A Neuroscientist's Guide to Memory: Tools for Remembering Better | Dr. Charan Ranganath

But the thing that really impressed me about it was how much our past can impact our present and how the memories that we choose to bring forth at any given moment can affect the way we view the world in the moment. Your feelings about the outcomes of your choices are not driven by actually what you experienced, but it's driven by memory for those experiences, which captures only a fraction of what happened.

Okay, you short circuited me. Welcome back. Or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training, a high performance psychologist, why do some memories seem to stick with us forever while others just fade away? Our guest today is here to help us wrestle with this question. Dr. Charan Ranganath is a renowned memory researcher, and he has a unique approach to improve our memories. Instead of working to remember more, Charan suggests we should work to remember better. Charan has spent more than 25 years as a professor of psychology and neuroscience unraveling the complexities of memory. He is a pioneer in understanding how our brains allow us to remember past events and use those memories to shape our present and future. Charan's latest book, why We Remember Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to what Matters, is an exploration of memory's influence on our daily experiences and its potential as a tool for personal transformation. In this conversation, we dive deep into how memory can be used as an accelerant for personal growth and how it can help us heal from trauma. We discuss practical strategies for improving memory and the performance benefits it brings to our decision making and our overall quality of life. So with that, let's dive right into this week's memorable conversation with Dr. Charan Ranganath. Charan, we're going to talk a lot about memory today, but I want to just start with a question about the present. How are you?

I'm very good. I'm happy to be here. And especially remembering the fact that I was supposed to be at your show a while ago, but I had broken my arm. And since then, things are a lot better. So I'm very grateful for that.

That is one of the good reasons, one of the only sufficient reasons to cancel last minute. Yeah. So you're remembering right now that you broke your arm.

That's right. That's right. And it's. It's both scary every time I remember it, but then I think about, oh, my goodness, I'm so happy to be where I am now and out of that position. So. And I've got kind of a story out of it. It's not that I always say that. It's like, if you're going to have something bad happen to you, you should have a good story. I don't have a great story, but at least it's something.

So don't bury the lead. What's the insight or the wisdom that you've learned from breaking your arm?

Oh, maybe that I'm too old for skateboarding.

Oh, you broke at skateboarding?

Yeah. It wasn't as cool as it sounds, but yeah, I was riding a skateboard and just caught on a rock and just fell and it was a freak, freak accident. But a lot of my relatives were like, you're never going on skateboard again.

Did you grow up on skateboards?

I went. Was junior high. I was into skateboarding. I was never in early high school. I was never very good, but I did it. And. And then, like, lately I've gotten into wake surfing and. And I. Even when I was on holiday, I tried surfing. And so I was like, oh, I'm going to get back into riding skateboard so I can work on these hips, because I have wonky hips. And it was. It was good until it wasn't. So. But I enjoyed it.

That. That is the story of action sports. It was good until it wasn't. Yeah, it's perfect. All right, so let's. Let's get into memory. Like, let's just start kind of big picture for a minute. Why is memory important for you?

Memory. Oh, for me? That's a really.

For you? Yeah. Why are we. Why did you dedicate your body of work to memory?

Well, it didn't. I didn't really plan on this. You know, sometimes life takes you in funny directions. The. I'll give you the medium short version of the story, which is that I was in grad school and I was actually training in clinical psychology, and I was doing depression research. And one of the things that I was doing was I was working in the clinic and I was doing clinical research on depression. And so in our depression research, one of the things that we did was we were studying people who weren't depressed, but trying to get them into a mood that simulated depression. And one of the most effective ways of doing this was actually getting people to recall sad events from their lives. And it was just extraordinarily effective in getting people to feel very sad in the moment. And of course, ethically, we got people out of that mood before they left and. And so forth. But it was really a powerful thing to see it in person and to hear people's stories that they Would often tell when we would do these experiments. And so. And then I was working in the clinic, and I would see patients and sometimes. And I was trained in a method called cognitive behavior therapy. And so cbt, as it's called, called you do some behavior therapy, which is based on learning theory. And the idea is, is that we learn fears, for instance, through these kind of rapid, primitive mechanisms in the brain. And you can learn to suppress and change these fears through exposing yourself to whatever it is you're afraid of or whatever it is you're anxious about. But then the cognitive part was really all about processing people's beliefs about what they're capable of, who they think they are. And that inescapably led to memory, because people's beliefs about the. The future and people's beliefs about their abilities and people's beliefs about these flaws in themselves were always rooted in memories of traumas big and small. And so that gave me this empathetic view linked to memory. And then on the other side, I was also doing work in the clinic doing neuropsychology, which was testing people who are coming in saying they had cognitive problems, problems in their thinking, and could have been somebody with a head injury. It could have been somebody with early Alzheimer's disease. It could have been somebody with. I had one patient with untreated syphilis. I had a patient. And many people with clinical depression, the thing that brought them all into the clinic was memory. They would always say it, and this was the thing that prevented them from being able to work, preventing them from being able to socialize or even be able to function in real life.

Let me pull on that. Let me pull on that a little bit. I've never heard that statement, is that what brought people to the clinic was memory. And so usually what we typically would hear is that what brought them in is distress or trauma or. Or life feels unmanageable, or they're hungry and want a little bit more. You know, like they're on the high performance side of wanting to improve and get better. So what does that mean, that they come in because of memory?

Well, I want to be clear that what I was saying was really about the neuropsychology clinic. And so these were not so much people coming in for additional problems, but they often did have mental health issues that were driving these things. So, but. And the only reason I brought that up, I realized it was confusing. But the reason why I brought that up is sometimes people have a problem with attention like adhd. Sometimes people had, like, depression as I was saying, or it could have been post traumatic stress disorder. I mean, so many causes that were not traditionally linked to memory, even schizophrenia, and yet memory was affected. And memory was the thing that was most distressing for them, not being able to remember, or in the case of ptsd, being plagued by memory problems in the sense of like both not being able to remember the things they want to remember and at the same time being plagued by recurrent memories of trauma that they'd experienced.

One of your earliest studies was a groundbreaking study, and it's the link between depression and memory. Can you open up that study for us and the insights that brewed from there? And I think that you might be able to help us just from that first bit of research that you did on how to use our memory better not to remember more digits and more information to cram it in our processor. But how the sense of memory impacts the, our day to day living.

Yeah, and this was exactly what, what I was impressed with in this first study. So I came to graduate school really green, not really having much of an idea of what I wanted to do. And so my advisor just handed me this project which was to basically record electrical activity from the brain eeg, as you told me you've been involved with too. And the idea is, is that there's these waves in the brain that can index whether some parts of the brain were active in certain. And I won't go into the details, but the point was we wanted to see if that led people to be more susceptible to be put in. Put into a negative mood. And we wanted to see if that would lead people to have just a bias towards processing things that were negative in the moment. And so there were some problems with this study, but. But the thing that really impressed me about it was we would bring people in, I'd put electrodes on their head and I would ask them to recall events from their lives. So we play really sad music and I would ask them, hey, I want you to listen to this music and use it to help you get into a mood where you can think about times in your life where you're. A time in your life when you're really sad and something that really impacted you. And I wasn't sure how this would go. It just seemed to me, playing music and asking people to remember something, what's that going to do? But it was so immediately impactful that you could see someone's face just utterly changing as they delved into their past. And it just occurred to me something that maybe it's obvious to other people, but it just really impressed upon me how much our past can impact our present and how the memories that we choose to bring forth at any given moment can affect the way we view the world in the moment.

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It was, I believe it was. Was it from a play called Alexander Nevsky? This is a memory experiment for me. This was actually caught in the fact checking of the book because I had the name of it. I actually remember the name wrong, but I think it was from a play called Alexander Nevsky and it was, I think, Pro K. It was a Russian composer.

I'll link it. I'll link it for both of us.

Yeah, but the song was called Russia under the Mongolian Yoke.

That's it, right? Yeah. Russia under the Mongolian Yoke. And so this is. This is not. You didn't accidentally just trip on the song and say, whoa, when people listen to this, they feel more melancholy. And this has been around in experimental psychology for a while, which is pretty interesting. Just that song has been found to introduce a sense of melancholy.

Yeah. In fact, actually, my advisor just handed me this cassette because it was back and it's aging me and I was saying this, but we used a cassette and this cassette was well worn and you could actually hear some crackling in the background. And so he had used it in a bunch of studies, but he got it because other people were using it and stuff. Studies. And so in psychology, often we just get what works and we keep going with that. And so that was.

That was freshmen, undergraduate students, you know. Okay, so. All right, so you're playing this tape, you're inducing a sense of melancholy and then asking them to remember in their past. Is that correct?

That's right.

And then what you found is when they're in a melancholic state, they. They would. It's almost like they put on these melancholy glasses and these gray glasses, if you will. And when they think about the past, they can find the gray, the sad things a little bit easier. And when they think about the future. Tell me if I'm wrong here. They think about the future. That they can more easily find the things that might not work out.

That's right.

Is that close?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

It's remarkable. Even something as seemingly benign yet very powerful on influence as music can fundamentally shape the way that we're experiencing our life based on how we're remembering our past and thinking about our future.

That's right. We have so many memories that we can draw upon at any given moment. And depending on which memories you draw upon, that can really change your worldview in terms of what you think is happening right now and what you think is going to happen, as well as, of course, your emotions, which is what we were interested in. It really changes the way you see the world. It's like, I think I used again, this is a memory thing. But I think I said memory is the prism through which we view the world. And I really do feel that way.

Okay, so, all right, you've got a concept that you're working from that you're hanging the power of your work on, which is the remembering self and the experiencing self. And I want to share. You've introduced a dilemma to me. And this dilemma is one of my life purposes is to help people live in the present moment more often. And the reason that's so important that I've put the flagpole on the ground right now for me, for my purpose is to help people live in the present moment more often is because that's where the unlock happens. That's where wisdom is revealed. That's where all things that are amazing and beautiful and difficult are experienced. And that's also where high performance is expressed. So the keyhole is the present moment. I want to help people experience. I want to help people know how to get to the present moment more often. And I want to help them have a love affair with experience. So we're not fighting against the present moment, but there's a love affair with it. It becomes our best friend, our best teacher. It becomes the hand that guides us into our potential. I can keep waxing with eloquent or at least in my head, metaphors. And you're saying, right, that's good. But I want to add, Mike, this whole other part of you, which is your remembering self. So can you just start the framing up and then let's really drive into the remembering self or the memory self?

Yeah. So I want to give Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist who recently passed away, actually credit for this distinction. But Kahneman wasn't interested in memory per se. He was interested in how we make decisions. And what he argued was that there's two selves that we have. There's the experiencing self who's present in the way that you're talking about. And by the way, I totally agree with you on everything your Goal is, I think, what many. What we should really strive for. But. But we'll come back to that. Okay, But. But he also argued that we have this remembering self, and in some ways, the self that we have when we reflect, the self that we have when we choose is not the experiencing self, but the remembering self. And what he meant by this was the choices that you make and the happiness or sadness or basically your. Your feelings about the outcomes of your choices are not driven by actually what you experienced, but it's driven by memory for those experiences which captures only a fraction of what happened.

Okay, okay, I interrupted you. Only because I couldn't get past. I couldn't. You short circuited me. Okay. And by the way, I loved your book.

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

I really enjoyed your book, why We Remember. Why We Remember. It was like candy for me. And so. Okay, say. I don't know if you can remember what you just said, but I think it's a first principle for you. Say it one more time.

The decisions that we make and our feelings about the outcomes of those decisions, whether they're good, whether they're bad, whether we did the right thing, whether we would do something differently, that is the province of the remembering self. The experiencing self arguably has nothing to do with that. It's really this remembering self. Now. Kahneman made a very. Oh, sorry, that's the.

I'm stuck again. That's the part that I love. Okay, so here's the thing. We've got a remembering self which is. Let's call it the processing part of our self that is reflecting on a past experience. Okay, just pause that shorthand for a minute. Then we've got the part of us that is experiencing now. And if I can change, upgrade, enhance, work from a place of wisdom on how I'm experiencing the experience right now. You're suggesting in a very simple way. And Dr. Kahneman, from his original position, is that it's not actually the experience that's important. It's the way you remember the experience that is shaping your future self.

Yes. And the reason that matters is, is because our memory doesn't match up with our experience. If we remembered. If we remembered everything and we remembered it in the way it happened, then it wouldn't make a difference because our memory would be our memory of the experience self. But we don't remember.

That's. We're not supposed to remember everything. It'd be overwhelming for people that have, like, photographic memories or. And I'm. I'm dangerously moving into your territory. But we're not supposed to remember everything. We're supposed to fall off the things. The things that are not important are supposed to fall off for survival. However, I want to remember more. And what you're saying is, yeah, but what if you could just upgrade the way you remembered things as opposed to how many things you remembered? Is that a fair challenge?

Absolutely. I think that's what. What we want. We don't want to remember more. We want to remember better. So if you are.

Do that. Open that up? Yes, open that up.

Okay. So if you are traveling somewhere, you could pack up everything that you've you own and put it all in various suitcases and take it on an intercontinental journey. That would be crazy. Why not just pack what you need so that you can access what you need when you need it and leave the rest at home? Right? And this is how I feel about memory. That we don't want to carry with us every moment of every experience, but we want the most important bits. And this is where I diverge with Kahneman, actually, because Danny would say, well, it's irrational to make decisions based on this incomplete memory. But if you think about what we remember from our lives, it's the highs, the lows, these typically these emotional experiences, but also things that were novel, things that were truly surprising to us. And there's a reason for this, biologically speaking, but it's also the most important stuff. So, I mean, if I perseverate for a moment on this vacation theme, but I come back from a vacation and you ask me, hey, how did it go? Or, you know, or say, do you want to do this again next year? I won't look back and say, oh, well, you know, I spent a lot of time in airport security, and then they searched me twice. And talk about the time I spent in line at the car rental place. That's not what I think about. I think about sitting on the beach with my daughter. I think about going out to this really cool dinner. I think about even the stuff that could have gone wrong in a way that I can look back and laugh at it. And that makes me want to make the same decision again later. And you could say, well, that's irrational. Why not take into account the entire range of your experiences? But the thing is, is that that's all we carry with us, is what we remember. Everything else is gone.

Okay? And if I ask you that question about your vacation and you're listening to that music, or you're listening to punk rock, or you are on a full stomach or an Empty stomach or you just argued with a supervisor. So whatever the experience that you recently had or are having is met by your philosophical and psychological framework and is met by your psychological skills to navigate the moment. And that fundamentally frames how you're going to remember as well. So it's not. It's not cold, it's fluid, based on your state. Do I have that right?

Yes. So it's a fascinating bidirectional relationship that how we feel and what we're thinking and our knowledge and our beliefs in the present shapes how we will construct our memories of the past. And then what we recall from the past will shape our view of the present. So it's really this kind of like, cycle where you can't. It's very difficult to break that cycle. So what I mean by this is, so far we've talked about how I recall a sad event and I feel sad in the moment, right? But there's another part of this which is the way it. The kinds of memories I have access to and the way I put that story together about what happened is reflective of my beliefs, my situation, my context in the moment. So in other words, you can have a memory for something that is. Has long been dormant, that you didn't even think was there. And you hear a song as we talked about, or you're in a place that you haven't been to since you were a little kid, and all of a sudden this memory pops into your head and that is based on your current context, where you are and what's happening in the moment. But then on top of it, we have the story that we tell. So memory can give us these little bits and pieces of. I have that feeling of going back in time. It's almost like as if I've traveled back to my childhood and I have these feelings, but then I make a story about it, right?

So I was in the airport line. So it can pop up a. Framing an image of like, being in the airport line. And it's a long line and then you make meaning of that, which is like, yeah, but you know what? That was part of it. And it led to some really good things. Or boy, you know what? I just get so agitated in lines. What's wrong with me? So it's the framing of that thing that pops up in your conscious awareness. Is there utility in getting better, quote, unquote, better at the way you frame the memory? Or are you suggesting that when the memory comes up, it's not so much about the story, it's more about. No, I Can't even ask a question because I don't know the corollary to it. I'm so stuck. I think we are meaning making machines that I too am classically trained. Cbt, Cognitive behavioral therapy. So. So what question am I asking you, Doc? Okay, hold on, hold on. Is it about the bits of memory or is it more about the story that you're pulling the memory bits together?

Well, it's almost hard in the moment to tell the difference because we do get those bits. We get, like a sense of, like, seeing things or smelling things, and everybody's different. Some people don't see the past, and some people see it in vivid detail. That the emotions that we had and so forth, and then we have actually even the physical grounding of the memory. Sometimes if it's a scary thing, like a car accident or like, if I remember like falling on the skateboard, breaking my arm, I have that. A little bit of the pain and my heart's racing and a little bit of eye dilation, you know, is there's that physical sensation and then there's the story and the appraisal and how we carry it. And. And this appraisal part is super important because it depends on our perspective. So, for instance, let me just give you an example. Let's suppose I did an interview like this, and you asked me a question, and I'm like, how do I answer Mike's question as well as possible? And I give you an answer, and it just is clear that this answer is bombed. And. And you're like, I don't get what you're talking about. Or you're just like, well, this is just wrong. You're just saying things that are wrong. Well, I can look back and say, God, I made this terrible mistake. I'm so dumb, blah, blah, blah. But if I look back, could I say in that moment, did I have the information that would have allowed me to say this is the wrong thing to say? If not, then I didn't necessarily make a mistake. It says the outcome was bad. In other words, we often look back with. It's like they say hindsight is 20 20. Right. And so what that really means is that when we look back on the past, we look back on it with the knowledge of what's going on right now. And then sometimes the knowledge of what we have right now is not going to be the knowledge in the future, Right? So you're in a relationship, it's going really well until it goes badly. You break up, and then you're like, this was A terrible relationship. I could think of all these things that this person did to hurt me. Then 20 years go by and you look back and you're like, boy, that was actually pretty good. We had a good thing while it lasted and it really affected who I am today in good ways as well as bad. And the events were the same. But we're picking and choosing those parts of the past and then we're building a narrative based on our perspective of where we are now. And so I think the advice is consider that perspective. It may be good, maybe useful to you, but there's other perspectives. And this, as a therapist, you know this, it's like that's why when people talk to you, you give them an outside perspective. You don't tell them, hey, this is how you should remember this, this is how you should feel about it. You just say, well, maybe there's other ways of constructing that same narrative.

What would it mean to be better at the remembering self? What does better mean to you?

I think better to me means being able to remember what you want when you need it and to be able to check on the accuracy of what you remember and to use it as a resource to dip into, to make better decisions to imagine cool stuff, but not to let it be in the driver's seat, not to let the remembering self be doing stuff all the time, not to ruminate, not to allow our biases to creep into our decisions and so forth. So in other words, it's a mindful use of memory and it's a resource based use as opposed to just constantly living inside our heads. Because even if we're, if we're daydreaming, if we're imagining all these future scenarios that could pop up, we're using memory. I mean you can scan people's brains while they do this and the brain activity while you're worrying about all these scenarios that could happen looks very similar to the memory for scenarios from the past that you're constructing when you're remembering past events.

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To me, the, the optimal is to use your remembering self to enhance both your experiencing self and to enhance your future remembering self.

Future remembering self and the idea there is that when you are thinking about the future, you're anchoring it to your memories of the past. Is that correct?

That's right. That's right. But also if you, if I'm using memories from the past to guide my decision, if I'm using memories of the past to guide my decisions in an appropriate way, I'll be thinking about what are the memories that I want to carry with me into the future. And that, that's part of where I'm going with this is I can say to myself I could sit around watching YouTube videos or, or I could do something creative or I could do something that is, you know, with people that mean something to me. I do special things and I asked myself, well what's what do I want to carry with me? Do I want to carry with me these memories of things that are, that are basically going to be lost because they're just indistinguishable from the clutter of day to day life or are they going to be moments that I really want to look back on?

Okay, so I want to, I don't want to complicate. I've got something really fun I want to introduce to you as an idea that I learned from an adventure based athlete who's really pushing on the edges of what Humans are capable in very hostile, cold conditions. I'll save the story for a minute, but how do we do. What you're suggesting is a way to enhance the quality of our lives? What are a couple ways that we can get better at it?

I'll give you, like, an example from my own life, right? Or I'll give you a couple of examples from my own life. So let's. Let's think about the big decisions, for instance, and interrupt me if you're like, well, this isn't a useful example to what I'm talking about, but basically I was deciding after I finished my clinical training and I was up for an internship, what's the direction I want to take with my career? Do I want to do an internship that will launch me into a lucrative clinical practice, or do I want a internship that will give me the time to do more research and transition towards a career in neuroscience? Two completely different paths. And so I asked myself, well, what are the conditions under which I feel good? And I looked back on my experiences in the clinic and say, well, you know, when I've been in the clinic, I have to get up really early. I have to be very present. Are things that are not that good at necessarily, but they're also not that enjoyable. I have to be very professional. I'm sometimes around. It's. It's just a particular kind of context, not good or bad, but it's just one that wasn't necessarily suited for me versus when I would think about times when I've been in the lab and just, you know, staying up late and talking, speculating and thinking about crazy stuff and being reveling in the uncertainty of science. And I was like, that's what I like. It's just that was defining the problems rather than solving the problems to me was really an exciting thing. And so that was a case where I used memories to make a life decision. And I do not regret that decision at all, even though I really do think, oh, would have been great to impact people's lives directly through clinical practice. I really feel like this was the right decision for me. But that's just kind of a big picture example.

Okay, so we had a gentleman on the podcast earlier, this is the story I was referencing, that is fundamentally committing his life to do something no one's ever done before. And he's working with memory as a psychological enhancement, a tool, if you will. His name is Akshay Nanavati, and he wrote the book Fearvana. So he really understands fear. And just for fun, the Dalai Lama Gave him a. An endorsement. That's pretty good. So he had a really interesting take on memory. And I want to understand if you believe that we can manipulate memory to work in our favor. And this is how he's doing it. So he's in very hostile suffering type conditions. Right. And so, and for me, suffering for him, I think as well, suffering is having something that you don't want or not having something that you do want. So that's like a state of suffering. And for him, when he's out in those harsh conditions, it's being in the suffering and wanting relief from it would be the condition of suffering. So I want to read a quote that he shared. If I ask you what you did for your last birthday, you think of it as accessing a video camera of those events, pulling together the five senses of said memory. But that's not how it works. The way memories actually work is every time you access a memory, you actually are assessing the last time you assessed that memory. So memories are malleable and they keep changing. And then he quotes research from Elizabeth Loftus and what she wanted to get after or what he wants to get after here is how can I purposely manipulate the memory of where I'm suffering now and store it in a way that will be favorable for me later? So he's going into training and when he's training, he's purposely getting to hard experiences and then manipulating the memory that this is a great time. So he's adding a layer on top of the suffering or around the suffering that this is awesome. This was what makes me. This is wonderful. I'm so happy to be in this state of suffering. I want to stay here because in every moment we're creating a memory of how that shapes our future versions of ourself, especially when we're in a moment of suffering. So is that something that you think we can do is purposely manipulate the ability to call forward a hard time in a favorable way later, or is that actually a distortion of reality that feels like it could get out of hand pretty quickly?

Yes, and yes. I mean, it's a lovely way of putting it. And I am not at all going to disagree with what he told you because I think that's exactly a piece of advice that I would give. I describe in my book an example of this where I had a near death experience paddleboarding on a. What I thought was a creek. Turned out to be much, much more intense than that. And people are going to get the sense that I'm accident prone, which is probably True. But what was fascinating about it was over the course of telling the story over and over, it just became funnier and funnier, and the terror kind of became a smaller and smaller part of it. And that's not to say that there's any kind of fear or embarrassment or shame or whatever from it, but there's a lot of interesting positives about it. And the big takeaway that I got from it is I get worried a lot. I'm, you know, I'm an anxious person in many cases, but when I was in that situation where I. Failure was not an option, I just pulled something out of me that got me out of it. And that was like an incredibly transformative takeaway for me, was this idea that I worry about stuff, and sometimes it's appropriate to worry about things, and it helps you make better decisions. But my ability to actually function under pressure is a lot better than I give myself credit for. So that. That's a very good thing. And the more you tell that story, as he said, now, every time you recall these events, there's a bit of the last time you remember it that's infused in there. Now, you brought up this idea of, well, is that a bad thing? Does that take us away from reality? And yes, we all know people who are, like, more narcissistic, for instance, who really fail to learn from their experiences because they reconstruct events in a way that just makes whatever they did look good. And so. And they. And they fail to benefit from alternative perspectives, especially with more social memories, that can be a real problem. So I think there's kind of a balance between remembering in a way that is allowing you to take perspectives that are productive, but also avoiding letting a bias basically dramatically distort your memories of the past. Because there is truth, and we can stray from the truth. But memory doesn't have to be false. It's more like a painting, right? And it's like you want that painting to have some details that are accurate and faithful to the subject, and you want to have it have some imagination and interpretation that gives it an added bit of beauty.

All right, now, if Bessel van der Kolk, one of the leading researchers and practitioners with ptsd, was here, and he wrote the book, I think the title was when the Body Keeps the Score. Something along those lines. We had him on the podcast. He was amazing. If he was in this conversation, I think he would say something like, but the body is keeping score, meaning that when you go through trauma, the body is purposely holding on to the experiences in A way to prevent you from being re traumatized again. Matter of fact, he didn't say this, but I've always thought that ptsd, Post Traumatic Stress disorder ought to be renamed which something like avoidance of being re traumatized. You know, it's like a re trauma avoidance. But notwithstanding, if he was in the conversation he says, right, but the body's keeping the score and it's going to speak to you to not to in a way that is maybe sometimes more powerful than conscious dialogue can help you with make sure that you don't enter a scenario or a condition that at one time was traumatizing.

Yeah, and I, I've, I've heard about this from many people who are really positively impacted by his book. People will often come up to me and talk about this and say, well, does the body remember? And I think, I think a lot of what you said rings true and I can get more into detail about that part of it. But what I want to be clear to people is the brain is a part of your body. It's not that your body is doing something separate from your brain. And what that means is, is that our brains are actually giving our bodies signals that trigger those feelings that we have. The gut wrenching ness or the heart rate increase or you know, whatever it is. And likewise those feelings can be in our body, can be retrieval cues that actually drive memory retrieval. So you could be feeling like, you know, your parts racing. And for some people that triggers memories of, you know, when they've been in past traumas. And so I guess what I would encourage people to think about is not a perspective in which we have the mind and we have the body, but rather that it's a connected system. It's all our brains a part of our body. And the reason why I think it's a subtle but important distinction is because I was talking actually with James Gross, who's this amazing scientist at Stanford who studies emotion regulation. And one of the things that we talked about is there's this perspectives on emotion that are very bottom up that you just have these primal hot systems in your brain that just says I feel bad now. You should feel angry, you should feel sad. And then there's another perspective which is it's all made up in your head and you're just constructing stories top down. Yeah. And I think the answer is it's, it's all connected. So if I have PTSD and I let's say from combat, this is actually what happened with patients who I used to work with. And so Vietnam war vets, every 4th of July they would hear fireworks and it would send them into a panic because they're reliving their time in the Vietnam War. Right. And this is on the one hand their body and their brain themselves basically providing signals that say, you need to keep safe, you don't want this to happen again, like we said. Right. And that's the wisdom, I think, and what he's trying to say. And I think that there's an immediacy to that that cannot be denied. You can't think your way out of that immediacy. And that's why I think in cognitive behavior therapy the things that are so powerful are the behavior and the cognitive part. Because the behavior therapy is targeted more at those physical sensations which can be cues for memory retrieval and they, I mean they can traumatize us in and of themselves because it's very hard not to panic when you have those physical sensations. If you're susceptible to anxiety. And you know, there's people with panic disorder I used to work with. It's like if they were hyper, if they were like kind of feeling their heart racing, they would immediately assume they're having a heart attack and then that would lead them to actually panic more. But that's the second part of it, which is the cognitive part, which is the appraisal, which is like, okay, my heart's racing, what's going on here? And if you say, well, I'm having a heart attack, that's a pretty extreme interpretation that will then scare you more and it will lead you into a darker place. Right. So there's no doubt that there's a link that those physical sensations can naturally lead us towards certain interpretations and those interpretations will drive our physical sensations. And memory is either going to help you or hurt you in this dialogue between the peripheral and the central nervous system. Basically.

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I think the first part of it is being aware that most of what you experience will be lost and what you do remember later will be subject to biases. Biases in what you remember and biases in the stories we construct and biases in the influence of those memories on what we're going to do in the moment for the, the way we see the future. And that can be good and that can be bad. But once you start with that awareness, you discover a few things. First of all, you can be proactive in thinking about what are the memories that I do want to carry with me and what are the things that I need to remember, what's important, Whether it's like remembering where you put your keys or remembering this moment, this cool concert you're at, or remembering this moment of, you know, holding, seeing your child take their first steps, whatever it is, right? Those are all the kinds of things that I think people would want to be able to carry memories with them forward. And then there's things I talk about in the book about how you could go about doing that. But the first step is that awareness in and of itself that, you know, memory is incomplete. And the second part about being able to put things together, I think is very important. And one of the more latent messages in the book is this idea that essentially it comes up over and over again, which is the diversity of our experiences and the diversity of the people who surround us and influences that we take in can give us a lot of value. They can help us remember more, they can help us remember more accurately, and they can help us be more creative and imaginative and be better problem solvers. And there's just many, many points in the book where I talk about that. If we embrace and appreciate that, that diversity and we're curious as opposed to threatened by it. And I'm not saying this in some human resources kind of way or tried to be all, you know, whatever woke or whatever people want to talk about. Now I'm really talking about this as a scientist because it's, let's just take imagination and creativity. Am I going on too long, by the way?

No, no, no, no, please keep going.

So let's just take imagination and creativity, right? Right now there's a lot of fear in the creative sector about the influence of generative AI and the idea that generative AI is going to essentially supplant human creativity. But the fact is, there's a couple of things that generative AI doesn't have, at least at the moment. One is it doesn't have lived experiences in the real world, and it doesn't have episodic memory for those lived experiences. Right. So it's just getting this kind of statistical average of whatever is on the Internet. But you as a person happen to have a college roommate from another country, let's say it was Ghana or something like that. You learn something from hanging out with this person. You happen to pull up a book on a topic that you never. It's totally irrelevant to what you would have thought your life's work is going to be, but it gives you some. The memories of that, gives you some idea that you can connect up with the present. I talk about Picasso, the Wu Tang Clan, Akira Kurosawa. These are all examples of people who are creative geniuses. But that genius came out of eclectic experiences and being able to connect dots between things that shouldn't go together, really. And so that comes about through having. Exposing yourself to a diverse set of influences. But it's very easy for people to be. This is unfamiliar to me, and that's scary, and I'm going to tune it out. I'm going to say this is bad because it's unfamiliar and that kills your creativity. And you might as well be chatgpt at that point. I know it's kind of grandiose, but that's my feeling.

No, that's good. Yeah. I have probably personally, the opposite problem is that I'm really high, like, on the big five personality. I'm really high on openness to ideas and experiences. And so I feel like I'm at a buffet table my whole life, and I'm taking and taking and taking and learning, learning, learning. And I love every, every morsel of it, even when it's hard, you know, or untasty. Like, a good example is in these, the Finding Mastery podcast. I wish I could remember more of the insights and the ahas and the pearls of wisdom and best practices. And I. I feel like they wash over me, which is cool. And I really hope that I can pull forward one or two, like, gems from this conversation to help me be better in my life for the people I'm trying to help. So I want to get super practical. Like, I'll make it even more concrete. It was just two days ago, I was working with an executive team. It was really intense and it was 12 people. And they're really wrestling down some important stuff about their personal philosophies and how it matches with the company purpose. It was awesome. It was rich and it was great. And out of nowhere, a woman says something that was like snot blowing, funny, like the whole room. You know that feeling when everyone's really intense and it's hot in the room and then somebody cracks a really well timed funny joke and we all just like really relished in laughter. And I even said out loud, and I pointed to my temple and I said, oh, I have to remember this. This is great. This is. That was so funny. And I woke up this morning, I was preparing for our conversation and I thought, oh, I did something interesting yesterday. But what did she say? Like, I tried. I tried my very best to anchor it and it like evaporated. So I'm now down deep in asking you, like, not necessarily how to reinterpret or appraise in a more meaningful way past experiences. And I'm not talking at this moment about being aware that my current state influences the memories that I pull up and influences the future imagination that I will have. But I am now mechanically getting into, like, how do I get a little bit better at remembering things that are meaningful?

You might have more in memory than you think. And part of the problem is sometimes that you just don't have the cues that serve as a lifeline to pull in that memory. Right.

It's a good take.

So basically, I mean, if you go back to the earliest studies of memory, where I talked about how much we forget. Ebbinghaus, the guy who did these studies, Herman Ebbinghaus, he actually measured memory not by how much he could remember, but how long it took him to remaster the same material that he had previously memorized. So part of is this.

The. After 20 minutes, you lose 50%. After, I think it's 24 or 12 hours, you lose six. Two thirds of it is.

That's right.

Do I have this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly.

So that's for me, for the listener, that's like a really important glow period. So when I'm working with somebody or a sport coach is working with an athlete and they want to reinforce something, there's a golden window. And part of that golden window is within that 20 minutes to help reinforce it, because it gives you. It gives you a big bump in. In in anchoring the takeaway. And you might have a more sophisticated way to help with coaching?

Well, I mean, there's, I think that there's. So what you're saying is a, is a special case that I want to get back to. But.

Okay, okay.

But actually, if you have access to the answer, like you still have that coach in front of you to give you the, the proper feedback, you'll actually do better if you try to pull up that information. When you're at the bottom of the forgetting curve, that is when you're struggling to pull up the right information. This is something that I call error driven learning in the book and.

Right.

The reason that it works is because essentially when your brain is struggling, when you're trying to remember something, your brain's never going to pull up a perfect facsimile of what happened. You'll get little bits and pieces, little frag, little windows of neural activity that vaguely resemble what happened. Right. But now if I say, hey, here's the information that you should be remembering, what happens is now you get this feedback and that produces neural activity that doesn't quite match up with the neural activity that's produced by memory. And that mismatch gives your brain an opportunity to tweak the old memory and make it different. So it's a kind of a memory updating that we talked about before with Elizabeth Loftus. And this idea of remembering changes the memory, but in a good way. But the more we struggle, the more you're going to give your brain the opportunity to expose the weaknesses in your memory and that allows you to fix them. Now, sometimes you don't have the luxury of waiting a week or whatever to get the right answer and then, and then getting the right answer to benefit from. And that's where this 20 minute period can really be helpful is if you struggle, but you're struggling just enough that you can actually remember what it is you experienced on your own. But to the extent that, I mean, if you're trying to learn a skill, it can often be better to space out. If you have a limited amount of time, it can often be better to space out your practice sessions so that each time your brain is struggling to pull up that information and then you're getting more out of the process of learning. Right. But I think the bigger gem of wisdom is whether or not you space it out 20 minutes or two days versus like, that's one thing, but the bigger principle is the more you can push yourself and make it effortful to remember, the more you can learn. So you're trying to master something you don't get to a point where you're just like coasting. You want to constantly be pushing yourself to the edge of what you know. And each time you do that, you will learn more from the process.

Can you make that like more concrete? If you're trying to learn something or remember, encode something so that you can recall it later. Like actually how I would do that.

Yeah. So let's give a very practical. I'll give you two examples, right? So you are a. You're a professional athlete. You are actually like watching films of past games and you're like, ah, this is the problem. I've got this right. Versus you actually can recreate that situation in a practice and give yourself the opportunity to express that memory yourself as opposed to just watching the video. But you could even do something similar where you just, you could take a guess as to what you could actually test yourself on. What did I do wrong? Or what? And what did I do right before you watch the video, then you watch the video and you can now compare the hypothesis that your brain generated against the real information and that gives you a chance to fix it. So this active kind of learning process is what I'm trying to emphasize. Another example is you're a regular person. You're coming into a new place. Well, you could basically get an Uber driver to take you around from place to place, but you won't learn a mental map of that environment nearly as well as if you just wander around on your own, take a walk or you drive on your own. And that will lead you to form a much better mental map again, because you're constantly consulting memory to figure out where you are and then matching up the memory with what you're where you really are. And so you're constantly giving yourself a chance to generate these errors and fix them. And it's the real counterintuitive because you'd think mastery is about getting it right, but mastery is about actually, I mean, you will approach mastery faster. I mean, your view as a coach, I'm sure can tell me far more about this than I, than I ever could know. But, but you can approach that mastery far more if you give yourself a chance to fail.

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Oh God, those are so hard. I mean this is so outside of beyond my pay grade, but no way.

No, no, no. You, you. Maybe you have more influence here than you might imagine.

If I'm going to give global advice, okay, yes. What I would say is number one, give yourself the chance to make mistakes. We talked about that. The idea that remembering is hard, learning is hard, and the more you can tolerate that difficulty, the more you will learn. And the second part that comes out of this is embrace uncertainty and approach it with curiosity as opposed to approaching it from a place of fear or you know, basically saying or approaching it from the perspective of I failed and. Or feeling anxious. Right. So you're a kid, you're trying to do a math problem and you just can't do it. Well, you could say I'm bad at math and I'm get develop a bad case of math anxiety. Or you could basically approach it with curiosity and that act of becoming curious will actually make it easier to learn for that learning to stick when you do find the answer. So that's, that's a big part, I would say too fascinating.

Of all of the choices that you could have guided us toward, you chose curiosity and failure. Like love up the failure because you're going to learn better and be more curious about how you're going to unlock something or how something works or what you can do better next time because that also enhances learning. And both of those I'm imagining, map to the coding of memory later.

Yes. Yeah. So I mean we haven't talked much about biology and you always have to be careful not throwing around biological terms when they don't really apply. But at least in our research we linked. I can get more into the details if you want, but we've linked basically the state of curiosity when people have this, I've got to find this information. It's kind of an unpleasant feeling sometimes. But we've linked that, that moment to an increase in activity and dopamine producing areas in the brain. And these areas allow you actually to learn more. They enhance plasticity, but they also energize you to seek the information that you're looking for. So you get this double benefit. One is that you get this motivational boost, but then the other is this actual plasticity boost that you get. And we found this works even in people who are older adults, not just young adults and kids. Everyone can benefit. At least as far as we know they can get the same benefit from curiosity. So it's a very powerful, it's a very powerful force.

I think, I think that what you're introducing to us is really important and it's not necessarily how to jam more bits in and pull more bits out later, which I know I was asking how to do that a little bit.

Better and I guess I can answer that question too. But we'll come back.

Oh, that would be great. Yeah, let's actually do that.

Okay. You want to. Sorry, you want to interrupt your flow, but.

No, please.

If there are Things that you need to remember, there's certain principles and I'll just give you two just to keep things concise.

Is that because you don't think I can remember three?

We could probably go three plus or minus one and you'll do great. So. But we'll stick with two because like, otherwise you're going to have, your editors are going to have a series serious problem. That's good. I still need to learn how to be more concise. So that's one of my learning goals here.

I understand that. I, for me, I understand that.

Well, let's take the first one, which is what makes memories more likely to be able to stick out to us later is something called distinctiveness. And what I mean by this is I use an analogy in the book of let's say I'm trying to find a note that I wrote on my desk and my desk is cluttered with notes. Well, if I wrote it on a yellow post it note and my desk is cluttered with yellow post it notes, I'll never find it. But if I've got a hot pink post it note that I wrote it on and everything else is yellow, it's easy to find, just pops right out. And memory, when we search memory, it's like that too. The memories that we tend to find are associated with the details that make this moment stand up. And this is what comes back to your point about staying in the present and the importance of staying in the present. Because what we find is, is that often when we're forgetting these everyday things like our keys and our phone and so forth, we were never really there when we put those keys down or put the phone down. I mean, this happens to me often, all the time. I'm very inattentive as a real problem. And if you don't have any distinctive the feeling of putting down your keys or the sight or the sound of what was going on in that moment, you're going to have a lot of problem remembering where I put my keys five minutes ago versus where I put my keys an hour ago or two hours ago. And we do all sorts of things. I will worry your listeners with them because I think you've done a great job in your show about pointing out many things that we can do or many things that we do to basically trip ourselves up, like, you know, trying to multitask and getting alerts on your, getting alerts on your phone every time you get a text message and so forth. These are the things that really can kill us. Memory blockers that's one thing. Another thing I really point out is that memory really benefits from cues. So thinking about the meaning of your experiences gives you an anchor for a memory that allows you to be able to find the cues later on that you need to remember. Sometimes you can even plant those cues ahead of time. So just one example of this is something called the memory palace technique, where essentially, people. Let's say if you just have to memorize a shopping list, right? So you gotta go, okay, well, I gotta buy lentils. I gotta buy milk. I gotta buy whatever it is, right? So I can imagine myself going through my house, and I'm in this room right now, and I imagine myself putting down a bag of lentils. Then I go into another room, I imagine myself putting in a carton of milk, and I go into another room, and I imagine myself putting down some chocolate chips.

No, you. You got to get weirder. You got to get weirder. You got to say, I. I'm pouring lentils into the opening of my guitar on the wall.

Yeah. So this is even.

Right. If you can get weirder, it's more distinct, I think. Is that right?

That's. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It doesn't have to be bizarre, but just distinctive. But yeah.

So in my guitar room, I pour lentils into the opening of the guitar, and then I go into my. Whatever, living room, and I put my milk on the red velvet couch or whatever you might have.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what. That also makes it fun, too, as opposed to, like, annoying. So that helps a lot. And then what happens is that my house is now the retrieval queue. And I've organized that information in a way that it protects it from interference and competition. So now when I do my mental walk through the house, I've got the house as the queue, and the rooms are cues that uniquely allow me to unlock each of those things for memory that I need to access.

And do you use your actual house or do you create an imaginary house?

Oh, I don't. I'm terrible at using strange.

I.

Actually, for me, things that work better will be imagining myself doing things, like just literally visualizing myself being in the supermarket, seeing what's around me and grabbing the milk, just imagining myself doing that. Then when I walk through that section, I've got a reminder right in front of me of what I need to do. And so I call that technique planting cues. It's a way of just basically creating a memory for something that hasn't happened yet, so that when it does happen, you'll Be able to pull up the memory. It's kind of a cool trick of imagination.

When you are blank, you. You're saying you're about to call somebody their name and you can't find it, but you know them well. Or you're thinking about that person that you went to lunch with four days ago and you're blanking on their name or something they said. Or I'll go. I'm going even further back in like, history where you're trying to call up the title of a book or a movie and you just can't get it and you're blank. In that moment when you're blank, what do you do?

I try to let go to a certain extent. Now, what I mean by this is there's actually a word. I try not to get too much into jargon, but I think this is a fun one. In computer models, they talk about things called attractors. This would be something in.

Wait, what's the word?

Attractors. So.

Oh, like attractive.

Attractive, yeah. And so basically the idea would be you're trying to find a memory and you activate one memory and it has this magnetic pull so that it just activates really strongly and suppresses anything around it. Right? So you're trying to think of someone's name, and, you know, it starts with a C and you pull up Charles or something like that. Right. And so now that memory is very, very active. But now it's suppressing Charon because you have this competition between the two memories. So it's like this gravitational pull towards the wrong answer that makes it harder to find the right answer.

Sometimes I was. I thought I was losing my mind. I did this two days ago as well. Is like, it's a friend of mine and I'm blanking on his name and I want to send him a note. And I hadn't talked to him for, like, I don't know, four months. I was like, I couldn't remember it. I knew it was a J. And I put J in my phone and I'm scrolling and I'm looking at Joe and John and I'm like, no, that's not it. And then when I came to, I didn't even come to his name. It was something that jarred it. That was close to it. I was like, oh, geez, of course. So. And so what I did in that moment is I used my. Outsourced my memory to my hard drive, basically. But then I. I'm like, am I really losing my memory at this clip that I can't remember a Friend's name. So it's an uncomfortable feeling for me.

Well, there's two things that happen. One is there's what we would call cognitive conflict, where you're trying to find the right answer, but it's not there in front of you. And it's literally thought to be. There's an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate that produces something good. Forgive my French. But it's. It's called the oh response, where essentially you've. It's giving you this, like, cognitive conflict signal. It's like, ah, I made a mistake. It's kind of painful. And actually when people are suffering, you will see activity in this area as well. And part of it is the what do I do right now? And so it'll give you that sense of conflict and suffering. And the idea is that's what recruits you then to really kick your prefrontal cortex in gear and really start to use some executive control functioning to be able to say, well, what's my strategy for finding the right information? What's the best way I can reason my way out of the situation? And so forth. So that. That's kind of the more biological explanation for what you're talking about. But then there's another part of it, which is, as we get older, this happens all the time because our prefrontal cortex starts to decline in functioning. And so we end up stuck in that conflict phase, but we ended up making it worse by stressing out over it. And what happens is that further shuts down the prefrontal cortex.

That's right, yeah. Yeah. You go to the survival kind of network. So the. When the anterior cingulate is active, are there strategies that you're aware of to preempt that activity so that you could damp down the trigger response of the anterior cingulate?

Well, the conflict in and of itself is not a bad thing to be aware of. I mean, you don't necessarily want to be living in a world where, where you don't detect mental conflict. Right. I think the issue is, what do you do with it? Again, this is something we've come back to a few times is like, how do you appraise that conflict? And we talked about this in terms of curiosity versus anxiety. But again, you can think about this in other ways. So if you get that conflict signal, how do you manage it? Do you wallow in indecision or. What I think is sometimes a helpful way around it is to change your mental context, change your perspective. Sometimes that means just going into another room or it can mean thinking about yourself, in thinking about the situation in a completely new way to bring yourself into. Well, what I'm trying to think of this name. I've got the wrong name. Let me just kind of pull up the surroundings of the last time that I talked to this person. Person. Let me try to pull up as much as I can. And it doesn't have to be. You necessarily visualize it. I sometimes hear people say, well, I have no ability to visualize, so this doesn't work. But it could be like, you know, what was the music that was playing at the time? Where were you? What were you thinking about? What were your goals at the time? And the more you can get in that mindset, you can get away from the gravitational pull of that wrong answer.

So I outsource, and I'll. I'll use my. My words to say, hey, Lisa, my wife. Hey, I'm blanking on his name. He always wears a flannel. And, you know, and then she'll go, oh, do you mean. And I go, thank you. Or. Or I'll try to. So when I outsource and I'm looking for external cues to prime, and sometimes what I'll do. I found this to be really useful, is I'll say, well, hold on. I just had a question I want to ask you. It's gone. Hold on. Give me a minute. And then if I'm not careful, that silence will tick up the spotlight effect. Like, oh, no, everyone's looking at me. And then I drop into a judgment critique, something which now I can't get even close. The prefrontal cortex is on high alert, and I just can't even get close to it.

And.

Andor when I'm really good, I say, wait, hold on. Give me a moment. It'll come to me. And then I'm trying to create space, and then I'll say, oh, you know what? I need a distraction. I'll come back to it. Let's keep going. And so I take the heat out of the moment by doing those two things. Give me a moment to think. And then I can't have the spotlight effect rolling, so I do something to take care of myself there. And then if I don't find it in a couple beats, I just say, oh, it'll come back to me. I need a distraction.

Yeah, that's. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. I think that that's just great. That's a great strategy for dealing with it. It's. I've. I've actually Seen a life coach myself. He talks about this as the power of the pause. And being able to pause and step out for a minute and say, okay, it'll either come back to me, or here's a different way of thinking about this. If this is a unique situation, but not being so caught up in that, like, cycle of, oh, God, I gotta find this other. Something wrong with me. And really, people shouldn't feel like you're becoming demented because this is happening, even if it happens often. But maybe it means you need to get more sleep. Maybe it means that you need to reduce some of the chronic stress in your life. Maybe it means that you need to reduce some of the distractions around you, but it doesn't mean you're becoming demented. This happens to everyone, and it happens more and more when you get older.

It's like you just looked into my, my patterns. I'm trying to sleep trust. You know, I'm trying.

I know I live these patterns. So.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay, now, last question or set of questions here is. So when we built the calculator, we didn't have to do as much complicated math. Like, we could outsource it. And then we built the computer and, you know, we could, we could outsource even more. And now we've got external processors, ChatGPT and the like that are incredibly powerful. What do you think about when you think about the future of memory and how you'll. You want to help us in the new world, meaning with Art of General Artificial intelligence and some of the. The processing speed that's going to be at our fingertips.

I think about this a lot, actually. I think about this in terms of the potential harm from technology and artificial intelligence especially. And I think about the potential for benefits because there's both. As it is with any technology.

We.

Need to be mindful of the potential for harm in one part of it is the, the ability to spread misinformation very quickly, which is kind of. Many people talk about this, so I don't think I need to go into detail. But the one thing I'll say is when we remember, we often have trouble remembering the source of information that came to us. And that can be very. That can lead us to bad places. Because it's like if I can't remember whether I heard something from Twitter or something like that, where there's like a bunch of troll farms putting out a bunch of misinformation versus a reliable source who I trust, then I'm going to be more susceptible to that misinformation. And so what often happens is again, we deprive ourselves of the frontal function because we don't pause. We're surrounded by stressors. We're trying to do too many things at once. And that makes us very vulnerable to essentially memory distortions and reality distortions because we don't remember the sources of where our memories came from. So that, that's one thing. I think there's another potential pitfall, which is we're starting to see with generative AI, for instance, things. I'll just say this for myself. I'm. I'll be writing an email and Gmail will suggest an ending to my sentences. And about one third of the time I'll say that's right, one third I'll say it's wrong. One third of the time I'll say, eh, it's good enough, let's go with that. What happens is our brains are constantly tweaking to basically optimize and make the world more predictable for us. And again, when we get stuck going into suggestions that are given to us, you can get sucked into this attractor where basically you're going to be more likely to communicate in the way that ChatGPT does or in the way of whatever Gmail is suggesting to you. And what they can lead us to is this sort of vortex of mediocrity where everybody's sort of using the same words. And you can see this in text message culture, for instance, where everybody's constantly doing things in a very robotic kind of way. So what's the potential here? Well, the potential is to really allow ourselves a way to outsource the tedious parts of memory that we're not very good at, to take advantage of the more photographic and literal memory of machines so that we can focus on using that in ways that enhance our ability to view things from different perspectives, enhance our ability to be creative. Right. So it's not like as if when samplers came out, it just meant the end of music. It meant that a lot of creative people in the realm of hip hop decided to generate completely new things with these devices that basically gave us sort of photographic memories of past creative works. And I think that's where we really have, have some potential with these devices and so forth. It's really not about making devices more human like, but making them more complementary to humans. They're good enough that we can trust them and work well with them, but not trying to make them exactly like us and not trying to be, not allowing ourselves to be exactly like them.

Yeah, What a big future we have. What a big opportunity and some real risks in AI. I am optimistic.

Yeah, I think so, too. I just want to add one thing, if you don't mind. Maybe this could be fixed with the editing, but which is another nod to Danny Kahneman is his book was titled Thinking Fast and Slow. And his point was that essentially we make the most errors, unsurprisingly, when we're thinking fast. And especially this is true with memory, where if we're just trying to think fast, we will be more susceptible to memory biases that lead us to bad decisions, lead us to be prejudiced, lead us to all sorts of bad outcomes. And when we think slow, we can be more likely to, quote, question the accuracy of our memory, to see events from different perspectives and to incorporate information from other people to create memories that are more accurate, more meaningful. Right. And I think the key is actually allowing ourselves the time to think slow. And that, I think, is where the potential for. That's where we can be optimistic, is if rather than having these technological advances mean we just take on more and more and more stuff, if we could actually get back some of our ability to think slow, I think that's where the real gains will be had.

You know, there's a. A challenge that's happening is that there's an efficiency that is going to take place in the workforce. And that efficiency is AI, is going to help people do the mundane at a faster pace and free up more time. So what do we do with that free time? What do we do with the employee base? What do we do with our. Our. Our own free time? And I hear you say, yeah, it's time to think slowly. It's time to really sit and feel, as opposed to, like, be on a, you know, breakneck speed to be able to get to the next meeting.

Yeah, yeah. And I think we can see that right now. People feel like they have to do many things at once, even. Right. Like toggling back and forth between email and text messages and doing the work that they're supposed to be doing or whatever. And it actually taxes executive function each time you switch. It will leave you with fragmented memories of whatever it was you're doing each time you switch. So when you switch back, you have to recall where was I? And then. And it actually increases your stress level, which will again tend to lose function even more.

That's right, even more. And you lose X number of seconds of that recalibration. You know, like when you're working on something and your text beeps or your phone rings, you lose kind of the ending when you got to go back. So inefficient all the way around.

Yeah, yeah, inefficient. And it reduces your quality of life. And. And these are habits, too, I should say, because even now when I'm not checking email, I think about it in any pause in the conversation. It's almost. It's a habit that I have ever since I got my iPhone. And so. But we can also develop habits that make us more mindful. I'm very. A lot of people say, well, does mindfulness change your brain? I'm skeptical. And I said, well, everything changes your brain. That's not. That's trivial. But, you know, not doing something could change your brain. Doing something, your brain's always changing, period. But the interesting question is, are you. For me, the interesting issue with, like, being. Practicing mindfulness in whatever way you want to do is it's a habit that you start to get into of observing thoughts as opposed to being the thoughts. It's a habit of seeing when you transition from the experiencing self to the remembering self. And those habits, I think, can counteract some of the bad habits that we have that can actually SAP us of our executive functioning and our potential.

Sharon, thank you so much for your time, your body of work and sharing it with us. There's so much more that you have to offer, and I want to. Can I give you a couple quick hits and I'll give you a thought stem and answer in one or two words? Okay. It all comes down to.

It all comes down to remembering with intention.

Living the good life is marked by curiosity. Success is.

You're going to ask about mastery too, right? But that's different than success. That's what I had a good answer for. Mastery. That was the thing. You know, my honest answer, as opposed to my answer trying to. Because I'm not a life coach, I'm not really a wellness guru or anything, but I guess my honest answer is success is a moving target.

There you go. Mastery is.

Mastery is being able to have an idea of what you don't know and having the capability of posing the question the right way to reducing that gap between what you know and what you want to know.

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Looking, looking forward to putting into practice this framing, this increased awareness I have now of the. The two different selves. And so thank you for hanging some. Some meat on that structure, on those bones. Like, it's great. And I appreciate your time and your expertise.

Thank you. For having me. This is a great conversation. I love this.

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