Charan Ranganath

Their words

I mean, I do feel like adolescence is much more important than I think people give credit for. I think that there is this kind of a sense the first three years of life is the most important part, but the teenage years are just so important for the brain.

Their words

about this idea that really when you’re older in most societies, your job is no longer to form new episodic memories, it’s to pass on the memories that you already have, this knowledge about the world, what we call semantic memory, to pass on that semantic memory to the younger generations, pass on the culture.

Their words

Almost everyone in the class said that the days were moving by slower. Then I would say, “Okay, so do you feel like the weeks are passing by slower, faster, or the same?” The majority of them said that the weeks were passing by faster. According to the laws of physics, I don’t think that makes any sense, but according to memory, it did because what happened was people were doing the same thing over and over in the same context.

Their words

It’s just this idea that people have about the past can be very useful if it brings you happiness in the present, but if it narrows your worldview in the present, you’re not aware of those biases that you have, it can be toxic either at a personal level or at a collective level.

Their words

One situation is you have people who are very dominant, who just take over the conversation. And basically what happens is the group remembers less from the experience and they remember more of what the dominant narrator says.

Their words

And from what I understand, the research actually shows that they just produce what people want to hear, not necessarily the information that is being looked for.

Their words

So what he concluded was that he called remembering an imaginative construction, meaning that we don’t replay the past, we imagine how the past could have been by taking bits and pieces that come up in our heads.

Their words

Well, I like to say there’s no such thing as true or false memories. It’s like Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, he had a saying that’s like, “I don’t believe in false memories any more than I believe in false songs.” And so the basic idea is that we have these memories that reflect bits and pieces of what happened, as well as our inferences and theories.

Their words

It just kind of vanished, because what happens, I’m creating all these artificial event boundaries. I’m losing all this executive function every time I switch, I’m getting a few seconds slower and I’m catching up mentally to what’s happening.

Their words

For the most part, it’s like these names are just utterly arbitrary, so you have no thing to latch on to. It’s not really a thing that our brain does very well to learn meaningless, arbitrary stuff. So what you need to do is build connections somehow, visualize a connection, and sometimes it’s obvious or sometimes it’s not.

Their words

This fits with some of the studies of chess experts and so forth that it’s not so much that you learn the patterns passively. You learn what to look for. You learn what’s important and what’s not.

Their words

By all accounts, from people who become memory athletes, they weren’t born with some extraordinary memory, but they practice strategies over and over and over again. The strategy that they use for memorizing a particular thing, it can become automatic, and you can just deploy it in an instant.

Their words

So that’s why I think this is a thing that I come back to over and over again, is that you will retain information better if you’re constantly pushing yourself to your limit. If you are feeling like you’re coasting, then you’re actually not learning

Their words

So if you remember this information in different times in different places, it’s more accessible at different times in different places because it’s not overfitted in an AI way of thinking about things. It’s not overfitted to one particular context. But that’s also why the memories that we call upon the most also feel like they’re just things that we read about almost.

Their words

if I just try to do half-an-hour and then later in the day I do half-an-hour, I won’t retain that information as long as if I do half-an-hour today and half-an-hour one week from now. So doing that extra spacing should help me retain the information better.

Their words

is this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it’s maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory.

Their words

What I say in the book is is that you don’t want to remember more, you want to remember better, which means focusing on the things that are important. That’s what our brains are designed to do.