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, well, memory is important when we can't remember, then we get frustrated about it. We say, oh, why can't I remember this person's name? 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 at space, when we are at 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 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 in a day-to-day basis. Yeah. So, you've sort of touched on something there. You've got a self that experiences stuff and you've got a self that remembers you experiencing stuff. 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 going to 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 want to make a decision about my life. Now, I want to make a decision about whether to take vacation. Well, what do I do? I think about all the past vacations I've taken, where I went, and whether I like them or not. And if I do that, I'm going to 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 Conorman, 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 want to do in the future? Um, you know, where am I? And so forth. uh we're really in the 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. It sort of suggests to me that the if there was a way for the remembering self to remember everything the experiencing self experienced that this would give us a fuller picture. Maybe we would be choosing from a deeper more rich data set to be able to make our decision about the vacation whatever it is. Oh well we once had a conversation with somebody about going to Tulum but but I forgot about that conversation about Tulum. We went to Tulum and Tulum sucked or or or it was great or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question and uh Conorman felt like it was in fact quite irrational that we don't have this capability to access the experiencing self when we remember. And to me it's actually quite the opposite. If you talk to people who have what's called highly superior autobiographical memory, these are people who have just uh this incredible database of information that they've experienced. You know, they could tell you uh on a particular date seven years ago exactly what they had for breakfast, what the weather was, who won the sports matches that day. Unbelievable. And if you read descriptions, many of these people talk about it as torture. They say it's something that they wouldn't wish on their worst enemy. I mean, they are often plagued by memories. um at best it's irrelevant stuff and at worst it's the stuff that is minor and negative but it just comes back to them over and over again. So one way I like to think about it is is that we're blessed with this incomplete memory because what we remember tends to be what we need. So, just as an analogy, imagine you're taking you are taking a trip, right? Since we're in vacation mode, imagine you are taking a trip. You'll pack your suitcase. Now, will you pack everything you own? Probably not. Probably not. Okay, good. So, I don't know, maybe you're a minimalist, but most of us would not, right? So, when you're making a decision, what do you about what to pack? What are you thinking of? How do you choose? probably think about similar trips you took in the past. Uh might imagine what this trip might be like and try to work out what it could be that would be required. Exactly. So you're going to work out what you think you'll need on this trip, right? And you'll carry with you only the stuff that you think you'll need. Sometimes you'll carry stuff that turns out you don't use. Sometimes you'll pack some things and it turns out that you're missing something, right? and you forgot this jacket that you desperately need and then you'll kick yourself for not having packed everything. But here's the bit. On average, you do pretty well by packing just what you need. And that's how memory works. It's kind of an analogy for memory and the journey of life that we take, right? Our brains are trying to figure out through millennia of evolution what's the best information to carry with us. What's the information that we're going to need in the future? Is it going to be every word of every conversation? Or is it going to be the stuff that was important in some way? The stuff that we paid attention to, the stuff that was surprising or new, the stuff that got us emotionally aroused because it's rewarding or something that is scary and a threat that we want to remember later on, right? And if you look back at the memories of your life, those will be the kinds of things that we tend to remember better. Just lingering on the super remembers for a second. What's happening inside of the brains of these people? Are their brains structurally, functionally different? Do we know why it happens? Yeah, there it's it's kind of surprising how little we know about these individual differences in memory. Overall, there are some hints that there are some differences. I believe it was in an area of brain called the stratum. Um uh but you know what surprised me in reading that research is how subtle and small the differences really are. They're not all that big. Uh and you can look at people with um uh severely deficient autobiographical memory. People who you ask them, you know, what they did yesterday and they'll give you a very minimal answer and they won't be able to remember hardly anything in detail. what they tell you will sound like they're reading from a book, not something that they actually lived, right? Yet you look in real life and the highly superior and the severely deficient people, they're functioning at equal levels. It's not like the highly superior people are limitless and they're, you know, rich and famous. And yeah, you can find some rich and famous people with het, but for the most part, they're just like everybody else in terms of their daily life. They didn't perform better at school. they didn't do, you know, live out some amazing experiences that nobody else would have. So, we don't know enough about what makes the brains different, but it may be something related in my opinion, and this is just purely opinion, it may be something to do with the way people think about what's interesting to them and the way they build their knowledge. So, for instance, there's all this data uh or not all this data, there's all these videos of LeBron James, uh I mentioned him in my book, and I also did an interview with the NBA about this. And basically, LeBron has this extraordinary memory for basketball games. He could talk about a game that he played in long ago and describe plays in that game, and the plays go point by point with a video that you could sync up to what he's saying. I mean, it's just and you think about how quickly that information is going by him and how hard it would be to construct some kind of a detailed memory from it. But the guy has studied the game and played the game for so long. what seems like this incredibly confusing array of people running around at super high speeds and all of this stuff happening. He's able to just grab it and put it in a little compartment because he's already seen it before basically. And so he's not even looking at what's happening now. He's looking at what's going to happen 30 seconds ahead, a minute ahead. He's looking at where the ball is going and anticipating three plays ahead. Right? And it's that expertise that really gives him this extraordinary ability to remember it detail. And that's a case where it's not about remembering more in the sense of just remembering everything willy-nilly. It's about remembering better in the sense of being able to grab the patterns, the information that you need and being able to pull it out as quickly as possible. Okay, let's say we're talking about a normal human now, not a a neverer, not an everything rememberer. How does human memory work typically in in in our brains? Oh, that's such a big big question. Um, uh, I think the way human memory works is it's often spontaneous in the sense that we will, you know, in our research uh, that's actually happening right now. Uh but in some of our very recent research, we've found that we're not actually encoding rich memories all the time because much of the world is very predictable. And in fact, it looks like our brains are really kind of forming these detailed snapshot memories at these moments when uh when we're struggling a little bit because something's new or surprising or at times where this is just motivationally very important to us. We just achieved a goal of some kind, right? And so these moments are kind of these snapshots that we have and then later on they can often spontaneously pop into our heads. Like if you hear a song that you haven't heard in a long time or if you go back to a place you haven't been to since you were a child and all of a sudden these memories pop into your head, right? But what happens is you get these little bits and pieces and then you reconstruct that into a story. And so what's critically interesting about that piece is that when we're remembering, we're never really replaying the past. We're imagining how the past could have been, just like an archaeologist imagines how an ancient civilization might have been based on some fragments of pottery that they dig up. Right. That's interesting. So why do we remember some events so clearly and other ones vaguely or not at all? What what predicts whether something will enter memory? There's many factors. Um I actually came up with an acronym for this after talking about memory for a long time and it took me forever to realize that I could come up with a pneummonic to help me remember these things which is medic. Um, and so it stands for meaning, error, uh, let's see, it was meaning, error. Now I'm trying to remember it all. Uh, you've got to remember the pneummonic distinctiveness. That's right. Meaning, error, distinctiveness, importance, and context. It did come to me. The pneummonic helped. There it is. So, uh, so let's go through that. Right. Meaning is just like what I was telling you in the LeBron James example. When you have a body of knowledge about something, it makes it really easy to memorize new information based on what you already know. So for instance, if you're a uh football fan, I'll say European football or whatever, everybody in America outside of America what they would call football, right? So now I give you a hypothetical player who doesn't exist at all and I give you the statistics on their uh performance and I say here's all the statistics you need to know about what this player is good at what they've done in the past and so forth. If you're a soccer expert you can grab that information immediately even though it's just a bunch of random numbers I just made up and a name of somebody who I've made up because you have a structure in your mind for locking in that information. And so meaning is a really good way to uh lock in new information by being able to tie what you're trying to learn with stuff you already know. So a lot of pneummonic devices work that way. Um I also mentioned error and this is kind of a counterintuitive one. I usually like to talk about this last but it's the second letter in medic. So error is basically the fact that the more we struggle to try to pull up a memory and if we get the right feedback what will happen is is it gives our brain a chance to actually stabilize the memory and repair the problems that would happen. What I mean by this is let's say you memorize how to pronounce my name and then later on an hour later you just ask yourself okay how did I pronounce this name again? Let me try it. And you just say it and then you play back what you actually said, which if you did it perfectly, by the way, what you'll find is you hear that and now your brain will go, wait, I made a little bit of a mistake. It wasn't quite what I said before. Let me fix that memory. And we can see this in action in the brain. And we've shown that you get activity in areas like the hippocampus when you're actually trying to retrieve information and then you repair these memories relative to just trying to memorize it just looking. Right? And that's why you learn a layout of a place better if you drive yourself than if you sit in an Uber. Um because you're actively trying to generate stuff for memory and then finding, oh wait, I was wrong. And those errors allow the brain to build a more detailed map, so to speak. So, so error is one. The more you struggle, the better it is, information will stick and you'll be able to retain it later on. If if you don't give yourself a chance to struggle, like you just read the lines and play without rehearsing them from memory, you're never going to memorize it, retain it well, right? So, that's another example. Um uh so I went to error. Uh there was also now distinctiveness. So distinctiveness means that essentially our memories are competing with each other. And so this is a little bit counterintuitive. You might think memories are just like your phone. You store photos and every photo is independent of each other. But that's not the way the brain does it. This is why we don't run out of capacity like your phone does because we're using the same neurons to code multiple memories. And so what happens is is that there's a pattern of activity that's uniquely associated with my memory for you and a pattern of activity that's uniquely associated to other people I know. Now, to the extent that you look like people I know, those memories will be confusable to me. But if there's some way I can attend to the features that make you different from anyone else I've met, now I will have a distinctive memory. And so my brain when it's trying to pull up a memory of you, it won't be as hard because you stand out relative to all the other faces of people I met, right? So, uh, where this comes into play, for instance, is when people will take photos at Instagram walls when they go to places or they're at a concert and they're taking videos. And what you find is that people actually have a poorer memory for these experiences when they do that than when they're actually just trying to immerse themselves in the experience. And the reason is is that when you're mindlessly taking pictures, you're not actually immersed in the details that will give you a distinctive memory. You're just kind of like floating around trying to grab as much information as you can. And what we lose is the memory for that experience. And all we get out of it is a recording that most of us never go back to. Right? So distinctiveness is hugely important. Now, you could use the camera and say, "I'm going to use this camera to take a picture of something that's so uniquely associated with this place or so uniquely associated with this moment that I will not be able to forget it." And that's where you're using the camera as a way of giving you a distinctive memory as opposed to depriving you of one. So, we've gone through me and D now, right? So, I is the big one, which is importance. And when I say importance, I'm not saying what you think is important in terms of your higher order self, but rather what your brain thinks is important based on evolution. Right? So the things that are important, as I mentioned before, tend to be things that are emotionally evocative at some way or another or arousing in some way. Being in a new place, being surprised, but also being scared. Uh traumas are enormously memorable regardless of whether we want them to be um you know things that are like you know being in a state of desire. Those moments are very memorable to us. And so you can look at those states and what you'll find is that there's these chemicals in the brain that are released pretty intensively during these states. Uh chemicals like dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin, cortisol. And many of your listeners, I'm sure, have heard some of these things. Dopamine everybody talks about nowadays, right? Uh and what dopamine does, Princess, is it gets you revved up. It doesn't actually give you a sense of pleasure, but it does give you get you revved up and it promotes plasticity. It allows these memories to rapidly consolidate, so to speak, so that they're much more resilient later on. So importance is not necessarily what I think, oh yeah, I have to make sure that uh I remember this doctor appointment next week, but rather it's something more along the lines of, oh my god, I uh was in this cave and I got attacked by a bear. I want to remember that experience and I want to remember how I got there and how to avoid that in the future. Right? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. So importance is a big one and that's why we often remember these emotional experiences. The last one and I know I've gone on for a long time but you wanted you asked for it. So I did indeed. So another one is context that we'll see in medic. So context is the place the time that these events took place. So when we remember events or episodic memories these are memories that are glued to a place in time. There's brain area called the hippocampus. What we know is the hippocampus if you if it has any kind of a filing scheme, it files things according to time and place. So that's kind of why for instance if you hear a song and this is a song that you haven't listened to since you're a teenager, well now what happens is it brings you back to that time because it's a cue that pulls up memories from that time period. And so that time period now has all sorts of memories associated with it. It might bring you back to, you know, sneaking beers with your friends in high school or it might bring you back to days where you went out to the beach or whatever it was, right? And that experience is something we would call mental time travel where a memory can bring you back to a past context, a time and a place. And uh these memories might seem like they're forgotten, but they can be pulled up if you're in the right context. And conversely, if you're in the wrong context, it's really bad. So, for instance, just as a simple example, you walk into the kitchen and you can't remember where you are or why you went to the kitchen. Sorry. You walk into the kitchen, you can't remember why you went there, then you walk back to whatever room you went from. And now it all of a sudden pops in your head. And the reason is is that my memory uh for what I wanted to do was in say this room which is my home office but then when I get to the kitchen I'm in a different context. My mind is switched over to a different place. And so these boundaries between the rooms act as shifts in our context that make it harder to remember things in the past. So that's the last one. And all of these factors will determine life or death. You know, in terms of memories, it seems to me I I've had it in my head as you've been explaining so far that memory feels a little bit like the breath. The breath being one of the few windows that we have into controlling the autonomic nervous system that you actually do it unconsciously but can step in consciously and make some amendments to it too. You can kind of tinker a little bit. Uh is that a a fair analogy in this regard that there is a there is memory is going on. We don't necessarily get to choose and then we also have this degree of conscious control over how much stuff gets um put into memory at the time how much we pull it back out etc. Absolutely. In fact, I would go farther and say we both have a lot of under the hood processes of memory. We have uh but we also have a ton of control with memory although we often don't use it or at least we often don't use it properly. Uh so what I mean is on the one hand you have these automatic processes that happen under the hood like uh the brain is constantly tuning itself up to learn from experience so that you can process things faster and more efficiently. So you're trying to learn Chinese let's say initially these characters will be very hard to read but if you keep reading the same characters over and over your brain will start to tune up so that you can process that information faster. A lot of that happens without or even really feeling the changes that are happening in the brain. It's just happening. Uh now on the bad side, you hear fake news and you hear it from 10 different sources and all of a sudden it starts to feel more believable. And the reason is our brain has tuned itself up to process those messages and in the process it seems easier to think about and if it seems easier to think about we often believe it's true. Right? So that's an example of sort of these automatic influences of memory that I talk about in the book. Um, but there's also gobs of control we have. So for instance, there's research showing that when we remember an event, we have a lot of control over the narrative that we use to put together that event. Right? So there's great stories about people where they have fans of two different sports teams. They watch the same football match. Then later on, you ask them for their memories of it and their memories are just completely different from each other because they're watching it from the perspective of the team that they're liking, right? Um, and there's other research showing that you can change your perspective. You can look at the same event from a different point of view and all of a sudden remember things that you didn't remember before. And so we have control over that narrative to some degree. And this is really important when you talk about things like trauma, right? I I used to work with uh veterans who had PTSD and one of the big challenges that they faced was they had all this shame about their trauma and they never talked about it with anyone. And you could see this massive transformation in these patients when they would get hooked in with a group and they're talking to other people who experience similar traumas and they share their trauma and all of a sudden they realize well they're not alone. There are other people who face similar things and they're getting support from these people from a completely different perspective. They're getting support from people who don't blame them, who aren't telling them to feel guilty. they are telling them that they're cowards and all of a sudden they look at the same experience they had from a completely different perspective and now what happens is you're modifying and updating that memory. So we have a lot of agency over the way we use memory and I think that is important because often people feel like their memories are you know a literal set in stone record of what happened and in fact it's like the sands are always shifting. There's always change that's happening. Um sometimes we do it without knowing it and we just make a lot of mistakes because errors start to accumulate in our memories. But uh sometimes we can do it properly and sometimes we can use that to our advantage. Why do we forget things? Is it just a real estate uh demand problem inside of our brain? There are there are two schools of thought both of which are probably right. One is is that you forget because a memory just disappears from the brain. that these connections that you have between neurons that allow the memory to be pulled up, those connections start to become start to decay and become wiped out and then you lose access to the memory because it's just gone. Another school of thought is that you can't find the memory you're looking for, but if you had the right cue, you would be able to pull it up, right? So, you're trying to remember the name of the guy who was in that thing and you can't pull it up and then an hour later it just pops into your head, but it's too late. Your conversation is over, right? So, in one case, you were in the wrong context, you couldn't pull it out, but now in a different context, you can might pull it up very easily. So, we have it's absolutely unequivocal that we have access to more memory. We have more memories that we could pull up than we can than what we can actually pull up at any given time. So, some of forgetting is just not being able to find. Um, there is some evidence though to suggest that not everything's completely kept and you know, I fully believe that too based on the biology. So, it's it's a little of both. But, I think we don't give ourselves enough of an opportunity to find those memories sometimes when they are there. How can we make ourselves forget? Is that possible? If there's something we think, I I don't want to keep that in my mind anymore. I've been able to dispense with my 16-digit pin across the front of my card that I've been desperately trying to remember for the last 3 years. Uh is there such a thing as making ourselves forget? There is. It's controversial as to how effective it is. Uh but a good friend of mine, Mike Anderson, has done a lot of research on what he calls voluntary forgetting, which is basically you cue people to re recall something and then you tell the person just suppress it, don't think about it. And what you find is is that the better people get at this, the more likely it is that they can voluntarily forget something. Now, these effects aren't gigantic, and it's not clear. Is this something that will help you probably it would be something that would help you forget, you know, um a temporary password or something like that. I would be surprised if it doesn't help you with that. Uh you know, maybe a traumatic experience, unlikely, but who knows? If you do it enough, maybe it would lead you to forget it. Um, if nothing else, I think it would make it harder to retrieve those memories. I get the sense, and I certainly know this for myself, that, you know, if I look back across a trip that I've taken or or or a time, an evening that I've spent with friends or an episode or a book that I've read or whatever and I don't feel like I've recalled enough, there's this sort of odd sense of guilt. I think, what what was the point of doing it? What was the point of go what was the point of going through all of this if it was just the passage of time and I've got no memory dividend that my future self is able to tap into so that my remembering self can actually sort of extract it. Is there an issue with this yeah this attempt to try and memorize more this sort of uh never- ending overdraft of wishing that you could recall more of the things that you did? Yes and no. I mean, what you're talking about is, I think, one of those kind of points where you want to be able to remember the things that are important. So, I always say remember better, not more. Try to remember the things that matter. So, if you're with your family or close friends or a partner and you go on a holiday, those are things that we typically like to remember. I mean, to some extent, a holiday is an investment in memories, right? Um, on the other hand, there's a lot that we forget that you can look and ask yourself, you know, 10 years later, will my future self care that I forgot this? No. Okay. So, not that important. Um, and I think that if you go back to the examples of the things that you aren't remembering with it, maybe you just need the right reminder. Maybe you need to mentally go back there. Cuz sometimes what happens is when you take a holiday, you're in such a different state of mind. You're in a different place than you come back home and you lose that part of yourself because you're a different person when you're in a different context, so to speak. So I think about this where Hawaii is my happy place, you know, and um when I'm in Hawaii, I can get into a mode that I can't get in my daily experience at work. And so sometimes it's a matter of you go back there and you are in the humidity and you're smelling these tropical flowers and birds are going and boom, you remember all these things that you couldn't remember before. And so maybe that's the thing that you want to be able to do is try to call back some of those memories either with photos or with uh you know just at the end of the day while you're on these holidays if you just take a moment and reflect on try to just remember one positive thing from the day, right? What you'll find is is that one positive thing will come to mind and then that'll make another positive thing come to mind and all of a sudden you've recalled all of these experiences that you had and the act of recalling those experiences will make it easier to bring those experiences to mind later on so that you can incorporate it into your remembering self in a more rich way. What are the fundamentals of training memory? You know, we've spoken about kind of how the environment cues our brain to tell us the things that we want to remember. This is uh how you breathe and why you breathe when you're not thinking about breathing. But if I was to start thinking about breathing and I wanted to breathe better, how should how should people come to think about training their memory? What should they do if they want to remember an experience while it's happening? What what are the fundamentals of that? Okay, so there's different. So, a lot of people when they talk about memory training is like memory athletes or something where they're trying to memorize like the thousandth digit of pi and that stuff is not going to be particularly helpful in remembering this moment that you want to hold in mind as pristinely as possible, right? Um, what I would say is the biggest thing that helps with remembering in a way that will keep get you back into that moment is the sensory details, whatever they are. Now, some people don't have a great ability to remember the sensory details in certain ways. There's people who have what's called aphantasia who can't visually image things for instance. But to the extent that you can immerse yourself in whatever makes this moment unique, that will make it more memorable to you because it's going to be distinctive. The D and medic that sticks out, it'll give you a context that's very unique and specific, the C in medic. And so, um, basically we can do that in part by controlling managing our, you know, basically just keeping ourselves from sabotaging ourselves for the most part. So, you know, there's just certain things that are just memory blockers like stress, fatigue, um illness, depression, multitasking. Multitasking is probably the major malady of the modern age, right? Um you know, if you want to remember this moment, don't keep looking at your phone. Don't keep don't uh turn off you know put your uh watch in do not disturb mode because the more tempted you are to do these things even thinking about it can be enough to sap your attention and get you out of that moment that you want to remember later on. Right. That's it. Okay. So avoiding doing the things that get in the way of you recalling the things is a good place to start. Yeah. Another thing is just setting the intention of what you want to take away in the first place. So, and this go this is I think a great analogy to the breath, right? Because I think a lot of people think that it should just be natural. It should be we just get everything for free and that's not really how it works, right? So if you know memories, your memory is going to be incomplete. Ask yourself what you want to take away from this experience in the first place because it's a lot easier to focus on the information that you want to take away in the first place than it is to try to pull it up later on if you did not focus on that information. Now, I know that sounds a little like obvious in some ways, but how often do we really ask ourselves, what's the memory I want to take away from this experience? I would bet you almost never. I don't do it nearly as much as I should, although I try to be kinder to my remembering self now than I used to before I wrote my book. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so error-driven learning, something you kind of hinted at earlier on. Yeah. Explain that to me. Well, this is kind of a counterintuitive concept, but basically when our brains form memories, they're a bit incomplete and like I said, they're very tied to a context. And so, what can be a problem with that is when you're trying to remember certain things, like let's say you're trying to remember uh um let's say you're trying to learn a new language, right? and you're trying to remember the words that you learned and use it in a conversation when you go on holiday. Well, if you're trying to do that, you want to be able to pull it up in a whole lot of different contexts. So, one of the things we found in our computer models of memory is that when people try to pull up these memories, the brain won't really do a perfect job of reconstructing what you pulled up. But then if you get the right answer and you have it in front of you, now the brain can tweak the memory. It can update it in a way so that it's going to be better at pulling up that information later on. So imagine uh maybe I'll give you another example like I'm trying to memorize uh your name, right? So now I uh leave I'm done with this podcast and I try to visualize you and pull up your name. Then I actually look at the video of our conversation and then go, "Oh yeah, that's Chris." And I remember his face and everything right now. My brain has tweaked my memory so that I've got a more accurate memory that a more distinctive memory of who you are later on. But it's also from a diff it's now been associated with a different context. And so the more places and times that we bring up this memory, the more resilient it will be and the less tied it will be to one unique cue that we would have. Right? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But on the other hand, if we don't give ourselves a chance to pull up the memory in the first place, like if we just try to I tell myself your name over and over and over again, that's not going to be very helpful because I haven't really given my brain a chance to pull up the crummy memory that it has. I'm just kind of like trying to read this word over and over and over again, but I always have the right answer. So, I'm not relying on memory in the first place. Um, so you know, you imagine you're trying to learn how to play basketball. You're obviously bet your best bet is to actually shoot baskets, not to think about it, right? And uh like and you're not going to get them all. You're not going to get them all all the time, but it's through that struggle that your brain can tune up and say, I had this model of what I was supposed to do and it's wrong and so I need to fix it. And that's what we call air driing. We can see this this is actually if you look at AI models like chat GPT and so forth they work because of this principle of error driven learning where the model tries to predict let's say the next word that's going to come up and if it gets it wrong then it tweaks just the connections in the model that are needed so that you can pull up that word later on again right so it's learning not trying to memorize everything but rather learning what it needs to do to correct a mistake and that that's where error-driven learning really is is key. Does that suggest that we learn more from pain and uh difficult life circumstances than enjoyable ones? Are we more do we have the negativity bias uh present in our memory as well as in our sort of noticing our reticular activating system? Well, what I'll say is that the the pain that I'm talking about is the pain of struggling to remember something. Mhm. And so if we adopt a strategy of saying that essentially memorizing should be hard, learning should be hard as opposed to learning should be easy and I should be getting easy A's all the time. Then it's not so painful. It's just part of the process. Just like you would be if you're trying to learn how to play tennis, you just do it because you like it, right? And so the more we can kind of get people from thinking about memory as kind of a shortcoming to thinking about memory as a learning as a journey of curiosity, then it's no longer painful. It's kind of the whole process of learning. Right. So that that's separate from the point that you brought up about the negativity bias. But maybe we could I'll let you react to that. No, no, no. You're you're you're on the money. Keep going. Okay. So separate from this is this negativity bias. And this is another thing I think that people don't appreciate is that our memories for the past are incredibly biased by what's going on around us in the present. So what I mean by that is if I'm feeling bad, I will have a bias to pull up negative memories. And whatever memories I pull up, I will reconstruct them in kind of a negative way. Now, if I have positive, if I'm in a positive frame of mind, I will manifest that opposite bias where I'll be able to pull up memories that are more positive and reconstruct them in a more positive way. Um, so you tend to see both kinds of biases. In fact, oddly enough, as people get, you know, really older, uh, they tend to have more of a positive bias in their memory for whatever reason. Uh, this is, of course, just on average, but everybody has ups and downs, right? And that's going to affect our memories. Uh, and just as an example of this, let's say you're, you know, I had an ex-girlfriend who was dating and, you know, she dumped me for a couple of months. I'm remembering all of these terrible things, either things that I could have done that I did that might have led to the breakup or things that she did that made me think that she was such a terrible person. Uh then later on I meet the uh woman of my dreams who I ended up marrying and it was just like six months later and now I can look back at my memories from that first relationship in a completely different perspective where it's neither good nor bad. It's just like if anything I dodged a bullet and now I can look back at the positive experiences what I got out of that relationship as well as the negative experiences. And so that that's what I mean is that our present beliefs as well as our emotional states affect how we reconstruct things. Oh, that's fascinating. So this this must create a kind of recursive loop for uh people whose lives are going well or lives are going badly for people who are depressed or people who are happy. Uh because your current state creates a context and that context predisposes your brain to viewing and interpreting and recalling and focusing on past experiences that match with where you are right now as an experiencing self. So sad people think about more sad things and happy people think about more happy things. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. And this is why depression is such a vicious cycle because when you're depressed, you tend to ruminate. And rumination is almost by definition regurgitating memories that are negative that reinforce your feelings at the moment. Right? So now you recall more negative memories. What happens? You feel worse. The worse you feel, the easier it is to recall negative memories. But even more importantly, the worse you feel, the harder it is to pull up memories that counteract your view of the world at a given time. Big big part of cognitive therapy that we would do is get people to overcome those biases by actually pulling up memories that contradicted their sense of the world at a given moment. Because it's so easy to fall into this trap of, you know, having a negative state of mind and then reconstructing the past in the worst way possible and then using that to confirm your beliefs about what's happening at the moment, right? And so, you know, we do have the capability to pull ourselves out of it, at least not in necessarily in cases of clinical depression. But I think, you know, when you're having a bad day, if you're not clinically depressed, it's a lot easier to pull yourself out of it by pushing yourself to remember just one positive thing, as minor as it could be, at the end of your day. And I've done I don't have the discipline to do things consistently, but when I do this, it takes me a while and I'll pull up something dumb like, oh, that you know, uh, I made a good sandwich at lunch or something like that. I like that sandwich. And all of a sudden, I get access to more stuff. It changes the way I feel. And the change in feeling makes it easier to pull up other memories that make me think maybe today wasn't such a bad day after all. It's so funny, man. You know, I've been spending a lot of time this year really trying to get into neurobiology a lot more. Rick Hansen, if you're familiar with Rick from Hardwiring Happiness, I think he's just so great. You know, he's got this unique intersection of Dharma come Buddhist mindfulness stuff and then, you know, the hardcore science behind the neuroscience things, sort of your work as well. And uh the more that I realize we have this fascinating window into the structure of our own brain and you do have some conscious control over it even though you can't predict the next thought that's going to come careening into view. You do have some conscious control over it. Um but unlike going to the gym, you can't see if you're actually doing it. You can't really fully tell whether or not you're doing gratitude, right? Did I do 10 reps of gratitude there? You can't say that with the same level of certainty that you know if you did 10 repetitions of a of a bicep curl and you don't know, is this actually making me better? Like you get a pump. You get a preview in the gym. There's no brain pump. All you do is just have a degree of uncertainty about whether or not that thing was the way that you were supposed to do it. And I think it was and I'll just keep on doing it. But um it is really interesting that we we do have some control, not entire control, but we do have some control and this control gets tuned up over time. Um just on your point about choosing the good sandwich, Oliver Burkeman has uh the idea of a done list, which is the opposite of a to-do list as he goes through the day and he crosses things off like cleaned shoes and walked dog and stuff. He he likes to do that and I I adapted it to a well done list which is basically what you're talking about. So toward the end of the day or as stuff goes on throughout the day I think oh [ __ ] like that was a really good walk. I had a really good walk earlier on today and the sun was shining and I I got to see a dog. That was nice. Like the dog was pretty cool and you know I was listening to this song and that song makes me feel happy and that was good. And it you know it's little things. Um but yeah I just I'm kind of fascinated about what you were saying there. this sort of interjection maybe for people with low mood or um a catalyst for people that are in good mood. There's two worlds colliding here and one of them is top down, right? Which is reframing things as they're happening. Uh do I want to really be present as present as possible allowing this to sink in really and then a little space repetition which I'm sure we'll get on to. Uh but then there's also the bottom up which is well go and find good experiences you know go and spend time doing things that are worthy of memory. Um and it yeah for people that are in uh good moods they want to maintain or bad moods they want to get out of it feels like those those two things need to work sympatico together. It's it's not enough to just think your way out of a living problem or think your way out of a feeling problem. But you also are missing out on some of the gains if you never think about your good experiencing experiences. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you want memory to be kind of your co-pilot, but you don't want it to be in the driver's seat, right? What do you mean when you say that? Well, what I mean is is that you want to actually experience things and you you want to um ideally have them work hand in hand. Ask yourself, okay, what what do I want to remember at the end of the day, right? What's the memory that I want to carry with me at the end of the week? And often that will help us avoid getting into traps that are things that we often find ourselves doing that are not particularly things we will want to remember later on. Like um I have checked email way too many times today. uh you know I went on Facebook more than I would have liked today already and those are things that are not the stuff that I want to remember later on those are things that you know except for the work stuff that I have to deal with for the most part that's wasted time in the sense that it generated no memories that I will want to carry with me right so I guess investing in the right experiences will give you the right memories I I don't know if that that relates to where you were Mhm. No, for sure. I There's certainly an issue of being taken out of the moment, trying to bank it, to remember it, whilst also trying to experience it, you know. Yeah. Oliver Oliver has this beautiful uh really interesting blog post where he talks about one morning he lives in the Yorkshire Dales in the UK countryside and uh he talks about one morning beautiful snow the sun's risen and the birds are chirping and he is experiencing this thing and loving it and as he's experiencing it he's thinking you really should remember this like this is really the sort of experience that you should be remembering more of and in the act of trying to enjoy something, he's whipping himself about not remembering it in future, which causes him to not even enjoy it in the moment. And I think lot lots of people have that, you know, this is so beautiful. I better hold on to this. I better be able to remember this in future. If I can't remember this, I'll feel guilty. It's like, dude, you're making yourself feel guilty for not remembering a thing that hasn't [ __ ] finished yet. Like, it hasn't even happened. Yeah, I do. I actually do the opposite for that very reason. I actually will if I say I want to remember this later on. I say what can I how can I what do I want to immerse myself in right now that I really want to take away from this you know is that maybe I'll focus on the sky and what it looks like right now or the smells or the sounds of this moment. uh maybe I'll just kind of take a moment and really check in with my feelings maybe and just kind of get a sense of like well this is how I felt at this moment and so yeah I mean I think it's perfectly natural to be have moments where you're like this is so good I have to hold on to it but rather than kicking yourself you can be proactive and indulge yourself in the very things that you want to remember even more you mentioned there about emotions yeah you mentioned there about emotions. What's what's the relationship between emotions and memory? Well, so we already talked about the idea that emotions can be a context, right? That emotions can uh bias the the things that we remember and the way that we remember them. Uh but emotions are also associated with these motivational circuits in our brain. Right? So um dopamine is a good example. Dopamine helps us. It's not about it's not rewarding per se, but it helps us learn about rewards, learn where they are and how to get them, right? So, um, where that comes into play is when we're in a new place, you will tend to have more dopamine activity. When you're encountering something uh that is surprising, you know, somebody comes in out of the blue that that you haven't met before. Well, that will be uh associated with more dopamine release when you're um curious. When you're in a state of curiosity, when it's like you go, wait, I thought I read this in his book, but he's telling me something completely different. Now, you go back to the book. We'll see. We've shown that you get activity throughout the dopamineergic circuits of the brain, right? And those uh those moments tend to be memorable in part because they're producing plasticity. Um but there is a kind of a catch to this which is that emotions will often you know so these emotionally intense moments where you get these chemicals released in your brain they don't turn up the volume in memory or the brightness in memory so much as they turn up the contrast. So they help you remember certain things more than others and they give us a sense of vividness but not necessarily that context. So in other words, when we're emotionally having an emotionally intense experience, we will remember that experience better, but we won't remember all of the aspects of that experience better. Right? So you have a traumatic experience, you'll remember the things that were especially traumatic about it as opposed to the color of the carpet or, you know, the um rabbit that was in the background when this happened. That's interesting. What are let's say that it's something good. What are the areas that an emotionally strong memory is is going to focus on there? Is it focus on more good things or is it just negativity bias all the way down? No. No. So let's say if it's a good experience that you have it's so what's kind of interesting is a lot of the work has focused on information that's experiences that are arousing. So say you go snowboarding or something and you like snowboarding or you like surfing and you go surfing. Those are good experiences that are or pleasant experiences often that are arousing. And what happens again is you'll remember the most significant parts of those experiences, the most attention grabbing parts. Maybe you're surfing and it's that particular wave that you caught that was the most exhilarating part of your set um as opposed to the other things. Now, when you have positive experiences that are kind of calming, we don't know as much about them. So, for instance, like uh you uh come back home and you hug your partner or you kind of like uh your dog starts licking your hand or something like that. Not necessarily arousing maybe, but maybe if it's relaxing, it's not going to be the same chemicals released in the brain that are going to promote these memories. And we don't know as much about whether there is an advantage for those calming experiences. It may be that the sort of more hard-coded biological responses that give you these emotional memory enhancements tend to be for more arousing experiences. What's the difference between remembering and imagining? Not much, as it turns out. So if you actually scan people's brains while they're they are imagining something, you will find that those brain scans are for the most part indistinguishable um from uh a brain scan of somebody actually let's say watching a movie or listening to a story and those brain scans are fairly indistinguishable from somebody remembering the movie or remembering the story or remembering an experience that they actually had. We are most likely imagining how the past could have been, imagining what's happening in the present and uh using that same core system to imagine what could happen in the future. Um the differences are that you know we do have this episodic memory system that allows us to ground our experiences in a place in a time. Uh and the other thing is our imagination typically is not as vivid as reality. So for most of us uh when we imagine something it's not going to be associated with as intense of smell and sight and so forth. It's going to be more focused in the things that we thought about and the emotions we had. And so that's where we have this ability to tell the difference between imagination and memory. Um but you have to take the time you have to engage this area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. uh and actually take pause and use this kind of more uh reasoning approach to be able to say this is something that I didn't actually experience. I just thought about it. I thought about responding to that email but I didn't really do it. And this happens to me all the time. Most of these problems that I write about in the book are my daily experiences. So, is it possible to learn something if we don't remember it happening? You know, you go through, you talked about um LeBron James knowing games. I if he can't remember shooting that particular three-pointer, how does that particular three-pointer get added to the corpus of experience that he can draw on to become a better basketball player? Like, I can't remember this very move from when I was 12, but it has contributed to his capacity. Is there different type is there embodied learning? Is this a is this such a thing? How does this work? Yeah. Yeah. So, basically uh the kind of memory that we've been largely focused on is the kind of memory I study which is episodic. That ability to travel to a particular time and place. But the brain has all sorts of capabilities for learning that are not episodic memory based. Right? So, you could have somebody even who has a pretty significant memory disorder. Say if you got into a car accident and you had some uh uh you know damage to your hippocampus and you had amnesia, you could still potentially learn how to play the piano or learn how to become a better basketball player or uh learn all of these skills because there's learning that anytime you have a bunch of neurons connected to each other talking to each other, there's that capability for plasticity and reforming those connections. And the brain's constantly doing that. It's constantly sort of changing its structure based on our experiences. So that principle of error driven learning happens. We know in the motor system for instance and even if it's not tied to any particular context, if I'm shooting that basketball, my brain, there's a brain area called the cerebellum that generates an internal model of what I just did and a prediction of where that ball is going to go into. And if the ball doesn't go into the right place or if it doesn't feel right as I'm shooting the ball, my brain will tweak the memory so that I will be better at. In fact, actually just saw a talk yesterday suggesting that sleep is a big part of that whole uh dynamic that during REM sleep when we're dreaming, for instance, what may be going on is uh at least one of the things that goes on is that the motor system is really tuning itself up so that you get these better movements and better hand eye coordination based on the skills you've tried to learn early in the day. In fact, that seems to be why dogs, for instance, like move their legs at night when they're asleep. It's not necessarily that they're having subconscious dream as much as their brain is like basically just tuning up the motor system. And in fact, those movements come from a very primitive area of the brain, as it turns out. And your dog's going to wake up tomorrow and be 2% faster because it's practiced it during its sleep. You need to be ready, possibly. Yeah. Uh, give me the So, it seems to me like novel experiences are pretty reliably placed in into memory. This is new. This is something that's that's different. And intense experiences as well. Uh this is you know this is really again which I guess intensity is kind of like uh volume novelty and what we think of as typical novelty is is uh the categorical uh newness I suppose. Uh yeah can you say the can you say the the difference between the two guns novelty again? Sorry I missed that. Well, if intensity is something I may have done before, but in a manner that I haven't experienced it previously, which I suppose is is a kind of novelty, but I think when people think about novelty, they think about something that's categorically new. I haven't been to this particular holiday destination before. I I I haven't skied on this particular mountain before, let's say, right? So, let's use skiing as an example. So, one might be I've been down this mountain a hundred times. I know the route, but this one time there's an avalanche behind me. Okay, so I've been there previously, but the level of intensity or or this time I go faster or this time I do a different I do a different trick. Yeah, it's a kind of novelty, but I think experientially for most people, we need to sort of work within the confines that most people's lives are rather routine. You know, you can say, "Hey, maybe if you want to make your day go a little bit slower, uh, take a different route to work." And you go, "Yeah, but there's like there's only five routes I can take to work." You know what I mean? So uh and the same thing goes for skiing down a mountain and so on and so forth. So yeah, novelty and intensity just seem to be sort of two levers that common threads that have come through today. Well, you know, so it's a great uh point. I think that novelty doesn't have to be something that is new per se. So the brain's constantly trying to generate predictions about what's going to happen. And this is just based on the way the brain's wired. I mean I mean I won't bore people with the details of theocortical interactions but the the basic gist of it is is that when you're in a completely new place your brains just generate has no predictions it can make right or it's making very weak predictions based on similar places you've been. But let's say you take the example of you're going down the mountain and you're skiing and you've been down this mountain a 100 times. There are still potential prediction errors there that you can make that can drive learning in the sense that you can focus your attention on the minutia because I mean the world is always changing. Our brains are always changing. I mean everything changes but often we just don't notice it. And if you take like meditative practices like mindfulness, a big part of these practices is attuning yourself to what's new and that creates these prediction errors in your brain. It stimulates curiosity and will give you better memories. It creates more distinctive memories. So I guarantee you that almost anything you do can be associated with some novelty. But you have to be curious and look for it and not assume not get so caught up in your predictions about the world that you just assume that your predictions are right. What's the relationship between memory and our sort of subjective passage of time? the the sense that we have of how quickly or how slowly time is going or time did go in the past. Yeah. Um uh there is a relationship. People argue about the relationship and one thing one thing that we've noticed is that uh shifts in our context affect our memories and that especially if you look on a long enough time scale dramatically affects our ability to tell the passage of time. So during the pandemic, people would sit around their computers all day like all the students who were in my classes. And what I would ask them, you one time I just had the idea to just ask them in class just to keep their attention is do you feel like the days are going faster or slower since the lockdowns happened than before? And so I'll ask you, you know, maybe if you were in a place that was locked down, did the days go by faster or slower for you? Yeah, I think they I think they probably went by pretty quickly. Okay, so this is interesting, but let's let's go back to it. Uh, so during the like so basically if I said just the last 24 hours, did they go by faster or slower? Overwhelming majority of people said that they went by slower on I think only two out of 120 people said it it was going by faster. Most people said their days were going by slower. But then speaking to your point at I said okay how about the weeks you get to the end of the week are they going by faster or slower and everybody said that the weeks were going by faster so what's going on this no law of physics can explain that right it's like uh how does time move more slowly in a day but disappear in a week and the reason has to do with memory you're staying in the same context and so you just have these memories that aren't very different from each other. And so, as a result, it feels like the day has just been going really slowly because you haven't been accumulating all these memories that would give you a sense of time passing. But then you reach the end of the week and you can't remember anything because you had all of these blurry memories that interfered with each other so much that you look back and it just feels like the time went by and disappeared because you have effectively lost that time because you can't remember it, right? And so it memories can really warp our sense of time uh uh as a result. Uh but the opposite is also true that if you don't have memories, you will be floating in time and space. That is if you ask people with memory disorders what date is it? They won't be able to tell you because their last memory of a time in a date was the time that they had, you know, a good memory. But, you know, they'll be if this they had a a stroke or a cardiac arrest that gave them brain damage in, you know, 1997, they will every day is 1997 to them and they look in the mirror and they're like, "What's happening? I don't I don't understand this." What else or what is it that you you wish more people knew about memory? if there was something that uh is regularly complained to you about how the human memory system works or about some misunderstanding, some common myth that people have around it. What is it that you wish that you could dispel? Uh I think that I would I mean there's so many we've talked about a number of them already, but I I probably the biggest one is that memory should be free and easy and that's just not true. I mean, all memory research shows that it's hard and it's it's not it's not easy and it's not free for sure. And so, a bit of intention goes a long way in helping you remember what you need as opposed to trying to remember everything and and expecting it should be there. Um, and so, so that's a really big one. I guess the other one is is that memory is supposed to be about the past and it's really about the present and the future. Why? Well, let's just take the present for instance, right? For you just to keep up with this conversation, you're constantly referring back in memory to things that I previously said. If you did not have memory, you'd just be repeating the same question over and over and over again, right? And so, and you see this in people with memory disorders, they will repeat themselves every 10 minutes because they don't remember. It's a it's one of the biggest signs if you have a relative who's entering dementia. If they say the same thing over and over again and don't remember that they've repeated themselves, that's a big sign that they have a memory problem. Um, so that that's just one example, but you know, others are just your ability to recall memories and use it to make sense of what's going on right now. Well, I've been here before and therefore here's what I can expect is going to happen now. Um, I've done this podcast a number of times and I know I can do this and I'm going to be do a great job of interviewing because I've interviewed a lot of people before, right? Um, and that's also your expectations for the future and your predictions about the future. And so, uh, your ability to remember to, you know, you want to be able to buy groceries when you get to the store. You're using memory to project into the future what you will be buying from the store, right? And then later on when you get to the store, you have to rely on memory to buy those things. So, I mean, there's I can give you a billion examples. I mean, these are just ones that just popped off the top of my head, but there's no shortage of examples in terms of how memories about the present and the future. And I mean, if it were just about the past, it would be useless because the past is over. There's absolutely we survived the past. So, there's nothing in the past that we need to hold on to except the stuff that matters for the present to the future. Yeah. Crazy. Charangath, ladies and gentlemen. It's uh it's fascinating. The the the idea of how human memory works is something that I've been really interested in for a long time. So, it's uh it's nice that you got to do a primer today. Where should people go? They want to check out all of the stuff that you do online. Well, so I have a website called taranath.com and uh people can sign up for a Substack. I haven't actually started writing them yet, but now that I'm done with teaching for the year, I can uh I'll start to use that to create a mailing list free. I'm not going to sell anything to anyone. I just cuz it's not what I do for a living. So, uh so people could just get more information that way. Uh you can also look up information about my events. Also, I have an Instagram that's pretty active. Um, and people can follow me there at the memory do uh the memory doc and uh that's a good one. And uh I'm a little less active on LinkedIn, but I have LinkedIn and blue sky as well. Um off Twitter now because it's a hellscape but that's another conversation though. Short talk for another time. Sharon, I appreciate you. Thank you mate. All right. Thank you very much. Take care. Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on.