Dr. Charan Ranganath: How Memory Fuels Imagination & The Science of Curiosity | EP 843

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12memory is the fuel for the turbo charges imagination say that again it's like the fuel that turbo charges our imagination allows us to put all sorts of unique possibilities right it's like you and i we may have very similar cultural knowledge that we've all soaked up just like ChatGPT has, right? But at the same time, you live next to somebody in the dorms at random in college, and I live next to different people. You know, I just happened to walk in. I just happened to listen to this song one day that got me curious about something. And so far, we all have these unique experiences in our lives, right?

0:50And that's what allows me to imagine things in different ways than you can. But it all is about basically, having these, first of all, just giving yourself a diverse range of experiences, exposing yourself to things that are maybe sometimes even outside of your comfort zone, right? Like, here's this music, and it seems kind of weird to me, but there's something it makes me curious about, right? And you get curious about something else. And the next thing you know, you have all of these diverse episodic memories that you can call upon when you're trying to imagine something new, you know, so some of this imagining this abundant future is being able to see things that are not obvious, right?

1:30And one of the things I find in research is that it's like, there are these great scientific questions and approaches and experiments right in front of us, but we can't see it normally. And I sometimes have to go to some talk that's completely outside of my area of research, and then boom, it just comes up, right? And so sometimes you need to allow yourself to make these random connections to visualize or to basically just see possibilities that don't appear there yes because you're stuck in this more narrow mindset yes how do we i mean it sounds like freeing our minds up with positive memories of the past gives us a better opportunity to have playful imagination in the future, right?

2:19Like more open-minded imagination and exploring the imagination of possibilities as opposed to limiting our imagination. How can someone on a daily basis set themselves up to open their minds to imagination? Is it giving time for play and activities and social engagement? Is it not only thinking about work, but also giving yourself downtime to just allow for randomness. Like how can we unlock our minds for imagination to attract more of what we want in our lives as opposed to things we don't want? I mean, definitely downtime is good. There's a friend of mine, Sarah Mednick, who wrote a whole book called The Power of the Downstate.

3:02And it's like, it's amazing. Giving yourself downtime can be enormously helpful. And in fact, we've even shown, and other people have shown this too, that when we're resting, like you just ask people, just lay down there, don't do anything. You can actually see evidence. It's not super strong. You can see this in studies of rest, though, too, where memories kind of bubble up and you can get kind of a glimpse of what happens during sleep, but just even while people are resting. And that rest can actually sometimes allow for memories to be reactivated and strengthened or recombined in interesting ways.

3:39And so there's something about that opening up of yourself and turning off some of these, turning off the goal-directed brain to being able to allow these memories to just sort of bubble up and recombine in interesting ways. I mean, in some sense, that's the core of de-dreaming, right? It's like dreams are basically, most likely, I would guess, memories that are being recombined in ways that don't make sense. Right. And you're not trying to force them into any particular story. They just kind of collide with each other and you're just trying to make sense of it. Yes, yes. And that's kind of, I think that's a core part of it is that and also really just diversifying your training data, right?

4:23It's like ChatGPT, in my opinion, is never going to produce interesting art on its own because it's just getting this homogenous junk that it's gotten from the internet, right? But you and I have these opportunities to just be curious about things that are just bizarre. Actually, just as in praise of curiosity in general, one of the cool things that one of my postdocs, Matthias Gruber, did in our lab was he did a study where he was just really interested in the role of curiosity and memory. And what we had found was that when people get a question that they're curious about the answer for, the question in and of itself is sufficient to trigger a spike in activity in the dopamine processing areas of our brain.

5:09And dopamine is thought to be this reward chemical, but it's actually more about chasing rewards and motivating us to get rewards and learning about rewards, right? It's that feeling of like energized that you can get when you want to get a slice of pizza or something. And you're like, oh, I can't wait to get this, right? Yeah. Something like that. And so that energizing, we could see a little neural signal related to that in these brain areas, the process that are involved in reward processing and motivation and involved in processing dopamine. when people got the question, not just getting the answer, not just getting the easy solution to the question, but really the question itself when they were curious.

5:49And when they were in this curious mindset, there was a little window where people could be exposed to just a face that they weren't interested in, nothing to do with the question, and they would get better memory for the face. So curiosity can open up this little window of plasticity. And other researchers and rats and And humans have shown that novelty can also do. It's like if you're exposed to something that's very new, like you put a rat in a new box and let it just explore the box at random, that can actually cause a release of dopamine that actually can cause plasticity and save memories for things that happened before they were put.

6:26Wow, interesting. And so there's this whole literature on the way in which these chemicals in the brain can enhance plasticity. And so curiosity is a big part of that. But, you know, when people, and I think this is a real decision point that people have, is that you can have something unexpected or novel or unfamiliar and be threatened by it. I mean, how many times do people see an idea or they meet some? It doesn't follow their beliefs also. It doesn't follow their beliefs, right? And it causes a little discomfort. And it causes like a separation, not a bridge. Yeah.

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7:59it. Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.