The School of Greatness - #1 Memory Expert: The No. 1 Thing That Weakens Your Brain
Episode Date: June 24, 2024In this episode of The School of Greatness, Lewis interviews Dr. Charan Ranganath, a renowned expert in neuroscience and author of "Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters...." They delve into the fascinating world of memory, discussing how memories shape our identity, guide our choices, and enrich our experiences. Dr. Ranganath shares insights on enhancing memory retention, the impact of emotions on what we remember, and practical tips for keeping our minds sharp throughout life. The conversation also touches on the power of moods to affect memory, the importance of context in recalling memories, and how to use mental time travel to transform negative memories into meaningful ones.Buy his book for yourself and a friend! Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What MattersIn this episode you will learnHow to enhance memory retention and keep your mind sharp throughout life.The impact of emotions on what we remember and how to use this to your advantage.Practical tips for transforming negative memories into empowering ones.The importance of context and perspective in recalling memories.Strategies for using curiosity and imagination to improve memory and learning.For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1632For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Rick Rubin – https://link.chtbl.com/1536-podBrene Brown – https://link.chtbl.com/1518-pod3 Brain Hacks Mashup – https://link.chtbl.com/1517-pod
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People need to change their way of thinking that it's not about remembering more but remembering what matters and that's what you need
the prefrontal cortex for. Once you realize and you really accept that you're going to forget most things,
then you have to ask yourself, what's important to me to remember and what are the memories I want to carry with me, right?
Professor Charan Ranganath. A psychologist and neuroscientist at UC Davis. Author of the new book, Why We Remember.
John Ranganath, thanks so much for being here.
What is the number one health issue that causes the brain to be the weakest?
It's major depressive disorder.
Depression.
Depression.
The people with depression on paper could look even worse than the people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
Really?
Yes.
What is the memory research saying about using devices, cell phones, and watches that have
constant notifications or reminders?
It definitely reduces memory performance for whatever it is you're doing.
But there's even work suggesting that heavy media multitaskers, that they actually even
have some thinning in parts of the brain,
including parts of the prefrontal cortex.
Thinning?
Yeah.
How do we imagine a future to create more abundance,
joy, fulfillment, and happiness in our lives
and alchemize anything we want?
Well, one thing that I really have gotten into,
and I just don't do it enough, but I really try to, is...
Welcome back to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring
Charan Ranganath in the house. And today we are exploring the topic of our memories.
And you are the author of a fascinating book called Why We Remember,
Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters.
You are a renowned expert in neuroscience, and you're here to share with us really how our
memories shape our identity, guide our choices, and enrich our experiences. And there are a number
of things I want to cover with you today, including enhancing memory retention, the impact that
emotions have on what we remember, and also some practical
tips on how to keep our minds and memories sharp throughout our life.
And the first thing I wanted to start with is a stat that I saw online, and I don't know
if this is 100% accurate or not, but according to the National Science Foundation, an average
person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day.
And of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts. I don't know how accurate
that is, but you say that memories shape our identity. On this show, I'm all about
empowering people to have the tools and the strategies to enhance their identity
because I believe identity dictates the quality of our life. It's one of the key factors. When we
have a negative identity or an identity that is more suffering status or suffering states,
we tend to suffer in our life. When we have a more empowering identity of ourselves,
we tend to have a more abundant life. And my question to you is, how do we use our memories
to shape our identities so that we create more abundance rather than have more suffering?
It's a great question. And what I'll tell you is, is that the key to answering this question is that you got to understand that your memories are selective. And the memories that we find depend on how're going to see right and likewise when we're
searching for memories we have a mood we have an emotional state we have a context this inner
landscape that that is permeating our thoughts and that's going to affect what we can find
and we used to actually do it was uh i mean my first study that i talk about in my book was when
i was doing depression research actually not memory. And what we used to do was to get people, we would play this sad music
and then ask people to recall sad memories from their life. The music made it either easier to
recall sad memories from their life. And the more, when they recalled those sad memories,
they felt terrible. Interesting. And then we had to get them out of it. And that was a whole part of the thing. So it wasn't unethical. But the interesting part
of that is the power of our moods to affect our ability to mind the past. And then the memories
that we pull up, the power of that to change the way we look in the present, right? So the cool part of it is, though, you can, if you try,
you can go in the opposite direction. You can say, let me think about a time, even though I know I'm
going to bomb this interview, and I'm going to, Lewis is going to walk out of here and say, like,
God, this is a school of boringness, whatever, right? Then I go like, oh, I remember I had this
great interview the other day and i just have
to bring that out of myself and once i remember that and i mentally time travel back to that
moment i can become a little bit of that person and people have shown you can become more altruistic
if you do this you could become more sad if you pull up sad memory become happier if you pull up
the happy memories and it all depends and i think it's like everybody can kind of relate to this right because it's like you're having a fight with someone who you love you can think of nothing
but all of the times that they've made you mad but now a week later you've made up everything's great
you can't even remember what you fought about right so it's interesting this weird trick that
we have and i think that the thing that people need to keep
in mind is you are going to have a biased sampling of your past. You can't remember everything.
And what you pull up will be reflective of how you feel in the moment.
Really? So if you're feeling good in the moment, you'll think of more positive memories?
That's exactly right.
And if you're feeling negative or depressed or anxious or stressed in the moment, you'll think of more negative memories from the past?
That's right.
And not just that.
Not just that.
But when I'm feeling negative and depressed, I will tell the story of these past events in a more negative way.
In a more dramatic negative way.
Yeah.
And if I'm in a positive state, I'll actually remember myself better than I might have really
been.
And I'll remember things of having been better than they really were.
How much of our memories are accurate?
I like to say that memory is not photographic.
It's like a painting.
And what I mean by that is, you know, I'm trying to make a painting of you now.
And imagine I have a decent bit of artistic talent. I'm more of a musician than a painter, but go
with me on this, right? So they're painting your picture. I'm going to get some parts completely
right, like the color of your shirt, the color of your eyes and so forth, the shape of your head.
But it's not going to be perfect. I'll make some mistakes. I'll also leave some
things out that I might not have paid attention to. And there'll be some parts of the painting
that are not really right or wrong, but they're more my interpretation, my perspective that I'm
bringing to this piece of art. And that is how I want people to think of memories, not in true
or false, but a construction. And just like if you go back to those old Renaissance paintings when they're poor,
they have to redo paintings over the same canvas.
That's what happens with our memory.
So when we pull up a past memory, we actually can change the memory.
And it opens up the box again so that we can sometimes strengthen it
and make it easier to access.
But you can also end up messing
with it and create all sorts of errors in the memory from the time of remembering.
Now you're getting me into a fascinating thought process here. I truly believe that the energy we
have in the present will support us in making either conscious or unconscious decisions,
empowering or disempowering
decisions, and decide whether we show up with a good energy towards others or a negative energy
towards others based on the energy we have in the present. What I'm hearing you say is when we're
time traveling constantly into the past and remembering things in a negative way, it's going
to make us feel more negative as well. But also if we're in a negative state,
to start with, we're going to be thinking about negative things from the past and our identity
and why we're not good enough for all these different things. My question is, how can we
use mental time travel to reverse a memory from a negative one to a meaningful one to support us in the present so that we make
better decisions now and in our future that's that is the big question let's go so we've got
i give you 100 answers but i'll give you like the shortest version which is to keep in mind that
that moment of mental time problem when i recall something I hear a song and it just brings me back to my childhood.
And I just flash back to like, I don't know, the summer of 1984 or whatever.
I'm like 13 years old.
Let's say it's not high school, junior high, but go with me on this, right?
So I flash back to this period, terrible time in my life.
I'm feeling bad.
But then I keep in mind that that sense of mental time travel is just a few
bits and pieces. It's a set of fragments. And then I'm making a narrative out of it. I'm making a
story out of it. And that story is going to be shaped by my beliefs, right? You know, I'm not
going to construct a story about things that were impossible that just could never have happened, right?
That pigs are flying around, whatever, unless I'm at a Pink Floyd concert or something.
But, you know, I'm not going to construct all these things that couldn't have happened.
So we impose our beliefs and our knowledge in the present, right?
So if you go into this with the sense that I'm a failure or nobody likes me, you can certainly find that, find evidence for that in this memory.
From your memories.
Yeah.
And you can build that story.
But you can also find things that are inconsistent with that.
And that was the big part that, I mean, that's why therapy, when I was doing, I only spent a few years doing clinical work in my graduate training.
It was like six years, but it
just dramatically influenced my way of thinking about things. Therapy work. Therapy work. Because
it's all about sharing memories. Interesting. And no matter what we were doing, what people,
I had somebody, my first patient came in with a driving phobia. But even after he was okay to drive,
it wasn't really until we processed this big, big memory of his that we really made
progress. But it's not about just recalling some traumatic memory because you can wallow in these
memories and feel worse, right? It's about being able to see it from a different perspective,
to look at the same event, but ask instead of going with your beliefs, challenging your beliefs,
right? So in science, Adam Grant talks about this, right? It's like, you try to find the things that
disconfirm your hypothesis, and that's what we do in science. And so you can find that in memory,
if you look. But if someone is so wrapped into a self-loathing identity, based on a story,
they keep telling themselves, this failure I had, this mistake I
made, this person abandoned me or treated me poorly, or I did something horrible that is
unforgivable and I'm so ashamed of what I did. And you live in that story and that self-belief
and identity. And you're like, all the evidence is there. I did this thing or this person did
this to me and it was horrible and wrong and no one should have to experience this. Yeah. How does someone shift the story so that they don't feel stuck in the past
of traumatic memories, but they can distance themselves and see themselves from a distance,
from afar, without them feeling the pain, but actually remove themselves and look at the
situation and start to change the story for
themselves. How do we start to do this practically? Is there any strategies or process that we can
actually do? Well, it's really hard. And I never want to tell because every time I talk about
memory, like four out of five people will say, oh, you know, I have such a terrible memory,
or this was really reassuring. I've been worrying about my memory. One out of five will say, how can I forget something? So there's a lot of people
you're talking to with this question. And I never, I've, when I talk to people face to face, it's
always, it's hard because, you know, people will say, well, that's easy for you to say. And I agree
it is it's, but not that I don't have my own horrible memories that I get stuck in, right? But I think one key that you can try to do is
context can be very important because context is a big cue for memory. So for instance,
when you go back to your childhood home, you would probably recall information from your childhood that you wouldn't recall in your house, right? So maybe you can keep your environment one that has reminders of things that actually
would be countering these beliefs, right? So like I did this, I mean, and this is not at all like
humble brag, it's just like, but I got by the new york times for the new york times magazine so my wife took uh um the pages from it and got it framed
professionally and so it's on my on a wall in her hallway and i was thinking i saw god this
people would probably walk by to the bathroom let's say this guy's such a jerk or something
so much into his ego or something yeah exactly but then. But then I was thinking, that would be, that's a really good reminder that when I'm feeling down, hey, some people thought that what I did was interesting
and it counters, it gets me and I can remember a specific event. That is key. What do you mean
a specific event? Well, I can remember being interviewed by him and actually talking to him on Zoom and that whole experience and connecting with this person who I've never met before, who's interviewed, like he just had interviewed Bono and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And he's talking to me. Right. And that feeling of being engaged and connecting with the person, which you don't always get. Right.
which you don't always get, right?
And it's like, and that happened to me in this one moment.
And so having these reminders, I think, can be very potent.
And likewise, you can surround yourself with negative reminders.
I talk about how addicts, when they're going to the same places and they're hanging out with the same people,
those are triggers for memories that will literally activate the goal of getting drugs or alcohol, right?
Interesting.
It's almost like evidence of proof or belief in yourself by creating an environment with different reminders to support you that, hey, yeah, someone was interested in me or I did something good or all that hard work did pay off.
Yeah.
As opposed to having nothing to remind yourself of
all the good that you've done. I have a kind of similar feeling like that. Like I have some stuff
hanging up in my office, but I'm always like some stuff I've taken down. So I'm like, ah,
is it too much about me? Is it too much? Like, look at my success in front, you know, it's,
it feels kind of awkward sometimes. Like I literally have a photo, you know, a cover of
me on success magazine and I took it down and I put it on the ground because I was like, just too much of me.
You know, it's like, is it too much?
You know, so I think there's a balance there to be like, make sure you're not, look at me, how great I am all the time.
Well, a lot of people have that bias.
On average, people tend to be, remember themselves more positively than they really were actually.
Is that a bad thing or is it a good thing?
It can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. I mean, there's nothing wrong with feeling
good about yourself and having optimism. And as people get older, they become, on average,
more optimistic.
Really?
Yeah. And they remember themselves and their past more positively.
Why is that?
We don't know. My colleague, Mara Mather at USC, studies this, and she'd been pondering this for a long time. And she has this idea about the way different chemicals in our brain change as we get older causes these tweaks in brain systems that bias us more towards positive information. And I have yet to read the paper in depth sufficiently. It came out pretty recently, and so I need to read the paper in depth to give you more, but there are these changes that happen. And I think one thing I'll also say is as you get
older, the brain changes in ways that make it so that it's less about you. The prefrontal cortex.
It's less about survival in the beginning or age, you know, days, I guess, right? It's like,
how do I survive? And I don't know how to defend myself because I need others to help me. That's right. That's right. It becomes more about like,
so there's an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex that I talk a lot about in my
book. And it's so important for memory because it's what allows us to say, hey, this is my goal.
And based on this goal, here's what I'm going to do. As opposed to saying, well, this is what's
in front of me based on this, what's in front of me, I'm going to do, as opposed to saying, well, this is what's in front
of me based on this, what's in front of me, I'm going to do this, right? Those are two different
things. And so somebody with frontal damage might know what they want to do, but they can't use that
knowledge to guide what they actually do. And as we get older, the frontal cortex starts to decline
in its function. So we become a little bit more, it becomes harder to inhibit ourselves,
but we're also a little bit slower when we have to do effortful things like searching for memories
and so forth. And you might ask, well, why is it we spend such a huge chunk of our life? I mean,
it starts after 30, believe it or not. So why do we have spent a huge chunk of our lives with the
frontal cortex is declining in function? And eventually I came to the realization
that, well, you need that when you're in your 20s to 30s because you're in prime parenting years.
And it's about keeping track of the big picture so that your kid who has an immature prefrontal
cortex can play and explore and learn. And you have to be thinking about the future and you have to be thinking about
this little nuclear family's future and going out and, you know, foraging and hunting or whatever
it is, right? But now you become older. Providing and protecting. Yeah. Now you become older. You're
not having kids anymore. It's not about you anymore because you're biologically, just the
likelihood is going down, especially for women past a certain age, right?
You get menopause. So now it becomes about the collective and really your kin, especially,
but the collective. And if you look at most of human history, older adults were occupying very
high positions and very engaged with younger people and passing on traditions of culture and language
and so forth. And I talk about this at the end of the book as one of the coolest discoveries that
I'd made while writing the book was another, there's not a whole lot of species that live
long enough, let's say to get menopause or long enough so that they're infertile for a large chunk of their life. But another one is orcas.
And orcas, if you look at a pod of orcas, who do you think leads the pod?
Between like men and women or youth and older?
Just anything.
Take a guess.
Throw it out.
My gosh.
Okay, I'll spare you.
Yeah.
Post-menopausal females.
Really?
They're the ones who lead the pod.
Why?
Because they have the knowledge of the culture that they pass on.
And that's at least from the...
Now, I'm not a marine biologist, but from the readings, I kind of went down this little rabbit hole.
Sure, sure.
And from the readings that I did, it was that essentially they're teaching everyone in the pod about the language and about the culture and so forth.
And that really rings true for me because I look back at my Indian family, and that was the way of thinking, that it's like the grandparents were really the ones who were playing this big part in their children's lives.
I had much less of that because my parents were in India when I was growing up, so I kind of missed out on that
and had more of an American style childhood.
It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that
as humans age, the part of the prefrontal cortex
starts to remember less and weaken.
Is that what I'm hearing you say?
Yeah, your ability to recruit it and use it
weakens. So how does someone, are there any ways that we can strengthen the prefrontal cortex
so that as we age, we actually remember more as opposed to recall less?
Yeah, I think I have a few things to say about that. One is what I like to say is remember better,
not remember more.
And the reason is, is that overwhelming majority of the details, what you experience will be
forgotten, right? So the key is how do you focus that part that we do remember on what matters to
us, right? It's not about trying to remember everything and nobody should, right? I mean,
I wouldn't go to your house.
I'm imagining just from looking at you, I bet if I went into your house, be beautifully
decorated or just be like nice and neat.
And if I went there and I said, God, this is, what have you done with this place?
You should be, you've got all this open space.
Why don't you just fill it with junk?
I'm sure you must've had stuff from all the years that you had growing up.
Why is not all, why aren't you using
every square inch of the space right and you say well of course not i'm not a hoarder right
but i think people have this intuition we're supposed to hoard memories we're supposed to
keep every experience that we have and so that's that's how i think uh um people need to change
their way of thinking that it's not about remembering more, but remembering what matters. And that's what you need the prefrontal cortex for. How do you remember
better and what matters as we age? Yeah. So is it letting go of other memories so that we can just
have fewer and better ones? Well, one thing I'll say is, is that, I mean, there's many,
many tips that I can give for it. I mean, the first step is,
once you realize and you really accept that you're going to forget most things,
then you have to ask yourself, what's important to me to remember? And what are the memories I want to carry with me, right? So in the short term, you can say, okay, I want to remember that
I put my phone here. And if you start with the assumption that I'm probably going to forget that,
I can teach you strategies. You can go on YouTube, find a hundred of these strategies
online. But the key is, is that no matter what strategy I teach you, if you don't have that
moment of stopping yourself and saying, hey, I'm going to forget this. So what am I going to do
about it? You've lost the game already. I can't help you.
So it's acknowledging you're going to forget things.
And then saying, how can I prevent this from being forgotten?
But I have to focus on what matters.
So what's an example of like if you lose your keys or your phone or something that you,
matters in the short term to have like utility and be resourceful.
Maybe not a long term, but in short term it's like i need to know where i'm going i need to know where my money is my passport my keys my cell
phone yeah my wallet is more just about okay i'm always going to put it in the same place every
time and that's so i don't have to remember where it is what's the strategy i mean putting it in
the same place is very good because that's a form of learning that we would call habit memory
um and it's related to
other kinds of things like skills and so forth. So you get on a bicycle, for instance, that's a
little bit different than a habit, but it's like you get on a bicycle. If you start remembering,
hey, what did I do the last time I got on a bike? You're going to be screwed. You just want to get
on and ride, right? And so once you get into a habit of like putting your wallet in the same place all
the time, you can do it mindlessly, which is what most of us do. And that's why people lose their
wallets in the first place is because we're somewhere else mentally, right? So one strategy
is you put it always in the same place every time. But let's say you're like me and you can't do that.
Well, the next thing you could say is, okay, so now you have to be mindful.
What are the ways I can be mindful?
Well, one thing you can do,
and some of this is unfortunately tips
that are like, don't do this.
And I wish I could give more positive tips like do this,
but I think this is very important
is I talk about, I like to think about memory hygiene.
What are the factors that are preventing me from being able to remember things around me?
And a big one is our phones, let's face it.
And I don't mean to be like a Luddite about our phones are making us dumb or whatever.
I mean, as a memory researcher, I'll give you carte blanche to say, any dumb memorization
task, let your phone do it, right?
So it's like your phone is a photographic memory.
We don't.
So let your phone just do the work.
But for the things that we really like remembering where you put your phone, that's on you, right?
So for those points, what you have to be able to do is you have to be able to divorce yourself from the device.
So there's the kind of the top level of stuff that kills you, which is the alerts.
The alerts just kill you because every time you're alerted, what happens is whatever it is I'm doing, now I've shifted and I've shifted my mindset towards whatever I'm being alerted to, right?
And how many people have apple
watches for instance that alert them every time they get you know buzz it constantly you know
i have a friend who has adhd and he has an itu too actually but he has doesn't help you when
you're constantly getting buzzed probably exactly right and and it's just like talk i can't have a
conversation with it because of this you know um but it's like what happens is there's a real mental cost to this.
And I think a lot of tech bros will be like, oh, I can totally manage all these streams
and do all these things.
And what is the memory research saying about using devices, cell phones, and watches that
have constant notifications or reminders?
Well, it definitely reduces memory performance for whatever it is you're doing.
And it also can, I mean, this, I wanted people to take this with a grain of salt because I think
there's a lot more research that needs to be done on this. But there's even work suggesting that
heavy media multitaskers, like people who switch back and forth between looking at my phone and
looking at my computer. Yeah. Yeah. That
they like, they're doing multiple things at the same time that they actually even have some
thinning in parts of the brain, including parts of the prefrontal cortex. Thinning. Yeah. So is
this like, if you multitask every day, this could cause some thinning in the brain or just over time?
People who have a thinner prefrontal cortex multitask more. Right. Right. Right. Because
they're
more just easily distracted it could go either way yeah yeah but it's not something i think we
want for ourselves either way and it definitely reduces it changes brain activity in bad ways
and the reason is it's actually pretty intuitive because what happens is when i switch even if and
i'm telling you this in full honesty because that i do do this, is that as soon as I got my iPhone years ago, I immediately became attached to email.
And the moment I have a long conversation, my mind shifts to like, I should check email.
In that moment, my goal has changed.
So the whole prefrontal cortex is shifting the program.
Once my goal changes, now my brain has to load up a
new program of what I'm, what would I need to do to check email? Why would I be checking email?
What am I looking for? What am I worried about? And so there's a period of time where you're just
catching up and that's called a switch cost. There's actually, psychologists found a bunch
of different costs of doing this, but so I switch over and then I'm like, oh no, I got to focus on
this conversation. This is going on, you know, to millions of listeners. So I come back to you,
but now I'm like, what were we talking about again? And I'm trying to catch up.
And so I'm already behind schedule. Now what's happened in that little bit of time within like
about 30 seconds is I've gotten a little memory for what happened right before
I lost my train of thought. Then I have a little memory for this bit of when I lost my train of
thought, but it's really nothing. Then I come back and I have memory for this new event,
but it's like I'm behind schedule. I'm catching up. And so mentally, I'm not really there.
I'm not here nor there. And I'm getting a bunch of little fragmented memories instead of one coherent memory.
And what you find is when you have overlapping memories that are fragmented, they compete
with each other and cause forgetting.
But when you have a bunch of little bits of a conversation, say that you're integrating,
you're constantly looping back and saying, how can I think about what he just told me
and understand it in that context?
It helps you remember everything better.
And we've even shown how this happens in the brain.
It's like you can actually see these little reactivations of past things in real time
that you're using to understand the present.
So there's a positive aspect of unitasking,
and there's some real negative aspects of multitasking. So that's one way in
which devices hurt us. And at the risk of going on and on, I can tell you another big one.
So think about the proliferation of Instagram walls. So you go to a place now and everybody
takes a picture on the Instagram wall. I mean, I hope we do by the school of greatness.
Sure, sure, we will.
That I got to be at the school of greatness, yeah. So, but there's this proliferation of these walls.
And so what happens is people go there, some cafe or restaurant, they take a picture by the wall,
and they feel like they're going to remember it better as a result. But the research shows that
on average, that actually makes your memory worse. Taking pictures, trying to document everything
actually can make your memory worse. And the reason trying to document everything actually can make your
memory worse. And the reason is, is that people will mindlessly document, right? So another example
is you go to a concert and everybody's got their phones up and you're younger than me, I'm sure,
but it's like, you might remember the days when people just watched concerts.
Yeah. They put their lighter up back in the day, right?
Yeah. Lighter up, exactly. Right. And so now it's like,
you got the phones up and the idea is, oh, I'm documenting this so that I'll remember it later,
but people don't go back to it, which is like your big mistake right there. But then on top of it,
the camera's only grabbing what the performer is doing, let's say at the concert. But what do you
want to remember about the concert? Do you want to concert. But what do you want to remember about the concert? Do you
want to remember the song or do you want to remember the feeling that you had when you were
immersed in the music? Do you want to remember the people that you were with? Do you want to
remember the sights and the sounds and the smells of this place? And what happens is that when we
mindlessly document, it takes us away from those parts that create a distinctive memory and one that will basically rise above all of the interference, right?
So you can go like, and this is one good thing that I do, that I practice, is I'm very strategic about documenting.
I'll go like, here's this moment, we're eating,
you're having a glass of wine, you're laughing.
I'm going to take a picture of this candid shot of just you being goofy
because that's going to remind me of that feeling of this moment
and bring back something in me.
But it also forces me to pay attention to this moment
and the wackiness and the stuff that's just kind of random,
the randomness of this experience.
Because that's what makes episodic memory, that ability to remember events.
That's what makes it tick is the uniqueness of the moment.
This is powerful.
I'm curious, what are, in your mind, what are three of the most common things we are doing today
that are negatively impacting our brain health and our
memories. Oh, okay. Well, I told you one, which is multitasking. I would say that's,
that's multitasking is hurting our brain health and our memories. I would say it.
Okay. It's maybe a little exaggeration to say brain health, but it does increase stress.
It increases stress. It does actually increase stress response. So we can say chronic
stress is a big one. Yes. That definitely chronic stress over long periods of time can be very bad
for brain health. Okay. So multitasking would be one of those things. It could contribute to it.
I want to be careful not to just be catastrophic. If you do it once in a while, it's not going to
destroy your brain. But if you do it every day, all day, it's not good for your memory. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing that I think we do is,
we, I mean, and again, I'm suffering from this myself, is sleep deprivation. There's so many
reasons why sleep is good for us and good for our brain health. One is, is that we know now that
a lot of the amyloid protein that our brains build up naturally over the course of the day are flushed out at night.
And the amyloid proteins, you might know this word because these are the proteins that build up in people with Alzheimer's.
And according to some theories, many theories actually, that it's kind of the trigger that basically starts the chain of events that leads to Alzheimer's disease.
And a lack of sleep increases that trigger.
Exactly.
You're not getting enough.
Maybe you're not getting enough of that clearance.
Interesting.
So it's like a flushing of these proteins.
It's a flushing of the proteins.
When you sleep well or sleep better, it flushes these proteins that trigger either dementia or Alzheimer's or memory loss.
Yeah.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
So a lack of sleep would cause someone to be more forgetful.
Yeah.
Well, and then there's other parts of it too, which is there's a lot of work to suggest
that memories are reactivated during sleep.
And according to some theories, what happens is you reactivate these memories and they
just stick around longer.
One theory that I describe in the book, and we have a computer model of this,
is even more powerful, which is that the brain may reactivate memories because I have this experience of you here. I have this experience of you when I run into you at a cafe. I have this
experience of you when I run into you at the airport or something. But those are all
different events in my mind. But if I start to randomly reactivate these memories and let my
brain just sort of free associate, I can find some length that makes me go, this is what makes
Lewis Howes tick. And that may be what happens during sleep is that we can start to get the big
picture. And so we're missing out on that part when we don't sleep. We're missing
out on this chance to take all these individual memories and create a big picture out of it.
Another, and make it actionable too. There is definitely work to suggest that whatever we're
trying to memorize, like you're trying to learn a new language, after sleep, people are better
able to incorporate those words into their spoken language, into their mental dictionary.
Interesting.
are able to incorporate those words into their spoken language, into their mental dictionary.
So there's a lot of work like that.
And then finally, and again, it's somewhat obvious, but you don't get enough sleep.
You're feeling like hell the next day.
You are stressed out.
You are, your frontal cortex is shot.
You're not able to focus on anything.
Your efficiency just goes down, right? So it really is just, you're just
damaging yourself in so many ways. And when you're in a bad mood, you're going to recall
more painful memories than positive memories. Yeah, yeah. So if you get a lack of sleep,
you're going to wake up groggy, you're going to wake up stressed, overwhelmed, forgetting things
behind, and therefore not feeling as good and
therefore recalling negative memories. Yeah. Which make you feel emotionally negative. Not only that,
but it makes you pessimistic about the future. Oh, man. Because that's what memory is really
all about. It's saying what's coming up next, right? Wow. I got attacked by this bear in the
cave. Next time I go to the cave, there's going to be a bear there. Yeah, watch out here. Yeah, exactly.
I wanted to ask you about repressed memories in a moment. So hopefully I remember this about
repressed memories, because I think a lot of people, I've had a lot of different therapists
and trauma experts on talking about healing memories, healing the past so we can live more,
I guess, healthy environments of peace in the now versus recalling the past
consistently. I want to ask you that in a moment, but I'm curious, since we talked about the three
things that are kind of holding us back, what would you say are three habits you'd recommend
people implement every day to have stronger memories and healthier minds okay that's a good one um so one thing that i
think people should really keep in mind is that uh um your brain is a part of your body so people
will say oh is there some should i take ginkgo will this help me remember or whatever should i
buy this like should i do these brain games whatever and it's like i hate i almost hate talking about
it because i was a memory researcher it's so non-psychological but it's like you have
cardiovascular disease you have diabetes you are it's gonna impact your brain it's gonna impact
your brain big time i mean really i've seen i mean and your brain is not separate from the rest of
your body no No, no.
I mean, diabetes is a death sentence for you. You can't be 100 pounds overweight and think you're going to have like a perfect brain.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's really health issues are just a dramatic, you know, they dramatically
impact your brain function, right?
And it's not just things like weight, right?
It would be things, I mean, you know, I don't want to speak to weight particularly, but as much as the factors that are associated with it, right?
Like hypertension, high cholesterol, things like that.
But there's also, you know, I know people with long COVID and it's just disastrous, right?
These brain fog conditions are very, very real.
And these brain fog conditions are very, very real.
And what is the number one health issue that causes the brain to be the weakest or memory to be the weakest?
Is it a link to obesity?
Is it a link to high cholesterol? Is it a link to something else that people might have that causes the brain to be less effective?
I'm going to go with the first one that comes to mind because it just came to mind,
but I think it also rang true with my experience. It's major depressive disorder.
Depression.
Depression.
What is the main cause of depression? And does depression start with a weakened immune system
or a weakened brain system?
start with a weakened immune system or a weakened brain system? Oh, this is a really tough question.
I think a lot of mental illnesses are now seen as neurodevelopmental, meaning that it's something where there's some sensitivities that you might be born with, but then there's a developmental
trajectory that affects it a lot, right? And so what happens is your brain is being shaped over
the course of even the adolescent years,
which is when a lot of these issues
like the anxiety and the depression really emerge, you know?
So there's a sort of shaping of brain circuits
around these times.
And for depression, attachment systems
are a real part of the story.
And so when there's a disruption
in these attachment systems, that can really affect.
What's an attachment system? What does that does that mean well i don't study it so i'm going to give you like very dumb things but basically if you think about our brains need to have some kind of
mechanism that allows us to care about you know at least relatives right like you know you have
a kid you want to protect that kid right you have You want to have a mate, you want to be able to be, you know, want to affiliate with that mate and connect with that mate.
And everybody differs and some people have different things than others.
But these attachment styles that people have, like some people are very kind of securely attached.
And you know these people where it's like, they kind of go, yeah, I love being around my parents.
Yeah, healthy relationships.
Healthy relationships, right?
Others are anxious for avoidance. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I'm sure you've talked to I had such a great childhood. Healthy relationships. Healthy relationships, right? Those are anxious or avoidance.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, I'm sure you've talked to people who are experts in this topic, right?
And those factors can really, you know, if you have these kind of anxious attachment styles, that can be really predispose you to depression, for instance.
And there's a lot that, frankly, we don't know about it.
And there's a lot that, frankly, we don't know about it.
There's memories a part of it that essentially people with depression have more negative memory biases.
And that kind of leads to this vicious cycle of recalling negative memories, which reinforces the depressed mood and so forth.
So there's all sorts of things.
And the immune system is affected by this. There's inflammation that is triggered by
mood and stress, for instance. Stress is a part of that too. So it's, when we say what's the cause,
it's all connected, right? And likewise, when you do interventions like exercise,
well, it can reduce inflammation. It can enhance mood. It can improve sleep.
And so everything is so connected.
But I brought up major depressive disorder mainly because I was thinking about how when I worked in a clinic, I would test people who were coming in saying, I have some kind of a problem with my thinking or whatever.
The most common thing by far was people complaining about memory. And with older adults, I found that half of the time that someone was complaining about memory,
it's not quite, these numbers aren't quite exact, but about half the time,
it looked like it was early stages of Alzheimer's.
Or maybe even less than that.
But a good chunk of the time, sometimes it's just you're anxious, but it's fine.
And then there was a chunk of the time where it was depression.
And the thing is, is that the people with depression on paper could look even worse than the people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
Really?
Yes.
Because they had the memory deficits, but they also, their frontal cortex was just completely dysfunctional.
They couldn't focus. They're just out of it in their heads and they just lack this initiative.
In a negative loop.
Negative loop. So it's like your attention is messed up. Your mental flexibility is messed up.
You get stuck on things and you can't shift efficiently. And so they looked worse than
somebody who just had a memory problem.
And that was the telltale sign, one of the telltale signs.
So if someone is experiencing either depression, depressed thoughts,
looping negative thoughts, or experiencing early stage Alzheimer's, is there a way to reverse
depression or early stage Alzheimer's completely?
If so, how does someone do that?
I don't know of any to completely reverse either depression.
I mean, if I did, I'd be very rich.
To completely reverse early stage Alzheimer's or depression.
What I'll tell you is that there is, let's talk Alzheimer's first.
So Alzheimer's, when people start to see memory
deficits, the problem is you've already had significant brain damage. And once you lose
neurons, you can't really get them back, at least with current treatments. So the best thing to do
is get, nip things in the bud before you get there prevent these prevent these things
and so there are a lot of talking about these three habits the first one being exercise which
i was yeah i cut you off early on but you were talking about exercise exercise being a thing
that can enhance brain function yes enhance mood positivity probably diminish depressed thoughts
right is what i'm hearing you say yeah yeah, yeah. That would be the first thing.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
What would be the second habit to support us?
This kind of flips against the negative, which is make sure to get enough sleep is one exercise.
We can talk about social engagement, I think, doesn't get enough attention.
I think doesn't get enough attention. Again, this is related to depression, too, because that really cuts off people's willingness and ability to engage socially. But in older people, you see these real positive effects of social engagement. And I think it's no coincidence if you look at like, I don't know if you've talked to, I think it's Dan Boutner, the blue zone guy. But you look at these blue zones,
and it's like older people are really engaged socially,
and they have a community they're plugged into.
And that really can have a positive effect on memory,
having healthy relationships.
And yeah, so that would be a big one too.
I would say we talk about diet can play a role.
You know, having a healthy diet, the Mediterranean diet has shown really good promise in terms of preserving brain health.
But none of these things in and of themselves are going to be the cure. But collectively, let me just make this in the
most concrete terms. There was a study that was done in China that they followed like 29,000
people. And they looked with, you know, when I look at this as a memory scientist, I was like,
these are the most crude measures of memory possible, very gross assessment, right? So they
just said, we're going to look at six lifestyle habits. Two of them
are just like not drinking and not smoking. Then there's things like being socially engaged,
being mentally active, having what they called a healthy diet, and then they had physical exercise,
right? So they looked at these six lifestyle factors, and then they said, here's some people
who have like four to six of these factors.
Here's people who have three to four of these factors. And here's people with zero or two to
four. Here's zero to one, right? So these are the unfavorable. We can look at the favorable.
Follow them up over 10 years. 10 years later, the memory scores for the people who were in the
favorable category were almost twice as high as those who
were in the unfavorable category, even though they're roughly about the same in the beginning,
right? So if I were to tell you, here's this drug that you can take every day, it's going to have
some really bad side effects, but you will be in that zone of preserving your memory over time,
you might be
tempted to take it, right? But what if I told you, here are these things that you can do, and they
will improve your quality of life in the present and improve your brain health long term? It's
kind of like, why can't we do that? What are the six factors again? It was no alcohol, no smoking. There was social engagement. And I don't know how
they measured some of these things. Right. Having a certain amount of friends or groups of friends
or activities with friends. Yeah. Yeah. There was maintaining cognitive stimulation. And again,
I remember, I don't know how they measured that. I didn't read that. It was like activities or
hobbies or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, some people say, oh, is it playing Sudoku that could do it? And yeah,
sure. If that's what excites you and keeps you. What did they call that? What did they call that
one? Cognitive stimulation, something like that. And then five and six.
There was a healthy diet. Exercise.
Exercise. Yeah. I think that was it. So they studied 29,000 people. 29,000 people.
And people who had more of these had better memory and I'm assuming better brain function and health.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably healthier, happier moods as well. That's right. That's exactly right.
And those that had less of these had, you know, worse attitudes, worse moods. Yeah. You know,
not as good quality of life. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I mean, worse moods. Yeah. You know, not as good quality of life. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And, you know, I mean, and just to hit this home even further, there's some really new
research that's come out and I need to find out more about it, but they're starting to
study these so-called super agers.
So these are people who go into their 80s and they seem to just be as sharp as ever.
Super sharp.
They remember everything.
They've got it all down. They can still drive perfectly, all this stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the
estimates are anywhere between 5% to 15% of older people are like this, depending on who's measuring
and how they measure. Now, are super agers, is that more of a genetic thing, or is it more of
other research proving otherwise? I think nobody knows for sure, but it's probably all of the above.
Like most things in psychology and neuroscience, it's all of the above, I'm guessing. There's
definitely some genetics that play a role in healthy brain aging, but there's a lot of it
has to do also with the context that you're in. And I think like one of the things that
people had observed, the researchers had observed in these super agers, and I need to learn more about this.
So this is a big caveat.
But that a lot of these super agers weren't necessarily great on all these six characteristics, but they were really socially connected and engaged.
So it sounds like social engagement is one of the key things for longevity as a neuroscientist,
memory researcher, but also from the blue zones. The blue zones, people that age the longest or
live the longest, they have a lot of social engagement. They're not isolated. And they
feel like they have a purpose within the community, within family roles, status as they age. Their
importance is still there.
Yeah.
And I think that's an important factor to think about from all these different things.
And it's about that kind of like, I think you said it best, healthy relationships, right?
Not just in a negative relationship and screaming at each other every day.
We'd stay together, but it's like actual peaceful, harmonious relationships.
Yeah.
The stuff that makes you feel connected
interesting and you can even one of the coolest things that i learned about was
this research on memory in couples and couples who are in these long-term relationships
what they found was that in fact they could also remember better because they shared the
burden of remembering shared memory yeah interesting and so
what would happen would be like the husband would in the research they have transcripts of this
it's really beautiful to see these things because like the husband will go like do you remember when
we were at this like uh theater production what was the name of it and they go oh it was cats and
you know yeah and i was I thought this was so ridiculous.
And you loved this.
And then the woman will say, no, I had some moments where I liked it.
And together, they put together this story. And there's even research to suggest that people can actually, when you have someone you can lean on like that,
when you have someone you can lean on like that, it's not clear whether they actually show better memory performance over time or they just appear to be non-dependent later on because
they've got this person that they can lean on. This is fascinating. So staying in a healthy
long-term relationship, the research shows that you'll be able to hopefully have shared memory support.
As opposed to having to recall everything on your own, there are some benefits to sharing
the memory with someone else that you care about.
Yeah.
That's beautiful.
Yeah.
I want to go back to what I said that I'm curious about.
I think this might be one of the most important things that we talk about today is on the
topic of repressed memories and traumatic
memories. I think a lot of people are starting to open up more in society about their past.
They're starting to have open conversations and dialogues with therapists or consultants or
coaches or priests and feeling more accepted in sharing their shame. Although I hear two different sides to this opinion,
that expressing the pain of the past is a good thing, but also reliving painful traumatic moments
over and over again creates a negative energy within yourself, creates a negative mood.
Is it better to repress our thoughts and keep them blocked and, you know, away from our memories the
best that we can? Although I feel like they'll always kind of come up in some other way. Is it
better to do that or is it better to talk about our traumatic memories? And if so, how do we do
it that it empowers us instead of reliving a traumatic event over and over again?
That is a really rich question and there's a lot here.
So let me break it down piece by piece.
Yes, please.
So first of all, you just mentioned repressed memories.
And so this is a big, big topic in my field because there's a lot of ideas out there in
this sense that the brain has an automatic defense mechanism, that when you've
had an experience that's so traumatic, the memory becomes suppressed deep down within the dark
reaches of our unconscious mind, right? And Freud had proposed that as part of a, and as an extension
of his general idea of repression, which is more about urges than memories.
Now, from what I understand, he actually rejected that later.
But other people definitely latched on to this idea.
And it became big in the 80s because there was a book that was released called Michelle.
It was like Michelle remembers or something.
And it was this book that talks about this woman who had therapy and then recovered all these memories of ritual abuse and so forth.
And she ended up marrying the therapist.
You know something's wrong with this story.
Really? That's interesting.
So it was like, and at the end, I think Satan comes out.
It's just a really crazy story.
Wow.
And so this became a big thing in the 80s, this repressed memory therapy.
this became a big thing in the 80s, this repressed memory therapy. And so what happens is that a lot of memory research was done on this topic. And it turns out if you want to implant a memory in
somebody that they've, so Beth Loftus at UC Irvine did some beautiful work on this, but many other
people since then, where basically if I want to get you to generate
a memory for something that never happened to you, what I do is I get one of your relatives
and they say, hey, do you remember that time when you stole that beer from a liquor store?
And you're like, I don't remember that. You don't remember that, right?
She's like, no, I was there and this happened. And you're like, start to doubt yourself.
You start to doubt yourself.
And then you start to imagine it.
Well, how could it have?
Wow.
And so then you start to think.
And then I come back to you again tomorrow and I say, so did that memory pop into your head then?
Do you remember it?
And now what happens is, well, you tried to remember it and you imagined how it could have happened.
And on day two, you're remembering your attempt to remember.
Interesting.
And so now you create a richer story about it, right?
And so I keep asking you over and over again.
And I say, hey, tell me more about that.
What were you thinking at the time?
How do you think you would get away with this?
And so then you start going into it more and more you create this whole story about how you really wanted to impress this girl by getting beer
whatever it was right and so you start doing you create this giant story and so they've done this
in lab many many different kinds of things really yeah it's very now not everybody this doesn't
happen to everyone but on average it happens when you have someone
you trust.
I ask you, try to imagine these things, recall it.
You really, this must have happened to you.
We do it over and over and over again.
We have you dig into the past.
And maybe I can even go further and I could say, well, let me hypnotize you.
Let me give you some medications to help you remember, right?
Wow.
And so if you look at all of those ingredients, they're exactly the ingredients they use for
repressed memory therapy.
There's somebody who you trust who's convinced, often with very good intentions, they're convinced
that because you're engaged in self-harm, because you have low self-esteem.
Something happened.
Something happened to you. And we just have to figure out what it was and some kind of sexual trauma usually.
Is it important to remember what happened to us in order to heal the self-harm or limiting beliefs
or negative thoughts that we have or the depressed thoughts that we have? Do we need to find something
to heal or can we just heal? Well, I just want to finish
because I do want to be clear about something, which is people can recover memories. And this
is the crazy thing is that, and the reason why I just had to close the book on this one thing is
because I just want to make it clear that not everyone who says I have a memory of being abused
is lying. That's not true. In fact, people who've been abused will
remember it really well often. And that's the problem is that this gets us back to the next
question. They keep reliving it. But sometimes people can have a recovered memory. And sometimes
that happens because maybe they've been trying to suppress it. And there's some research that shows
if I try to suppress it over and over, the memory can become kind of blurry and harder to access. Like eliminate is something. Yeah,
yeah, exactly. Can you truly eliminate a painful memory? No, I don't think, well, we don't know,
but nobody's shown it completely that you can. I mean, let me give you a personal example.
You know, I've talked about this publicly on here, so a lot of people have heard this,
but if this is their first time here, they'll hear it for the first time. I was sexually
abused when I was five. And for 25 years, I never told anyone, but it was like a movie replaying in
my mind. I wouldn't say every day, but it felt like weekly for 25 years. Maybe some weeks it
wasn't as often, maybe other weeks it was more frequent.
And it was something that I would just try, it would come up in my mind, I would remember it
vividly and I would just try to like distract myself in the memory, right? Until I,
11 years ago, started opening up about it for the first time. And created a very painful open
up about it. It was probably the hardest thing I've ever done emotionally
because it felt like I was going to die.
Yes.
It felt like death.
It felt like my life was over.
Yeah.
If people knew this about me.
Yeah.
I started to open up about it and was terrified,
but actually had a lot of relief
because I was in a safe environment
where I felt seen, accepted, and not shamed for the
experience I went through. And then a process of a few years of allowing me to process it,
feel like I was reclaiming my power as opposed to allowing this abused moment to be my story. Yes. And reclaiming my identity, my power, and creating meaning
from the painful event. Creating meaning in how I could use this of service. Yeah. How I could
benefit from this and how I could, not that it's a benefit thing, but how I could help others in
this process. And that has given me more relief and more harmony and peace in the last 11 years since starting to tell this.
But for 25 years, I don't know if I tried to repress it or just more block the memory.
The memory was there, but I tried to like, ah, get away from it.
Suppress it.
Get away from me.
I don't want to think about this.
Let me just go make more money or, you know, chase girls or whatever it was you know it's like get bigger
stronger so this won't happen yeah it's a very it's a very poignant story and i think it captures
so much of what i talk about in the book because really i mean so let's go back to this idea of
the traumatic memory what do you do with it, right? So there's insight-oriented therapy is all about basically if I open up the box and I
remove the memory, I'll be relieved of this burden.
And I don't think it quite works that way.
You can't remove a memory, really.
Yeah, well, not just that, but it doesn't reflect.
I mean, you brought this up yourself, which is if you just recall something that's painful and you just wallow in it, that does not help.
That actually can be re-traumatizing you.
And if you look in PTSD, what happens is people recall these traumatic memories and they get the physiological response.
Like they're back there.
They're back there, exactly.
And they relive the trauma in all of these new contexts.
And so what happens is these memories become generalized the trauma in all of these new contexts. And so what happens
is these memories become generalized and updated to all of these different contexts. So now nowhere
is safe. Everywhere. Because everywhere you go, there you are. Exactly. In that traumatic memory.
Exactly. You're still there. Even if you're in a safe environment at home with someone that loves
you, you're still traumatized from 10, 20, 50 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right.
By recalling the event.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
So it's almost like recalling or suppressing doesn't work for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So what can someone do then to process?
Well, so recalling is part of the story.
Yes.
It's the first step.
Yeah.
So the key things to keep in mind are our memory for what happened is both driven by a lot of beliefs and, you know, driven
by the way we construct the story. It's driven by our perspective. Yes. And it's also different
than the feelings that come with remembering, biologically different, meaning that there's
different brain areas involved, but they interact with each other and they're connected, right? So you have the feeling of going back in time and then it makes
you feel like this kid again and there's shame or there's fear, but then we can engage with that in
a way that magnifies that feeling, right? And amplifies it. And amplifies it based on getting
into that mindset and into that perspective.
And we reconstruct the story in a particular way.
Which creates a deeper sense of feelings emotionally and physiologically in the body, which makes you feel unsafe.
It makes you feel unsafe. And now the memory becomes updated because you've recalled it in this new place.
And you take this part of the present and you glom it on, you associate it with those past memories, right?
So what can someone do when they recall the memory?
And a lot of people don't have a safe environment to even recall it.
The safe environment is key, but it can be a safe person.
Yes.
And the reason why people, I say, are so powerful is not necessarily because having a person is special.
I mean, who knows? Maybe AI at some because having a person is special. I mean,
who knows? Maybe AI at some point will be useful for this. I don't know. But what I could say is that having a person is really valuable because if I tell you my story, and I mean, I'd really
love to know if this resonates with your experience, because I don't want to be telling
people a bunch of BS. But I feel like when I was on the other side, when I was doing work with people who had PTSD from Vietnam, I ran a therapy group.
And so these guys would come in for the first time and they would tell their story.
And they were just so terrified and nervous.
And you could just see it in their eyes.
Sobbing and crying and emotional.
Yeah.
But then they tell their story.
And just the act of telling the story in a way that makes sense to someone
else is changing your perspective. You're no longer talking to yourself, I'm talking to you.
So this is transforming the story. It's transforming the memory itself.
Part of the memory is the storytelling. Do you think someone can heal the traumatic memories or the emotions that come up from the memories we have that were traumatic without sharing with another person by just internalizing and journaling only?
Or do you think part of storytelling with another human, that social engagement factor, which helps us live longer and be healthier and happier, is part of the healing process.
I won't say that you can't do it without that.
And I think journaling is a great example of something that can really help.
But what I would say is that having another person is very powerful.
Because once I share that memory, now it's a memory for you.
I've created a memory in your head of something
you've never experienced, but you're looking at it from your perspective, not mine. And if you can
tell me back your impressions based on your views and outsider, I can see the same experience from
a different perspective and look at it from the perspective of you because you've communicated
that to me. And this allows me to separate the storytelling from the actual information.
And now maybe I can go back and recall things in a different way. And basic, basic research has
shown that if I change your perspective, you can actually recall different information, right? It's
why if you're a fan of one football team
and another person's fan of an opposing team,
you both watched them playing in the Super Bowl,
you'll walk away with different memories of like,
you're talking about all the heroic plays of your team
and they're talking about all the bad calls
they got from the ref, right?
But if you can change that perspective,
it's very hard for people to do that on their own.
Yes. But it's natural for someone who's caring and doesn't have that experience to be able to do that for you. And
through that process, you can now update the memory. And it's not about, you don't want to,
I mean, as much as, I mean, this is a risky thing for me to tell you, but I would tell you, I don't want you to lose the memory of what happened to you, but I want you to be able to change your relationship with it.
Yes.
Because the perspective is very different.
And what I mean by this is you're a survivor.
You're resilient.
That's part of your story.
Yes.
You've also learned a lot about how people work in a way that
other people don't know about. And it's sent you on this path that is doing a lot of good for a lot
of people. It's given you this mission, you know? So it doesn't define you in the ways that might
be associated with shame and guilt. It defines you in a way that emphasizes
these parts of you that you want to keep, right?
Yes, yes.
And so they, and it's just like what I was talking about
with the, you know, I mean, I don't want to be trivial here,
but it's like, it's what I was,
it goes back to what I was talking about
with the cell phones and watching the concert, right?
There's the concert and there's your feelings
about the concert and your re-experience
of it right and it works the other way too that there's sort of the what happened but the shame
the guilt the fear is stuff that you experienced but it's not necessarily inherent to the what
happened part of it right it doesn't have, you can view these from a different perspective, just like you can view, and again, I don't want to trivialize this,
but just like you have this great relationship and then you find out your partner has been
cheating on you, you can look back on all those things from a very different perspective. So you
can do that in a positive way too. Absolutely. So when you're, I mean, there's so much you're sharing here that I love, but it sounds like, you know, the story or the memory and the story you tell
yourself about the memory ties to your beliefs plus your feelings, plus the perspective that
you have, if I'm getting that correctly. And the perspective you have is the meaning you give yourself on that story and the beliefs about it.
So when you're working with, you know, Vietnam War veterans who come in and share for the first time their traumatic experience about losing a brother or watching something horrific happen next to them or whatever might have happened.
And they share this repressed feeling or memory or stressful memory that they've been suppressing,
whatever it might be, and they share it for the first time or maybe one of the first times,
and they relive the traumatic experience and they have a physiological reaction and response,
as if they're living that again from 5, 10, 20, 50 years ago, whatever it might be.
What is the next step in the process after someone shares
with another the story of the memory on how they can start to integrate healing, wholeness,
perspective, meaning, and transmute that into a mission that is service-based rather than depression focused. What are the next steps?
Oh, I mean, it's so hard, right? But it doesn't happen overnight. It's not like one session. Okay,
I'm healed. And I can like create meaning from this horrible thing that happened in my life or
this traumatic moment or series of events. It's really hard to do that overnight. Obviously,
it doesn't work like that. But what's... I really look at your story that you told me, and I can see a lot of facets in it. One
is that you engaged with this with different people in different contexts. So what you see,
if you look at, and I feel a little silly making this comparison, but if you look in studies of
animals, let's say when they get an electric shock and they learn that some sound is associated with a shock.
Well, if you put it in a box and you just play the sound over and over, their fear response will go down over time.
So their brain is saying, you're safe.
But it turns out if you put them in a different box, they'll get scared again.
So they're learning this context is safe, right?
So I'm with this therapist.
I'm in this group. And this context is safe right so i'm with this therapist i'm in this group and this is a safe space you need to get out of that and do it in multiple spaces you have to do
it in multiple spaces otherwise there's only one safe space you can go back to yeah it's just it's
just like what we talked about when you while when you just experience the trauma in many places now
it generalizes but the safety can also generalize too.
And it can become more of something that you can think about in a way that is associated with an outside perspective.
This is fascinating.
I'm so glad you're saying this because you're, you know, based on, I guess, your neuroscientist perspective and research, you know, I feel like I did these things intuitively
because first I did it in an environment of a group setting where I felt safe
and intentionally went there to try to transform and find some type of healing opportunities or
letting go of certain things that were holding me back. So I did that in a group setting. But then afterwards I said, oh, okay, I feel safe here because other people were also vulnerable
in opening up about stuff in their life. But I could never tell this to my friends or family.
And then I was thinking, oh, this traumatic event or memory has power over me still then.
memory has power over me still then. If I'm unable to share with another person,
it therefore is controlling and consuming my energy. And therefore blocking my abundance,
my peace, my harmony, my ability to love myself for all of me. So then I said, okay,
let me tell my family members one by one. Terrifying. Yeah.
Horrific experience for me leading up to it because I was like, what if they don't love me?
What if they don't accept me?
What if they, whatever, all the scenarios of the future events that might occur.
Yeah.
But doing that process one by one gave me more safety processing with each one of them.
And it's by sharing the story.
Yeah. I felt safer with each one of them. Then I's by sharing the story. I felt safer with each
one of them. Then I said, okay, well, they're my family. They have to love me, but my friends,
they're going to disown me. I was like, oh, but this event still has power over me. It's still
controlling me then. So I started to tell my friends one by one, terrifying because I don't
want to be alone and want to lose my friends, all these things. But one by one, it felt like,
oh, I felt seen and accepted and they're not going to leave me because of this traumatic thing I dealt with when I was
five. And the more I did that, and then I eventually was like, I felt the need to do it publicly. So I
talked about it on my show many times. I don't think everyone needs to share something traumatic
publicly or whatever, but I felt like I don't want this to have power of me. I want to have an identity where I feel I am safe no matter anyone accepts me or not,
but I feel safe. I am the safe environment. Not needing one or two places to go to, to feel safe,
but I am safety inside of me. And that process of doing this continually, not re-traumatizing myself by
recalling the event, but sharing from an empowered place of here's how I'm transforming and here's
the meaning I'm giving the event, gave me purpose and peace. And again, I go back to, should people continue to talk about the traumatic event
because it's going to re-traumatize them? Or is there a way to talk about it where it doesn't
traumatize but supports them? Yeah, I think it's really important to get a different perspective
and not reinforce your perspective. The perspective is huge because
it's like, if you, I mean, everything you're talking about in your example was so characteristic
of how our memories shape our predictions of the future. So you have this traumatic memory and your
prediction is if people knew the truth about me, they would not like me.
Yes.
They would just disown me.
Yes.
Right?
That was the fear.
That's the fear, right?
That was the story I was telling myself.
And so the critical part is being able to violate that prediction so that you can change the way that you think about them.
It's terrifying, though.
It is.
Or it was for me, I should say.
I mean, I work with enough patients during my training that I get it.
It's not just you.
It's a lot of people.
But it sounds like that is the necessary step of the process.
Is, what did you say, violating the fear of people abandoning you in the future?
Yeah, basically getting counter evidence to these predictions
that you have and these beliefs that you have. And if you only do it with one person or a therapist
or a pastor or a priest or, you know, psychologist or whatever, if you only do it with one person and
not at least the closest people to you, what happens to the brain or our memories or our feelings around this past event well it's likely
that what happens is you one possibility and i never of course reverse engineering these things
like it always works in the averages or in these animals who are you having a lab but basically
the general answer would be that you would learn that in this context, I'm safe. Not I am safe.
Like in the box.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm like the wrath that's in the safe box.
But when I go to this other box,
who knows what's out there, right?
It's like, I told this in the context
of the sacred confession
and the church is the sacred safe space.
But when I go out in the real world,
anything can happen to me, you know?
So it's not only just doing it in confession and feeling like okay i'm safe in this little box uh with the
priest is saying like i forgive you of your sins or whatever yeah but it's like when you go out to
the real world outside of the church do you feel safe yeah yeah exactly exactly and i mean if you
think about it from an evolutionary perspective, right?
I'm trying to keep you alive.
Yes.
If you remember that time that you got attacked by the bear at a bunch of random moments where
there's no possibility of a bear being there, maybe it's okay.
It's better that than forgetting that you saw the bear.
Of course.
Right?
We're not talking about physical safety.
We're talking about emotional safety, psychological safety. And as social beings, social animals, a lot of those basic systems are recruited into our social interactions and become part of our social interactions and things that are.
that are, and we all know that many times, like, you know, feeling like rage can be triggered
by something that you've seen online,
which is evolution did not shape that.
That's just-
So interesting that somehow,
sometimes our emotional or psychological fears
can feel like physical fears.
And like, we have to defend ourselves.
It'll cause a scream or do something that's like
erratic i guess when really you are most you are physically safe yeah but you feel psychologically
or emotionally unsafe yeah yeah exactly and it may not even be real it may just be based on a
trigger from a memory yeah yeah exactly exactly and mean, just to keep in mind the physical thing,
I think in neuroscience,
we tend to get focused on the chemicals, right?
But it's like, if you just pulled a knife on me right now,
my fight or flight response will go off, right?
But if I just decided to go bungee jumping after this,
my fight or flight response will also go off.
Two very different emotions,
but very similar physiology, right?
So the way we frame these experiences
can shape our emotions.
And it's not just about the chemicals
that are being released, right?
I mean, everything's connected.
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, the chemicals are part of how we feel and how we think.
And they shape, you know, when I get these things going on, my brain gets mobilized into
activating memories that are consistent with threats.
But that actual physical response doesn't necessarily mean that I'm under threat.
If somebody goes off on me on a you know on a tweet that
i had or something like that i'm not physically being dangerous yeah and in fact this person
there's almost no consequence if i'm you know i mean in many cases there's almost no consequence
of these things sure and yet we still feel that threat and that's based completely
on our mental construction of the situation the the narrative that we piece together
this is fascinating now again what i'm hearing you say is that the more we can focus on
creating a positive attitude and energy state in the present. It sounds like the better our life
will be because we'll be recalling more positive or empowering memories from the past, and we'll be
predicting potential future abundance and positive possibilities in the future. But if we ruminate, if we think negatively about others or
think lower energetically about ourselves or identify lower than we're capable of, or if we're
gossiping or stressed or ungrateful versus grateful, it sounds like that energetic state
will recall more negative memories or painful memories from the
past and will predict more negative outcomes in the future from that energetic attitude state of
being. Am I accurate here? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like to say that memory can give you more options
in life or it can give you fewer options.
And so it's like the key is if we can get out of our, you know, I mean, sometimes people are, as we've talked about, incredibly narcissistic and unable to see their weaknesses and over
confident in their ability to do certain things.
And remembering these times where you were overconfident and things didn't necessarily
go as well as you thought can be very helpful in allowing you to learn from those mistakes.
But likewise, if you wallow in the mistakes, then it's like you don't see, you know, yeah,
maybe this didn't work out in hindsight, but at that time I couldn't have known that.
Or maybe there's something I could have done and I can learn from it and take it in a positive way.
But basically you want to be able to mind these memories
in a way that gives you more options and not less.
Interesting.
Now you mentioned the idea of mental time travel in the past,
going back to these memories.
Have you explored or researched the ability
to mentally time travel in the future?
To predict, to put ourself in a state of being or an environment of abundance,
and then be able to draw that future closer to us now into the present?
Yeah, yeah.
We've done a little bit of it and other people.
We've done more in this kind of like prediction kind of thing in a more concrete sense.
But there's other people who've gone even farther and said, imagine you are going to meet President Barack Obama or imagine that you're going to go like complete a triathlon or whatever it is.
And if you look at the brain activity, it turns out that that brain activity is very similar to what happens when people are remembering something that did happen.
So if you ask me one year ago, imagine having a conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow, right?
And you scan my brain while I imagine that story. Now it's a day after I just had this crazy thing
that I never thought would have happened to me. And if you ask me to recall it, the activation patterns in my brain would be very hard to distinguish from my memory
of what happened versus my imagination of what happened. Because to our brain, all you're doing
is you're reactivating these concepts, essentially. You're reactivating these percepts and these
concepts. There are some differences between memory and and imagination but a lot of it is the same because a lot of memory
research and this is a very old idea actually goes back to a psychologist named bartlett in the 30s
he proposed that we don't replay the past we imagine how the past could have been right so
it's like you're an archaeologist, you get a few fragments of pottery,
and then you say, this is what this society was like back in...
Ancient civilization, I saw the whole thing.
Exactly, right? And this is what we do with memories.
We use these bits and pieces that are pretty good indicators of the past,
but then we use it as fuel for imagination.
And likewise, if I'm imagining the future, I'll take my memories of the past, but then we use it as fuel for imagination. And likewise, if I'm imagining
the future, I'll take my memories of the past, use those bits and pieces of different things
that have happened and imagine something. And so some researchers have found that people with
memory disorders actually have an impoverished ability to imagine the future. Wow. That it's
like, they'll just go like, imagine that you're on a beach and they'll
go like, yeah, there's sand and water. That's it. I mean, this is a fascinating concept because
in our world, everything that is physically constructed is based out of one person's
imagination. Yeah. To create that, this book, you know, this pen, these cameras, this light, this room, this building,
these clothes is all someone's imagination that was alchemized into the physical world,
the three-dimensional world.
But it didn't come from three dimensions.
It came from mental imagination, which is fascinating that we can imagine something, come up with a memory of
the future and then actualize it. It is fascinating to me that this is what human beings can do.
So how do we imagine a future to create more abundance, joy, fulfillment, and happiness in our lives and alchemize anything we want in the material world.
Well, one thing that I really have gotten into, and I just don't do it enough, but I really try to,
is gratitude practice. And I know it sounds like a real, like, sorry, I'm not a wellness guru or
anything like that, but I tried to do this stuff early on and I just never, I would tell
people, it's like, I'm really bad at gratitude. I suck at gratitude. And then one day I decided to
be very concrete and minimal and say, let me just recall three things that happened to me
that are specific events, episodic memories. They can be as trivial as I want, but they're things that gave me some happiness.
I got an email from a friend.
I saw a story from someone on Facebook that was a friend of mine and something good happened to them or something like that.
I mean, anything, right?
I found a shirt on sale.
My coffee was better than usual, whatever it is, right?
And I found that when I started to do this,
initially it would be hard. I would be tired. I'm in a bad mood. I just had a bad day at work,
whatever. And it would be really hard. And I just had to get into that mindset. But once I pulled up something tiny, it made it easier to pull up something else. And the next thing you know,
I'm like realizing, boy, something, I really had a great week. And I just had no idea about this, right?
So once you start getting all those memories, now you have the fuel to imagine things that could have happened.
Because memory is the fuel that turbocharges imagination.
Say that again?
It's like the fuel that turbocharges our imagination allows us to put all sorts of unique possibilities.
It's like you and I, we may have very similar cultural knowledge that we've all soaked up, just like ChatGPT has.
But at the same time, you live next to somebody in the dorms at random in college, and I live next to different people.
I just happened to walk in.
I just happened to listen to this song one day that got me curious about something.
And so far, we all have these unique experiences in our lives, right?
And that's what allows me to imagine things in different ways than you can.
But it all is about basically having these, first of all, just giving yourself a diverse range of
experiences, exposing yourself to things that are maybe sometimes even outside of your comfort zone,
right? Like, here's this music, and it seems kind of weird to me, but there's something
makes me curious about it, right? And you get curious about something else. And the next thing
you know, you have all of these diverse episodic memories that you can call upon when you're trying to imagine
something new you know so some of this imagining this abundant future is being able to see things
that are not obvious right and one of the things i find in research is that it's like there are
these great scientific questions and approaches and experiments right in front of us but we can't
see it normally and i sometimes have to go to some
talk that's completely outside of my area of research and then boom, it just comes up, right?
And so sometimes you need to allow yourself to make these random connections to visualize
or to basically just see possibilities that don't appear there because you're stuck in this more narrow mindset yes
how do we i mean it sounds like freeing our minds up with positive memories of the past gives us
a better opportunity to have playful imagination in the future right like more open-minded
imagination and exploring the
imagination of possibilities as opposed to limiting our imagination.
How can someone on a daily basis set themselves up to open their minds to imagination? Is it
giving time for play and activities and social engagement? Is it not
only thinking about work, but also giving yourself downtime to just allow and social engagement? Is it not only thinking about work,
but also giving yourself downtime to just allow for randomness? Like how can we unlock our minds
for imagination to attract more of what we want in our lives as opposed to things we don't want?
I mean, definitely downtime is good. There's a friend of mine, Sarah Mednick, who wrote a whole
book called The Power of the Down State.
And it's like, it's amazing.
Giving yourself downtime can be enormously helpful.
And in fact, we've even shown, and other people have shown this too, that when we're resting,
like you just ask people, just lay down there, don't do anything.
You can actually see evidence.
It's not super strong. You can see this in studies of rats, though, too, where memories kind of bubble up and you can get kind of a glimpse of what happens during sleep,
but just even while people are resting. And that rest can actually sometimes allow for memories to
be reactivated and strengthened or recombined in interesting ways. And so there's something about that opening up of yourself and turning
off some of these, turning off the goal-directed brain to being able to allow these memories to
just sort of bubble up and recombine in interesting ways. I mean, in some sense,
that's the core of de-dreaming, right? It's like dreams are basically most likely i would guess memories
that are being recombined in ways that don't make sense right and you're not trying to force them
into any particular story they just kind of collide with each other and you're just trying
to make sense of it yes yes and that's kind of i think that's that's a core part of it is uh
that and also really just diversifying your training data, right? It's like
ChatGPT, in my opinion, is never going to produce interesting art on its own because
it's just getting this homogenous junk that it's gotten from the internet, right? But you and I
have these opportunities to just be curious about things that are just bizarre. Actually, just as in praise of curiosity in general,
one of the cool things that one of my postdocs,
Matthias Gruber, did in our lab was he did a study
where he was just really interested
in the role of curiosity and memory.
And what we had found was that when people get a question
that they're curious about the answer for,
the question in and of itself is sufficient
to trigger a spike in activity
in the dopamine processing areas of our brain.
And dopamine is thought to be this reward chemical,
but it's actually more about chasing rewards
and motivating us to get rewards
and learning about rewards, right?
It's that feeling of like energized that you can get
when you wanna get a slice of pizza or something
and you're like, oh, I can't wait to get this, right?
Yeah.
Or something like that.
And so that energizing, we could see a little neural signal related to that in these brain areas that are involved in reward processing and motivation and involved in processing dopamine.
and involved in processing dopamine. When people got the question, not just getting the answer,
not just getting the easy solution to the question, but really the question itself when they were curious. And when they were in this curious mindset, there was a little window where people
could be exposed to just a face that they weren't interested in, nothing to do with the question,
and they would get better memory for the faces so curiosity can open up this little window
of plasticity and other researchers and rats and humans have shown that novelty can also do it's
like if you're exposed to something that's very new like you put a rat in a new box and let it
just explore the box at random that can actually save or cause a release of dopamine that actually
can cause plasticity
and save memories for things that happened before they were put.
Wow, interesting.
And so there's this whole literature on the way in which these chemicals in the brain can
enhance plasticity. And so curiosity is a big part of that. But, you know, when people,
and I think this is a real decision point
that people have is that you can have something unexpected or novel or unfamiliar and be threatened
by it i mean how many times do people see an idea or um or they it doesn't follow their beliefs it
doesn't follow their beliefs right and it causes a little discomfort yeah it causes like a separation not a a bridge
yeah yeah and it's like i mean uh we often in science get people talk about innovation all the
time and i can tell you from hindsight that you know an innovative idea when half the people
listening say we already knew that and half the people say this is obviously wrong basically it's
like they get that discomfort and they're like let's make this go away we knew this or interesting yeah we just
missed this a long time ago yeah exactly and it's like if you can make the flip from instead of
anxiety to curiosity there it opens up all sorts of opportunities for new learning that's so
interesting my my fiancee she's really good at this
because she says, when you say something or when someone in my life says something that I don't
maybe agree with or associate with, or it's not part of my belief system, instead of judging them
and making them wrong, she says she really tries to come from a curious perspective first.
Yeah. Like, well, I'm really fascinated that you think a completely different way than me, as opposed to being like, no, you're bad and wrong. Yeah. And something I
really appreciate and love and respect about her because I don't think I've always done that until
in the last few years I've been like, okay, let me be more curious about this person and why they
think the world is flat or whatever it might be, you know, whatever thing they think of.
And I think when you come from a place of curiosity,
you're also less judgmental and a judgment energy is a kind of a lower state energy. Also,
it's less imaginative and it kind of, it just shrinks your ability to think more openly. So
this is fascinating. I'm curious about, you know, as a, as, as a memory doctor and a neuroscientist,
do you think we can learn more from our mistakes or our failures or shames versus our successes
and wins in life? Which one do we learn better from or have more, you know, opportunity for
imagination and growth from?
Well, we can definitely learn more from our mistakes.
And this goes at the most basic level.
And I say learn more as opposed to master.
There's a really interesting distinction there.
But it's like in our research,
and I mean, there's a number of different ways
of looking at this, but basically,
And I mean, there's a number of different ways of looking at this, but basically, if you look at the way learning happens in the brain, if you just were to just passively record everything, what happens is that you kind of run out of space pretty quickly, at least in you actually tweak the brain to say, hey, look, rather than just trying to grab everything, let me strengthen the connections between neurons that were helpful
in getting me the right answer and weaken the ones that promoted the wrong answer, right?
But you can only get that when you allow yourself to actually generate the wrong answer.
And so I'm kind of dramatically oversimplifying this,
but we have like a whole computer model
of how this happens in the brain.
So like the simplest example
is something called the testing effect, right?
So let's say that I were to say,
okay, so name one function of the amygdala, right?
Let's say if you knew nothing about neuroscience,
you might say, well, I don't know, reading.
And I would go, no, that's not correct.
Actually, one function that you might think about
is it's been implicated in studies of fear conditioning.
I don't know, whatever.
I just said something, right?
By getting it wrong and then being corrected,
then I'm more likely, oh, I don't want to get that wrong again,
so I'm going to remember this. Well, it turns out you do remember the answer better, the right
answer better when I've given you the opportunity to get it wrong, even before you knew what the
answer was. And if... Because I'm like, I don't want to get it wrong, so let me focus on the
right answer or what? There's probably some of that, which is what we would call a metacognitive
thing. It's a change in your way of looking at the learning that it humbles you. So you're a little bit more focused because
people tend to be dramatically overconfident in their memory. But there's another thing,
which is that we think when you generate the wrong answer and then you're confronted between
the difference between the reality of the right answer and the wrong answer, the cell assemblies, so to speak,
the sets of neurons that activate the wrong answer will be less likely to be activated the next time
we're on. And so you're more likely because memories compete with each other in this big
ecosystem. And so if you have this in these set of neurons that are going to activate the wrong
answer and you can wipe those out, you're more likely to activate the right answer.
And so that's why people learn most
under the conditions where they're struggling.
Like if you test yourself,
as opposed to if you restudy the material
over and over again.
So restudying without a test
doesn't allow you to remember as well.
It doesn't allow you to remember as well. It doesn't allow you to remember as well because you've recalled, because when you recall the
information, your memory is never going to be as perfect as the actual answer.
You're always going to be getting a noisy bit of recall.
Even if I recall the right answer, it might take me a little time.
I might have to struggle with it.
And then when I get the right answer, there can be this comparison between my prediction, so to speak, and the reality.
And what I can do is I can learn from that difference so that the next time around,
I'll be more likely to produce the right answer. It's just like if you're trying to learn a new
neighborhood and you're actually driving, you will do better than if you're in the passenger seat.
And you got to take the wrong turn once or twice so you can know where to take the right turn.
Exactly, exactly.
So for someone, you know, as a memory doctor and a neuroscientist, for someone like myself,
who has been attempting to learn Spanish for 25 years, what practices could I start to implement more regularly that would allow me to retain
the language of Spanish or any language better than less?
Well, so there's a lot of people who actually use foreign language words in these studies,
and we have two. And so one thing that you want to do is even before you see it,
try to guess what that word could mean.
Then you get the real English meaning.
And then you go, okay, now that's the real answer.
Then test yourself on it.
But also revisit these things after some time.
You know, so space out your learning experiences.
That's another powerful technique.
Don't exhaust yourself constantly with it.
Don't exhaust yourself constantly with it. Don't cram either. Really try to space it out. And then
another thing is that try to use it in context. Try to give yourself opportunities to speak to
people and give yourself the opportunity to be bad at it. And fail. And fail at it. Interesting.
Yeah. And again, do it in different contexts.
So it's one thing to sit in your house.
Not in a safe environment.
Not in the safe environment.
Because what happens is in your house in front of your laptop, you're great at speaking Spanish.
There's no consequences.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Then you kind of like walk off the plane in Madrid and you're like, all your learning was based
in this one context, so you can generalize it.
And you know, I, yeah, I'll test that
because I've been practicing more and more,
because part of my thing is like, I don't wanna look stupid.
Yeah.
So I'm not gonna attempt it.
So my fiance who speaks Spanish perfectly,
she's from Mexico, you know, I'm always like,
okay, you go ahead and do it.
And you order, you speak for me,
you know, all these different things. But now I'm attempting more and more in unfamiliar situations,
not just with her, not just with her family, but in social settings where I feel completely out of
the box. And I'm just attempting to at least practice a little bit, little phrases here and
there, and just like to fail consistently. The
more I fail consistently, the less afraid I am to fail. Because it doesn't hurt as much when I do
it more frequently. If it happens once and someone's like, oh no, that's not the word.
You're like, oh, I'm an idiot. I forgot this thing. I'm not ready for this. I'm not going
to try it again. You don't feel emotionally safe. And you also learn more from it.
Like there's actually more learning that's taking place, better learning that's taking place.
This is fascinating.
I mean, can you imagine you're an actor, you're about to go onto the set, and you just decide you're going to read the script, but you don't actually rehearse it, right?
I mean, or you're doing a play, right?
play right if you didn't rehearse the play and you just thought okay well i'm here i'm reading these lines this is great and i'm just i i'm seeing all my blocking stuff i'm just gonna do
it right i mean it's insane why would you do that yes and it's like we don't use i think our
educational system education's hard but i do feel like we could do something differently which is
to change people's attitudes about learning that learning is supposed to be easy that we're supposed to be able to just memorize
effortlessly as opposed to saying isn't it nuts that we ask kids to memorize so much and we don't
teach them how to learn so hard i mean it's nuts that we don't do memory 101 in you know for the
first three years expect people to learn how to remember yeah exactly and
then it's like we use tests as a way of saying how good are you as opposed to using tests to
get people to learn in the first place so if i'm getting like straight A's on every test i'm
not really learning nearly as much as if i'm actually trying and I get the wrong answer. And then I've
learned from that test. Now, it may be that I've mastered whatever it is I'm being tested on.
That's why I'm getting a perfect score. But I'm not learning any more from it. There's no point
in my taking this class anymore. You already mastered it.
Exactly. What's the point? You're not growing beyond it.
Yeah. So everyone should be getting
like a B plus constantly then.
This is actually,
yeah,
I mean,
there's actually,
even in machine learning,
this is true,
is that there's kind of
a sweet spot of learning.
I think they call it like,
I think it's the 80-20 rule
or something.
You want to be right
80% of the time
or 20%.
This is interesting.
Yeah.
This is fascinating.
I've got a bunch more questions for you, but I feel like this has been a good start to this conversation with
you. You've got an amazing book called Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold
onto What Matters. And there is, I don't know, 40 or 50 pages of kind of citation and research.
Maybe it's 100 pages. I don't know. That's kind of backing all of the different things that you've researched and talked about in here. I think it might be a
hundred pages of research. It's about one third notes. It's unbelievable. So, you know, you're a
professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of the dynamic memory lab at the
University of California at Davis. You've been doing this for over 25 years. If someone wants to understand
their memories themselves better and how to create better imagination for their future,
I recommend people get this book, Why We Remember. If someone is having trouble unlocking their
memories, check this out. There's lots of different practical tools and advice and wisdom and research
in this book. And I'm just so grateful
that you are doing this work. So I want to acknowledge you for the efforts you have,
for the studies, the research, and your ability to kind of try to simplify, you know, accomplish
things, the mind, the brain, the memories, the past, the future, all these things. And I acknowledge
you for creating this work and for sharing it
so openly in this conversation. This has been really beautiful. There's so many more things
that I want to ask you about, but I want to give people this first to start. Maybe we'll have you
come back on in the future. Happy to do it. And there's so much I'm sure that will unlock for me.
If someone has a question or a follow-up to anything we've talked about here, leave it in
the comments on YouTube or post about it on social media. You are The Memory Doctor on Instagram.
Also, your website, what's your website again? CharanRanganath.com.
CharanRanganath.com. But get this book. It's online. It's in bookstores. Make sure you get
a copy for friends.
This will just be a powerful resource for you in your life. And again, for me,
the School of Greatness is all about helping people improve the quality of their life
in different areas around health, relationships, money, mindset, purpose, mission. And I think
the neuroscience, understanding our minds, who we are, our identities and our stories, all those things can either hurt us or help us based on the tools we use to empower ourselves.
And so I just think this is a beautiful resource to empower ourselves if using these tools appropriately and not sinking back into the past negatively.
So many more things I want to ask you,
but we're going to save this for another part two with you.
I do have two final questions.
Before I dive into it,
is there anything else we can send people to
or anywhere else we should send people to
besides the book, Instagram, the website?
I also have a Twitter account,
Charan Ranganath as well.. John Ranganath on Twitter.
And if you just look me up, you can find it too. Perfect. Yeah.
And that would be another way too,
but the website is a great one and we're going to set up a mailing list and
so I'll be able to hopefully, if I can find time,
I'll be able to find more newsletters. Sure. So yeah. I love this stuff, man.
This is great, John. Thank you.
This is a question I ask everyone towards the end of our conversations.
It's a hypothetical question.
It's called the three truths.
So I'd like you to imagine, again, we're talking about imagination.
So I'd like you to imagine the last day on earth for you, but you get to live as long
as you want to live.
So, you know, AI and science extends our lives, you know, as long as you want, right?
And you get to imagine, you get to create the exact life you want from this moment until the last moment.
Friends, family, relationships, work, career, passions, hobbies, they all come true in a beautiful way.
But for whatever reason on the last day, you have to take all of your work with
you. This book is gone. Anything you've researched and talked about publicly or this conversation,
it's gone from this world. Hypothetical scenario. And on the last day, you get to leave behind
three lessons or three things from everything you've learned in life, whether it be from career,
personal, professional, whatever it might be, spiritual, you get to share three final truths. And this is all
we have to remember you by. What would be those three truths from you? God, this is such a deep
question. I'm feeling so knocked right. But now I'll try. So number one is just kind of a life
lesson that I've learned which is uh sometimes
the worst thing that can happen to you is to get what you want when you want it and i've learned
this so many times because so because i've had times where i wanted to get into this particular
grad school i wanted to get this particular job i wanted to have whatever it was when I wanted it.
And it turned out that I didn't get it. And some other door opened up that was far better than
anything that I had anticipated or imagined, right? So we've been talking about imagining
this abundant future, but let's face it, the world has endless possibilities, right? And so
sometimes I think it's like the world hits you in the face
but it points you in a particular direction when you're done and so i think that's been something
i never ever would have thought i would become a scientist really ever yeah yeah never i mean it's
like to me science was just a bunch of formulas and laws and rules and i don't like laws i don't like rules so it wasn't uh yeah
but it just kind of happened and it happened through a series of of random coincidences and
things that opened me up to a lot of the world that i never would have thought of you know
random coincidences or purposeful synchronicities yeah however you
want to look at it however you want to look at but that's the thing it's like you can find meaning
in these things after the fact right yes and i guess that's the second thing i would say is
cultivate curiosity in your life um maybe i can i can even go further than that. I will say, be curious about things that make you uncomfortable,
or maybe just be more comfortable with discomfort. What I mean by that is, if you look in the field
of memory research in general, what you find is if you want to remember, if you want to learn more, if you want to remember more
accurately, if you want to inoculate yourself against misinformation, you have to, or if you
want to overcome even traumatic events, part of the process of learning involves being able to
challenge your beliefs, challenge your assumptions, but also giving yourself the time
to do these things. It's like Kahneman talked about thinking fast and slow, and a lot of which
you need to remember accurately, a lot of which you need to use memory to make better decisions
involves giving yourself the time. And likewise, these things that we've talked about with error
driven learning, giving yourself the opportunity to make a mistake and actually test yourself on what you think you remember as opposed to just assuming that you remember.
So there's so much about when I wrote the book that came back over and over again about becoming comfortable with discomfort was like another big one.
And then the third thing I'll just say is your hypothetical scenario notwithstanding,
all we're left with is memories.
And so what I mean by this is
this moment is over.
The moment I said moment, that's over.
All we have left is what I talk about it based on a term that Danny Kahneman came up with is the remembering self.
It's not the person who experienced these events, but the person we have when we look back on them.
And I've really taken as part of my life this idea of saying, what are the memories that I want to have one year from now?
Wow.
And really use that as kind of a signpost for, hey that I want to have one year from now? Wow.
And really use that as kind of a signpost for, hey, I've got some time off.
I mean, I never really get time off, but I've got some time where my wife and my daughter have some time off.
What do I want to do?
Well, I know it's going to be a pain to look up Airbnb because I'm going to kill myself
to get the best airfares, blah, blah, blah.
up air bbs i'm going to kill myself to get the best airfares blah blah blah but a memory of taking a week to go to some river and hang out is going to be far more memorable to me than sitting
watching tiktok videos or whatever it would be that i would do right and i think it's like if
you look at it from the perspective that when we look back we'll remember the highs and lows
and everything else is just noise, you know? And
so what are the highs that you want to take with you as opposed to just thinking about everything?
That is a beautiful third truth and kind of point that you just said. What are the memories
I want to have a year from now? I think that's a question if everyone asked that to
themselves right now, they could start to imagine and get intentional about decisions they want to
make over the next three, six, 12 months. Yeah. Okay. A year from now, I want to have this memory.
I want to have this memory of going on this trip with my family. I want to have this memory of
taking time off to go work on this hobby or project to write this book. I want to have this memory of taking time off to go work on this hobby or project to write this book.
I want to have this memory of these shared interactions with friends, family, whatever
it might be.
I want to have this memory of doing a random adventure across the country, whatever it
might be.
I want to have this memory of being uncomfortable and how much I learned about myself in this
process of discomfort. Yeah. For me, I wanna have a memory of going through Mexico City
and being able to talk to people that don't speak English
and being able to have somewhat of a conversation
and be like, wow, I'm so proud of what I overcame
and how I was able to connect with people
with a different language, all these things.
I would have people put in the comments also,
what are the memories that you wanna to have a year from now?
Put that on YouTube or wherever you are watching or listening to this.
John, this is fascinating.
I've got one final question for you, and that is, what's your definition of greatness?
Oh, man.
That is a really tough one.
is really tough one um i guess for me i would say someone who really like can inspire and bring make everyone around them better you know when i think about all the i mean one of the cool things
but what i do is you know i'm not a big in genius. I think there's somebody out there who's better
than me at something. Everyone's better than me at something. No one's better than me at everything,
right? And so it's like, but I'm especially fortunate to be in a field where there's people
who I can get in the room with and I know nothing about what they're talking about and that they'll tolerate me and help me become
better in the process. And I can think of a thousand people in my life like that, who I would
say, this is a great person because every time I spend with them, I come out feeling both that I
come out more knowledgeable and feeling better about myself in that process. Yes.
That's beautiful.
Good to try.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
This is amazing.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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And I want to remind you
if no one has told you lately
that you are loved,
you are worthy,
and you matter.
And now it's time to go out there
and do something great.