Fresh Air - Best Of: The Making Of 'Dune' / Why We Remember

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

Denis Villeneuve remembers watching the 1984 movie version of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel Dune and thinking, "Someday, someone else will do it again" — not realizing he would be that filmmaker. He spoke to Sam Briger about shooting Dune in the desert and his love of silent film.Ken Tucker reviews a new solo album from guitarist Mary Timony. Neuroscientist Dr. Charan Ranganath's book is Why We Remember. We talk about how stress affects memory and what's happening in the brain when something's on the tip of your tongue.For sponsor-free episodes of Fresh Air — and exclusive weekly bonus episodes, too — subscribe to Fresh Air+ via Apple Podcasts or at https://plus.npr.org/freshairLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From W.H.Y.Y. in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger in for Terry Gross. The much-anticipated sci-fi movie Dune Part 2 is now out in theaters. Today, our guest is the film's director Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve read the 1965 novel Dune when he was a teenager, and even then he imagined making it into a movie. Also, do you have trouble remembering names and faces? Or what you were supposed to get at the market? Or the ever-popular, where did I put my keys? Do you wonder why you're so forgetful?

We'll get some explanations from cognitive neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, author of the new book, Why We Remember. And Ken Tucker reviews the new solo album from Mary Timoney. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger in for Terry Gross. My first guest is filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. His movie, Dune Part II, is now out in theaters. Villeneuve was a teenager when he read the 1965 novel Dune by Frank Herbert. He was already a fan of science fiction, but Dune was a huge inspiration for him.

Even at an early age, he wanted to make it into a movie. After successes making films like Arrival and Blade Runner 20 age, he wanted to make it into a movie. After successes making films like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, he got the chance. His movie Dune Part 1 came out in 2021 to critical and commercial success. Dune Part 2 takes place in the distant future, mostly on the harsh desert planet Arrakis, after the feudal house Atreides has been wiped out in a conspiracy between the Galactic Emperor and their enemies the Harkonnens, including the head of Atreides, Duke Leto. But Leto's son, Paul, and Paul's mother, Jessica, played by Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson, escape the attack and are taken in by the indigenous people of Arrakis called the Fremen.

The Harkonnens have regained control of Arrakis, and Paul and Jessica have joined the Fremen's insurgency against them. Many of the Fremen think that Paul might be a prophesied messiah figure that will help them regain control of their planet. But Paul is wary of these prophecies. He has had premonitions that if he takes on the mantle of prophet, he will set in motion a terrible galactic genocide. The movie follows the choices he makes

while pursuing his revenge against the Harkonnens. Along with Chalamet and Ferguson, Dune Part II stars Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, Charlotte Rampling, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, and Christopher Walken. Denis Villeneuve's other films include Sicario and Prisoners. Denis Villeneuve, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you.

You wanted to make this movie for a long time. How old were you when you read it? I read the first book at 13, but then there's many books, and my love for Dune went on through the years. So let's say I discovered between 13 and 14 years old. So what were you drawn to in that first book? I think that the idea that a boy finds home in another culture that feels comfortable in a foreign country. That really moved me at the time. And also I was in love with biology when I was a student.

And it's something that I was mesmerized how Frank Herbert used ecology to express himself. It really deeply moved me. And you thought about early on making this book into a movie. You made storyboards for it. How old were you when you did that? Did that happen right after you read it? Yeah, around the same period of time,

me and my best friend, Nicolas Kedsma, Nicolas was very strong at drawing and me, I was very bad, but I was good at telling stories and we started that our friendship was born from that

dream of that one day we could be filmmakers it's the way we met and we didn't have any cameras at the time but we I was writing stories and Nicolas was drawing them and we had like

inspired from the book we had started to do some drawings about the making of Dune. But that was, like, very old dreams. And this was before David Lynch's version of the movie came out in 1984. Is that correct? Yeah, absolutely. So you've been thinking about this book visually for a long time. So what was it like for you to see someone make this book into a movie and to see someone's interpretation of this book that you love so much? I was very excited when I learned that the movie and being very mesmerized and impressed by how David Lynch approached it. I was also destabilized by some of his choices.

Because that's not how you would have done it, right? Yeah. David Lynch has a very strong identity as a filmmaker, of course, and it glided into the... Of course, it's a fantastic interpretation of the book, but there were some choices that were made that were very far away from my sensibility. And I remember watching the movie, saying to myself,

someday someone else would do it again in the future. It will happen because I didn't feel that he captured some of the essence of, specifically about the Fremant culture. I felt that there was some things that were missing. And it's like, that's the nature of adaptation. You know, it's like, so I was expecting someone else to come back with the project at one point.

And that turned out to be you. Yeah, which is I'm still pitching myself. In Dune Part 1, you have to spend time setting the scene. This is a very complicated and very strange universe. The story takes place on multiple worlds. There are these competing power factions, including secret societies. How did you decide how much you were going to have to explain versus how much you were just going to show?

It's a fine line. I tried to find a balance. I tried to make the movie as cinematic as possible. The first decision was to focus this adaptation on the Bene Gesserit sister power, that sisterhood that controls the politics from the shadows, that use religion as a political tool. And there's a lot of school of thought in Dune.

There's a lot of different... There's the Manta, the Spacing Guild. There's a lot of different, there's the Manta, the Spacing Guild. There's a lot of group of people. And I focused on the Bene Gesserit sisters. And then in part one, the idea was to really see the reality through this young man's eyes. The camera will be just above Paul Atreides' shoulder and that we will, the reality of the movie will unfold slowly

through his eyes. So it's a movie that is much more meditative, contemplative and the boy is an old teenager in part one. So he's a, let's say, a victim of the events. He has no control. He just tries to survive. So, which is the part two victim of the events. He has no control. He just tries to survive, which is the opposite.

In part two, it's totally the opposite. He became active. He became a guerrilla fighter and take control of his own destiny. So the second movie was meant to be more of an action movie. When you say you tried to make it as cinematic as possible, by that you mean not using just a lot of exposition dialogue, right? If I could have made movies without any dialogue, it would have been paradise.

Dialogues for me belong to theater or television. I mean, it's like I'm not someone who remembers movies because of their lines. I remember movies because of their images, because of the ideas that are being hidden or unfold through images. And that's the power of cinema. For me, it's not about dialogue.

And I hope one day I will be able to make a movie with as little dialogue as possible. With Dune, it was a bit difficult, but that's my goal. Have you thought of making a silent movie sometime? I will be definitely tempted, yes. By the way, that's why silent movies were so powerful and still today the best movies.

I mean, it's like normally a great movie, you should be able to watch it without sound. And that's the ultimate goal, yeah. So were there lessons that you learned from making Dune Part 1 that you applied to making Part 2? Multiple, and it would be boring to mention all of them, but let's say that there's something about the rhythmic of my mise-en-scene, you know, how I can convey ideas through choreographies and the movement of camera and trying to be more efficient. I was trying to find an energy that I found more in part two, and also being more agile with visual effects. And more specifically, I will say,

where I think there was a lot of improvement is in their screenwriting, trying to be more cinematic. But the project itself, the nature of the project itself allowed me to go to something much more playful cinematically. You actually film a lot of the movie in the desert.

And I was just wondering, what complications that brought up? Were you always worried about the movie in the desert. And I was just wondering, like, what complications that brought up. Like, were you always worried about getting sand in the camera? The complication is, first, to bring a full unit deep in the desert requires a lot of logistics to protect the crew. And, like, how many people are in a unit? Several hundreds. Several hundreds.

Maybe in Jordan we're at 800 sometimes. I could not give a number for Abu Dhabi exactly because it's several hundred people that, because at one point you need people to take care of people. It's just the structure of the base camp. We had to build roads,

eco-friendly roads, I must say. Roads that don't exist anymore but that at the time were built to bring the trucks deep into the desert and a path also, a sidewalk to bring the crew where I wanted them to be. There was a massive logistic that was deployed to have like shelters to uh to protect actors and the film crew from the heat and uh the heat was our enemy i mean there was a period of time in the middle of the day where i i've it was the soup mode that you felt that your brain was cooking it was like really um uh i had to bring the crew

away from the sun a couple of uh in the middle of the day it was too warm. It's the big challenge also is that, and that I'm fully responsible for that, is that I wanted to shoot the movie as much with natural light as possible. I mean we shot entirely with exclusively with natural light in the desert, which

meant that in order to make no compromise aesthetically it drove my first assistant crazy because it meant that you had to, according to sun position, to deconstruct the whole shooting schedule according to the sunlight, sun position.

And it was for, and my cinematographer and I, and for the actors, quite a crazy puzzle. So that means that if you're shooting one scene and then you want to do it again or add on to that scene, the next day you have to wait until the sun's in the same position? Yeah, for some scenes specifically, yes. Or to deconstruct the scene in different areas in the desert so you can have the maximum aesthetic quality

for the shot, but it meant that an actor could throw a line to another actor in two different locations. That's what people say, okay, that we can do, but when it becomes 12 locations or 14 locations, it becomes a bit complex for the crew. If you're just joining

us, our guest is filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. His new movie, Dune Part 2, is now out in theaters. We'll be back after a short break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to my interview with filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. His movie, Dune Part 2, is now playing in theaters. Denis, you've told the story before about how you got into science fiction as a kid. Your aunt brought you this box of magazines, and it contained some issues of this sci-fi

magazine. Can you tell us that story? It's a very, very important moment in my life. It's like one day, my aunt, Uget, came back, was in love with the science fiction and the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, etc. She was, like, always bringing... She brought home three boxes filled with magazines which were, like, monthly or weekly graphic novels,

Metal Hurlant or Tintin Magazine, which were, like, filled with all those stories from those authors from Europe, like Bilal, Druyer, Christin, Jean-Paul Dionnet, Moebius, those masters that absolutely made that huge revolution in the 70s, went so far creating those worlds. As a kid, it really was an electroshock. It was really like a massive...

My brain... I don't know if my brain melted or exploded, but I'm still haunted by those boxes, the power of creativity that was in those boxes. Metal, Erlans, was known in the U.S. as heavy metal, but here it was more decidedly R-rated. I think that you've said that it was a different magazine. It is true that the English, American version

was much more for adult, which was not the case for the European version. It was more about pure sci-fi. So what intrigued you about science fiction? Like, were you drawn to the spaceships and technology, or did you appreciate what Ray Bradbury said about science fiction, that it's the history of ideas? Wow, that's a nice quote.

I never heard that before. I will say that it's like a way to digest reality and to explore it in a very poetic way. And it's in a way the ultimate way of dreaming because you project yourself in the future. It's an act of hope. And I think that I've been raised, being raised in a village, very tiny village, where there was two structures.

One of them was the church. The other one was a nuclear power plant. And I was raised between both powers. And the idea of having that nuclear power plant in the horizon, that power, the nuclear power, with everything what it meant. At the time, I was raised in the 70s with the fear of the atomic bomb, which was like the big threat at the time. There was something there, that fear of science, that fear of the unknown, that fascination for science also. So how much of a prevailing fear was there in your town in Quebec because of this power plant? The thing is that the scientists were there to reassure us all the time. I think that me as a kid, I had the fear, but around me, the adults were very excited by the economical potential of those powerful devices. I didn't feel the fear until they were explaining to us that if there was an accident and the wind was blowing in that direction, then you started to question the technology.

Everything's fine unless... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was meant to be a very safe technology. It was just that unconscious fear of the atom. It's a power that we are not supposed to... We went too far. And it's something that you know inside yourself that it's like you're playing with the power of the stars.

So, you know, there are atomic weapons in Dune Part 2, and one of the characters sort of thinks that they're going to be the solution to all the problems. I was wondering when you did those scenes, if you had been thinking about your hometown. When you do something something as an artist, you're always talking about your hometown. So I think, I will say, when I'm thinking about the Fremen, I'm thinking about French Canadians.

The idea, the alienation of religion. The idea that the population is under the control of the church and that the church is linked with the politics. And that for many years, we were, we didn't, the French Canadians didn't have any economical power and were under the control of the church and submitted to this power where the church was telling us where to vote. And it's very powerful. It's the absolute power. I mean, if you say to someone tells you, if you vote for this guy, you go to hell. Religion is a good thing, but it's not meant to be linked with politics. Was your family religious? I was raised, yes. My family was religious, yes.

Do you recall hearing about hell and whether you would go there depending on how you did it? Absolutely. I was raised as a Catholic. And I always say that I really absolutely loved the chants. One of the first discussions I had with Hans Zimmer was about those church... Who wrote the score for Dune. Exactly, exactly. And to have that kind of sacred power.

I mean, it was like very inspiring, the chants that we were singing as kids. There was something I remember being elevated by. I'm not a religious person anymore, but at the time, there was a time as a kid, I was like everybody else in my hometown. When you were young, how did you imagine what your adult life was going to be like? Did you see yourself staying in that town? That's a good question. I will say that I became happy when I landed in Montreal.

Why? It's because finally I was in contact with culture, with movie theaters, with museums, with big libraries, with bookstores. I remember the first time I walked in Montreal as a young adult, the impression to be in Blade Runner. I was absolutely deeply excited by culture and the power of having all those resources all around me to learn more about the world. You started making small independent films with shoestring budgets and unknown actors. And now you're working, it's like an almost different planet.

You're making movies with $100 million budgets, huge crews, you said, like 800 people in the desert, all A-list actors. I just wonder if you could reflect on that. Well, actually, I made sure to not make too big of a step between each project. I would have not been able to make Dune as my third movie. Some directors can. I'm always impressed by directors that can jump from indie to massive Hollywood budget at ease. Me, I needed to go step by step. I'm a slow learner, and I needed to slowly build stairs, something solid under my feet.

So you intentionally did it incrementally? Yes. And because I didn't want to be crushed by the system, I wanted to keep control on creativity. And also, I will say that I approach those movies absolutely the same way as I did the indie movies, which is that at the end of the day, I'm with actors with a camera. And I try to keep it as intimate on set as possible. It's like the big difference between the movies when I was young and now is the distance between the car and the camera and the amount of people around it. But it's like I have a strong capacity to forget about the amount of people around it. But it's like I'm very,

I have a strong capacity to forget about the scope of things and focus on the intimacy with the actors. Denis Villeneuve, thank you very much for coming on Fresh Air today. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. His latest film, Doom Part II, is now out in theaters. The guitarist, songwriter, and singer Mary Timoney has just released her first solo album in 15 years. It's called Untame the Tiger, and rock critic Ken Tucker thinks it represents a new

high point in her varied, adventurous career. Timoney was on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest guitarists of all time, published last year, and she's familiar to indie rock fans as a member of bands such as Helium, X-Hex, and Wild Flag. Ken says this solo album is a marvelous collection dealing with strong, sometimes contradictory, emotions. guitar solo Check the situation Is it cruel or is it kind We wander in the desert Trying to find time The white flags above us Fly on our down

Time to meet the mountain There's no other way out Mary Timoney's guitar playing over a 30-plus year's career has been characterized by a firmness, an unyielding flintiness that conveys a confidence in making music, even when the songs themselves are detailing doubt, vulnerability, or loneliness. Her new album, Untame the Tiger, unfolds like a journey in which the traveler maps her emotions onto every scene.

In the song Dominoes, for example, Timoney adds to the list of great rock and roll road songs, singing about going 90 in the wrong direction, riding next to someone whom she's decided she's no longer in love with. She doesn't feel trapped in that car, though. If anything, she's feeling the power she has to control her destiny. When you said it was forever You looked me right in the eye.

The next second you were gone, and that's when I realized that was a lie. Going in the wrong direction I was right beside you Trying to steer back my affection I really never thought I'd be out here on my own Living in this desert High frequency zone Living in this desert, I've been with you so long Long enough On the song Don't Disappear, a lyric about comforting a troubled friend

could also be Timonnie talking to herself, perhaps without realizing it. When she reaches the chorus of the song, Timonese lifts her voice and her guitar into a brighter, sunnier place. She sings harmony with herself and plucks out chords that would fit right into a Beach Boys song, saying, don't be afraid, and uses an odd, soothing phrase, I've got you in my brain parade. The garden of time Roses, backwards in my mind If you fall, don't be afraid I've got you in my brain

You're close to the edge of that emotion Come on, fall back in to my devotion Most of the time here, the music is made by a core trio of guitar, bass, and drums. Some of the prettiest drumming is done by Dave Maddox, the 75-year-old former member of Fairport Convention, Going Strong. Timonese vocals are so plain spoken, her details so vivid, it's as though she's recording the audio book of a novel she's written. But now my brain is running hot And I'm counting all the rain Want to go where your animal runs free

I hear it call my name What do I get from loving you Just this song about the pain That's from the title song, Untame the Tiger. At about five and a half minutes long, it features a languid, dreamy instrumental intro before her vocal abruptly picks up the pace. The song becomes a piece of brisk pop music about realizing a relationship you thought was over is still very much alive.

It's the tiger that hasn't been tamed. Her words try to downplay the intensity of these thoughts. At one point, she calls Untame the Tiger just this song about the pain. But Timonese's words are contradicted by her guitar playing, a gorgeous, galloping solo that becomes the heart of the range of sounds Timonty taps into here. On The Guest, Timonty makes her guitar do the work of a country music pedal steel guitar, creating a high, caning sound that rises up to meet her as she greets her old friend, Loneliness. Hello, Loneliness, you've come back home You were the only one who never left me alone

I try and I try to say goodbye but you insist you insist More than once listening to this album, I was reminded of something Carrie Brownstein, her bandmate in the group Wild Flag, once wrote describing her friend's guitar playing. This is the sound a wound makes. On Untame the Tiger, it sounds as though the wound is healing. Ken Tucker reviewed Mary Timoney's new album, Untame the Tiger. Coming up, neurologist Charan Ranganath will talk about memory and forgetting. His new book is called Why We Remember. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger in for Terry Gross. Terry has our next interview. I'll let her introduce it. Sometimes I'm convinced that I wrote and sent an email, and I'm later alarmed to find I did neither. I felt a little bit better reading that the same thing happens to my guest, and he's a cognitive neuroscientist who studies memory. Charan Ranganath's new book starts with a quote that I love that's from an anonymous internet meme. Quote,

My ability to remember song lyrics from the 80s far exceeds my ability to remember why I walked into the kitchen, unquote. I understand that. I've experienced that. Maybe with different lyrics, though. When Ranganath meets someone for the first time, the question he's most often asked is, why am I so forgetful? He says, we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for. He says, quote, the mechanisms of memory were not cobbled together to help us remember the name of that guy we met at that thing. Instead of asking, why do we forget? We should really be asking, why do we remember? Unquote. And that's the question he's been researching for about 25

years with the help of brain imaging techniques. He directs the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, where he's a professor of psychology and neuroscience. His new book is called Why We Remember. Charan Ranganath, welcome to Fresh Air. It's a pleasure to have you here. I learned so much about memory. I want to tell you, I've had proper noun issues for years or decades. And sometimes, if anything, that starts with a capital letter, a person's name, a movie, a television show, a recording, the songwriter's name. I remember the lyrics, but not who wrote it, even though I know who wrote it. And I know the name of the movie, and I know the name of the show, and I can't find it in my brain. And then a few seconds or a few minutes or a few hours or a few days later, without even thinking about it, it just kind of pops into my mind.

What is going on? 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. Yes. 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, and 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'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. But sometimes I know that the name starts with a K or starts with an L. Why do I know that, but I don't know the name? 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 – and 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. Oh, I go through the whole alphabet. Is it K, K, K, O? Yeah, and the more similar they are, harder that competition is right and uh i want to be clear that proper nouns are exceptionally hard because um 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. The problem 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 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. And like, for there's a difference between forgetting and a retrieval failure. And like, for instance, my proper noun problem is a retrieval failure because it's in there. It's in my brain someplace. I just can't find it. It's like rummaging through the junk drawer to find something really small. 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 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 is 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 memory. But you can't do that with every memory. I mean, it's like having a new password

every time you sign onto a site. There's a limit to how many mnemonic devices or, you know, like little memory tricks you can use for every password and add to that everything you want to remember. How many memory devices can you come up with? Well, I think this is the 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. And I think one of the ideas that

I really have come to appreciate as we've done computer models of the brain and how memory might work in the brain is that there's always design trade-offs. So there's no free lunch, right? So let me give you an analogy. If I'm building a motor vehicle and somebody tells me, I want to haul around as much junk as possible. Well, I can build you a semi truck and it's going to use a lot of fuel and it's going to be lumbering and very slow and you can't really stop it on a dime and go quickly and it's not going to be nimble and agile. But if I want something that's going to be high performance and nimble and agile and not use a lot of fuel, I might do something more like an electric sports car or something, right? So the human brain is much more like the high efficiency

but also high performance sports car. We're not designed to carry tons and tons of junk with us. And like you said, I don't know that anyone would want to remember every temporary password that they've ever had. So I think what it's designed for is to carry what we need and to deploy it rapidly when we need it. So you and I share that we sometimes think we've written or sent an email, but we haven't. In my case, many times I did write the email and I'm certain I sent it and then I find it still in drafts. What I tell myself is I must have been distracted and interrupted and then I forgot about it or I just imagined that

I sent it when I didn't because of this interruption. Now, notice I'm not really taking responsibility for forgetting. I'm blaming it on the interruption. But is that possible that I was interrupted and that was the problem? Absolutely. I mean, this is the reality of modern life is that we're constantly being interrupted. Now, sometimes those interruptions are in our world and not of our own making. So any person with a newborn child, for instance, can relate to this idea of you're trying to do something and all of a sudden your child starts crying and your brain is telling you, forget everything else. Let's focus on this. Then there's things that we do to ourselves, like we just have other thoughts that come into our

head or we start daydreaming about things. But then I think the most insidious of all are the alerts and the distractions that we put upon ourselves with, like, you know, smartphones and smartwatches where there's things constantly buzzing and grabbing our attention. And then people start to get bad habits, like checking texts and emails. For instance, I'll sit in academic talks and see people checking email during a talk, and I can guarantee you they're not remembering either the email or the talk after they've left the place. Does stress interfere with memory? Absolutely.

So stress has a bunch of complex effects on memory. So if you have a severely stressful experience, sometimes you can remember that experience better than if it was not stressful. And so this happens a lot in cases of traumatic memories. But the other part of it is, is that stress makes it harder to pull out the information you need when you need it. It's basically kind of shuts down the prefrontal cortex. And under those states of stress, you're prioritizing things that are more immediate, your knee-jerk responses to things. And so that makes it harder to remember stuff that happened before you were under stress. Then there's the issue of chronic stress, where we know that chronic stress can be actually neurotoxic for areas of the brain that

are important for memory, like the prefrontal cortex and another area called the hippocampus. And that is really, I think, part of the problem that you see in people with PTSD, for instance. What do you mean by neurotoxic to parts of the brain? Well, what I mean is that if you're under chronic stress for a long period of time, there's a whole series of stress-related hormones that are bathing your brain in these stress-related hormones. And what can happen is this can be causing damage to areas like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex so that they're no longer functioning as efficiently as you would hope they would. And you can see this in many different animal models of stress.

When you talk about damage, is this permanent damage or temporary damage? We think it's permanent damage. But again, we're talking pretty severe, pretty chronic stress. Well, this is pretty severe chronic stress. Oh, okay. Like being in war or something. Being in war, exactly. Or being in a repeatedly abusive household or something like that.

I should add too that stress – there's a lot that's not known. We've studied the effects of stress on memory and we find that the responses to stress are enormously variable across people. And you can even look in the cases of traumatic events that have happened to many people at the same time. And some people develop PTSD and some people don't. And we don't know why that is. And so this is one of the many mysteries in this field. But for whatever reason, some people have this chronic stress that really does affect them in a severe way. I want to ask you about social media because so many people are constantly like jumping from one post to another, from one screen to another.

And attention spans on screens are getting shorter and shorter. How does it affect your memory of what you've seen on social media if you just keep scrolling? And does that have an impact on your general ability to remember? Like if your attention is constantly getting diverted from one thing to another, one thing to another, does that have a sustained effect? 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 for, you know, 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 looking, 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, 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 surrounding. And what do you do? You post it. You get a lot of these pictures. You over-document, and then you post them,

and you either never go back to them, or in the worst case, they disappear, right? So there's a platform called Snapchat where the information literally disappears within, I don't know, 24 or 48 hours. And I think that's a metaphor for how technology can impact our memories in general. You write that sleep is very important both to memory and to synthesizing memory. Can you tell us, you know, briefly, what goes on in the brain while we're sleeping that is so helpful? Well, one of the fascinating things about sleep is we tend to think, oh, nothing's happening. I'm not getting anything done.

But your brain is hugely at work. There are all these different stages of sleep where you can see these symphony of waves where different parts of the brain are talking to each other essentially. And so we know for a fact that at some of these stages of sleep, what happens is the brain will flush out toxins like the amyloid protein that can build up over the course of a day. So just by virtue of that function, sleep is very important. But then on top of it, what we can see is that the neurons that were active during a

particular experience we have come back alive during sleep. And so there seems to be some processing of memories that happen during sleep. And the processing of memories can sometimes lead to some parts of the memory being strengthened, or sometimes you're better able to integrate what happened recently with things that happened in the past. And so sleep scientist Matt Walker likes to say that sleep converts memory into wisdom, for instance. So we should really give ourselves time to sleep, even when we feel like we don't have the time. Absolutely, because it's an investment, because you're depriving your brain of all this information processing that can happen in your sleep. And I do believe, it's controversial, but I do believe in the idea that sometimes you can wake up and through that memory processing actually have the ability to solve a problem that

you couldn't do before you went to sleep. I mean, the other part of sleep I think that's very important is when we're sleep deprived, it's just terrible for memory. All the circuitry that's important for memory does not function as well, and memory performance really declines. Do you get enough sleep? No, not at all. Not at all. No, I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm still trying to figure out exactly why. Charan Ranganath, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you. This has been fantastic. Thank you.