The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus - Dr Charan Ranganath

Why is memory important?

Well, memory is probably not important for the reason people think it is, right? So we always think, "Oh, memory is important" when we can't remember. (laughs) Then we get frustrated about it, we say, "Oh, why can't I remember this person's name?" And, "Why can't I remember the name of that guy who was in that thing?" Why memory is really important is because it's absolutely central to helping us understand the present, where we are in space, when we are in a time, and to be able to plan and imagine possible futures. So if you look at people with memory disorders, their problem in life is not that they can't remember the past per se, it's that their in- inability to remember the past makes it hard for them to remember whether they've eaten recently, or they end up repeating themselves over and over again, or they just don't have much foresight into what they will do in the future. They have all of these deficits that keep them from living independently, not because they can't tell you what happened, you know, an hour ago or something, it's because that inability leads them to just not be able to do almost anything that, uh, healthy people do in society on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah. So you've sort of touched on something there. You've got a self that experiences stuff-

Mm-hmm.

... and you've got a self that remembers you experiencing stuff.

Mm-hmm.

What is the relationship, the difference, the tension between these two selves?

Well, one of the things that we know from memory research is that the overwhelming majority of what we experience will be forgotten, right? So if your listeners end up telling somebody, "Hey, I heard this great interview on this podcast. The interviewer was on fire," you know, and so then they, they describe it to one of their friends. If they spend 10 minutes describing this long-form conversation that we're having, that would be a huge success memory-wise, right? There's no way anyone's gonna regurgitate every word of what we said, and many of the important points we talk about, people will probably forget, right? So here's the thing. Now I wanna make a decision about my life. Now I wanna make a decision about whether to take a vacation. Well, what do I do? I think about all the past vacations I've taken, where I went, and whether I liked them or not, and if I do that, I'm gonna be relying not on what I experienced, but on memory, which is much, much more, much less complete, right? It's this tiny fraction of what we actually experience. And so, uh, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, referred to this idea that we have an experiencing self that lives through all of these things that we do. But the remembering self only has access to a tiny bit of that information, and that's the basis on which we decide, am I happy right now? What do I wanna do in the future? Um, you know, where am I? (laughs) And so forth. Uh, we're really in this situation where we make most of our decisions based on the remembering self, and, and it's almost as if they're two different people, because of the fact that the experiencing self is in the present, and the remembering self is in the past. It's like if you're a fan of that show, Severance, it's a bit like that.