There’s a cliché that doctors at parties are always being buttonholed when people find out their interesting specialties. Spare a thought, then, for memory expert Charan Ranganath, director of the memory and plasticity programme at the University of California, Davis. Because everyone is interested in – if not downright worried about – their memories.
“Nine times out of 10, people will say, ‘Oh, you should study me. I have a really bad memory,’” says Ranganath. “But with the 10th out of 10 I get, ‘Oh, I’ve got a great memory’, or occasionally, ‘I don’t remember unless I can visualise something. Do you know anything about that?’ There are interesting questions.”
Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, comes at such questions differently from most of us. He’s not concerned about remembering more. In fact, he has turned down requests to write self-help books on the subject. “There are lots of good books out there on the topic. I wanted to say: ‘Well, what’s optimal for memory in the first place?’ And to get to that, you have to understand what memory is for.”
Which you might have thought you knew already. But not quite. Ranganath’s theory will be a comfort to the forgetful. “You’ll never remember everything. So, if your expectation is that you’re supposed to, that’s probably off. People don’t necessarily try to remember in the way that our brain was optimised to do, and so that makes it harder and unnecessarily frustrating.”
In fact, we are designed to forget, he says. Forgetting isn’t bad, as long as you can remember what you need to. And he wants his new book, Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us to change the way people think about what their memory should be doing for them. It’s a book full of startling but practical conclusions about … um, oh, you know.
Ranganath is specific about his intentions: “I would like people to first of all see the way memory gets into their lives in so many places, whether it’s decisions, whether it’s plans, whether it’s creative activities, as well as, of course, the day-to-day things like finding your keys.”
We Can Train Ourselves
Ranganath’s parents emigrated from India to the US when he was a year old – so, of course, he has no memory of that event, but “for my parents, this was an interesting memory thing. When they left India, they were pretty young – my mum was 18. Their memories got crystallised at that point. The period of adolescence to young adulthood is so important to people’s memories. So, every time we would go back to India, [they would notice] a lot of change.”
His family’s story was the opposite of the populist narrative about immigrants being a drain on the system. “My dad was getting a PhD in mechanical engineering. And then, when my mum was ready to give birth, she went back to India to be taken care of by her family because they didn’t have health insurance.” His mother “didn’t get her college degree, but she worked in retail in computers very early on, in the 80s, then worked all the way up, co-ordinating networks and marketing”.
But there was pressure on the young Ranganath to succeed. “You either became an engineer or a doctor or you were homeless. I was fully expected to become an engineer.”
He had bad school study habits, which he thinks were probably due to ADHD, but he dutifully began studying engineering at college, “and I hated it. I just couldn’t pay attention, no matter how hard I tried, because I wasn’t interested in it.
“I ended up taking a couple of psychology classes, which is what many people in college do when they’re confused. At some point, I realised this was what I wanted to do, because I was interested in this idea of what makes people tick.”
Which eventually led to the Big Idea behind the new book: we forget because we need to prioritise what’s important, and our brain does that for us. But is this something we have to train ourselves to do, or do we just have to go with what our brain decides for us?
“We can train ourselves,” says Ranganath, “but we revert to what our brain is designed to think is important. Things that are surprising, new emotional experiences – those are the things that we tend to remember. And there are things you pay attention to that also can be prioritised. The problem is that we’ve got so much going on, and we switch back and forth and get distracted. A big thing people can do is create more focused environments.”
Do not pick up your phone and check it while reading a magazine story, for instance.
Furthermore, each time we remember something, we remember it slightly differently. We might emphasise one element of an event over another – depending for instance, on who we are telling the story to – and each memory is like an increasingly faded copy of a copy of a copy.
False confessions
Knowledge about memory is increasing rapidly, thanks to the development of functional MRI and what it tells us about what the brain is doing at any given time. “It is so exciting to be able to look at a picture of someone’s brain and say, ‘Here’s what’s lighting up.’”
One of the most startling experiments described in the book demonstrates how easy it is to instil fake memories in people, which has obvious implications for, among other things, false confessions in criminal cases. “A person is being interrogated, and information is fed to them by the questioner, and they’re under duress and not sleeping, so their whole ability to monitor the accuracy of their memory is bad. They’re being fed this misinformation and asked these questions over and over again. And then every time they’re asked the questions, they might imagine how this could have happened. And the problem is, it’s actually difficult to tell the difference between things you’ve imagined and things that have happened.”
Perhaps we should be glad Ranganath, is using his powers for good instead of evil.
“I feel like evil is way ahead of good already, and the memory researchers are just catching up to the way a lot of memory functions are being weaponised. When I was researching the book, I was amazed by the strange tale about the push polls [surveys designed to push people to a certain point of view].” In the 2000 US Republican presidential primaries, people were reportedly asked: “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”
“McCain had actually adopted a child from an orphanage in Bangladesh, so the question was a blatant and carefully crafted work of misinformation,” says Ranganath. And sure enough, some people started to remember that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child.”
A more benign, domestic example is the way members of a family can remember the same occasion differently, so that family histories are often at variance with each other. “We all remember things from our own perspectives. And so there’s a lot of things that we might have been able to remember if we could see it from another person’s point of view.”
People can even have different memories of the same thing at different times, as shown in an experiment by educational psychologists James Pichert and Richard C Anderson. “They were interested in seeing whether something in our memory is shaped by the way we’re looking at it.”
Do we remember new things when we revisit the memory and look at it in a different way? “They had a story about two kids who were hanging out at one kid’s house. One group read this story from the perspective of a thief, and another read it from the perspective of a homebuyer. And the people doing it from the thief’s perspective were asked, ‘What is here that I’m going to steal?’ The people who read it from the perspective of the homebuyer were thinking, ‘Oh, is this broken or is this valuable?’ and so forth. Then the subjects were asked to swap perspectives. ‘I know you are a homebuyer, but now pretend you’re a burglar. How would you remember this event?’ And people would recall things that they didn’t recall before.”
Ranganath says the people most uncomfortable with these insights into the malleability of memory are journalists. “It’s totally understandable, because for journalists, there’s a value on the truth and the truth is usually something that comes from memory. It’s difficult to be told that people don’t necessarily replay the past; they imagined it. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Memory can be inaccurate, but that doesn’t mean it is inaccurate. And it doesn’t mean people don’t have the ability to tell the difference between reality and imagination. They do – they’re very good at it.”
Which leads to the most basic memory question of all: where did you leave your keys?
“One thing that it would be good for people to let go of is kicking themselves if they can’t remember something that’s very tedious and arbitrary, like names, or things that we do all the time.
“We shouldn’t be devoting brain space to remembering where we put our keys. The reason we forget is that it’s so instinctual we don’t pay attention to doing it. It’s driven out of our memories by all the more novel, multitasking things that are going on.”
Ranganath is pragmatic about the effect of our devices on memory and has no shame about sharing memory jobs with them. “I like to say my phone has a photographic memory, I don’t. I offload tedious memory tasks. Let my phone take care of the hard work. I would like people to take away from the book that improving your memory is not remembering more, it’s remembering better, and sometimes less is more.
“So, put things in your phone, but maybe instead of taking pictures of everything that you’re doing, like kids do on Instagram, take a few pictures that serve as effective reminders. When you do take a picture, carefully compose it, so then you’re paying attention to the moment and you have the vivid memories to go with it.”
For the record, he keeps track of his days with Google Calendar and “I have given a lot of people access to my calendar so that they can put in appointments for me. The key is I have to remember to look at it in the morning.”
Oh no – not déjà vu again
Typical of the helpful “so that explains it!” information in Charan Ranganath’s Why We Remember is a theory about déjà vu – the sensation that we are experiencing something we have experienced before. Previous explanations have involved the likes of unwitting time travel, but according to Ranganath and a lot of neuroscientific brain-imaging work, déjà vu is not a memory but the same brain activity that we get when we do have a memory, occurring in the perirhinal cortex, to be specific.
In other words, when we experience déjà vu, the bits of the brain that go to work when we remember something are activated. It’s the feeling of remembering, not a memory itself.
But why would our brains do that to us? “There are a lot of theories about déjà vu,” says Ranganath, “but one I think is fairly likely is that something matches something you do have a memory for. And there are neural circuits in the brain that give you the sense of familiarity.”
He describes an experiment on the phenomenon by Colorado cognitive psychology professor Anne Cleary using virtual-reality environments. “First, [the subjects] walk through a virtual museum, then they walk through a virtual arcade which has the exact same layout, but instead of museum exhibits, there are arcade games. People will get this intense feeling of déjà vu because it’s feels like they’ve been there before, even though they haven’t.”
Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us, by Charan Ranganath (Faber & Faber, $39.99)
