Unlock Your Memory by Memorizing Less
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You know, even if you're not a Los Angeles Lakers fan, it is hard not to admire LeBron James. For his amazing athleticism on the court, yes, but also for a more unexpected ability. The start of the fourth, I think they cut it, the 14. Do you have any idea what, I mean, I think they scored seven quick ones, anything, what happened there? What happened? Um...

We ran him the first possession. We ran him down all the way to 200 shot clock. Marcus Morris missed a jump shot, followed it up. He got it. They got a dunk. Uh, we came back down. We ran a set for Jordan Crawford. I mean, Jordan Clarkson, and he came off and missed it. They rebounded it. And we came back on the defensive end and we got to stop. They took it out on the sideline. Jason Tatum took the ball out through the market smart in the short corner. He made a three. We come back down, miss another shot. And then, um,

Tatum came down and went 94 feet, did a little step, and made a right-hand layup timeout.

LeBron has an incredible memory. I mean, that is some vivid recollection, sparing no details. And maybe you're left wondering, what's the special sauce that makes his ability to remember so unique? I hope he's listening to this because it's like, I'd love to talk to him about his memory, but he has such an exquisite knowledge of the game that he can reduce what's happening around him into one pattern.

That's Dr. Charan Ranganath, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, where he also directs the Dynamic Memory Lab. Recently, Dr. Ranganath wrote a book. It's called Why We Remember. And in it, he touched on professional memory athletes. And no, I'm not still talking about LeBron. Well, they're in these competitions where they try to memorize as many digits of pi as they can or try to memorize the order of a deck of cards. And they're not just talking about LeBron.

And in general, that's a lot of information, right? Now, if you're someone who can normally only store the highlight reel, but you want to work on remembering the play-by-play, Dr. Ranganath says the key to remembering more may be to memorize less. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is Chasing Life. The title of the book is Why We Remember. So why do we remember? Yeah.

I would say that we remember because we need to have the capability to understand what's happening in the now and to anticipate what's about to happen in a pretty uncertain and sometimes scary world. And so if you're packing for a trip, let's say there's some disaster and you have to go report on it as medical correspondent, you're not going to take everything you own, right? You're going to try to say, hey, what do I need? I might need a jacket. I might need some boots because it's going to be raining out there.

And so you'll pack some stuff, you'll go there. You might say to yourself, Hey, look, I don't have everything I need. Oh, I wish I brought a razor or something. And you might've packed something that you didn't need, right? Like you packed a sweater and it turned out to be warmer than you thought, but on average you do pretty well. And that's what memory is like, right? Memory is not about packing every experience that you have for the journey of life. It's really about packing what you need and,

based on what your brain thinks is going to be important for the future. And so I think that's the fundamental thing people have to understand about memory is it's not supposed to be complete. It's not supposed to be perfect. It's supposed to give you what you need when you need it. So having a good memory is not remembering everything, but it's remembering better, remembering the things that are important. How accurate is memory?

I would say that memory is like a painting. So in other words, you wouldn't look at a painting and go, that painting is true or that painting is false. You'd say, well, this painting is a true to the vision of the artist. Right. And so, you know, you might have details that are faithful to the thing that they're trying to paint.

But at the same time, there's parts that are going to be distorted or inaccurate or missing. And there's also going to be some parts of it that just reflect the person's perspective at the time, right? For instance, let's say if somebody is dating somebody and then they break up, well, as soon as they break up, their memories of the relationship are probably going to be negative, either memories of things that their partner did that wronged them or memories of guilt or something.

But then 20 years later, that person ends up in a new relationship. They're happily married and just loving life. And now they can look back at that relationship really differently because their present is so different that they can see things from a different perspective. And that's a big part of what I used to do when I was doing psychotherapy. It was really not about changing necessarily the memories themselves, but people's relationship with their memories and allowing them to paint those memories from a different perspective.

one of the main points that you make is that happiness and satisfaction don't necessarily come from what you've experienced, but more from what you remember. And reading that part of the book, you know, it really sort of struck me that, that,

If I imagine something in a certain way, if I reflect on it, let me say, in a certain way, I can greatly enhance the memory of that experience. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Because there's so many different ways in which we can approach things.

and look at the same memory, right? And this affects how, not only how we look at the past and how happy we were with it, but also our ability to plan for things that we'd like to do in the future. So if you look back at a memory of vacation, unless you really sit around and think about, you know, the trouble you had parking in the airport garage and the time it took going through security and, you know, maybe issues with your baggage,

you probably instead be thinking more about how much fun you had with your family or, you know, the beautiful beach that you were sitting on and that's going to make you more likely to take a vacation again. And so Danny Kahneman, the great psychologist who won the Nobel prize would say, well, this is utterly irrational. Right. But I actually think it's not so irrational because those high points are really worth it in some ways. I don't think it gives us necessarily a worse quality of life than

to be able to look back on those points that you remember as being the ones that are the most important. Your experiencing self versus your remembering self. Danny talks about that as well, right? Professor Kahneman. What is the experiencing self versus the remembering self?

Well, we know for a fact that forgetting happens very, very quickly, right? So as much as I would love to think that your listeners are hanging on every word of this conversation, if they remember even 20% of what we've talked about, you know, within a week from now, that'll be a gigantic success, right? And so the experiencing self that we're having is

is basically one version of ourself. But then when we remember, we've got a very selective piecemeal narrative, as you said, that describes this experience in a meaningful way, but it's very different from what we experienced, right? It's almost like Severance, that TV show where you have like these experiencing selves that are going out and they're the outies, I guess. And then it's like the remembering self is this innie who has only limited access to what happened.

By the way, do you like that show? I love that show. It is one of the greatest explorations of the mind I've ever seen in fiction. It's beautiful. Wow. That's saying something coming from you, Charan, I think. But just sticking with this remembering self versus experiencing self, you know, it's interesting because Maya Angelou once said, you know, people may not always remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel, right? Yeah.

So this idea, Charm, that you and I are having this conversation, we're talking about memory, obviously, but I'm sitting here looking at you on the screen and you're looking at me and you got a nice smile on your face. You present this in a very, very accessible way that I think is joyful, right?

That, I think, makes a difference for me, right? The idea that you're making me feel a certain way about this topic. Is that going to influence how I ultimately think about it? Absolutely. If you look back, I think most people, if you ask them just to randomly pull out memories of their life, they're not going to typically be the most bland things about like, you know, I remember where I parked my car five days ago. They're going to be typically things that were associated with joy or with happiness.

anger or with love or desire and there are actually chemicals in the brain chemicals i'm sure your listeners have heard about like dopamine serotonin or adrenaline that are released during these intensely emotional states and those actually promote plasticity they allow uh

so-called consolidation or, you know, really affirming of the memories that happen so that they're much more likely to stick around. And so that's part of why you'll remember how people made you feel. And again, you could say, well, why, why would we have such a selective memory that's based on these feelings that we have? But I mean, if you think about it, feelings tend to be associated with things that are biologically important, right? It's like if you,

We're a cave person. You walk into a cave and a saber tooth tiger mauls you or something like that. You should remember that later on. And you should not only remember that it happened, but also how you got there. Right. And so there's a reason that memories of trauma stick around, because it's in a way our brain trying to protect us from trauma.

not doing these things again or try to avoid these threats that are out there in the world, right? Likewise, if something great happens that, you know, you have this great experience with a prospective mate or something like that, that's a really good thing to keep in mind for later on. So our brains are trying to look out for us and these emotional experiences are a big indicator that a particular experience is important and worth keeping for later on.

You know, it's interesting. A lot of people sometimes will be surprised at what they still remember. I still remember from my childhood, like taking a walk with a favorite auntie of mine when I was very young, maybe five or six years old. I still remember certain things about what the weather was like that day. Why do certain things like that stick? Whereas studying for an algebra test when I was in high school, that left me much more quickly. Yeah.

You know, you could always try to reverse engineer things that you remember versus things that you don't. And it's really hard because there's so many factors that go into it. But clearly that emotional part of the experience and the attachment that you have both to your auntie, I mean, you said she was your favorite auntie, right?

And that attachment to the place as well are a big part of why you remember it, right? And it's not necessarily that you remember everything about that experience. I mean, you could probably take an hour of that experience and maybe you have a couple of sentences that you could use to describe it. So you have an experience of that moment you can pull up, but there's not necessarily all the detail that goes with it because you can use your imagination to fill in those blanks.

Yeah, I've often wondered like how much of these good memories that I have from childhood are actually true, you know, and how much of it has been my imagination that have filled in some of those gaps over time. And I guess, does it matter? If memory serves as the story of me, then it is my story, right? So maybe it doesn't matter so much.

Absolutely. I would say that it doesn't necessarily matter so much. I mean, I think right now we have a little bit of a problem, which is that people remember what they want to remember. Right.

We have a real problem in the sense that if you think about our collective memories, that is the memories of things that we've all experienced right now, there's a real attempt to manipulate collective memory in the sense of like using social media or using.

other methods to basically reshape people's collective memories of our past. And I think this is a real problem. And it also can create a problem in terms of implanting memories for information that's just inaccurate, that can lead people to become suspicious of science, for instance. And as a medical professional, I'm sure you're aware and thinking a lot about how problematic the spread of misinformation is, right?

So on one hand, we don't want to be too critical of our own autobiographical memories. And at the same time, we have to be critical consumers of information that can seep into our memory. Is memory the problem there or is it the interpretation of memories, meaning it's raining outside and one person says this is terrible, you know, it's going to cause flooding and this and the other thing. And another person says it's raining outside and it's going to help people.

the flowers bloom. Is that what you're talking about? Or might people actually not remember that it was raining outside?

Well, yes and yes. So let's get into this a little bit. So two people watching the same football game will remember different things that happened based on their beliefs that shape what they take in and how they interpret that information later on and the narratives that they put together. And so those beliefs definitely shape how we construct the past, right? But then on top of it, you have another layer, which is that

Our memories are fungible and they change. Right. So if you and I talk about that same experience later on, as it happens, we can actually remember less collectively after we've talked about it than we would have if you and I just individually experienced that day and didn't talk about it.

And not just that, but we can actually grow to misremember it if you misremember something and you spread that to me. It's sort of like a virus or something and that it can be contagious so that the misinformation now can seep into my memory. So once we share a memory, it's no longer mine or yours. It's ours because of the fungible nature of memory. If it's my team that I'm rooting for, whatever, I may remember the more positive aspects of that and

willingly or intentionally or not, sort of imprint those on you.

Exactly, exactly. And so, for instance, let's just say you believe your team is better than, you know, the other team, but you got screwed because the referee made some mistakes. Right. I also believe that. And so we start talking about it together. And now we build an even more selective memory of what happened. And we forget the times that the quarterback threw an interception or we forget the fumbles that happened in that game. Right.

And so now we've developed a more extremely inaccurate version talking to each other. But there's even another layer to this, which is what I find to be the really scariest part, which is that when we don't have a fully explicit memory of one particular event, our experiences can still change us in the sense that they can make certain concepts seem more familiar to us, right?

And so if you start to hear the same thing from 10 different sources, what happens is it just seems more believable to us because it seems more familiar. And lots of research has shown that your ability to think about whether something is true and share that information with other people.

is based significantly on how much experience you have just hearing it, right? So if you hear from 10 different people that vaccines are bad because they all read the same badly researched blog post or they heard the same badly researched podcast,

Well, eventually that'll seem more believable because you've heard it so many times. And to the extent that it agrees with your preexisting belief, it'll seem even more believable. So that part of our brain's constant tuning itself up, that plasticity can be really hijacked in certain ways and lead us to just construct our own realities. And that's what I really worry about right now.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break here. When we come back, Dr. Ranganath is going to explain how to best absorb the nearly 12 hours of information we take in daily.

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It's interesting. I mean, getting back to this Maya Angelou quote, how you feel at the time you're hearing something, if you're attaching, whether it be a concern about vaccine, if you're attaching it to a very emotional story of a child being injured by a vaccine or something like that, that will probably have an outsized impact on people's memory overall. If you're trying to counterbalance that with facts and data and worldwide data,

it may not hold as much merit as one emotional story. - Yes, absolutely, absolutely. That story that captures your imagination will be definitely something that will weigh more heavily

than all the information that you've received that was fairly bland and not emotionally riveting. There's an added part of this too, which is that people's certain learning and your learning of causes and effects is more related to things that you've done than things that haven't happened or that you haven't done. So it's just harder intuitively to learn the cause-effect relationship between taking a vaccine and not getting sick.

than it is to learn the relationship between taking a vaccine and having a bad side effect from it. Right. That's interesting, this idea of trying to prove a negative, like you took this and nothing happened to you. You know, I think when people first saw a novel virus coming out, and novel almost being the operative word here, even more than virus, people, I think the instinct is to stick this in a bucket that they know.

Right. SARS virus. China. Oh, I know that bucket. That's 2003. That's SARS from 2003. This is going to behave the same way. Terrible virus, but did not did not expand very much outside of South and Southeast Asia. Or they may think respiratory virus. This is going to be like flu. You immediately want to stick it into a context bucket that you know.

Whereas if something is novel, you haven't experienced it before. There is no bucket in which to place it. But that's not a comfortable thing, I think, for people. Getting back to the idea of memory, you want to put it in the neighborhood of previous memories, right? You want to make the unfamiliar familiar in some way.

Yeah, yeah. And in fact, what you can find is that when there is conflict between different possible explanations, what could happen or when there's this uncertainty, I mean, it really causes this discomfort. You can see it in brain activity all over the

especially in an area called the anterior cingulate. So people have this motivation to resolve that uncertainty. - Right. - But there's different ways you can go about it, right? One is just pure anxiety and, you know, or another is just to convince yourself that in fact, this is something we've seen before.

But a third option is curiosity. And we've studied this in our lab. And so you can actually say to yourself, you know, this is a little bit different than anything that we've seen before. It resembles SARS in some superficial ways, but maybe we should learn more and we should find out more and use that to guide our information seeking.

And that's where you can see, for instance, even when people respond to uncertainty with curiosity, we can see activation in these dopamine carrying areas of the brain and it promotes learning. And so it can be, again, a different narrative that you put onto the same information and stimulate maybe a more productive way of dealing with it. It seems like people are not that comfortable with uncertainty.

People are trying to inject certainty into a fundamentally uncertain world. They want to see black and white where they should rightly see gray. That's challenging, and I guess that's where memory sort of starts to fill in gaps. And that seems like where it can get dangerous. And the more that uncertainty relates to distinct threats, the more motivated we have to pull up the right information.

But again, our brains also have this balance, which is to say we're not always going to get it right. And so our brains have this other mechanism that allows us to say I'm going to find new information to supplement what I've already seen before. So we both attend to things that don't match up with what we've seen previously. And we have this capability to then use that to learn new information. I think this is this is

something that I talk about a lot, which is learning is uncomfortable. Learning shouldn't feel easy or good. You know, if a kid's getting straight A's and not even studying for the test, they're not really learning, are they? And when there's uncertainty, those are the opportunities for us to learn the most.

I have three teenage girls and we're going through the whole process of colleges and what classes to take for the next year. And I think you're absolutely right. It's an ongoing negotiation in our household of how to navigate that. I'm sure maybe for you as well.

One of the things you wrote in the book is that the average American is exposed to 34 gigabytes, 11.8 hours worth of information every day. I couldn't even get my head around that. That's 11.8 hours of information every day, which is far greater than what our ancestors were exposed to. Last time I looked it up, the estimate increased even more since then. Right.

How is it that we could be absorbing nearly 12 hours worth of information every day? Well, we're not. I mean, you know...

we're being exposed to it, but we're not exposed to it. So we're not necessarily taking it in. I think one of the kind of misconceptions out there, we see this in the age of AI is that we're supposed to be taking everything in that's around us. And in fact, our brains really operate on this principle of economy to get as little information in as possible and to make as much of that information. And that's why our brains, you know,

as smart as you are, your brain is using far less energy than the lighting that's being put on you right now compared to like chat GPT, which could take down an entire power grid. Right.

So it's all about this economy and being able to use attention as this big filter to be able to focus on the things that are most important. And sometimes it's the things that you expect, and sometimes it's the stuff that violates your expectations. And that's where there's the most meaning there. But it also means that we miss things sometimes, and we end up with frustration because our attention was directed in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Attention and intention. That's the answer you write in terms of why you are able to remember certain things and why you forget other things. Memory is an intentional act. I mean, I'm raising my left hand right now. I'm doing that obviously with intention. People think of memory as I'm going through my day. I saw this red cup over here. I saw that those wipes over there, whatever it might be.

And they're automatically just going to be imprinted in my memory. But in fact, I have to be intentional about it, right? Mm-hmm.

That's absolutely right. Because essentially, especially now, you know, we live in this world with devices and with, you know, information sources that are designed to grab our attention. And that's why I distinguish between attention and intention. Because intention is saying, here's my goals. Here's what's important to me. Do you also fall prey to this as a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist? Do you doom scroll social media and do things that...

are designed to grab your attention away from you? - Absolutely, but I think I will say that I've done a lot to reduce it. I've removed ruthlessly alerts on my phone and alerts on my computer, all these things that by default they force you to take in. And if those apps were alerting me to something dumb,

those moments where I break away from our conversation now actually create these artificial boundaries in my head about what was, what we were talking about. And then I come back and I have this moment where I have to get back on track. And that actually, you can see a little, uh,

like blip of activity in these areas of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, when we have to switch back and forth between these different goals. And it leaves us essentially one step behind. We have a blurrier memory, also a little bit of stress from having to just keep using that control to get us back on track. So sometimes it's not even what's around you, but rather the habits that we develop that lead to this internal drive to shift away from our goals.

I'm sure you get this question all the time. If you're a memory researcher, people think their memory is poor. They're going to come to you and say, how do I improve my memory? And you write about this idea that most humans can keep just a few items in their mind at one time.

even people who are well-trained professional memory athletes, they have the same limitations as everyone else, right? So what is the strategy then to try and improve your memory? If we're all limited by the same thing, you can only keep a few things in your mind at once, how do you improve your memory? Well, the thing that I like to say is don't try to remember more, remember better.

And sometimes remembering better means memorizing less. So you brought up the idea of a memory athlete, and these are people who compete in these, well, they're in these competitions where they try to memorize as many digits of pi as they can or try to memorize the order of a deck of cards.

And in general, that's a lot of information, right? So what the person who's a memory athlete does is they develop strategies that allow them to meaningfully slot the information that they're trying to remember into this larger structure so that 10 things can become one thing, right? So I remember when I was trying to learn the lines on

the music staff, they would give you this acronym, every good boy does fine, right? And then for the open spaces, it would be FACE, F-A-C-E. And that gives you now, instead of like all of these little things to remember, actually, I have to run through it now. Well, you know, you can go E-F-G-A, obviously, but

But nonetheless, it gives you these this powerful way of taking all this information and lumping it into one thing. Right. And so if you look at people like chess experts, what you find is, is that their knowledge of the game allows them to meaningfully create one pattern or one chunk of

Out of an extremely complex sequence of moves with all of these different pieces on the board. Right. And I talk in the book about LeBron James is another wonderful example of this. I hope he's listening to this because it's like I'd love to talk to him about his memory. But I suspect this is true of many athletes in high speed.

speed sports where there's a lot of complexity going on, but he has such a exquisite knowledge of the game that he can reduce what's happening around him into one pattern. And what that allows him to do is not only see and remember what happens at a particular moment of the game, but also to use those patterns to predict what's likely to happen in real time. And so even though these things are happening at a split second pace, the

Because he has that knowledge, he can not only remember these events and you can go on YouTube and find these beautiful examples of him recalling games in, you know, massive detail to the point where you could put the video right next to what he's actually saying and be able to see in time exactly how he's remembering it and how good it is. Right.

And we all have that capability. But again, it requires a little bit of intention to think meaningfully about what's happening now and be able to put it together. So interestingly, like, you know, if you meet someone, you get curious about their life story and you ask them a little bit more about what they do and a fun fact and so forth. It can make it easier to remember their name because now you have a richer set of

cues that you can integrate this little piece of new information into. I remember that it's on page 62 of your book, talking about this concept of chunking, right? Chunking all these various things together, like you're describing. You really remember page 62? It's not in front of you? Oh my goodness. That's amazing. See, this is why you survived med school and why I would have done terrible. I know.

Well, I don't know if you do. But it is interesting, the idea of sticking things in to the memory banks for periods of time for exams and things like that. I mean, I do think a lot of professions sort of rely on that. You think AI is going to change how important memory is? I mean, the way that calculators changed how important it is for us to be able to do long-form math in our head. Is AI going to change how much we need to actually remember? Yeah.

I would say that it will change, probably change how we remember and it will change also how memory influences the way we do things. Especially in doing things differently than the way that our brains do them in terms of being able to complement our limited attention and our ability to take in large amounts of information.

I think also AI has the potential to be the tail that wags the dog in the sense that, you know, I always talk about this example of how when I started using Google's AI to complete my phrases, when I write an email, half the time I'll go, nope, that's not what I wanted. Another quarter of the time I'll go, that's exactly what I wanted. And then a quarter of the time I'll say, that's not what I wanted, but it's good enough, right?

And so what happens often is, is that that good enough then shapes our brain and sort of trains our brain to say good enough is actually good, you know? And so you get these algorithms that feed you songs and these songs are based on lots of songs that you have. And so you don't explore new songs. You end up developing tastes that become narrower and narrower and probably closer to the, just the general common denominator, right? Because AI itself, um,

is based on the lowest common denominator in senses, just scraping everything off the internet in many cases for these large language models.

And what makes humans unique is this capability to remember these singular experiences that we have in our life, right? You had a college roommate who was obsessed with Camus, and that's given you something that changes the way you think right now. And I think the thing is, is that our experiences can be extraordinarily diverse and give us this

toolbox of random information that we've experienced. And AI will filter that stuff out typically because it doesn't, it didn't live in your dorm. It didn't know that person who was obsessed with Camus. And so we can use it to complement our experiences, but it's,

It's really important to have these diverse experiences, to read things that aren't recommended to us and meet people who come from different backgrounds and so forth. And I know diversity has taken on this terribly political kind of view right now. But really, I say diversify our training data. You know, we can like expose ourselves to sources of information.

that go beyond AI because AI is not getting a random sample population. It's getting kind of a smaller sample that's overpopulated with certain ideas and certain thoughts. And so I think we need to kind of be cognizant of that and force ourselves to get out of our comfort zone in order to be able to get a richer imagination to stay relevant in the age of AI. Right. Sharon, what a pleasure to talk to you.

Oh, it's amazing to talk to you, too. I'm really, really impressed with all that you've done to spread science to everyone. So thank you for having me on. Oh, no, it's my pleasure. And thank you for that. And congratulations on the book. I mean, you know, you learn all these things and then you put it out there in the world. And I think we're all better for it. So thank you. Thank you. Couldn't be happier hearing that.

Maybe we'll go have dinner in Napa sometime. I would love that. That would be a nice thing to remember. Yeah, yeah. Or you can come to my house, the best Indian restaurant to Davis. Okay, I love it. I love it. Thank you, Charan. Thank you so much. That was my conversation with neuroscientist and memory expert, Dr. Charan Ranganath. He provided us some great insight and tips that I truly hope we all remember. Thanks so much for listening.

Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Aaron Mathewson, Jennifer Lai, Grace Walker, Lori Gallaretta, Jesse Remedios, Sophia Sanchez, and Kira Dering. Andrea Kane is our medical writer. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom. Amanda Seeley is our showrunner. Dan DeZula is our technical director. And the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Liktai.

With support from Jamis Andrest, John D'Onora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Lainey Steinhardt, Nicole Pesereau, and Lisa Namarow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker and Nadia Kanang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.

This week on The Assignment with me, Adi Cornish. The rise of buy now, pay later services or BNPLs. The idea is this. Instead of using traditional credit or debit to pay for your new sweater or TV or even your DoorDash order, you can break it up. And sometimes those payments happen every few weeks, sometimes once a month. And it's clear we're not sure how to feel about it. Is this a dangerous fad or a smarter, healthier form of credit?

Listen to The Assignment with me, Audie Cornish, streaming now on your favorite podcast app.