Charan Ranganath
speaker
1,021 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Charan Ranganath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I really find this a fascinating phenomenon. They call it the tip of the tongue phenomenon sometimes. I don't know if this is what you're talking about.
Where you have—you know the information is there. And, I mean, you're aware of something, but it just doesn't—you don't have proof of its existence. You're just working on this complete faith that it exists. There's many reasons why this happened. One of the big ones is you pull out the wrong information.
When you pull out the wrong information, what happens is it makes it much harder to find the right information. So in other words, if you're looking for someone named Fred and you accidentally pull out Frank, you know that's not the name. Now Frank is very big in your consciousness, and it's fighting against the other memory that you have. And so as a result, you're going to have some trouble.
Now later on, what happens is your mindset changes, and you're no longer stuck in that previous mistake, and that's why it can pop up. So what can sometimes happen is that we're looking for something, but then we get the wrong thing, and that leads us so far in the wrong direction that the competition in memory works against us.
Well, that's another thing that can happen is that you get what's called partial retrieval, where you get a piece of the information but not the whole thing. And again, one of the things that I talk about in the book is this idea that I realized as I was writing it that it's not very intuitive, but memories compete with each other. And this is true for a name.
This could be true for a memory for an event. And so if you have learned multiple names that start with the letter K— Now what happens is you have this competition where essentially they're fighting with each other.
Yeah, and the more similar they are, the harder that competition is, right? Yeah. I want to be clear that proper nouns are exceptionally hard because they're not – the problem is never the name or usually not the name. With me, it's sometimes with my name. It's the name for people. But let's say if the person you're looking for is Catherine, right? It starts with a K.
So the problem is, is that there's nothing that helps you link Catherine's name with her face. It's just a completely arbitrary link, right? They could look like anyone and that would be their name. So you're really trying to form a memory for something that's utterly meaningless. And that's the hard part. It's a little bit easier if you have some knowledge about them, but often it's
It's just very hard. And even once you learn it, as you said, you can still suffer from this competition because there's many other people that you have probably met whose name also starts with a K. Well, you make an interesting distinction, which is that there's a difference between forgetting and a retrieval failure.
That's exactly, that's one of the best analogies that I would think of is rummaging through the junk drawer, right? Another example I could give, which is, it's easy for me to think of because it's my life, is that, you know, if I walk into my desk in my office, it's completely filled with junk. My desk is my junk drawer, basically.
And I'm looking for something, let's say, let's just imagine I have 100 Post-it notes on my desk, and they're all yellow. And on one of them, I wrote my password for some bank account, let's say. I'm looking and I'm looking. It's going to take me a while to find it. And I might not find it amidst all the other clutter.
But if I had used a hot pink post-it note, it would stick out relative to everything else. And that is the issue with memories. You want something that's distinctive that makes this particular memory unique relative to other memories that you're looking for, right? And so that's a big part of what helps you overcome the competition in memories.
Well, I think this is one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book so badly. I had been told by a lot of people, hey, you should write a book teaching people how to remember more. And I always say you don't want to remember more. You want to remember better because nobody that's ever been studied has a photographic memory for everything.
And in fact, I don't care because my phone has a photographic memory. Literally, I don't need to do that.
Yes. I think that the technology in and of itself doesn't necessarily cause these changes. It's more how we interact with the technology. And what I mean by that is that if we are switching between one thing and another and we're so in the habit of being responsive to everything, what happens is that you have two problems with this.
So one is that your attention actually gets grabbed every time you switch. You actually have a little bit of a cost in your prefrontal cortex. Just to simplify, it has to work a little bit harder just to get you caught up and back on the program, right? So I'm Right now, I'm doing a social media post, but then I'm Instagramming my time at this cafe, and then I'm going back and talking to my wife.
Every time I switch back and forth, my brain uses some resources just to get on task. So I'm already behind schedule once I switch over. And as a result, I'm a little bit more – I'm even stressed.
I'm behind and I'm having trouble focusing in a way that allows me to get these sharp memories because the memories that stick around are going to be the ones where we have a lot of rich information about the sights and the sounds and just they're more the immersive sensory details that can really make this moment unique relative to all these other moments.
And so other things that we do with social media and the way we interact with it, like taking pictures, for instance, sort of the rise of Instagram walls everywhere, you can see now how much that has changed people's experience of places.
And as a result, what I think sometimes happens is that people get into a mode of mindlessly taking pictures in a way that doesn't focus them on the details of their surroundings. And what do you do? You post it. You get a lot of these pictures. You over-document, and then you post them. and either never go back to them, or in the worst case, they disappear, right?
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