Modern Wisdom
#939 - Dr Charan Ranganath - The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus
Sat, 10 May 2025
Dr. Charan Ranganath is a cognitive neuroscientist, professor, and an author. What are memories? Our brains are shaped by countless experiences, but how exactly do we store these stories? Learn what makes some memories stick, why others fade, and how our minds handle the ones we'd rather forget. Expect to learn why memory is important, what the difference is between the experiencing self and the remembering self, How human memory works, why we remember some events so clearly and others vaguely or not at all, how we can make ourselves forget, the best memory improvement techniques, what the relationship between memory and novel experiences is, how our memories shaped by our social interactions, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is memory important?
Why is memory important?
Well, memory is probably not important for the reason people think it is, right? So we always think, well, memory is important when we can't remember. We get frustrated about it. We say, oh, why can't I remember this person's name? Why can't I remember the name of that guy who was in that thing?
My memory is really important is because it's absolutely central to helping us understand the present, where we are in space, when we are in time, and to be able to plan and imagine possible futures. So if you look at people with memory disorders, their problem in life is not that they can't remember the past per se.
It's that their inability to remember the past makes it hard for them to remember whether they've eaten recently. or they end up repeating themselves over and over again, or they just don't have much foresight into what they will do in the future. They have all of these deficits that keep them from living independently, not because they can't tell you what happened an hour ago or something.
It's because that inability leads them to just not be able to do almost anything that they healthy people do in society in a day-to-day basis.
Yeah, so you've sort of touched on something there. You've got a self that experiences stuff and you've got a self that remembers you experiencing stuff. What is the relationship, the difference, the tension between these two selves?
Well, one of the things that we know from memory research is that the overwhelming majority of what we experience will be forgotten, right? So if your listeners end up telling somebody, hey, I heard this great interview on this podcast, the interviewer was on fire, you know, and so then they describe it to one of their friends.
If they spend 10 minutes describing this long-form conversation that we're having, that would be a huge success memory-wise, right? There's no way anyone's going to regurgitate every word of what we said. And many of the important points we talk about, people will probably forget, right? So here's the thing. Now I want to make a decision about my life.
Now I want to make a decision about whether to take vacation. What do I do? I think about all the past vacations I've taken, where I went and whether I like them or not. And if I do that, I'm going to be relying not on what I experienced, but on memory, which is much, much more, much less complete. Right. It's this tiny fraction of what we actually experience.
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Chapter 2: What is the difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self?
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Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom. a checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. Why do we forget things?
Is it just a real estate demand problem inside of our brain?
There are two schools of thought, both of which are probably right. One is that you forget because a memory just disappears from the brain. These connections that you have between neurons that allow the memory to be pulled up, those connections start to decay and become wiped out, and then you lose access to the memory because it's just gone.
Another school of thought is that you can't find the memory you're looking for. But if you had the right cue, you would be able to pull it up, right? So you're trying to remember the name of the guy who was in that thing and you can't pull it up. And then an hour later, it just pops into your head, but it's too late. Your conversation is over, right? So in one case, you were in the wrong context.
You couldn't pull it up. But now in a different context, you can pull it up very easily. So we have... It's absolutely...
unequivocal that we have access to more memory we have more memories that we could pull up than we can than what we can actually pull up at any given time so some of forgetting is just not being able to find um there is some evidence though to suggest that not everything's completely capped and you know i fully believe that too based on the biology of that
So it's a little of both, but I think we don't give ourselves enough of an opportunity to find those memories sometimes when they are there.
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