What Do Our Memories Mean? (with neuroscientist Charan Ranganath)

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0:58Here we go. Cha 'arin Ranganath is a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology at the University of California at Davis. He is also the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab, and he is the author of the book, Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters. Today we had a fascinating conversation about how memory works, how it shapes our identities, and what makes something memorable. We talked about some of the most interesting things he's learned from studying the brain and how it processes certain events, including traumatic or painful memories.

1:40And he shares a few tools for remembering the things that are important to us and how we can come to see our memories as neither a true or false record of the past, but as a tapestry of our perspective and the way we see the world. Let's get to today's episode.

1:58How are you? I'm good. I'm good. Very excited. I'm so happy to talk to you. Is my sound okay on that end? It sounds great to me. Okay. Excellent. I play music and so I've got some good audio equipment. Good. What do you play? I can see your guitars. Yeah, that's pretty much my instrument is guitar. I do vocals too, mainly guitar. Oh, come on. What's your SoundCloud? I can send it to you. I've got a couple of, I use a band camp as my main method of distributing music. So I got to get in on this. I just, I love that you're a UC professor of neuroscience and you're also rocking out in your spare time.

2:45Well, you know, you got to do something to stay sane, right? Yeah, for sure. Is that a good place to start? You know, I hear that music impacts math or cognition. So is it beneficial for memory? It can be. I think it's definitely an effective retrieval cue, and we could definitely talk about that. This is what people do with memory, is they just find what they want to remember. They start off with the story and often will just put together their memory based on what the story was that they had to begin with. Right, right. And that's what's so interesting about your work and what I never really thought of this idea of memory being so incredibly subjective and like an impressionist painting.

3:30And it's so rare that something is, you know, I guess you say that there certainly are elements that can be reported as how they happen, but then there's this whole other palette of colors that sometimes didn't happen at all. Yeah. Or they just reflect our perspective, right? It's like neither true nor false, but just the way we see the world. So let's, let's go back to the beginning a little bit, because I would just, I would love to understand how you chose memory as your area of focus as a neuroscientist, like how, and, and you're a psychologist as well, right? That's right. Yeah. Okay. So, so how did those things dovetail for you in terms of your focus?

4:18Well, I originally went to grad school in clinical psychology, and so that was my training. And so I spent about half my time doing research, and I was starting out doing depression research, and half my time in the clinic. And when I was in the clinic, I would either see patients for therapy, or I would start doing neuropsychological testing, which is when somebody comes in and they think they have a cognitive problem or they think they have brain damage, and we would do testing to see what kinds of abilities might be difficult for them. Like brain scans or Q &As or combination? Well, in the clinic, it was mainly Q &A and then testing.

5:02And so we had a series of tests. and a lot of these tests and this is true even today a lot of the tests that if you got god forbid it doesn't happen but if you got whacked in the head or something like that go to the hospital whacked in the head let me just tell you so but yeah if you got whacked in the head you go to the hospital they give you some tests what's going to happen is that people will use tests that were developed in the 1930s or the 1940s sometimes. More recent ones are developed in the 70s, but a lot of the work that's been done to develop clinical measures was done before we had a really good idea of how memory works in the brain.

5:43And in fact, that was one of my motivators for going into memory research was because so many people come to the clinic and they say, I have a memory problem. And sometimes they really did have a memory problem in the conventional sense, and it was usually early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Sometimes it was major depressive disorder. And for somebody who's older and significantly depressed, they can be cognitively worse than somebody in the early stages of Alzheimer's because they not only have an episodic memory problem, that is a problem for forming new memories for events like this conversation, but they also have these severe attentional problems and they're just disengaged and dissociating sometimes.

6:31And so it was really eyeopening to me to see just no matter what people had going on, they would always come in and say, I have a memory problem. And so it was very, whatever was going on, the distressing part was memory. Right. Yeah. Then, of course, in the clinic, when you're doing therapy, what you find is that everyone wants to share and process memories. And there's a lot of memories associated with shame that people really need to unload. And I mean, my first clinical patient, I'll never forget him. He came in with a driving phobia. him. And so I don't know if you have a phobia or you know people who do, but basically they're pretty immediate kinds of things where you see something, you get this fight or flight response.

7:19And so he would have that with driving. And so the treatment is basically you get people to do these repetitive driving things over and over that are so boring. And then they do it over and over again until their brain sort of learns to suppress the fear response. So we do that. He's not feeling better. And so we kept talking and he eventually revealed to me that he was gay and that he came out of the closet and had this big argument with his father. What he remembered was that it happened right before the accident. And we talked about that and we reframed it and we really went through that. And then he felt like he had gotten some closure from it.

8:02And I'll never know what exactly happened with his father, and I'll never know whether that had anything to do with his driving phobia. But for him, it mattered, right? And so just this whole relationship that people have with memory, whether it's memories that they can't form or memories that they can't find or memories that they can't get rid of. It was always there. It's interesting how, you know, I've been thinking a lot about memory for the first time since I knew I was going to be speaking with you. And I, I, you know, I'm a person who I think that I, through this perimenopause time in my life, and, you know, it's like, I'm reaching for words.

8:50And there is something very scary about the idea that you're losing your memory because our memory is our identity. We hold all of the unique things about ourselves in our memories, right? I mean, in the present, in the exact present moment, you don't have a lot to bring. We're bringing all this stuff from our whole lives into new units of time. And that's kind of like what makes us us. And I've been thinking about, I mean, of course, like sometimes I'm like, do I have dementia? Because I can't. In fact, my friend the other day, Tracy, she said, she said, you know, words just kind of used to flow out of my mouth.

9:32And she's like, and now I kind of have to go upstairs and like look in a filing cabinet to find the word, you know, like this imaginary filing cabinet, which I think is all kind of normal stuff. But, you know, what really has struck me as I've been thinking about it is the degree to which we embellish our memories, the ways in which we, not that we're lying, but the way, like, for example, I just went to my 40th, sixth grade reunion, which is not a thing, but it is, I guess, for me and this group of friends. You enjoyed sixth grade, I take it. I guess we enjoy, yeah, we all graduated from an elementary school together in sixth grade, 40 years ago in 1984.

10:16And we still get together. It's crazy. And some of us are still really close friends. And we were watching videos and montages of photographs of when we were little. And my memories lack articulation. It's like they come in these big feelings. and to me it's almost like a different kind of memory because there's sort of the cognitive memory but then there's sort of these sweeping life memories that are just feelings like are those what are those are those memories i would yeah i would say i mean if i follow you and i think i do and it's quite beautiful the way you've described it i think it that's actually the real essence of an episodic memory, that sense of pastness, that feeling of the past and the feeling of that moment.

11:14And then, like you said, there's the articulation, the ability to make the story out of it. And if you actually scan people's brains, what you'll find is there's this boom, aha moment, and there's this burst of activity in the hippocampus, which is a brain area that's important for memory. And then what happens is there's a shift towards this, what they call an elaboration phase, where people do start to articulate it and tell the story. And that's almost where they become a little bit disconnected from that actual experience of remembering. And it becomes a little bit more of a communicative function, if that makes any sense.

11:51And so, yeah, I feel like what you're saying makes perfect sense. And just one thing to add to this, which I think is so important is you brought up this idea of the feeling and it sounded like you were going into emotion. And one of the fascinating things in the field is that people's feeling of vividly remembering or their sense of how strong a memory is, is more tightly correlated with that emotion that comes back than it is with the actual content people can pull up. At Goop, we believe the spaces we spend time in shape how we feel and how we connect. That's why we're drawn to Convene, a global hospitality brand reimagining work in meeting spaces centered around design and care.

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13:18Convene for the moments that move your business. Why are early memories important? You know, like why? Was it Freud? Who asked their patients, like, what's your first memory? And why is that important? Or is it not? I don't think it is. I don't think it's any more important necessarily than your last memory. I mean, definitely, if somebody pointed a gun to you and that was your last memory or something, that would be more important than your first memory of saying Dada or whatever. so there's a little bit of a sense and i think as a parent you can appreciate this there's a little bit of a sense that whatever happens in these childhood years is just so formative and it will stick around and just shape everything and there's a truth to that but you know the adolescent years hugely important too and the brain is just constantly developing and so and you brought up menopause and i really hope we get back into this because i hope you read the coda chapter because that's where I talk about the orcas.

14:17And it's one of my favorite topics to discuss. I mean, we have to talk about that. Is this, you just reminded me of a question I wanted to ask you around the teenage years, which is like me, my parents, my grandparents, anybody you ask thinks that, you know, the music of their teenage time was indisputably the only real music. I was wondering if there's like a conflation between the brain developing this sense of memory and identity at the same time that there's like a soundtrack to our lives. Is that why we all think that? Why is that? Yeah, I think you really hit on it. It's this period that we tend to go back to most often, which is called the reminiscence bump.

15:11It's like you made a little graph of people's memories over time. There's a little bump in the graph right around, I think it's ages between 14 and 30 or something like that. And in that period of time, that's when your sense of who you are, especially in Western cultures, really emerges, the sense of the unique self that we have. And that's also the period when people get their taste in music. And I defy people to tell me that their favorite music was the stuff that they had heard for the first time when they were in their 60s or something. It's really, people go back to that early reminiscence period.

15:46And so you mentioned it's the soundtrack to our lives. And so that is crucial because if there's music that you listen to for a particular period, like you have a breakup or something like that, or you graduated and it's the summer before college or something, you're going on road trips or whatever. those songs are very distinctive cues for that time period because memory is all about cues and like you said it's the background so it's the context that gives us a sense of time and space and so when we hear the song it can be so evocative in part because it's uniquely associated with that so it's a little reminder that's telling your brain hey there's something here that rings a bell and takes you back to that place in time.

16:33And then the other part of it is it's emotionally evocative for many of us too. And for people who really emotionally connect with music, that's a bigger part because those songs are often not just the soundtrack, but they're also, they connect us with the feelings. They give us that rich sense of remembering. Mm-hmm. It strikes me as you talk about this that it almost doesn't make sense that it's all called memory. The fact that this reminiscence that you speak about and the kind of romance that we imbue in the story of our lives through the reminiscence is memory, but but also learning something for the SAT is also memory.

17:23Do you think of it all as the same thing? Is it all from the same part of the brain? No, no. In fact, actually, there's nothing memory scientists love to do more than to cut up memory into different pieces and to argue about what those pieces are. And there certainly are ways to do it. So, for instance, I distinguish in my career, I've really investigated the difference between episodic memory which is that memory that's tied to a place in time and this context-based memory versus semantic memory which is our more of the knowledge of the content in our world like objects the people and so forth and that's a valid distinction you can find people for instance who have episodic memory problems but they can still learn new knowledge so they're definitely they definitely can be teased it apart.

18:13But in the real world, they're related to each other. If you have episodic memory, you can learn facts and you can learn knowledge much easier. Another one is what's called procedural memory, like you're learning to snowboard for the first time or something like that. Initially, you might use episodic memory to say, okay, what did my instructor tell me? I've got to make sure to do this. But then over time, what happens is it becomes more of a motor program and you can initiate that and run it better if you're not consciously remembering. So there are all these different forms of memory. And in some sense, that's what the book is all, that was the challenge in writing the book and in teaching it, is there are all these important differences in the brain, but they're also connected with each other.

18:58And it's hard to talk about the science in a nuanced way because you want to say things are different, but you also want to say they're connected. And I think this is the challenge in science communication is I didn't want to give people some overly simplified thing that's wrong, but I had to simplify it a lot. And so I hopefully succeeded with that. You did. And I think this, the simplification makes it very digestible and comprehensible. And therefore, you know, it's like, I've been thinking about all this stuff in a new way since. So I really appreciate it. And I do think it's wonderful to think of all of these different ways that we recollect and that some are so soulful and some are so pedantic and everything in between, you know, it's like, and some are both at the same time.

19:50I don't, you know, for me, like learning a language, it's both, you know, it's like, you're trying to learn grammar, like a conjugation of something, but also there's this feeling of, you know, that the language evokes if it's Italian. I'm trying to learn Italian right now. And so I think it's a wonderful thing that you've made it, you know, for people like me who didn't finish a UC education and who dropped out, what makes something memorable and stay with us. Like there's so much of my life I don't remember. So much of my life I didn't write down because I, you know, was worried about like the National Enquirer finding it or something like that.

20:36And I sort of kick myself because, you know, those are little catalysts. Like when you read something that you wrote, you know, oh yeah, I remember that. But then I have, so I've forgotten so much, but I remember so much. So what makes something memorable? What makes something stay with us? Well, I think there's many answers to this. I'll give you just a couple. But one thing to keep in mind is we often have more memories at our disposal than we're aware of because you just need the right cue sometimes to pull them up. And so we talked about songs as an example. My guess is when you went to your sixth grade reunion, you might have popped up some memories just from seeing people that you didn't realize were there just because there were these cues that were just out of your sight.

21:25And so they were just out of mind, right? Yeah. I mean, did that happen? Was that a thing? Absolutely. It was wild. I mean, there were certain people I hadn't seen since 1984 and I was sort of peering into their face to find the, you know, 11 year old, the 12 year old. And then once I kind of made that connection, then memories came flooding back. Yeah. Yeah. And so sometimes it's just a matter of having the right cue as opposed to just having the right memory. But having the right memory does play a big part in it. Right. So what makes something memorable? Well, the events that we tend to remember the most easily tend to be associated with some kind of a strong emotional response because our emotions are tied to these more basic systems that keep us alive.

22:12There were, when you think about the things that you remember, I was scared. I was happy. I was elated. I was, you know, feeling lust or whatever. I was stressed out. And all of these feelings, or, you know, I'm holding my child for the first time. I mean, all of these feelings are associated with particular chemicals that are released in the brain. these neuromodulators that make the brain more plastic. It allows new memories to really solidify it in a nice way. And so those are the events that naturally tend to be memorable. Sometimes we can also will ourselves into doing it because something's important and we focus our attention on it.

22:52Sometimes they're memorable because they lock into some meaning that we already have. And sometimes it's a matter of having the right structure of taking this new information that's totally hard to remember and locking it into information that you already have, because now you have a key to access the information and you're protecting it from interference. The last thing is it's that distinctiveness, the vividness in the sense of like, can you see it? Can you smell it? The sounds, all of these different parts of the background that bring you to that time and place that are unique, right? If you're paying attention to that.

23:31So then what about, so you say that they tend to be born out of these strong emotions or adjacent to these emotions that they provoke. So how come when we're overwhelmed, we don't remember things? Well, so what happens, it's actually very interesting because there's a whole line of work in memory research talking about how stress enhances memory. and it's sort of relevant to traumatic memories and PTSD that being in these states of chronic stress. I mean, some of the stress hormones, the glucocorticoids like cortisol can improve plasticity and it's kind of what you want, right? If a bear is chasing you, you want to remember not only that you were chased by a bear, but you want to remember how you got to the bear in the first place.

24:22You're not going to do that again. And so that is an enhancement of memory. But when we are stressed out, retrieval of other memories is actually cut out. We have problems retrieving old memories. And part of the reason for that is that the prefrontal cortex, this area of the brain that's important for using our goals to sort of focus, it's related to executive functions, as I talk about in the book, this ability to say, hey, this is what I really want inside. and here's how I'm going to focus memory so that I can get what I want. But those executive functions go out the window and are stressed out.

25:01So that's why you have these difficulties. What about trauma? What about people repressing horrible traumatic memories from childhood and not being able to access them? What happens there? Well, so there's, I think there's most memory researchers will agree on this. In fact, almost every memory researcher will agree that there's not strong evidence for any kind of a defense mechanism that just causes memories to be repressed. And what I mean by that is Freud originally had thought of, extended this idea of repression, which would be repressing urges to saying when something unacceptable happens, you just repress the memory.

25:42He later, I think, turned around on that idea and didn't like it anymore, but other people really locked onto it. But there's no evidence for that. In fact, if anything, on average, as I was telling you with the bear, people really have trouble forgetting and want to forget. I get people, four out of five people I talk to will tell me, you know, improve my memory. One out of five will say, help me forget something. And so these memories are really hard to forget. But it does happen that people will recover a memory and they'll have this experience of recovery, right? So what's going on there? Well, one thing that could be going on, I mean, one thing that we know can happen is that people might be suppressing the memory over and over and over again.

26:28And I talk about how memories can be updated and morphed a little bit. And if you have something that's just painful and it keeps popping up, well, maybe you're trying to push it away from your consciousness and that could make the memory a little bit blurrier and in some cases harder to access, even though on average, our brains really don't want to do this. But another thing is sometimes people will have these memories available to them, but then they forget that they remembered them. So they'll have it just kind of sitting there for a while and then they'll lose track of it, but then they're in the right mindset.

27:02And then they realize, oh man, this was a really formative thing for me. And I don't know, I've noticed this with certain celebrity memoirs, like I was reading Chrissy Hines autobiography. I love rock memoirs. And she talks about this harrowing experience that she had. And it was like one of those things where I'm sure she wasn't the way she wrote it. It almost seemed like she hadn't really been thinking about it until she wrote this memoir. So sometimes that can happen, too. And sometimes you just need the right cue. It's just like any other memory thing that we were talking about. But all of a sudden you're in that childhood home or you're listening to a song and boom, it pops back up.

27:43This isn't my topic of research, but I really read a lot about this. And it's something that memory researchers discuss a lot. So I want to be very clear. I would never, ever tell someone, hey, your memory isn't true because I just don't know. Now, the thing about these ritualistic abuse memories is they often come up after repressed memory therapy. And one of the things that I discussed in the book is this repressed memory therapy, the idea is, well, you have these issues that are going on with you. You have low self-esteem, maybe you're self-harming, maybe your moods are all over the place. and so we think that that's you must have been abused and so what happens is they'll say well try to remember these events from your past how could this have happened and so people start to imagine things sometimes and sometimes they'll be under medications or even under hypnosis and so they're not able to critically evaluate things anymore and the act of imagining something produces a memory.

28:49And so people can imagine something and then they can imagine something on top of it. And then they're remembering something, but they're not remembering an event that happened, but they're remembering something that they imagined. Now, maybe even they recalled something that was bad, but then they are encouraged to elaborate on it and being given this encouragement by somebody who they trust, somebody who's even well-meaning. And so what can happen is you can build the story that goes way beyond anything that happened. Those have been demonstrated a number of times in lab. In fact, the recipe for making someone remember something that didn't happen is almost identical to repressed memory therapy.

29:31I read actually once a study where they took some university students and they were actually able to implant memories of, I think it was a car accident or something like that. that had not occurred. And a certain cohort in the experiment literally walked away, absolutely believing that something had happened when it had not. Yeah, it definitely can happen. And I mean, people have been manipulated into confessing to crimes that they didn't commit because of this. And people have walked away. And in experiments, It's like they've convinced people that they were like had all sorts of things like a childhood illness.