Charan Ranganath: Unlocking the Power of Memory

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. As you've now heard for about 250 times, we are on a mission to make you remarkable. Today's remarkable guest is Dr. Charan Ranganath. He's a distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Davis, and he's the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab. Charan has dedicated over two decades to exploring the intricacies of human memory, and he's employed a variety of methods from brain imaging to computational modeling.
His book, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power To Hold Onto What Matters, offers a remarkable perspective on memory. It not only demystifies the common frustrations of forgetting, but also highlights the critical role memory plays in our daily lives, from learning and decision-making to managing trauma and fostering healing.
The book challenges the traditional understanding of memory. It argues that our brains are not designed to retain every minute detail. Instead, they extract meaningful insights from our experiences to better navigate the present and prepare for the future.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here's the remarkable Charan Ranganath. How many guitars do you have? I see guitars in this picture.
Charan Ranganath:
So if memory serves.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, wait, what do you mean if memory serves? You're the memory guy. I know.
Charan Ranganath:
Okay, so there's some guitars that are basically dismantled or in various states of non-playability, but if I include the ones that just need minor repairs or actually, okay, that would be three acoustic guitars, one bass, and then another two baritone guitars, and then I think three electrics. Something like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I thought this was just going to be a multiple choice question. It wasn't going to be an essay.
Charan Ranganath:
Yeah, I know. It's one of these things. So people who play guitar will understand. So I always skimped and skimped when I was a grad student and because I played music then and I played in bands, but now that I can, I collect them.
But I use them because it's like every guitar brings out different songs from you. They feel different in your hands. So it's not so much the sound of the guitar. With electric, it's like you can make it sound like anything if you know what you're doing. But it's really more that the feel of it. The feel of different guitars brings out different playing in you.
Guy Kawasaki:
To give you a parallel question, which you could probably relate to, because you mentioned surfing in your book. If you asked me how many surfboards do you have, I would have to give you an essay answer too. Depends on how you define I have. Is it I have that I use or I have as trophies on the wall, or I have with my kids that we share? It's not as simple as six acoustics and three bass, but anyway.
Charan Ranganath:
That's right. You need what a thruster. You need a longboard. You need so much stuff.
Guy Kawasaki:
How is your surfing? Have you continued?
Charan Ranganath:
No. Part of it is that I'm a lousy swimmer. Part of it is that it's I am out of shape. Part of it's that I'm very far away. Let's blame it on the fact that I'm far away from the shore. So since I wrote the book and finished it, I have not been surfing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Where do you live?
Charan Ranganath:
I live in Davis, California.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. That's pretty far.
Charan Ranganath:
Yeah, it's not as bad as you might think. If I went to Bolinas, it's probably about a two, two and a half hour drive, two and a half hours, let's say. Parking there is supposedly pretty bad. But it's cold, it's cold water. Are you in Hawaii?
Guy Kawasaki:
No, I'm in Santa Cruz, California or Watsonville, California.
Charan Ranganath:
Oh, you're in Santa Cruz. Okay. Oh, yeah. You have a connection with Hawaii? I'm sorry, I don't know that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, I was born and raised in Hawaii, but I never surfed while I was growing up. I came to California, and I started at age sixty. So you're not sixty. How old are you? Forty?
Charan Ranganath:
Wait, did you say age sixteen?
Guy Kawasaki:
Sixty, six-zero.
Charan Ranganath:
Six-zero. Oh my god, you look great.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's the beauty of high res cameras and AI. So I got to tell you a short story to get this rolling.
Charan Ranganath:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm from Hawaii. My family and I, we go to Hawaii probably every year, once a year. And when you go to Hawaii, you have the stereotypical great surfing sessions. You go to the lūʻau, you go to all the great restaurants and all that stuff.
What the Hawaii Visitors Bureau wants you to know. But one year we stayed in a place called Hawaii Kai, which is about fifteen miles from Waikiki. And on New Year's Eve, the guy who owned the house took us in this power boat to watch the fireworks on New Year's Eve from the water.
And little did we know that a small craft warning happened while we're out there. Going there was fine, but coming back got really rough and people started throwing up, and it was awful. They thought they were going to die. And they're really throwing up over the side and all going crazy.
And I tell you this story because now when we talk about Hawaii, we don't talk about the great food, the great surfing. We talk about the trip from hell. Okay? So now you're the memory guy. Why do we remember what we remember? Why do we focus on something so bad at the time as like now brings us great joy?
Charan Ranganath:
Yeah, I have a few stories like that in my book too, which is stories of things where everything went totally wrong. And I always like to say that if something bad happens to you, it's not worth it unless there's a good story you get out of it. I suspect you live by similar philosophy in life. But I think the two things that come from these experiences, one is they're emotional, and our emotionally intense experiences are going to be the ones that we remember.
There are certain chemicals in the brain that are released during intensely emotional experiences, times where we're scared or times where we're in moments of desire or attachment, stress. And so those chemicals, we call them neuromodulators, they actually promote plasticity and enable memories to stick around and be more resilient. So that's part of it. I think another part of it is that you have something that's memorable and emotional and you want to share it with people.
So if it's not something truly traumatic that's associated with shame, you probably will share those experiences and sometimes start commiserating about them. But then they can also be used as almost like a little brag that you survived it, as that becomes now, every time you tell that story, it becomes more memorable. Actually you strengthen that memory itself just by virtue of retrieving it over and over again.
Now, you might even embellish it more and more. I imagine you have a long version of this story that you tell people after a couple of beers or something. And the long version, I'm sure there's a lot of embellishments that come into it. And the more times you embellish, the more of those details can become incorporated in the memory too. Those experiences that are emotionally intense, but we get a good story out of it, sometimes they become, at some point, more of a story than they are a memory.
Guy Kawasaki:
It started off as rough seas, and it's already progressed to small craft warning and next step is hurricane. I can see the slope of this line already.
Charan Ranganath:
It's like that movie A Perfect Storm. I'm picturing Mark Wahlberg on the boat with you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I want the Rock to play me. Okay?
Charan Ranganath:
You could play you, man.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you answered why we remember what we remember, but now why do we forget what we forget?
Charan Ranganath:
So forgettable experiences are ones in which the memories are just like every other experience we have. What I mean by this is that memories in the brain compete with each other. And many times when we forget, it's because these memories are drowned out by other memories that overlap with them and are similar to them. And there's nothing remarkable about them.
There's nothing emotionally intense, there's nothing important, relevant to our goals, and there's no surprises involved. And so all those factors can lead us to essentially forget about them. And that's a good thing, right? Think of all the temporary passwords, the people who you meet in passing who you'll never meet again.
No offense, but you meet a TSA agent while you're going through, you're nice to them, they have one line, but you don't really need to carry that information with you. That's what I'm talking about. And those memories, it's hard to reverse engineer why did you forget them. Right?
And maybe there's something in there so that if you met that TSA agent again, it would be a little bit easier to memorize their name and remember their face the second time around. I don't know. Many of those things we just don't know. But basically the kinds of factors that make something forgettable or unimportance, familiarity, they're just not novel, predictable and emotionally bland.
Guy Kawasaki:
It sounds like I'm bringing back TSA trauma to you, but okay.
Charan Ranganath:
I just got back from Seattle a couple of days ago, but it wasn't a traumatic one. It was actually a nice experience, but I could not remember the TSA agents that I dealt with, for the life of me. Actually I do.
So this is a great example. The one thing I remember was there was an extremely colorful guy who was near the conveyor belt and he just kept saying, "Okay, don't forget to put this inside, put your electronics in a separate crate." But he was doing it in this way that was almost like theatrical, and it just struck me. That's what I remember from my TSA experience. And if it wasn't for that guy, I would not have any memory of it, I'm sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. It's like when you see a traffic cop having really lots of fun. Right?
Charan Ranganath:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
Explain to me, are things like remembered and then forgotten? What's the baseline? Do you remember and then you forget, or you forget and then you have to recall? What's going on there? Are we predisposed to forget or predisposed to remember?
Charan Ranganath:
This is a very hard question to answer because it depends on what it is we're talking about. So what I would say is, on average we're predisposed to forget. And what I mean by this is research shows that if you give people a bunch of meaningless information that they have to memorize, about little less than two-thirds of it will be forgotten by the next day.
How that translates though into real-world events is a little bit harder to say. But on average I would argue that, yeah, we forget most. And here's one way in which we can answer this question. Later on you say, "Hey, do you remember that really amazing interview you did with this memory researcher?" So then you go, "Oh yeah." And you describe it, and you can describe that event in about two minutes, but then at that point you're going to run out of details to talk about. Right?
So it's not a literal replay of however long we're going to spend talking. It's really reduced version of that. There's a lot of details, exact words that I'm saying, exact things that are going on in the background, sentences, even several minutes, they're just going to be dropped.
Guy Kawasaki:
So when I'm asked about this interview in a year, I'm going to say, "Oh, that's the guy with all the guitars."
Charan Ranganath:
And then you'll go, "What was he talking about again? I can't remember. Oh yes, that's what we talked about. We talked about forgetting."
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, but when people ask you about interviewing with me, you're going to say, "Oh, that's the guy who sent me the socks." You're not going to remember else's.
Charan Ranganath:
That's exactly right. I have already forgotten many of the podcast interviews that I've, but I will not forget the man who sent me those great socks. And the microphone too.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't care what it takes to stand out, as long as I do.
Charan Ranganath:
No, this has been a lot of fun already. This is a very memorable interview. Much more memorable than some others.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, you say it to all the podcasters. But anyway.
Charan Ranganath:
And I mean it.
Guy Kawasaki:
On a slightly more serious topic, based on your book, I must say that I am not too confident in witness testimony. So when you read about criminal cases and it's ten years old and they have eyewitnesses, it's hard to have faith in what they're saying, isn't it?
Charan Ranganath:
I think it depends. What I hope to convey in the book was that you can't look at any of these things in memory as an all or none phenomenon. In the case of eyewitness testimony, it's not like I'm telling people, "Oh, ignore it's all unreliable." Nor would I say that it's like you should just blindly trust a confident witness. Let's say if you and I became friends, and hopefully we will, because I need some serious surf instruction. I have a feeling you're the man to do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
And I need guitar lessons.
Charan Ranganath:
So let's say I go visit you at Santa Cruz a bunch of times. We'll start hanging out, we become pals. I teach you a little guitar, you teach me a little surfing. And so next thing you know, I see you rob a bank or something like that. So the policeman say, "Okay, so who robbed the bank?" I'll say, "It was Guy Kawasaki." And I will be very confident, and I'll be pretty accurate, because I know you, and so I have a very good memory of who you are.
I'm hopefully not going to mistake you for somebody who looks like you. But on the other hand, if it were somebody who I didn't know. My wife actually says this to me that I cannot tell faces apart. She'll say this about anybody. If you look at the literature, for instance, there's a big factor called the Other Race Bias where essentially people have a harder time recognizing faces of people of other races. And it's not necessarily a prejudice thing, it can be just a lack of exposure to people of other races.
It's also the fact that I think they're stated to suggest that people, when they look at someone from another race, they actually don't pay attention to what makes them unique as much as the factors that help them identify the race. Whereas when they look at people of their own race, they're able to actually see them as unique face, which is sad, but also fascinating and revealing.
Let's say somebody is trying to do an other race identification and it's very quick, they just get one flash. And then let's say they look at the mugshot and then they're being asked to look at it again and again. And then at some point, third time around, they're like, "I think that's it." So then they do another lineup. They're like, "Oh, I think that's it."
And then they really, the third time around, they're really sure. At that point, that's a highly unreliable testimony because people can essentially create a memory for seeing this person rob the bank, when actually they just saw this person in the mugshot book, and they may have looked a little bit like the person who robbed the bank.
And as they look at it more and more, they become more and more confident. So there's a case like this in literature that I describe in the book, and in fact there's many other cases out there that I did not describe in the book, but this is a remarkably common thing. And you'll even see this with AI face recognition systems, that they will also have these biases, especially with people of color.
And the reason the AI systems have this problem is because they're using data curated by humans, and the internet has these biases baked in. So it's an issue, period, when it comes to face recognition of strangers. There's more to it. I could go on and on, but that's just one example.
Guy Kawasaki:
You dedicate quite a bit of space to the creation of false memories. And I got the impression that in the hands of a skilled or skillful or manipulative person, that person can create false memories in people without too much difficulty. Did I get that right?
Charan Ranganath:
I would say that we don't know why, but some people seem to be more susceptible than other people. There does seem to be some evidence that age, and so children and the elderly are a little bit more susceptible to false memory creation.
There's other factors like if you're under the influence of alcohol, if you're just tired and stressed out, all these things that reduce your ability to check yourself would be the factors that predispose you. Under an ideal circumstance, no, many people would not be susceptible to having an entirely false memory created. But I would argue that most people are susceptible to having their memory corrupted.
And what I mean by that is that maybe you could ask me a question about a crime and you give me a leading question. "When you saw this person rob the bank, were they in a blind rage?" And let's say they just seemed a little bit, you saw someone and they're just walking into the bank, and they just look a little, they're frowning or something like that.
You might now remember it more like they were really ready to go off and they're unhinged. And that's the power of imagination, because when we remember the past, we get all these little bits and pieces, but then we generate a story, and that story reflects our beliefs in the present.
Guy Kawasaki:
Aren't you telling me that a skillful detective or a skillful prosecutor or a skillful criminal attorney can use these things to their advantage?
Charan Ranganath:
I would argue that they do. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's intentional to create a false memory, but I think a good defense or prosecuting attorney will want to manipulate their witnesses to say what will be needed to convince a jury. There's a technique that I talk about in the book called the Read Technique, and it's part of a standard manual for interrogation, and it contains basically the recipe for getting people to confess to crimes that they never even committed.
It's definitely those kinds of questioning approaches that can lead people to get severe distortions in their memory. But not everybody uses those techniques. I don't, in fact, know how many people use those techniques, but it is out there for sure that somebody can. And keep in mind, by the way, this is not just limited to prosecutors.
So one of the things I talk about in the book is an example of how George Bush Jr. was going up in a primary against John McCain. And so his campaign started doing these phone polls where they would call up people at their homes and say, "Hey, do you remember when John McCain said this? What do you think of it?" And they implanted things in the questions that weren't true.
And so what happened is that people who did the polls were more likely to think it was true. So they spread this false information about John McCain, and had to do his tax policies and this incredibly racist story of him fathering a black child illegitimately. And these stories ended up spreading just because they were in the question that was being asked in this poll. That wasn't even studied by memory researchers until years later.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Charan Ranganath:
I suspect that in the research community we're catching up to where people are actually using these techniques already in the real world.
Guy Kawasaki:
You also mentioned positive sense of that quizzes can help you learn as opposed to just help you test. Right? This is the same concept.
Charan Ranganath:
Absolutely. If you're trying to say, learn a new language, for instance, or even memorize someone's name, the intuition would be, "Oh, I need to study it. I need to just say it over and over in my mind, say the name." Or if I'm trying to learn a word, I can just memorize the Spanish word just by saying it over and over again. I go, “palabra”, just Spanish for “word”, actually. That's not true.
The better way is actually to test yourself. And one of the coolest findings out there is if I test myself on a word or a name before I even get it, testing myself even before I know the answer, can actually help me remember it better.
And so we have a computer model of how this works, and what happens in the computer model is, when you have some degree of error in the testing, that's when you really get some benefit, because then what happens is the brain can suppress the wrong answer, which helps the right answer pop out more in memory.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, let me get this straight. So you're saying if you're trying to learn a new subject, you take a quiz before you know anything about it to prep you?
Charan Ranganath:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Charan Ranganath:
Now what I would do is prep on each thing that you're trying to learn though, but do the prep test. You don't want to wait until the end after you spent an hour studying. And then you basically don't want to do it, give yourself a quiz on the entire thing that an hour later come back to it. You want to get some feedback fairly immediately.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's an eerie coincidence, but Madisun and I are just about to release a book called Think Remarkable, and this is the Remarkable People Podcast. So we have a lot of knowledge about how people can become remarkable. And we're also creating a course with Canva about how to be remarkable.
And the people who design the course, they have quizzes inside each section really simultaneous with actually presenting the information. And they said, "Yeah, these quizzes help people learn." I said, "How can they help people learn? They don't know the answer yet." And then bada-bing bada-bang, one week later I'm hearing from a scholar that yes, it's true. There you go. God works in strange ways. Yeah.
Charan Ranganath:
That's exactly right.
Guy Kawasaki:
I see in your book and many other books, they're always talking about MRIs, right? So they show a person this and they look at the MRI and they say, "Okay, this is where the prefrontal cortex spiked and this proves that and that." Is this all bullshit? Tell me everybody's going to an MRI and they're proving that this does that.
You look at an image of this, it spikes this. Everything is an MRI. Is an MRI so reliable that I could show the MRI result to a scientist and the scientist could say, "Oh, I can tell you what caused that spike," as opposed to show the person this and then prove that the MRI do that? Is MRI predictive?
Charan Ranganath:
So you're actually asking me the method that I've used in my research for the past twenty-five years, is it all bullshit?
Guy Kawasaki:
You should be able to defend it.
Charan Ranganath:
Oh no, you're absolutely right. No, actually the question is very astute. Can you just look at an MRI scan and can it be predictive? And the answer is, in some circumstances, yes.
For instance, what people are starting to do is to use machine learning techniques where if somebody is watching a movie, or even if somebody is remembering a movie, you can train computer models that relate the brain activity to the things that people are seeing and thinking about and so forth. And then in theory, you could present new things to the person and be able to generate a prediction of what it is they're thinking about, what it is they're remembering.
Now that requires a lot of data that may need to be person specific, and right now we're still in the Stone Age of doing that for anything that's remotely interesting. But it can be predictive. A lot of the work that I talk about in the book, though, is more of an average of people. This is a lot of the psychology and the neuroscience of everything. The neuroscience of everything is averaging across people and across animals and so forth.
And so we don't yet have a great idea of what makes you different from me. And that is something I think that's the big gaping hole in our research. Then sometimes people do experiments and they just don't have the richness to be able to do what you said, which is to predict what you're going to do. But I think we can do it. And that's one of the goals that I have in my research for the next few years.
We're developing computer models of memory, and we are using machine learning tools in our MRI research. And so that would be the hope. I know we keep giving you these long answers, but I should just add, MRI is just one tool. We're measuring blood flow in the brain, which is very slow.
There's other tools like where we can record directly from the brain in patients who have epilepsy, for instance, they stick electrodes in their brains for surgery, where we can read out data in the millisecond scale. And that's the time which brain activity really happens. And so I think in an ideal world, we would be able to do that in general. So MRI is one technique. It's very crude, but it can be very powerful in the right circumstances.
Guy Kawasaki:
Please don't take this personally because quite frankly, nonfiction books, business book writers like me, we have no proof of what we say is true either. So don't sweat that.
Charan Ranganath:
No, no, I really am not. I was giving you a hard time.
Guy Kawasaki:
But can I, just one more detail? So I have had something called Meniere's disease, which is deafness, tinnitus, and vertigo. And when you first try to get diagnosed, they stick you in an MRI. And this MRI is this thing where you're in this huge thing, and you're in this little tunnel and it sounds like a jackhammers going off in your head.
Is that the kind of MRI you're saying that we show people movies, and we measure their MRIs, they're sitting in the middle of this thing with a jackhammer in their head watching the movie? Is that what you're telling me?
Charan Ranganath:
It's remarkable, yes. Actually every kind of scan we do, let's say if I want to get a picture of the structure of your brain or I want to look at the white matter in your brain, or I want to be able to measure fluctuations of brain activity, they all involve different kinds of, what you call, pulse sequences, which are different ways of using the magnets to measure things in the brain.
And I've had people in my lab who've been scanned so many times, they actually can tell what it is we're scanning based on the unique sounds of the pulse sequence. So how do we do experiments? I got to say, these are remarkable questions.
I never get these questions, so it's great. So when people are lying in an MRI scanner, they actually look up and there's a little mirror, and then they can see in the mirror outside of the magnet, we have a video screen, and the video screen will play the movie.
And they have these noise-canceling earbuds that we put in. We put earplugs around them to keep them insulated from the sound of the magnet, and so people can hear them. We have a noise-canceling microphone that people can use to speak to us while the scans are taking place. So it's not cheap, it's not easy, but we can do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so I've had maybe two or three MRIs in my life, and I will tell you, an MRI is the most disturbing thing you can have without pain. Do you pay these people a lot to do this or are they just masochist, they're just sitting in a tunnel with a jackhammer going off in their brain?
Charan Ranganath:
No, we pay people, but not all that much. And first of all, you should have ear protection. So the jackhammer-ness, the experiments we're doing, most of it just sounds like beeping, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It just depends. Some people have claustrophobia, for instance, and can't stand it. I have trouble staying awake. I feel like if I could, I would probably sleep in an MRI scanner better than I would in my house. It could be so comfortable.
Guy Kawasaki:
If I ever come to Davis, we will try an MRI. Okay.
Charan Ranganath:
All right.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right. Now, why do some memories return out of the blue seemingly?
Charan Ranganath:
Sometimes what happens is that you haven't forgotten a memory, but you just don't have the right way to access it or find it. And what I mean by that is you can think of the world as having a bunch of cues in it. They could be like a key that unlocks your access to that memory and helps you time travel back to that point. But without the key, you don't actually have any access.
So in the case of memory, we find that things like music, for instance, everyone tells me that, almost everyone tells me that music, they'll hear a song from their childhood and boom, it brings back some memory that just seemed dormant before that. Smells are another one or being in a particular place.
I bet you when you go back to your hometown in Hawaii, you probably have memories that pop into your head that you didn't think about while you were here in Santa Cruz, right? Places, smells, anything that's unique to a time in your life can be the cues that allow you to travel back to those times.
Guy Kawasaki:
But I thought you said by default we're forgetting. So what does it mean to forget if all of a sudden you can smell something and it comes back? It wasn't forgotten? Is it like a hard disk where you reformat and it's gone?
Charan Ranganath:
Yeah, so I wrote about this, actually, in an editorial, which is that there's different kinds of forgetting. There's forgetting that I would say is the benign kind, which we call retrieval failure. Where it's not that the memory isn't there, it's just that you don't have the right cues to find it. And this happens a lot as we get older. Then there's the big F, forgetting, where you just lost the memory, or you never really adequately formed the memory in the first place.
That also happens to all of us, and it happens a little more as you get older, but it's not much worse than you'd think. If it happens very quickly and it happens all the time, that's a sign that you have a memory disorder. But what you're talking about is the classic retrieval failure case, where you don't have any awareness it's there because you don't have the right cue to get you back.
Guy Kawasaki:
And is there a purposeful way to get the cue or it's just happenstance, you smell the same durian or something?
Charan Ranganath:
There is a way for sure. So all of our experiences in life, all of these events, are basically encoded in our brain according to the time and place they happen. That's in a place of part of the brain called the hippocampus. And this part of the brain just blindly associates things according to when and where they happen. But what you can do is you can put yourself in the mindset.
So if you just close your eyes now and imagine the sounds of the birds and the smell of the tropical flowers and the ocean rushing in on the beach, you could probably remember some of that Hawaiian vacation that you took and be able to pull up memories that go beyond just simply that time where you almost drowned in the tidal wave on New Year's Eve.
Guy Kawasaki:
When I smell barf, it reminds me of that night. How's that?
Charan Ranganath:
No, I'm trying to go for more pleasant memories of that trip.
Guy Kawasaki:
The answer I've been hoping to get since I read your book is this. It seems to me that you're saying that the human mind has the ability to remember important things and that's why we forget stuff so that we're not distracted or our hard disk is not all used up. But I'm telling you that where my car keys are and what my hotel room number is, I know is important, but how come I cannot remember those things? They're important.
Charan Ranganath:
They're very important, and it is one of the most frustrating things. But the things that we forget about that are important, the problem is that we have so much competition in memory.
So if you're not disciplined, and I'm definitely not disciplined, and you put your glasses or your keys or your cell phone in random places, as soon as you get distracted, what happens is that you have now multiple places where you have memories for different places that you put your keys at different times. So the issue isn't where did I put my keys, it's where did I last put my keys?
Because there's all these other memories of where you put your keys yesterday. If you're going around traveling, giving talks to big audiences, which I'm sure you do, it's not what's the number of my hotel room, but what's the number of today's hotel room as opposed to the one I had last week?
And these are fairly arbitrary bits of information and they're competing with all these other similar memories. And often we don't pay enough attention to them even though they are important. And all those factors lead you to get something that's highly forgettable. And this is more lowercase f, benign forgetting like retrieval failures.
Guy Kawasaki:
Tell me if this is what you call a scheme. Listeners scheme is a positive in this sense. It's not like a Donald Trump thing, this is a scheme to help you remember. So I used to go to SFO all the time, once a week I used to park in SFO, and I came up with this scheme that no matter what, I would always park on the bottom floor.
Even if it was the opposite side of the parking lot, I would always park on the bottom floor. That way whenever I returned I would always know it's on the bottom floor. You don't have to remember all the floors and all the colors. Is that what you call a scheme?
Charan Ranganath:
Are you talking about a schema?
Guy Kawasaki:
A schema, sorry. Yeah.
Charan Ranganath:
That's okay. I do like scheme. I wish memory receptors used more terms like that. Yes. Actually, so you could think of what you're talking about as a way of organizing information and memory. So you just have a rule that you use that you can go back to again and again.
And so my guess is if you just have that rule, you've simplified the playing field a lot, and that makes it a lot easier to remember where you park your car while it's on the ground floor. And because you've reduced the amount that you have to remember, it makes it easier to pull that information up and that's the key to schemas in general is there a tool for reducing the amount of information you need to memorize.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. And so now you might as well explain chunking for us too.
Charan Ranganath:
To understand chunking it first helps to just keep in mind that we have only a limited amount of information that you can hold in your mind at a given time. If you tried to spell my name out, you just didn't have any idea, and I just gave you all the letters of my name, you'd have a really hard time keeping all those letters in mind.
But if I tell you just my name is Charan Ranganath and you just have two things to keep in mind, that's not so bad. But those things don't have a whole lot of meaning, so you might actually store as Cha-ran Ran-ga-nath. So it's five things. But once you've read my book and once we've talked and become friends, now it's just one chunk in your mind.
So the same amount of information could be just far too much to hold in mind, or just the max of what you can hold in mind, or something that you can easily hold in mind just depending on how much you're able to lock it in with your prior knowledge. Does that make sense?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes. Yes. Okay. So tell me that you have become dependent on Apple tags.
Charan Ranganath:
I have bought them, but I have not yet remembered to actually set them up. You're asking this question is the first time in months that have thought about it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Apple tags, really, they do tell you where your keys are and they beep for you, and they really help. As someone who is key location challenged, I'll tell you, it's a game changer.
Charan Ranganath:
I actually bought some for my glasses because glasses are the one that I lose all the time, and I just haven't taken the time to set them up.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so now many creativity experts say that it really helps to be creative and create memories, blah, blah, blah. If you write things down longhand, not type them, you have to write them down longhand. Is that like an old wives tales or there's some truth to that?
Charan Ranganath:
I don't know. I don't study creativity. I know somebody who's really into this research and I would ask her. We can't tell you for creativity.
Guy Kawasaki:
But wait, what about remembering things? Is it better to type notes in a class or write them down?
Charan Ranganath:
Actually, there's a study on this that was done that said that it was better to write them down, but then another study did not replicate that finding. So it's not a hundred percent clear. But I think the principle that you can see based on everything that's been done in memory research is, if I were to just write down literally every word you say and just barf it onto a piece of paper, that's not helpful, and in fact it can be counterproductive.
But if I'm thinking about what you say and I go, "Aha, this is the remarkable part of what he's telling me," and I write that down or I use my notes to say, "Hey, wait a minute, he mentioned this thing about the surfing," and then we talked about it previously. "This is something that he really likes to talk about." And I just focus on those parts that are the most meaningful.
Now I'm actually enhancing my memory because the writing is focusing me on what's unique about this moment. And that's the key for everything, whether it's writing notes, typing notes, taking pictures, it's really all about focusing you on what's unique in the moment for memory.
And I imagine for writing down ideas, it's a similar kind of thing, because part of writing things down by hand means slowing it down. I don't know about you, but I've almost forgotten how to hand write. So it's so slow for me. And so I really have to think about what I'm going to write. And I think if people are deliberative, that's what really helps.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. You discussed this person who became a memory superstar, the world's greatest memory competition or whatever it is. So what explains people like that?
Charan Ranganath:
So there's this whole group of people out there called memory athletes, and they'll get into these competitions where they're being asked to just memorize the order of a deck of cards, for instance, or a series of names and faces that they're just endless. And people learn these strategies. The interviews that I've seen with memory athletes, none of them say, "Oh, I've been blessed with a great memory from birth." They don't say that.
What they say is that "I'm just like anybody else, but I just learned these strategies and I practice them over and over again." And I would argue in fact that we all have this capability that we use, but we just don't realize it.
So an example that I give in the book that I just love is LeBron James for instance. So LeBron says he has a photographic memory. And there's these gorgeous YouTube videos of him actually calling out, point by point, everything that's going on in several plays in a row in a basketball game that he just played. And it just corresponds beautifully.
You can see the video side by side of his own recollections, and they're remarkably detailed. But the thing is that he has such a beautiful memory for the game, such a beautiful knowledge of the game and so much expertise. And you can see this in chess experts.
You can see this in bird experts. It's that expertise basically gives you these rich schemas that you can use to encode less. You actually can simplify the memory problem dramatically. And so that's what memory athletes do is they learn strategies for memorizing decks of cards and so forth, that allow them to effortlessly pick up this new information.
Guy Kawasaki:
And in the case of LeBron James, is it the fact that LeBron James is a great basketball player so he can have such detailed memories, or he has a great memory so he can become a great basketball player?
Charan Ranganath:
I believe that he's put in the time to learn and to study the game, and I would argue that he's extraordinarily intelligent and capable of deploying that information.
Guy Kawasaki:
I only wish that I was in an MRI when the outage occurred. You could see what happens to my hippocampus when a podcast goes off the rails like that.
Charan Ranganath:
I actually bet I would have seen a huge spike in activity.
Guy Kawasaki:
There was definitely no huge spike in internet access.
Charan Ranganath:
Maybe we have to start scanning you while you're doing podcast interviews. That would be a lot of fun.
Guy Kawasaki:
That would be a little scary here. Luckily we're going to see what we get. Who knows? But I have backup recording in real time here locally, so that should not be anything too bad for us. So we were talking about memory superstars, and they're normal people, but they have developed these techniques.
So my last question is, I think a lot of times when people see winners of the spelling bee or winners of this memory test, they equate that ability to regurgitate or recall facts. With intelligence, a good speller is intelligent or someone who can tell you the order of a deck of cards. Does that mean that person is smart or just can regurgitate stuff?
Charan Ranganath:
I believe that the concept of intelligence is stupid. When you actually think about it as a neuroscientist, it just makes no sense. Now, there are people I know who believe in it in the field of neuroscience. But getting back to your question, I think that no, I would not use the ability to remember things as an index of memory.
I think that there are correlations between what people do on tests of IQ and people's ability to remember certain facts and so forth and their ability to learn. But part of it too is how interested are you? How capable are you of insulating yourselves from the distractions?
How much are you willing to follow directions? And that's all part of it. So you could find somebody who seems like they have a terrible memory, or they seem like they're not very intelligent, put them in the right context and all of a sudden they seem a lot better.
Maybe I've bought into the whole Adam Grant hidden potential thing, but I feel like there's a lot that we don't know about people, and I would definitely not encourage anyone to look at somebody who's struggling to remember something and say that person's not intelligent. People can often remember everything but understand nothing. So it's not necessarily that the two go together.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, but wouldn't you say that so much of standardized tests is built on memory? To remember facts. Who scored higher on a standardized test or an IQ test? Does that really test intelligence?
Charan Ranganath:
There's certain kinds of memory which would be called semantic memory, which is your knowledge about facts, for instance, knowledge about the world. And that is what's called crystallized intelligence, and that is measured on some IQ test, but it's different from what people call fluid intelligence, which is this ability to control distractions and stay focused and keep a lot of information in your mind at a given time.
And those abilities tend to change throughout our lifetime, which is why they call it fluid. And that information is less tied to measures of memory, but people who are higher in fluid intelligence tend to do better on tests of memory.
Guy Kawasaki:
So this opens up a whole can of worms because why remember facts in a world where there's LLMs and stuff? The fact is now so readily available. So what does intelligence mean going forward in a world of AI?
Charan Ranganath:
I love to talk about AI. You're going to have to call me back on the show to talk about this again because I could go on ad nauseam. I hear all these engineers go on about how AI is reached a point, LLMs are like human intelligence and blah, blah, blah. It's just they learn in a way that requires gobs of data and tons of electrical power.
So if you think about the carbon footprint of Chat GPT for instance, it's huge. Estimates of the human brain suggests that we use maybe something on the order of ten to twenty watts. It's just orders of magnitude less, right? So our brains are designed for efficiency. It's always less is more. And so my phone has a photographic memory. I don't process the information that's important, I process the information that's meaningful. And I can deploy that information extraordinarily quickly.
Chat GPT is trying to predict the next word. I'm trying to predict what's your point? I'm trying to go to not the next word, I'm trying to think about what's the end point here. Where are we going with this conversation? It's a completely different ballgame. And one of the things I've become interested in is people talk about, "Oh, generative AI is going to kill human creativity. And who knows where things will go."
But humans create from a weird array of lived experiences and interacting in the world. What I mean by that is you've actually surfed. Chat GPT hasn't surfed. It's like Charlie, don't surf. So Chat GPT hasn't surfed. Your memory of surfing will be different. And if you were to incorporate that in a story, you can do so in a way that reflects your lived experience.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my goodness, this was a fun interview. I love when you can ask an expert like Charan really practical questions. And as you can tell, I'm very curious about memory and forgetting and schemas and schemes and chunking and taking notes. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of Remarkable People with Charan Ranganath. I can even remember his name, Charan Ranganath.
And if you ever get an MRI, man, I feel for you, because it is a very disturbing experience. And if this episode doesn't help you that much, then if I were you, I would buy Apple tags. And don't forget to set them up. Attach them to your keys, your wallet, your laptop. I will even give you an official Guy Kawasaki power tip for Apple tags, which is you go and buy what's called adhesive patches for glucose monitoring. This is a little piece of adhesive that's round and you can put your Apple tag right in the middle of it, and it's meant to stick things on your arm.
But it's great to stick on your laptop and in your wallet and on little things. That's a power tip you get for listening to Remarkable People. You'll not get that tip any place else in podcasting. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Like I said, I hope you learned something, and now it's time to thank the Remarkable People Team. And that would be Madisun Nuismer, producer and co-author of Think Remarkable. Do not forget to buy and read Think Remarkable. There will be a test later. And then there's Tessa Nuismer, our ace researcher. There's Shannon Hernandez and Jeff Sieh, our sound design mavens. And then there's Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura and Fallon Yates.
We are the Remarkable People team, and we're helping you make a difference and remember that you did. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.