#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Charan Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist at UC Davis, specializing in human memory. He's the author of Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got riverside for recording remote podcasts, ZipRecruiter for hiring, Notion for note taking and team collaboration, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for e-commerce and LMNT for delicious, delicious hydration. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/contact.
And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will, too. This episode is also brought to you by riverside, the platform for recording remote podcasts and studio quality. I've used them a bunch of times in the past. They're amazing. It is the thing I recommend for anybody, especially for people starting a podcast. Studio quality, exceptionally easy to use, a million features that are all extremely useful for the whole pipeline of creating a podcast. I mean, where do I start? First of all, they do the editing. And you could do text-based editing of the audio and the video. So whatever you say, there's an AI-generated transcript in like 100 plus languages, whatever the language is, you can use then the text to do the editing. It does speaker detection, so it figures out who is speaking. All the synchronization obviously is done, not obviously, because some things seem obvious, but a really effortless, beautiful execution of it just is a breath of fresh air. So in case you don't know, it's through the browser, you record the video and the audio both sides of the conversation. Everything is synchronized, everything is stored, just everything is done really well. They have a lot of recommendations of what kind of hardware to use. I think in the video they provide, they say the most important thing is the microphone and lighting, and I agree with that. Good audio is number one. Second to that is indeed lighting, because basically every kind of camera that's available now will do all right. Anyway, riverside makes that whole process super easy. I record my remote interviews with riverside. Give it a try at riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is also brought to you by ZipRecruiter, a site that connects employers and job seekers. To me, one of the most fulfilling things in life is working together with a great team. I love working. I love what I do. Everywhere I've ever worked, I loved doing it. And I love to be surrounded by people who also love doing it and especially who are very good at it. And are pushing themselves to the limit and together we're creating something special. Whatever that is, it could be a small thing or it could be a world changing thing. Whether the mission is small or the mission is big. As long as there's a mission and we're in it together or we're constantly improving, I mean like a team that works great together full of great people is one of the real joys of life. I think that's true for me. I think that's true for anybody because so much of our lives is spent working. And that's where we really, especially in the realm of intellectual pursuits, really challenge ourselves. And so in the process of that challenge is where we find meaning. So build great teams and use the best tools to do it. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go to ziprecruiter.com/lex. They try it for free. That's ziprecruiter.com/lex. The smartest way to hire. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. I've used it for a long time now for note taking, for organizing my thoughts, for connecting my thoughts, for searching through my thoughts. And now using AI to summarize, organize, generate drafts of things that I'm either planning or ideas that I'm working through or the research that I'm doing. Now that's for the individual. Where Notion really starts to shine is when there's multiple people working together. It is an incredible team collaboration tool. And again, the AI component gets integrated really nicely because you can do the search, you can do the summarization, you can create a report of what everybody's been working on. It looks to the docs, the wikis, the projects, and can basically do a Q&A for you to figure out like, where do things stand from a manager position or from an individual contributor? What am I supposed to be doing? What are the people doing? Where can I help? That kind of stuff. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase. notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 180 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Phil Ivey on poker, Aaron Franklin on barbecue and brisket, Carlos Santana on guitar, Tom Morello on guitar, Terrence Tao on mathematical thinking, Martin Scorsese on filmmaking. In fact, I would really love, and I'm planning on talking to actors and directors more. I love film. I love great TV. I love that medium of storytelling. And great actors and great directors are the way we consume stories. They are the medium, the channels, the wizards through which we, all of us take in the stories, new, exciting stories, the stories of old retold better and better and better. So I would like to talk to those people. WTF podcast by Mark Maron. In the past, I really loved it when he interviewed actors and directors and he's done it really well. inside Actor Studio was a program I really loved. When long-form interviews with actors, long-form interviews with directors, even Charlie Rose did a really good job with that. Not the clickbait sort of Hollywood style journalism, but more long-form conversations. I would love to do more of those. Get unlimited access to every master class and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. 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