A Neuroscientist's Guide to Memory: Tools for Remembering Better | Dr. Charan Ranganath

Charan Ranganath (0:01)

But the thing that really impressed me about it was how much our past can impact our present, and how the memories that we choose to bring forth at any given moment can affect the way we view the world in the moment. Your feelings about the outcomes of your choices are not driven by actually what you experienced, but it's driven by memory for those experiences, which captures only a fraction of what happened.

Michael Gervais (0:28)

You short-circuited me.

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. Why do some memories seem to stick with us forever, while others just fade away? Our guest today is here to help us wrestle with this question. Dr. Charan Ranganath is a renown memory researcher, and he has a unique approach to improve our memories. Instead of working to remember more, Charan suggests we should work to remember better. Charan has spent more than 25 years as a professor of psychology and neuroscience, unraveling the complexities of memory. He is a pioneer in understanding how our brains allow us to remember past events and use those memories to shape our present and future. Charan's latest book, Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters, is an exploration of memory's influence on our daily experiences and its potential as a tool for personal transformation. In this conversation, we dive deep into how memory can be used as an accelerant for personal growth and how it can help us heal from trauma. We discuss practical strategies for improving memory and the performance benefits it brings to our decision-making and our overall quality of life. So with that, let's dive right into this week's memorable conversation with Dr. Charan Ranganath. Charan, we're going to talk a lot about memory today, but I want to just start with a question about the present. How are you?

Charan Ranganath (2:06)

I'm very good. I'm happy to be here and especially remembering the fact that I was supposed to be at your show a while ago, but I had broken my arm and since then, things are a lot better, so I'm very grateful for that.

Michael Gervais (2:19)

That is one of the good reasons, one of the only sufficient reasons to cancel Last Minute. So you're remembering right now that you broke your arm.

Charan Ranganath (2:30)

That's right. That's right. And it's both scary every time I remember it, but then I think about, oh my goodness, I'm so happy to be where I am now and out of that position. So and I've got kind of a story out of it. It's not that I always say that it's like, if you're going to have something bad happen to you, you should have a good story. I don't have a great story, but at least it's something.

Michael Gervais (2:53)

So don't bury the lead. What is the what's the insight or the the wisdom that you've learned from breaking your arm?

Charan Ranganath (3:01)

Maybe that I'm too old for skateboarding.

Michael Gervais (3:07)

Oh, you broke it skateboarding.

Charan Ranganath (3:09)

Yeah, it wasn't as cool as it sounds, but yeah, I was riding a skateboard and just caught on a rock and just fell. And it was a freak freak accident. But a lot of my relatives are like, you're never going on skateboard again.

Michael Gervais (3:25)

Did you grow up on skateboards?

Charan Ranganath (3:27)

I went was junior high. I was into skateboarding. I was never in early high school. I was never very good, but I did it. And and then like lately, I've gotten into wake surfing. And I even when I was on holiday, I tried surfing. And so I was like, I'm going to get back into riding skateboard so I can work on these hips because I have wonky hips. And it was it was good until it wasn't. So I enjoyed that.

Michael Gervais (3:57)

That's that is the story of action sports. It was good until it wasn't. Yeah, it's perfect. All right. So let's let's get into memory. Like, let's just start kind of big picture for a minute. Why is memory important for you?

Charan Ranganath (4:14)

Memory? Oh, for me, that's a really great question.

Michael Gervais (4:17)

Yeah. Why are we? Why did you dedicate your body of work to memory?

Charan Ranganath (4:22)

Well, it didn't I didn't really plan on this. Sometimes life takes you in funny directions. The I'll give you the medium short version of the story, which is that I was in grad school and I was actually training in clinical psychology and I was doing depression research. And one of the things that I was doing was I was working in the clinic and I was doing clinical research on depression. And so in our depression research, one of the things that we did was we were studying people who weren't depressed, but trying to get them into a mood that simulated depression. And one of the most effective ways of doing this was actually getting people to recall sad events from their lives. And it was just extraordinarily effective in getting people to feel very sad in the moment. And of course, ethically, we got people out of that mood before they left and so forth. But it was really a powerful thing to see it in person and to hear people's stories that they would often tell when we would do these experiments. And so, and then I was working in the clinic and I would see patients and sometimes, and I was trained in a method called cognitive behavior therapy. And so CBT is it's called, you do some behavior therapy, which is based on learning theory. And the idea is that we learn fears, for instance, through these kind of rapid primitive mechanisms in the brain. And you can learn to suppress and change these fears through exposing yourself to whatever it is you're afraid of, whatever it is you're anxious about. But then the cognitive part was really all about processing people's beliefs about what they're capable of, who they think they are. And that inescapably led to memory, because people's beliefs about the future, people's beliefs about their abilities, and people's beliefs about these flaws in themselves were always rooted in memories of traumas big and small. And so that gave me this empathetic view, link to memory. And then on the other side, I was also doing work in the clinic doing neuropsychology, which was testing people who were coming in, saying they had cognitive problems, problems in their thinking, and could have been somebody with a head injury, it could have been somebody with early Alzheimer's disease, it could have been somebody with, I had one patient with untreated syphilis, I had a patient, and many people with clinical depression. The thing that brought them all into the clinic was memory. They would always say it. And this was the thing that prevented them from being able to work, preventing them from being able to socialize, or even be able to function in real life.