the future because we understand what it is like to be overcome by our desires or our emotions, right? Remembering times that we were able to do really well in an interview or in a speech can overcome our belief that we are not good speakers or not good at interviews or whatever it is, right?
I mean these singular events are very powerful. And so, , I mean, for me, the way I've managed to do it when I do it, is I'll just go through and say, in the past day, what is anything, small as possible, that gave me even the tiniest bit of happiness?
And, it might start with just getting an email from a former student who was telling me how well they're doing now, or something like that. Or, it could be like, I made the perfect espresso this morning, right?
These just tiny things like the espresso would not be important in the scheme of things. Right. But it's like, what happens is it starts to take on momentum and you remember one little minute positive thing. And then all of a sudden other things start popping into mind because once you kind of get in that mindset, then it opens up other memories that are associated with that same context.
And all of a sudden you can realize, boy, in the past week, a lot of good things have happened and I can do this, even though I might I've started off waking up in a terrible mood. I can do this and realize that life has offered me a lot of good things and that makes my mood better in the present.
I used to get stuck in this idea of gratitude practices as being, I'm thankful I don't have cancer or I'm thankful and we should be right. If you don't but I think it's a very powerful thing to focus on the small stuff that's happened recently that's very specific in terms of events, and that's in some ways going to give you a more concrete sense of positive emotions, I guess. Give you more actual kind of re experiencing of positivity in the moment.
Lainie Rowell: I love how you talk about the specific, that's so important. I know I gotta let you go, but I got two quick questions. What is the one important thing that you cannot say enough? You will stand on the rooftops and scream this, what do people need to know about memory?
Charan Ranganath: Memory is not to be thought of as, an easy way of storing every experience that you have. Nor do we want that to be the way memory works. Memory should be a effortful process of finding meaning in our past experiences that we can use to carry into understanding the present and navigating the future.
And we need to be mindful of what memories we create and what memories we pull up in the moment, because memory is a resource. It's a co pilot, but you don't want it in the driver's seat.
Lainie Rowell: That's a great way to put that. Okay. I love that. Now, what are the best ways for people to stay connected with your work?
I hope they will get a copy of Why We Remember. It is so beautiful. I mean, I love that you do such a good job with the stories and the neuroscience and just making it all so accessible. I loved it. I read every word and it was amazing.
Charan Ranganath: Thank you so much.
Well, so you can definitely keep up on my Instagram.
That is almost entirely dedicated to book related stuff, events, and as well as a couple of random music references here and there. And then, I have a mailing list, which I haven't started using yet, but I'm just still finding out how to, how to use it. But if you sign up on my website, CharanRanganath.com, there's a space to enter in your name for the mailing list.
I don't spam people. In fact, I haven't sent anything yet, but I will start sending out resources and tips for brain health, how to remember more effectively the things that you need to remember and you know, keep people up to date on new things that in the field of neuroscience that I want people to be aware of and maybe even tease my next articles and books as they come out.
Lainie Rowell: Amazing. Well, definitely subscribe to that because you're gonna be on the ground floor, early adopter, charter member of a subscribing group, right?
Charan Ranganath: I sincerely hope so. That'd be great. That'd be really great.
Lainie Rowell: Okay, great. Well, I will definitely be doing that. Thank you for writing this book. Thank you for your work and I hope we get a chance to connect another time.
Charan Ranganath: Thanks a lot. No, I would be happy to do so. Thanks Lainie.
Lainie Rowell: Thank you. And thank you all for listening.