SOG EP 1632 BONUS: #1 Memory Expert: The No. 1 Thing That Weakens Your Brain | Dr. Charan Ranganath EP 662

0:03Hey everyone, this is Lewis Howes and I am so excited to invite you to the Summit of Greatness 2024 for happening at the iconic Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. This is more than just an event. It's a powerful experience designed to ignite your passion, boost your growth, and connect you with a community of other inspiring achievers. Join us Friday, September 13th, and Saturday, September 14th for two days packed with inspiration and transformation from some of the most incredible speakers on the planet. Don't miss out on this chance to elevate your life, unlock your potential, and be part of something truly special.

0:38Make sure to get your tickets right now and step into greatness with us at the Summit of Greatness 2024. Head over to lewishouse.com slash tickets and get your tickets today and I will see you there. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

1:01I think a lot of people are starting to open up more in society about their past. They're starting to have open conversations and dialogues with therapists or consultants or coaches or priests and feeling more accepted in sharing their shame. Although I hear two different sides to this opinion, that expressing the pain of the past is a good thing, but also reliving painful traumatic moments over and over again creates a negative energy within yourself, creates a negative mood. Is it better to repress our thoughts and keep them blocked and, you know, away from our memories the best that we can?

1:43Although I feel like they'll always kind of come up in some other way. Is it better to do that or is it better to talk about our traumatic memories? And if so, how do we do it that it empowers us instead of reliving a traumatic event over and over again? That is a really rich question, and there's a lot here. So let me break it down. Yes, please. So first of all, you just mentioned repressed memories. And so this is a big, big topic in my field. There's a lot of ideas out there in this sense that the brain has an automatic defense mechanism, that when you've had an experience that's so traumatic, the memory becomes suppressed deep down within the dark reaches of our unconscious mind, right?

2:25And Freud had proposed that as part of a, as an extension of his general idea of repression, which is more about urges than memories. From what I understand, he actually rejected that later, but other people have definitely latched onto this idea. And it became big in the 80s because there was a book that was released called Michelle Remembers or something. And it was this book that talks about this woman who had therapy and then recovered all these memories of like, you know, ritual abuse and so forth. And she ended up marrying the therapist. You know, something's wrong with this story. That's interesting.

3:01So it was like, and at the end, I think Satan comes out. It's just a really crazy story. Wow. And so this became a big thing in the 80s, this repressed memory therapy. So what happens is that a lot of memory research was done on this topic. And it turns out if you want to implant a memory in something that they've, so Beth Loftus at UC Irvine did some beautiful work on this, but many other people since then. where basically if I want to get you to generate a memory for something that never happened to you, what I do is I get one of your relatives and they say, hey, do you remember that time when you stole that beer from a liquor store?

3:45And you're like, I don't remember that. You don't remember that, right? She's like, no, I was there and this happened. And you're like, start to doubt yourself. You start to doubt yourself. And then you start to imagine, well, how could it have been? Wow. And so then you start to think. And then I come back to you again tomorrow and I say, so did that memory pop into your head then? Do you remember it? And now what happens is, well, you tried to remember it and you imagined how it could have happened. And on day two, you're remembering your attempt to remember. Interesting. And so now you create a richer story about it, right?

4:18And so I keep asking you over and over again. And I say, hey, tell me more about that. What were you thinking at the time? How do you think you would get away with this? And so then you start going into it more and more. You create this whole story about how you really wanted to impress this girl by getting beer or whatever it was, right? Sure, sure. And so you start doing, you create this giant story. And so they've done this in lab, many, many different kinds of things. Come on, really? Yeah. It's very, no, not everybody. This doesn't happen to everyone. But on average, it happens when you have someone you trust.

4:52I ask you, try to imagine these things. Recall it. you really, this must have happened to you. We do it over and over and over again. We have you dig into the past and maybe I can even go further and I could say, well, maybe let me hypnotize you. Let me give you some medications to help you remember. Right. Wow. And so if you look at all of those ingredients, they're exactly the ingredients that you use for repressed memory therapy. There's somebody who you trust, who's convinced often with very good intentions, They're convinced that because you're engaged in self-harm, because you have low self-esteem, something happened to you.

5:30And we just have to figure out what it was. And people can recover memories. And this is the crazy thing is that and the reason why I just had to close this the book on this one thing is because I just want to make it clear that not everyone who says I have a memory of being abused is mine. That's not true. In fact, people who've been abused will remember it really well. And that's the problem. is that this gets us back to the next question. They keep reliving it. They keep reliving it. But sometimes people can have a recovered memory, and sometimes that happens because maybe they've been trying to suppress it, and there's some research that shows if I try to suppress it over and over, the memory can become kind of blurry and harder to access.

6:11Like a liminator or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

6:26Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:16Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.