Fresh Air - Why We Remember (And Forget)

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Charan Ranganath recently wrote an op-ed about President Biden's memory gaffes. He says forgetting is a normal part of aging. We also talk about PTSD, how stress affects memory, and what's happening when something's on the tip of your tongue. His new book is Why We Remember. Also, John Powers reviews Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?For sponsor-free episodes of Fresh Air — and exclusive weekly bonus episodes — subscribe to Fresh Air+ via Apple Podcasts or at https://plus.npr.org/freshairLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. 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. Before we get to your book, because there's so much I want to talk about that's in it, I want to ask you about an op-ed you recently wrote about Joe Biden's memory. And the headline is, we're thinking about Biden's memory and age in the wrong way. And you wrote this after special counsel Robert Herr's report saying that one of the reasons he decided against prosecuting Biden for having classified documents in his home was that, quote, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. What was your reaction when you read that?

So when I read that, my first thought is, hey, I know something about memory. Maybe I should look into what he's talking about. And when I read the examples that I saw from the report, they didn't actually seem to fit with what he was saying, because I think the quote that he presented really pushed on some people's stereotypes about aging and memory. And a lot of that would be that you lose your memory when you get older. And so I wanted to clarify to people about what they can expect as they get older about memory. And this is something that I think cuts across party lines because one in six Americans are over the age of 65, right? So I wanted to clarify that idea that memory changes as we get older, but it's not what people think. And I think it's important to bust some stereotypes about this,

both in terms of the presidential election and in terms of people out there who might be worried about their own memory. So what are some of the myths that you wanted to correct? So in the editorial, I say basically that there's forgetting and there's forgetting with a capital F. And what I mean by that, that's not really a technical term, but what I mean by that is that there's a certain kind of forgetting that we talk about colloquially. And what I mean by that is that there is a certain kind of forgetting that we talk about colloquially. And what I mean is that we sometimes will say, I forgot because I can't find the memory. I know it's there, but I can't find the memory, right? So in the case of Joe Biden not being able to remember the year in which he finished his vice presidency, in all likelihood, he had that memory somewhere, but he just couldn't

access it. And in particular, he couldn't access the year, but I would be more concerned if he couldn't remember anything from the last year of his presidency, which I really doubt. And likewise, he remembers many things about surrounding the death of his son. He just couldn't tell the year at the moment that he was asked about it. So what happens when we have that form of forgetting with a lowercase f? Well, that actually is something that happens increasingly with healthy aging. I think we all do. I don't know about you, Terry, but this happens to me all the time. We'll talk about this more in a moment, yes. Yeah, this is going to be our therapy session, which we can get into later anyway.

So as we get older, we experience this kind of forgetting more and more. And it's related to the changes in the functioning of an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. And this is what allows us to focus our attention on what's relevant and to use strategies to try to find the information that we need when we need it. So I talk about it in terms of remembering with intention. And so one of the problems that you find is that as we get older, we'll often have memory for what happened. But if you wanted to start getting into the details, we struggle because our frontal cortex isn't working as efficiently as it used to be. And so these are the kinds of memory errors that people talked about with Biden. And this is different from what I call forgetting with a capital F, where the memory is just not there.

It was either never formed properly to begin with, or it's just lost. And lost, I mean, I say just gone. And that's, I should say, even the capital F forgetting, everybody forgets. And going back to the first quantitative studies of memory, everyone forgets and the majority of your experiences will be forgotten. And that capital F forgetting does increase as you get older, but it's not severe. So in other words, if you didn't remember that something happened when it was very recent, that would be, I would say then you have a poor memory and there's maybe a memory problem. But if you have the memory, you know, it's there and you can't find it. Or if it's something along the lines of you just never got somebody's name and as soon as, you know, five minutes after you

met them, you forgot it, I would be much more forgiving about that and say that's pretty normal. Were you more concerned in terms of Biden's memory when after the statement by the special prosecutor, Biden was talking about Gaza and in referring to the president of Egypt, he used the name of the president of Mexico? I was not because one of the things that I know is that's not a memory problem, right? So I would be concerned if instead of if he didn't remember meeting the president of Egypt or he didn't remember meeting the president of Mexico, like he just had no memory that he had ever met them. But this kind of word finding problem is not what I would even call a memory problem. It's just more of an articulation issue.

And actually Biden has a long history of articulation issues or what people call gaffes because I think it may be related to his long-lasting stuttering issue, which is not at all related to memory per se. So yeah, I was not concerned about that. But I can see how people who don't know much about the neuroscience of memory might say, oh, this is a memory problem. But it's really the classic kind of thing that happens to many of us where, you know, you're trying to get something out under pressure and you say the wrong thing and you're slower to catch that error. And that's typical of aging. So do you think the kind of memory slips that we've heard would affect Biden's ability to lead the country and to make wise decisions? I will not say anything about that because, you know, I'm a scientist, right? And I haven't gone

through a whole bunch of testing. You'd really need a couple of days of testing and interviews to really get a sense of either of the presidential candidates. And I should clarify, Donald Trump has a whole line of similar kinds of gaffes and switching of names and so forth. He is famously confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. So that's another example. And again, I'm just not in the position to say anything about the specifics of their memory problems. Or I think this is really a public question about what it takes to lead this country. And this was another thing I wanted to point out in the editorial, is that some things change a lot with aging, which is episodic memory or this ability to remember events. Then there's other things like attention goes down with aging and the ability to sort of control what you need when you need it. But other things like your knowledge

about the world and what we call semantic memory. So for instance, knowledge of all the relevant issues that you need to know when you're president, those things can stay solid or sometimes even increase with age. Likewise, compassion can sometimes increase with age, optimism, and also emotion regulation, which is very important for a president not to just go unhinged at any moment, right? So I think people need to factor in the big picture. And we're due for a national conversation about this as our whole population is aging. But I really wanted to be very clear that I'm not jumping in and making some kind of an argument for or against anyone because this is really more of an issue of people

understanding what happens with aging. And one of the nice things about writing this editorial is I got a lot of feedback from people who felt personally relieved by this because they were worried about their own memories. In terms of a national conversation about what we want in a president, do you think there should be some kind of cognitive test before someone even runs for president? I think not a cognitive test, but I think it would be a good idea to have a comprehensive physical and mental health evaluation that's fairly transparent. We certainly have transparency or seek transparency about other things like candidates' finances, for instance.

And obviously, health is a very important factor. And I think at the end of the day, we'll still be in a position of saying, okay, what's enough? What's our line between healthy and unhealthy? But I think it's important to do because, yes, as we get older, we do have memory problems. And I want to be clear, too. Some people are super-agers, and their memory does not change much as they get older. It's quite remarkable. And in aging science, this is a big deal. Understand why. And other people can precipitously decline younger.

And I've seen people who were relatively young who have a serious memory disorder, and they're quite articulate. But nonetheless, they have a clinically significant problem that would keep them from functioning. You can even see this too in some of the late interviews with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Thatcher especially, where she was exceptionally articulate. And yet she probably, I can't say for sure, where she was exceptionally articulate. And yet she probably, I can't say for sure, but she was probably having significant memory problems around those times. Right. So I really feel that it would be good to have some kind of a transparency and some kind of testing, but there's not a single test that's going to do it. And especially with disorders

like Alzheimer's, for instance, there's not going to be some conclusive thing that you can point to. But it would really be, I used to do these evaluations, it would be a day of comprehensive testing, interviews, and so forth. And that's when you'd be able to say for sure, is this person capable of doing their job? You know, while we're on the subject of remembering names, 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, 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. 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, you know, 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, the harder that competition is. And 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. 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 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. Well, let me reintroduce you again.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Charan Ranganath, author of the new book, Why We Remember. He directs the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis. With the help of brain imaging, he studies the mechanisms of the brain responsible for how and what we remember and forget. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. Hi there, it's Tanya Mosley, here to share more about my new series of Fresh Air Plus bonus episodes.

I love when he casts his mom in movies. It feels so authentic. I know. You know, she was also in the film Goodfellas, which I also love. I need to get that screenplay, by the way. I don. You know, she was also in the film Goodfellas, which I also love. I need to get that screenplay, by the way. I don't have that one. For the next few weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, I'll be talking about all of my favorite movies with my colleague Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you want to hear what movies I love and which screenplays I actually own and use as

creative direction, sign up for Fresh Air Plus at plus.npr.org. Let's get back to my interview with neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, author of the new book, Why We Remember. It's about what he describes as the fundamental mechanisms of memory, the principles behind why we forget and how to remember the things that matter. He considers how memories influence our sense of self and our understanding of the past and present and why memories often change over time, becoming less true to what really happened. His new book is called Why We Remember. He directs the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University

of California, Davis, where he is a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology. 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 that stress makes it harder to pull out the information you need when you need it. It 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 get back to traumatic memories and PTSD a little bit later in the interview. Right now, 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, you know, 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. 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 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? 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. So let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is neuroscientist Charan Ranganath. His new book is called Why We Remember. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. There are memories that we'd like to forget, but we can't. And that's mostly like traumatic memories, especially PTSD, or memories of, you know, sexual abuse, rape, crime.

And when we have an experience like that, a traumatic experience, the fight or flight response kicks in whether or the brain with that fight or flight experience that makes a bigger, like a deeper, unforgettable kind of memory? Well, there's two parts of it, right? So there's this fight or flight response, which is we tend to associate with the feeling of fear. And so that's our heart racing. Our body is mobilizing us to move. And so we're getting our adrenalines pumping through our veins and we have a burst of a neuromodulator called noradrenaline in our brains. And that's going to promote plasticity for this moment when I was scared for whatever it happens to be. And so that's the brain saying, hey, this is biologically important. But we also have the anxiety of how things could happen.

So in other words, if you're a mouse and you're running around and all of a sudden you see a cat and the cat starts chasing you, you get this big fight or flight response. But now you could be a mouse and you don't know where the cat is, but it's somewhere out there. And any moment it could jump out. Now you're under stress and anxiety. And that's associated with all these release of these stress hormones. And the way these stress hormones tend to work is they don't just enhance memory for that moment where the bad thing happened, but a lot of the things leading up to it. And we think the reason for that, I think it makes sense, is if you're a cave person

and you go into a cave and you get attacked by a saber-toothed tiger, you don't want to just know that you got attacked by the saber-toothed tiger. You want to know where that cave was and how to avoid it in the future. So you want to learn all the things that led up to that point. And so that's one of the ways in which these traumatic experiences can hijack those survival circuits that we have. So once you have what seems like an indelible, horrible memory, and things that are happening now make those memories come to the surface again, and you're deep into post-traumatic stress disorder, how does our knowledge of that perhaps help in changing the trauma of re-experiencing the traumatic event? Well, part of the vividness that we have when we recall a traumatic event, and this is true in PTSD

and in people who don't have PTSD but were remembering something traumatic, is that you get this visceral response. And that's that kind of you get a reactivation of the stress response or the fight-or-flight response where your heart starts racing. You may be sweating or something like that. And that actually gives us that feeling of vivid remembering. Even though we're not getting the details of what happened often, it just makes us feel like we're remembering more. And I think one of the important things that we used to do when I was doing my clinical training was actually do cognitive behavioral therapy. And the behavioral therapy was addressing this kind of more visceral response

associated with the fear. But then there's the how you think about it part. And the thinking about it part is actually separate. And it involves getting people to not just not change the memory per se, but change how you interpret it and how you think about it. Can you explain that a little bit more? Because I know early in your career or in your studies, just not change the memory per se, but change how you interpret it and how you think about it. Can you explain that a little bit more? Because I know early in your career or in your studies, you were working with veterans and it was kind of like a group therapy session that you were running and they were dealing with these kind of traumatic memories from their time, I think mostly in Iraq. So how did the technique that you're talking about is changing the narrative that you tell yourself about that story? How did that go? How did that

work? In our group, we had both veterans of the Vietnam War, but also the Iraq Wars. And so I came into this group cold, thinking to myself, you know, I'm a young psychology intern. I don't have any of these experiences. What am I going to do? And what I realized was I had this hugely important role to be a team member with them. It wasn't like they were my patients. Like, we were working as a team where one person would release this memory that they just hadn't shared before, and another person would release a memory. And next thing you know, I could see this shared narrative buildup that was common across all these people.

But because I wasn't in the thick of it, I could view it from a bird's eye view and give them a different perspective on it. And as we would come to an agreement about the way to reinterpret this memory, those memories are being transformed little by little because the act of recalling them and sharing them changes it. So you tell me a memory and it's no longer your memory, it's our memory because of the work that we put into in terms of transforming it.

So how does that make things any better? Well, I think that there's events that we experience that are objectively bad. But what do we take away from those experiences, right? Sometimes they're learning experiences where we would say, okay, I don't want to make that mistake again. There's something we can look at and learn from and take with us into the future. Sometimes there's things that are just bad things happen to people. But even then, you learn from your resilience and you learn that you survive those experiences. And so, you know, I've had experiences like that myself. And I think that act of changing the way you look at the past makes you realize that it's not an objective thing.

The way we look at the memory is going to affect how we feel about it. And as you've pointed out, like memories change over time. Memories aren't like indelibly the same. You compare it to like a copy machine and making a copy of a copy of a copy. The image gets lighter. It can change, you know, change slightly. And it's no longer like the original. So what you're talking about is having that work in your favor. That's right.

That's right. But what I would say is that we can even – it's not like you're fundamentally changing necessarily your recall of what happened. But when we look at memories from a different perspective, we can often see different things. You can actually pull up parts of the memory that you didn't even know were there before, right? So it's not necessarily distorting your memory but changing your perspective. But that in and of itself now changes that narrative that you've started to put together. So the story is part of how we approach that past. And building that new story changes our default way, so to speak, of imagining how that thing could have been. 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. Right. So we all have problems, I think it's fair middle of the night and I'm still trying to figure out exactly why. Right. So we all have problems. I think it's fair to say remembering names and faces, it's very common. And it's really embarrassing when it happens, especially if it's someone whose name you really ought to have remembered. I'm confident that this has happened to you. And it must be especially embarrassing because you are a memory scientist. So how do

you deal with it when you, especially if you're supposed to be introducing this person to somebody else and you can't even remember their name, how do you deal both with the embarrassment of it and just with the, you know, not wanting to hurt somebody's feelings by making them feel not important enough to have remembered their name. Like, what's your cover? Oh, my God. I still am working on this. I've had so many gaffes with people who have known for so long, and I'm just terrible at this. The only thing that I have going for me is that people can just tell within an instant that I'm absent-minded. And especially once I tell people I study memory, that gets me off the hook because you tend to study what you're not good at, right?

So they call it me-search. And so I think there's kind of a general idea that you study the things you're not good at, which is why I'm always a little suspicious of the social psychologists. Jaron Rangana, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you. This has been fantastic. Charan Ranganath is the author of the new book, Why We Remember. He directs the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, where he's a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology. Coming up, John Powers reviews a new book about the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, its movie adaptation starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,

and its afterlife in American culture. This is Fresh Air. In the new book, Cocktails with George and Martha, writer Philip Gefter tells the story surrounding Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, from its days as a Broadway sensation, through the making of the film version with megastars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, through its afterlife in American culture. Our critic-at-large John Power says it's a very smart and entertaining book that got him thinking

about how this once controversial play seems today. There are some titles that stick in your head forever. One of the most indelible is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a witticism that Edward Albee saw scrawled on the mirror of a Greenwich Village bar and appropriated for his groundbreaking 1962 play. Albee couldn't have dreamed that 60 years on people would use the title as a shorthand to describe fractious marriages, boozy arguments, and parties gone terribly wrong. Albee's play, and the 1966 movie adaptation with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, are the subject of Philip Gefter's dishy yet earnest new book, Cocktails with George and Martha, Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Moving from the origins of the play in Albie's unhappy childhood to the

shark tank that was the film's production, with Taylor, Burton, and director Mike Nichols all flashing their teeth, Gefter shows why Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf hit the 60s like a torpedo. His book got me to thinking about how it looks in 2024. As you probably know, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf portrays a late night battle royal between a floundering Professor George and his frustrated wife Martha, the daughter of the university president. Martha has invited over for drinks an ambitious young Professor Nick and his dippy wife, Honey. Over two-plus hours of industrial-level boozing, the loudmouth Martha and venomously witty George go after one another, and their unlucky guests, with stinging barbs and cruel revelations.

Here, after George plays a vicious game with his guests during a quick trip to a roadhouse, he and Martha argue as they walk back to their car. My baby, I did it all for you. I thought you'd like it, sweetheart. It's to your taste, blood carnage and all. I thought you'd sort of get excited, sort of heave and pant and come running at me. You have really screwed up, George. Oh, come on. I mean it, you really have. You can sit around with a gin running out of your mouth. You can humiliate me. You can tear me to pieces all night. That's perfectly OK. That's all right. You can stand it. I cannot stand it. You can stand it. You married me for it. That's a desperately sick lie. Don't you know it even yet? Now, as Gefter makes clear, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf took aim at post-war America's idealized vision of marriage,

in which fathers knew best and wives just loved being mothers and helpmeets. Albee depicted marital unhappiness in all its rancor and often perverse fantasy, like George and Martha's imaginary child, that hold people together. Its ferocious candor shifted the cultural terrain, paving the way for everything from Ingmar Bergman's scenes from a marriage to Tony and Carmela Soprano. Yet if you view Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf now, it feels dated and almost innocent. George and Martha were shocking creations in their day because Albie was showing audiences what Broadway and Hollywood kept hidden. These days, nothing's hidden. Real-life

couples sign up to flaunt their toxicity in TV series from Real Housewives to Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Where Albie searched for meaning inside his character's sensationally bad behavior, reality TV settles for the sensational. Who cares what it might mean? What feels most contemporary about Virginia Woolf is the way it piggybacked on celebrity. Liz and Dick, as they were known, landed the lead movie roles, even though she had to put on 20 pounds and 20 years to play Martha. No matter. Ever since their affair on the set of Cleopatra,

they were hot. A paparazzi magnet who jetted from posh Parisian hotels off to Mexico. They made Puerto Vallarta famous. The world knew about their drinking, their passionate sex, she called him her little Welsh stallion, and their rip-roaring fights. Naturally, their fame, willfulness, and self-absorption made them hard to handle on the set. Their stardom also made the movie a hit. In the end, Burton gave a terrific performance, and Taylor did better than expected, even winning an Oscar. Still, it's eerie watching them today. Their roles seem to predict the future in which they became the target of jokes. The once legendary beauty being mocked

as a chubby chicken-scarfing fool by John Belushi in drag. While Burton sank ever deeper into the persona of a drunken, self-hating cautionary tale about wasting one's talent. Sad to say, we live in a culture bored by ordinary people.

Liz and Dick were the prototypes of the parade of celebrity couples who now dominate public consciousness. Their stardom heightens the movie's profile, the way Princess Di and Charles elevated the dreary British monarchy. Even the Super Bowl had a special tang this year because of Travis Kelsey and that other less ravishing but far more talented Taylor, who's also known for her string of exes. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a great play, and Gefter's a good writer. But if the movie had cast its original Broadway stars,

Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, I wouldn't be here talking about it. John Powers reviewed Cocktails with George and Martha, movies, marriage, and the making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Busy Phillips, a star of the new movie musical adaptation of Tina Fey's Mean Girls. And she's in the streaming series Girls 5 Ever about a girl group that reunites decades after their one hit. Phillips' first big role was in the series Freaks and Geeks.

In her best-selling memoir, she's written about misogyny she's faced in Hollywood and in her personal life. I hope you'll join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salat, Phyllis Myers, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.

Teresa Madden directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.