#1 Memory Expert: The No. 1 Thing That Weakens Your Brain

In this episode of The School of Greatness, Lewis interviews Dr. Charan Ranganath, a renowned expert in neuroscience and author of "Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters." They delve into the fascinating world of memory, discussing how memories shape our identity, guide our choices, and enrich our experiences. Dr. Ranganath shares insights on enhancing memory retention, the impact of emotions on what we remember, and practical tips for keeping our minds sharp throughout life. The conversation also touches on the power of moods to affect memory, the importance of context in recalling memories, and how to use mental time travel to transform negative memories into meaningful ones. Buy his book for yourself and a friend! Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What MattersIn this episode you will learnHow to enhance memory retention and keep your mind sharp throughout life. The impact of emotions on what we remember and how to use this to your advantage. Practical tips for transforming negative memories into empowering ones. The importance of context and perspective in recalling memories. Strategies for using curiosity and imagination to improve memory and learning. For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1632For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Rick Rubin – https://link.chtbl.com/1536-podBrene Brown – https://link.chtbl.com/1518-pod3 Brain Hacks Mashup – https://link.chtbl.com/1517-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Charan Ranganath?

  People need to change their way of thinking that it's not about remembering more, but remembering what matters. And that's what you need the prefrontal cortex for. Once you realize and you really accept that you're going to forget most things, then you have to ask yourself, what's important to me to remember? And what are the memories I want to carry with me, right?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Professor Charan Ranganath.

• 0:20Charan Ranganath?

  A psychologist and neuroscientist at UC Davis.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Author of the new book, Why We Remember. Charan Ranganath, thanks so much for being here.

• 0:28Lewis Howes?

  What is the number one health issue that causes the brain to be the weakest?

• 0:34Charan Ranganath?

  It's major depressive disorder.

• 0:36Lewis Howes?

  Depression?

• 0:37Charan Ranganath?

  Depression. The people with depression on paper could look even worse than the people in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

• 0:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 0:46Charan Ranganath?

  Yes.

• 0:46Lewis Howes?

  What is the memory research saying about using devices, cell phones and watches that have constant notifications or reminders?

• 0:55Charan Ranganath?

  It definitely reduces memory performance for whatever it is you're doing. But there's even work suggesting that heavy media multitaskers, that they actually even have some thinning in parts of the brain, including parts of the prefrontal cortex.

• 1:07Lewis Howes?

  Thinning?

• 1:07Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:08Lewis Howes?

  How do we imagine a future to create more abundance, joy, fulfillment, and happiness in our lives and alchemize anything we want?

• 1:18Charan Ranganath?

  Well, one thing that I really have gotten into, and I just don't do it enough, but I really try to, is...

• 1:27Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Charan Ranganath in the house. And today we are exploring the topic of our memories. And you are the author of a fascinating book called Why We Remember: Unlocking Memories' Power to Hold On to What Matters. You are a renowned expert in neuroscience, and you're here to share with us really how our memories shape our identity, guide our choices, and enrich our experiences. And there are a number of things I want to cover with you today, including enhancing memory retention, the impact that emotions have on what we remember, and also some practical tips on how to keep our minds and memories sharp throughout our life. And...

• 2:11Lewis Howes?

  The first thing I wanted to start with is a stat that I saw online. And I don't know if this is 100% accurate or not, but according to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. And of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts. I don't know how accurate that is, but you say that memories shape our identity. On this show, I'm all about empowering people to have the tools and the strategies to enhance their identity, because I believe identity dictates the quality of our life. It's one of the key factors.

• 2:53Lewis Howes?

  When we have a negative identity or an identity that is more suffering status or suffering states, we tend to suffer in our life. When we have a more empowering identity of ourselves, we tend to have a more abundant life. And my question to you is, how do we use our memories to shape our identities so that we create more abundance rather than have more suffering?

• 3:20Charan Ranganath?

  It's a great question. And what I'll tell you is that the key to answering this question is that you got to understand that your memories are selective. And the memories that we find depend on how we're searching, right? So imagine you have a particular lens, like you ever heard the phrase like, "You view the world with rose-colored glasses."

• 3:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 3:40Charan Ranganath?

  Right? And so that affects the colors that you're going to see, right? And likewise, when we're searching for memories, we have a mood. We have an emotional state. We have a context. It's inner landscape that is permeating our thoughts. And that's going to affect what we can find. And we used to actually do, it was, I mean, my first study that I talk about in my book was when I was doing depression research, actually, not memory research. And what we used to do was to get people, we would play this sad music and then ask people to recall sad memories from their life. Music made it easier to recall sad memories from their life. And the more, when they recalled those sad memories, they felt terrible.

• 4:22Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 4:23Charan Ranganath?

  And then we had to get them out of it, and that was a whole part of the thing. So it wasn't unethical. But the interesting part of that is the power of... Our moods to affect our ability to mind the past. And then the memories that we pull up, the power of that to change the way we look in the present. Right? So the cool part of it is though, you can, if you try, you can go in the opposite direction. You can say, let me think about a time, even though I know I'm going to bomb this interview and I'm gonna, Lewis is gonna walk out of here and say like, God, this is a school of boringness. Whatever, right? Then I go like, no, I remember I had this great interview the other day and I just have to bring that out of myself.

• 5:06Charan Ranganath?

  And once I remember that and I mentally time travel back to that moment, I can become a little bit of that person. And people have shown you can become more altruistic if you do this. You could become more sad if you pull up sad memory, become happier if you pull up the happy memories. And it all depends. And I think it's like, everybody can kind of relate to this, right? Because it's like, you're having a fight with someone who you love. You can think of nothing but all of the times that they've made you mad. But now, a week later, you've made up, everything's great. You can't even remember what you fought about. Right? So it's

• 5:42Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 5:42Charan Ranganath?

  This weird trick that we have. And I think the thing that people need to keep in mind is you are going to have a biased sampling of your past. You can't remember everything. And what you pull up will be reflective of how you feel in the moment.

• 5:55Lewis Howes?

  Really? So if you're feeling good in the moment, you'll think of more positive memories?

• 6:00Charan Ranganath?

  That's exactly right.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  And if you're feeling negative or depressed or anxious or stressed in the moment, you'll think of more negative memories from the past?

• 6:08Charan Ranganath?

  That's right. And not just that, not just that. But when I'm feeling negative and depressed, I will tell the story of these past events in a more negative way.

• 6:20Lewis Howes?

  In a more dramatic and negative way.

• 6:21Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. And if I'm in a positive state, I'll actually remember myself better than I might have really been. And I'll remember things of having been better than they really were.

• 6:32Lewis Howes?

  How much of our memories are accurate?

• 6:35Charan Ranganath?

  I like to say that memory is not photographic. It's like a painting. And what I mean by that is, you know, I'm trying to make a painting of you now. And imagine I have a decent bit of artistic talent. I'm more of a musician than a painter, but go with me on this, right? So they're painting your picture. I'm going to get some parts completely right, like the color of your shirt, the color of your eyes and so forth, the shape of your head. But it's not going to be perfect. I'll make some mistakes. I'll also leave some things out that I might not have paid attention to. And there'll be some parts of the painting that are not really right or wrong, but they're more my interpretation, my perspective that I'm bringing to this piece of art.

• 7:17Charan Ranganath?

  And that is how I want people to think of memories, not in true or false, but a construction. And just like if you go back to those old Renaissance paintings when they're poor, they have to redo paintings over the same canvas. That's what happens with our memories. So when we pull up a past memory, we actually can change the memory. And it opens up the box again so that we can sometimes strengthen it and make it easier to access. But you can also end up messing with it and create all sorts of errors in the memory from the time of remembering.

• 7:52Lewis Howes?

  Now you're getting me in a fascinating thought process here. When we, I truly believe that the energy we have in the present will support us in making either conscious or unconscious decisions, empowering or disempowering decisions, and decide whether we show up with a good energy towards others or a negative energy towards others, based on the energy we have in the present. What I'm hearing you say is when we're time traveling constantly into the past and remembering things in a negative way, it's going to make us feel more negative as well. But also, if we're in a negative state to start with, we're going to be thinking about negative things from the past and our identity and why we're not good enough or all these different things.

• 8:33Lewis Howes?

  My question is, how can we use mental time travel to reverse a memory from a negative one to a meaningful one to support us in the present so that we make better decisions now and in our future?

• 8:50Charan Ranganath?

  That's, that is the big question.

• 8:53Lewis Howes?

  Let's go.

• 8:53Charan Ranganath?

  So we've got, I give you a hundred answers, but I'll give you like the shortest version, which is to keep in mind that that moment of mental time travel, when I recall something, I hear a song and it just brings me back to my childhood and I just flashback to like, I don't know, the summer of 1984 or whatever, I'm like 13 years old, let's say it's not high school, junior high, but go with me on this, right? So I flashback to this period, terrible time in my life, I'm feeling bad, but then I keep in mind that that sense of mental time travel is just a few bits and pieces, it's a set of fragments, and then I'm making a narrative out of it, I'm making a story out of it.

• 9:35Charan Ranganath?

  And that story is going to be shaped by my beliefs, right? You know, I'm not going to construct a story about things that were impossible, that just could never have happened, right? That pigs are flying around, whatever, unless I'm at a Pink Floyd conference or concert or something, but you know, I'm not going to construct all these things that couldn't have happened. So we impose our beliefs and our knowledge in the present, right? So if you go into this with the sense that I'm a failure or nobody likes me, you can certainly find that, find evidence for that in this memory.

• 10:08Lewis Howes?

  From your memories.

• 10:09Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, and you can build that story, but you can also find things that are inconsistent with that. And that was the big part that, I mean, that's why therapy, when I was doing, I only spent a few years doing clinical work in my graduate training, it was like six years, but it just dramatically influenced my way of thinking about things.

• 10:28Lewis Howes?

  Therapy work.

• 10:29Charan Ranganath?

  Therapy work. Because it's all about sharing memories. And no matter what we were doing, what people I had somebody, my first patient came in with a driving phobia. But even after he was okay to drive, it wasn't really until we processed this big, big memory of his that we really made progress. But it's not about just recalling some traumatic memory, because you can wallow in these memories and feel worse, right? It's about being able to see it from a different perspective, to look at the same event, but ask instead of going with your beliefs, challenging your beliefs, right? So in science, Adam Grant talks about this, right? It's like you try to find the things that disconfirm your hypothesis. And that's what we do with science. And so you can find that in memory,

• 11:15Charan Ranganath?

  if you look.

• 11:16Lewis Howes?

  But if someone is so wrapped into a self loathing identity, based on a story they keep telling themselves, this failure I had, this mistake I made, this, you know, this person abandoned me or treated me poorly, or I did something horrible that is unforgivable, and I'm so ashamed of what I did. And you live in that story, in that self belief and identity. And you're like, all the evidence is there. I did this thing, or this person did this to me. And it was horrible and wrong, and no one should have to experience this.

• 11:45Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Lewis Howes?

  How does someone shift the story? So that they don't feel stuck in the past of traumatic memories, but they can distance themselves and see themselves from a distance from afar, without them feeling the pain, but actually remove themselves and look at the situation and start to change the story for themselves? How do we start to do this? Practically, is there any strategies or process that we can actually do?

• 12:12Charan Ranganath?

  Well, it's really hard. And I don't, I never want to tell, because every, every time I talk about memory, like, four out of five people will say, oh, you know, I have such a terrible memory, or this was really reassuring, I've been worrying about my memory. One out of five will say, how can I forget something? So there's a lot of people you're talking to with this question. And I never, I've, when I talk to people face to face, it's always, it's hard. Because, you know, people will say, well, that's easy for you to say. And I agree, it is, it's, but not that I don't have my own horrible memories that I get stuck in. Right. But I, I think one key that you can try to do is context is can be very important. Because context is a big cue for memory.

• 12:56Charan Ranganath?

  So for instance, uh, when you go back to your childhood home, you would probably recall information from your childhood that you wouldn't recall in your house. Right. So maybe you can keep your environment one that has reminders of things that actually would be countering these beliefs. Right. So like, uh, I did this, uh, I mean, and I, this is not at all like humble brag. It's just like, but I, I got interviewed by the New York Times for the New York Times Magazine. So my wife took, uh, um, the pages from it and got it framed professionally. And so it's on my, on a wall in our hallway. And I was thinking, I saw, God, this, people would probably walk by to the bathroom and say, this guy's such a jerk or something.

• 13:39Lewis Howes?

  So much into his ego or something.

• 13:41Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, exactly. But then I was thinking, that would be, that's a really good reminder that when I'm feeling down, hey, some people thought that what I did was interesting. And it counters, it gets me, and I can remember a specific event. That is key.

• 13:57Lewis Howes?

  What do you mean specific event?

• 13:58Charan Ranganath?

  Well, I can remember being interviewed by him and actually talking to him on, on Zoom. And, uh, that whole experience and connecting with this person who I've never met before, who's interviewed, like he just did interviewed Bono and Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he's talking to me, right? And that feeling of being engaged and connecting with a person, which I, you don't always get. Right. And it's like, and that happened to me in this one moment. And so the, having these reminders, I think can be very potent. And, and likewise, you can surround yourself with negative reminders. I, I talk about how addicts, when they're going to the same places and they're hanging out with the same people, those are triggers for, um, memories that will.

• 14:44Charan Ranganath?

  Literally activate the goal of getting drugs or alcohol, right?

• 14:47Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. It's almost like evidence of proof or belief in yourself by creating an environment with different reminders to support you that, hey, yeah, someone was interested in me, or I did something good, or all that hard work did pay off.

• 15:02Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to having nothing to remind yourself of all the good that you've done. I have a kind of similar feeling like that. Like, I have some stuff hanging up in my office, but I'm always like, some stuff I've taken down. So I'm like, is it too much about me? Is it too much like, look at my success in front? You know, it's, it feels kind of awkward sometimes. Like, I literally have a photo, you know, a cover of me on Success Magazine, and I took it down, and I put it on the ground. So it's like, just too much of me, you know, like, it's, it's like, is it too much? You know? So I think there's a balance there to be like, make sure you're not, look at me, how great I am all the time.

• 15:36Charan Ranganath?

  Well, a lot of people have that bias. On average, people tend to be, remember themselves more positively than they really were, actually.

• 15:43Lewis Howes?

  Is that a bad thing, or is it a good thing?

• 15:45Charan Ranganath?

  It can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. I mean, there's nothing wrong with feeling good about yourself and having optimism. And as people get older, they become, on average, more optimistic.

• 15:55Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 15:56Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. And they remember themselves and their past more positively.

• 15:59Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 16:00Charan Ranganath?

  We don't know. My colleague, Mara Mather at USC, studies this, and she's been pondering this for a long time. And she has this idea about the way different chemicals in our brain change as we get older, causes these tweaks in brain systems that bias us more towards positive information. And I have yet to read the paper in depth sufficiently to, it came out pretty recently. And so I need to read the paper in depth to give you more. But there are these changes that happen. And I think one thing I'll also say is, as you get older, the brain changes in ways that make it so that it's less about you.

• 16:37Charan Ranganath?

  The prefrontal cortex.

• 16:38Lewis Howes?

  It's about survival in the beginning or age, you know, days, I guess, right?

• 16:41Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Lewis Howes?

  Like, how do I survive? And I don't know how to defend myself and I need others to help me.

• 16:45Charan Ranganath?

  That's right. That's right. It becomes more about like, uh, so there's an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex that I talk a lot about in my book. And it's so important for memory because it's what allows us to say, hey, this is my goal. And based on this goal, here's what I'm going to do. As opposed to saying, well, this is what's in front of me. Based on this, what's in front of me, I'm going to do this. Right? Those are two different things. And so somebody with frontal damage might know what they want to do, but they can't use that knowledge to guide what they actually do. And as we get older, the frontal cortex starts to decline in its function. So we become a little bit more, it becomes harder to inhibit ourselves, but we're also a little bit slower when we have to do effortful things like searching for memories and so

• 17:30Charan Ranganath?

  forth. And you might ask, well, why is it we spend such a huge chunk of our life? I mean, it starts after 30, believe it or not. So why do we have spent a huge chunk of our lives with the frontal cortex is declining in function? And eventually I came to the realization that, well, you need that when you're in your, you know, twenties to thirties, because you're in prime parenting years. And it's about keeping track of the big picture so that your kid who has an immature prefrontal cortex can play and explore and learn. And you have to be thinking about the future and you have to be thinking about this little nuclear family's future and going out and, you know, foraging and hunting, whatever it is, right? But now you become older.

• 18:14Lewis Howes?

  Providing and protecting.

• 18:15Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. Now we become older, you're not having kids anymore. It's not about you anymore because you're biologically, just the likelihood is going down, especially for women past a certain age, right? You get menopause. So now it becomes about the collective and really your kin especially, but the collective. And if you look at most of human history, older adults were occupying very high positions and very engaged with younger people and passing on traditions of culture and language. And so forth. And I talk about this at the end of the book is one of the coolest discoveries that I'd made while writing the book was another, there's not a whole lot of species that live

• 18:58Charan Ranganath?

  long enough, let's say to get menopause or long enough so that they're infertile for a large chunk of their life. But another one is orcas. And orcas, if you look at a pod of orcas, who do you think leads the pod?

• 19:12Lewis Howes?

  Between like men and women or youth and older?

• 19:14Charan Ranganath?

  Anything, take a guess, throw it out.

• 19:17Lewis Howes?

  My gosh.

• 19:19Charan Ranganath?

  Okay, I'll spare you.

• 19:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Charan Ranganath?

  Post-menopausal females.

• 19:22Lewis Howes?

  Really, though?

• 19:23Charan Ranganath?

  They're the ones who lead the pod.

• 19:24Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 19:25Charan Ranganath?

  Because they have the knowledge of the culture that they pass on. And that's, that's, that's at least from the, now, I'm not a marine biologist, but from the readings, I kind of went down this little rabbit hole. And from the readings that I did, it was that essentially, they're teaching everyone in the pod about the language and about the culture and so forth. And, and that really rings true for me because I look back at my Indian family, and that was the way of thinking, that it's like the grandparents were really the ones who are playing this big part in their children's lives, you know? I had much less of that because my parents were in India when I was growing up. So I kind of missed out on that and more of an American style childhood, but.

• 20:09Lewis Howes?

  It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that as humans age, the part of the prefrontal cortex starts to remember less and weaken. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 20:22Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, your ability to recruit it and use it weakens.

• 20:26Lewis Howes?

  So how does someone, are there any ways that we can strengthen the prefrontal cortex? So that as we age, we actually remember more as opposed to recall less?

• 20:36Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, I, I think, I have a few things to say about that. One is what I, what I like to say is remember better, not remember more. And the reason is, is that overwhelming majority of the details what you experience will be forgotten, right? So.

• 20:54Charan Ranganath?

  The key is, how do you focus that part that we do remember on what matters to us? Right? It's not about trying to remember everything and nobody should, right? I mean, I wouldn't go to your house. I'm imagining just from looking at you. I bet if I went into your house, be beautifully decorated, it would just be like nice and neat. And if I went there and I said, God, this is, what have you done with this place? You should be, you've got all this open space. Why don't you just fill it with junk? I'm sure you must have had stuff from all the years that you had growing up. Why is not all, why aren't you using every square inch of the space? Right? And you'd say, well, of course not. I'm not a hoarder. Right? But I think people have this intuition that we're supposed to hoard memories. So we're supposed to just keep every experience that we have.

• 21:36Charan Ranganath?

  And so that's, that's how I think, uh, um, people need to change their way of thinking that it's not about remembering more, but remembering what matters. And that's what you need the prefrontal cortex for.

• 21:48Lewis Howes?

  How do you remember better and what matters as we age?

• 21:52Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. So

• 21:53Lewis Howes?

  Is it letting go of other memories so that we can just have fewer and better ones?

• 21:58Charan Ranganath?

  Well, one thing I'll say is, is that, uh, I mean, there's many, many tips that I can give for it. I mean, the first step is, once you realize and you really accept that you're going to forget most things, then you have to ask yourself, what's important to me to remember? And what are the memories I want to carry with me? Right? So in the short term, you can say, okay, I want to remember that I put my phone here. And if you start with the assumption that I'm probably going to forget that, I can teach you strategies. You can go on YouTube, find a hundred of these strategies, um, online. But the key is, is that no, no matter what strategy I teach you, if you don't have that moment of stopping yourself and saying, hey, I'm going to forget this. So what am I going to do about it?

• 22:42Charan Ranganath?

  You've lost the game already. I can't help you, right?

• 22:45Lewis Howes?

  So it's acknowledging you're going to forget things.

• 22:48Charan Ranganath?

  And then saying, how can I prevent this from being forgotten? But I have to focus on what matters.

• 22:53Lewis Howes?

  So what's an example of like, if you lose your keys or your phone or something that you matters in the short term?

• 23:00Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Lewis Howes?

  To have like utility and be resourceful.

• 23:02Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Lewis Howes?

  Maybe not a long term, but in short term, it's like, I need to know where I'm going. I need to know where my money is, my passport, my keys, my cellphone.

• 23:10Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Lewis Howes?

  My wallet. Is it more of just about, okay, I'm always going to put it in the same place every time and that's so I don't have to remember where it is. What's the strategy?

• 23:18Charan Ranganath?

  I mean, putting it in the same place is very good because that's a form of learning that we would call habit memory. Um, and it's related to other kinds of things like skills and so forth. So you get on a bicycle, for instance, that's a little bit different than a habit, but it's like we get on a bicycle. If you start remembering, hey, what did I do the last time I got on a bike, you're going to be screwed. You just want to get on and ride, right? And so once you get into a habit of like, uh, putting your wallet in the same place all the time, you can do it mindlessly, which is what most of us do. And that's why people lose their wallets in the first place is because we're somewhere else mentally, right? So one strategy is you put it always in the same place every time. But let's say you're like me and you can't do that.

• 24:01Charan Ranganath?

  Well, the next thing you could say is, okay, so now you have to be mindful. Well, what are the ways I can be mindful? Well, one thing you could do, and some of this is unfortunately tips that are like, don't do this. And I wish I could give more positive tips like do this, but I think this is very important is I talk about, I like to think about memory hygiene, you know? What are the factors that are preventing me from being able to remember things around me, right? And a big one is our phones. Let's face it. And I don't mean to be like a Luddite about our phones are making us dumb or whatever.

• 24:39Charan Ranganath?

  I mean, I'm as a memory researcher, I'll give you carte blanche to say, any dumb memorization task, let your phone do it, right? So it's like your phone is a photographic memory. We don't. So let your phone just do the work. But for the things that we really like remembering where you put your phone, that's on you, right? So for those points, what you have to be able to do is you have to be able to divorce yourself from the device. So there's the kind of the top level of stuff that kills you, which is the alerts. The alerts just kill you because every time you're alerted, what happens is whatever it is I'm doing, now I've shifted and I've shifted my mindset towards whatever I'm being alerted to, right?

• 25:23Charan Ranganath?

  And how many people have Apple Watches, for instance, that alert them every time they get

• 25:27Lewis Howes?

  Always buzzing.

• 25:27Charan Ranganath?

  Buzzing, buzzing constantly, you know? I have a friend who has ADHD and I do too, actually, but he has

• 25:33Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't help you when you're constantly getting buzzed probably.

• 25:36Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly, right? And it's just like, I can't have a conversation with it because of this, you know? But it's like, what happens is there's a real mental cost to this. And I think a lot of tech bros will be like, oh, I can totally manage all these streams and do all these things.

• 25:51Lewis Howes?

  What is the memory research saying about using devices, cell phones and watches that have constant notifications or reminders?

• 26:01Charan Ranganath?

  Well, it definitely, it definitely reduces memory performance for whatever it is you're doing. And it also can, I mean, this, I wanted people to take this with a grain of salt because I think there's a lot more research that needs to be done on this. But there's even work suggesting that heavy media multitaskers, like people who switch back and forth between looking at my phone and looking at my computer. Yeah, that they, like, they're doing multiple things at the same time. That they actually even have some thinning in parts of the brain, including parts of the prefrontal cortex.

• 26:33Lewis Howes?

  Thinning?

• 26:33Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Lewis Howes?

  So is this like, if you multitask every day, this could cause some thinning in the brain?

• 26:39Charan Ranganath?

  It may be people who have a thinner prefrontal cortex multitask more.

• 26:43Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 26:44Charan Ranganath?

  Because they're more easily distracted. It could go either way.

• 26:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:48Charan Ranganath?

  But it's not something I think we want for ourselves either way. And it definitely reduces, it changes brain activity in bad ways. And the reason is, it's actually pretty intuitive because what happens is when I switch, even if, and I'm telling you this in full honesty because that I do this, is that as soon as I got my iPhone, you know, years ago, I immediately became attached to email. And the moment I have a long conversation, my mind shifts to like, I should check email. In that moment, my goal has changed. So the whole prefrontal cortex is shifting the program. Once my goal changes, now my brain has to load up a new program of what I'm supposed, what would I need to do to check email? Why would I be checking email? What am I looking for? What am I worried about?

• 27:33Charan Ranganath?

  And so there's a period of time where you're just catching up and that's called a switch cost. There's actually psychologists found a bunch of different costs of doing this, but uh, but so I switch over and then I'm like, oh no, I gotta focus on this conversation. This is going on, you know, to millions of listeners. So I come back to you. But now I'm like, what were we talking about again? And I'm trying to catch up. And so I'm already behind schedule. Now, what's happened in that little bit of time within like about 30 seconds is I've gotten a little memory for what happened right before I lost my train of thought. Yeah. Then I have a little memory for this bit of when I lost my train of thought, but it's really nothing. Then I come back and I have memory for this new event, but it's like I'm behind schedule.

• 28:18Charan Ranganath?

  I'm catching up. Uh, and so mentally I'm not really there. I'm not here nor there and I'm getting a bunch of little fragmented memories instead of one coherent memory. And what you find is when you have overlapping memories that are fragmented, they compete with each other and cause forgetting. But when you have a bunch of little bits of a conversation, say that you're integrating, you're constantly looping back and saying, how can I think about what he just told me and understand it in that context? It helps you remember everything better. Um, and we've even shown how this happens in the brain. It's like you can actually see these little reactivations of past things in real time that you're using to understand the present.

• 28:58Charan Ranganath?

  So there's a positive aspect of, of unitasking and there's some real negative aspects of multitasking. So that's one way in which devices hurt us. And at the risk of going on and on, I can tell you another big one which. Go ahead. Okay. So, so think about the proliferation of Instagram walls. So you go to a place now and everybody takes a picture on the Instagram. I mean, I hope we do by the school of greatness. Sure, sure. That I got to be at the school of greatness. Yeah. So, but there's this proliferation of these walls. And so what happens is people go there, some cafe or restaurant, they take a picture by the wall and they feel like they're going to remember it better as a result. But the research shows that on average, that actually makes your memory worse. Taking pictures.

• 29:43Charan Ranganath?

  Trying to document everything actually can make your memory worse. And the reason is, is that people will mindlessly document, right? So another example is you go to a concert and everybody's got their phones up. And you're younger than me, I'm sure, but it's like, you might remember the days when people just watched concerts.

• 30:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, they put their lighter up back in the day, right?

• 30:03Charan Ranganath?

  Lighter up, exactly, right? And so now it's like you got the phones up. And the idea is, oh, I'm documenting this so that I'll remember it later. But people don't go back to it, which is like your big mistake right there. But then on top of it, the camera is only grabbing what the performer is doing, let's say, at the concert. But what do you want to remember about the concert? Do you want to remember the song? Or do you want to remember the feeling that you had when you were immersed in the music? Do you want to remember the people that you were with? Do you want to remember the sights and the sounds and the smells of this place? And what happens is, is that when we mindlessly document, it takes us away from those parts

• 30:47Charan Ranganath?

  that create a distinctive memory and that one that will basically rise above all of the interference, right? So you can go like, and I, this is one good thing that I do, that I practice, is I'm very strategic about documenting. And I'll go like, here's this moment, we're eating, you're having a glass of wine, you're laughing. I'm going to take a picture of this candid shot of just you being goofy. Cause that's going to remind me of that feeling and of this moment and bring back something in me. But it also forces me to pay attention to this moment and the wackiness and the stuff that's just kind of random. The randomness of this experience. Cause that's what makes episodic memory, that ability to remember events.

• 31:29Charan Ranganath?

  That's what makes it tick is the uniqueness of the moment.

• 31:33Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, this is powerful. I'm curious, what are, in your mind, what are three of the most common things we are doing today that are negatively impacting our brain health and our memories?

• 31:46Charan Ranganath?

  Oh, okay. Well, I told you one, which is multitasking. I would say that's, that's more of-

• 31:51Lewis Howes?

  Multitasking is hurting our brain health and our memories.

• 31:53Charan Ranganath?

  I would say it- Okay, it's maybe a little exaggeration to say brain health, but it does increase stress.

• 32:00Lewis Howes?

  It increases stress.

• 32:01Charan Ranganath?

  It does actually increase stress response. So we can say chronic stress is a big one.

• 32:06Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 32:07Charan Ranganath?

  That definitely chronic stress over long periods of time can be very bad for brain health.

• 32:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so multitasking can be one of those things.

• 32:15Charan Ranganath?

  It could contribute to it, yeah. And I want to be careful not to just be catastrophic.

• 32:20Lewis Howes?

  If you do it once in a while, it's not going to destroy your brain, but if you do it every day, all day.

• 32:25Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 32:25Lewis Howes?

  It's not good for your memory.

• 32:26Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah. Another thing that I think we do is, I mean, and again, I'm suffering from this myself, is sleep deprivation. There's so many reasons why sleep is good for us and good for our brain health. One is, is that we know now that a lot of the amyloid protein that our brains build up naturally over the course of the day are flushed out at night. And the amyloid proteins, you might know this word because these are the proteins that build up in people with Alzheimer's. And according to some theories, many theories actually, that it's kind of the trigger that basically starts the chain of events that leads to Alzheimer's disease.

• 33:06Lewis Howes?

  And a lack of sleep increases that trigger?

• 33:09Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly. You're not getting enough, maybe you're not getting enough of that clearance.

• 33:13Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So it's like a flushing of these proteins?

• 33:16Charan Ranganath?

  It's a flushing of the proteins.

• 33:17Lewis Howes?

  When you sleep well, or sleep better, it flushes these proteins that trigger either dementia, Alzheimer's, or memory loss.

• 33:26Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 33:28Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Lewis Howes?

  So a lack of sleep would cause someone to be more forgetful?

• 33:32Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, well, and then there's other parts of it too, which is, there's a lot of work to suggest that memories are reactivated during sleep. And according to some theories, what happens is you reactivate these memories and they just stick around longer. One theory that I described in the book, and we have a computer model of this, is even more powerful, which is that the brain may reactivate memories, because I have this experience of you here. I have this experience of you when I run into you at a cafe. I have this experience of you, like, when I run into you at the airport or something. But those are all different events in my mind. But if I start to randomly reactivate these memories and let my brain just sort of free associate, I can find some link that makes you go, this is what makes Lewis Howes tick.

• 34:16Charan Ranganath?

  And that may be what happens during sleep is that we can start to get the big picture. And so we're missing out on that part when we don't, when we don't sleep. We're missing out on this chance to take all these individual memories and create a big picture out of it. Another, and make it actionable too. There is definitely work to suggest that whatever we're trying to memorize, like you're trying to learn a new language. After sleep, people are better able to incorporate those words into their spoken language, their mental dictionary.

• 34:44Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 34:45Charan Ranganath?

  So there's a lot of work like that. Um, and then finally, and again, it's somewhat obvious, but you don't get enough sleep. You're feeling like hell the next day. You are stressed out. You are, your frontal cortex is shot. You're not able to focus on anything. Your efficiency just goes down, right? So it really is just, you're, you're just damaging yourself in so many ways.

• 35:10Lewis Howes?

  And when you're in a bad mood, you're going to recall more painful memories than positive memories.

• 35:16Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:17Lewis Howes?

  So if you get a lack of sleep, you're going to wake up groggy, you're going to wake up stressed, overwhelmed, forgetting things behind and therefore not feeling as good and therefore recalling negative memories.

• 35:27Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Lewis Howes?

  Which make you feel emotionally negative.

• 35:30Charan Ranganath?

  Not only that, but it makes you pessimistic about the future.

• 35:32Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 35:33Charan Ranganath?

  Because that's what memory is really all about. It's saying, what's coming up next, right?

• 35:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:38Charan Ranganath?

  I got attacked by this bear in the cave. Next time I go to the cave, there's going to be a bear there.

• 35:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, watch out here.

• 35:44Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:45Lewis Howes?

  Um, I wanted to ask you about repressed memories in a moment. So hopefully I remember this about repressed memories because I think a lot of people, uh, I've had a lot of different therapists and trauma experts on talking about healing memories, healing the past so we can live more, uh, I guess, healthy environments of peace in the now versus recalling the past consistently. I want to ask you that in a moment. But I'm curious, since we talked about the three things that are kind of holding us back, what would you say are three habits you'd recommend people implement every day to have stronger memories and healthier minds?

• 36:23Charan Ranganath?

  Okay, that's a good one. Um, so. One thing that I think people should really keep in mind is that your brain is a part of your body. So people will say, oh, is there some, should I take Ginkgo? Will this help me remember or whatever? Should I buy this? Like, should I do these brain games or whatever? And it's like, I hate, I almost hate talking about it because as a memory researcher, it's so non-psychological, but it's like, you have cardiovascular disease, you have diabetes, you are-

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  It's gonna impact your brain.

• 36:56Charan Ranganath?

  It's gonna impact your brain, big time. I mean, really, I've seen, I mean, and-

• 37:02Lewis Howes?

  Your brain is not separate from the rest of your body.

• 37:04Charan Ranganath?

  No, no. I mean, diabetes is a-

• 37:06Lewis Howes?

  You can't be 100 pounds overweight and think you're gonna have like a perfect brain.

• 37:10Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, it's really, health issues are just a dramatic, you know, they dramatically impact your brain function, right? And it's, it's not just things like weight, right? It would be things, I mean, you know, I don't want to speak to weight particularly, but as much as the factors that are associated with it, right? Like hypertension, high cholesterol, things like that. But there's also, you know, I, I know people with long COVID, and it's just disastrous, right? The, these brain fog conditions are very, very real. And-

• 37:46Lewis Howes?

  What is, what is the number one health issue that causes the brain to be the weakest? Or memory to be the weakest? Is it a link to obesity? Is it a link to high cholesterol? Is it a link to something else that people might have that causes the brain to be less effective?

• 38:05Charan Ranganath?

  I'm gonna go with the first one that comes to mind, because it just came to mind, but I think it's, it also rang true with my experience. It's major depressive disorder.

• 38:15Lewis Howes?

  Depression?

• 38:16Charan Ranganath?

  Depression.

• 38:16Lewis Howes?

  What is the main cause of depression? And does depression start with a weakened immune system or a weakened brain system?

• 38:24Charan Ranganath?

  Oh, this is a really tough question. I think a lot of mental illnesses are now seen as neurodevelopmental, meaning that it's something- Where there's some sensitivities that you might be born with, but then there's a developmental trajectory that affects it a lot, right? And so what happens is your brain is being shaped over the course of even the adolescent years, which is when a lot of these issues like the anxiety and the depression really emerge, you know? So there's a sort of shaping of brain circuits around these times. And for depression, attachment systems are a real part of the story. And so when there's a disruption in these attachment systems that can really affect.

• 39:05Lewis Howes?

  What's an attachment system? What does that mean?

• 39:07Charan Ranganath?

  Well, I don't study it, so I'm going to give you like very dumb things. But basically, if you think about it, our brains need to have some kind of mechanism that allows us to care about, you know, at least relatives, right? Like, you know, you have a kid, you want to protect that kid, right? You have a mate, you want to be able to be, you know, want to affiliate with that mate and connect with that mate. And everybody differs and some people have different things than others. But these attachment styles that people have, like some people are very kind of securely attached. And you know, these people where it's like, they're kind of go, yeah, I love being around my parents and I have such a great child.

• 39:42Lewis Howes?

  Healthy relationships.

• 39:43Charan Ranganath?

  Healthy relationships.

• 39:44Lewis Howes?

  Right, or anxious or avoidant.

• 39:46Charan Ranganath?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah, I'm sure you've talked to people who are experts in this topic, right? And those factors can really, you know, if you have these kind of anxious attachment styles that can be really predispose you to depression, for instance. And there's a lot that frankly, we don't know about it. There's memories, a part of it, that essentially people with depression have more negative memory biases. And that kind of leads to this vicious cycle of recalling negative memories, which reinforces the depressed mood and so forth. So there's all sorts of things. And the immune system is affected by this. There's inflammation that is triggered by mood and stress, for instance. Stress is a part of that, too.

• 40:30Charan Ranganath?

  So it's, when we say what's the cause, it's all connected, right? And likewise, when you do interventions like exercise, well, it can reduce inflammation, it can enhance mood, it can improve sleep. And so everything is so connected. But I brought up major depressive disorder mainly because I was thinking about how when I worked in clinic, I would test people, test people who are coming in saying, I have some kind of a problem with my thinking or whatever. The most common thing by far is people complaining about memory. And with older adults, I I found that half of the time that someone was complaining about memory, it's not quite, these numbers aren't quite exact, but about half the time, it looks like it was early stages of Alzheimer's.

• 41:17Charan Ranganath?

  Or maybe even less than that, but a good chunk of the time, sometimes it's just you're anxious, but it's fine. And then there is a chunk of the time where it was depression. And the thing is, is that the people with depression, on paper, could look even worse than the people in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

• 41:37Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 41:37Charan Ranganath?

  Yes. Because they had the the memory deficits, but they also, their frontal cortex was just completely dysfunctional. They couldn't focus, they're just out of it in their heads and and they just lack this initiative, yeah.

• 41:51Lewis Howes?

  Negative loop.

• 41:51Charan Ranganath?

  Negative loop. So it's like your attention is messed up. Your mental flexibility is messed up. You get stuck on things and you can't shift efficiently. And so they looked worse than somebody who just had a memory problem. And that was the telltale sign, one of the telltale signs.

• 42:08Lewis Howes?

  So if someone is experiencing either depression, depressed thoughts, looping negative thoughts, or experiencing early-stage Alzheimer's, is there a way to reverse depression or early-stage Alzheimer's completely? If so, how does someone do that?

• 42:28Charan Ranganath?

  I don't know of any to completely reverse either depression. I mean, if I did, I'd be very rich to completely reverse early-stage Alzheimer's or depression. What I'll tell you is that there is, let's talk Alzheimer's first. So Alzheimer's, when people start to see memory deficits, the problem is you've already had significant brain damage. And once you lose neurons, you can't really get them back, at least with current treatments.

• 42:59Charan Ranganath?

  So the best thing to do is get nip things in the bud before you get there.

• 43:04Lewis Howes?

  Prevent these.

• 43:05Charan Ranganath?

  Prevent these things. And so there are a lot of.

• 43:07Lewis Howes?

  Talking about these three habits, the first one being exercise, which I was.

• 43:10Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Lewis Howes?

  I cut you off early on, but you were talking about exercise.

• 43:13Charan Ranganath?

  Exercise.

• 43:14Lewis Howes?

  Being a thing that can enhance the brain function.

• 43:16Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Lewis Howes?

  Enhance mood positivity. Probably diminish depressed thoughts.

• 43:22Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Lewis Howes?

  Is what I'm who's hearing you say.

• 43:23Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:24Lewis Howes?

  That would be the first thing.

• 43:25Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 43:26Lewis Howes?

  What would be the second habit to support us?

• 43:30Charan Ranganath?

  Ah, this kind of flips against the other, the negative, which is give us make sure to get enough sleep.

• 43:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Charan Ranganath?

  Is one exercise. Uh, we can talk about social engagement, I think, doesn't get enough attention. Again, this is related to depression too, because that really cuts off people's

• 43:48Charan Ranganath?

  willingness and ability to engage socially. Uh, but in older people, you see these real positive effects of social engagement. And, um, and I think it's no coincidence if you look at like, I don't know if you've talked to, uh, I think it's Dan Bootner, the, the blue zone guy. But you know, you look at these blue zones and it's like older people are really engaged socially and they have a community they're plugged into and that really can have a positive effect on memory, having healthy relationships. And, uh, and yeah, so that would be a big one too.

• 44:24Charan Ranganath?

  I would say we talk about, uh, diet can play a role, you know, having a healthy diet, the Mediterranean diet has shown really good promise in terms of, uh, of, uh, preserving brain health. But none of these things in and of themselves are going to be the cure. But collectively, I mean, let me just put this, make this in the most concrete terms. There's a study that was done in China that they followed like 29,000 people. And they looked with, you know, when I look at this as a memory scientist, I was like, these are the most crude measures of memory possible, very gross assessment, right? So they just said, we're going to look at six lifestyle habits. Two of them are just like not drinking and not smoking.

• 45:08Charan Ranganath?

  Then there's things like being socially engaged, being mentally active, having what they called a healthy diet, and then they had a physical exercise, right? So they looked at these six lifestyle factors. And then they said, here's some people who have like four to six of these factors. Here's people who have three to four of these factors, and here's people with zero to, or two to four, here's zero to one, right? So these are the unfavorable, we can look at the favorable. Follow them up over 10 years. 10 years later, the memory scores for the people who were in the favorable category were almost twice as high as those who were in the unfavorable category. Even though they're roughly about the same in the beginning, right?

• 45:52Charan Ranganath?

  So if I were to tell you, here's this drug that you can take every day, it's going to have some really bad side effects, but you will be in that zone of preserving your memory over time, you might be tempted to take it, right? But what if I told you, here are these things that you can do, and they will improve your quality of life in the present and improve your brain health in the long term? It's kind of like, why can't we do that?

• 46:18Lewis Howes?

  Right. And what are the six factors again?

• 46:21Charan Ranganath?

  Uh, it was, uh, no alcohol, no smoking. There was, uh, social engagement, and I don't know how they measured some of these things.

• 46:30Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Having a certain amount of friends or groups of friends or activities with friends.

• 46:34Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah. There was, uh, maintaining cognitive stimulation. And again, I remember, I don't know how they measured that, I didn't read that.

• 46:42Lewis Howes?

  It was like activities or hobbies or something like that.

• 46:44Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, some people say, oh, well, is it playing Sudoku that could do it? And yeah, sure, if that's what excites you and keeps you.

• 46:52Lewis Howes?

  What did they call that? What did they call that one?

• 46:53Charan Ranganath?

  Uh, cognitive stimulation, something like that.

• 46:57Lewis Howes?

  And then five and six?

• 46:58Charan Ranganath?

  There was a healthy diet.

• 47:00Lewis Howes?

  Exercise.

• 47:00Charan Ranganath?

  Exercise. Yeah, I think that was it.

• 47:03Lewis Howes?

  So they studied 29,000 people.

• 47:05Charan Ranganath?

  29,000 people.

• 47:06Lewis Howes?

  And people who had more of these had better memory and I'm assuming better brain function and health.

• 47:12Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:13Lewis Howes?

  Probably healthier, happier moods as well.

• 47:15Charan Ranganath?

  That's right. That's exactly right.

• 47:17Lewis Howes?

  And those that had less of these had, you know, worse attitudes, worse moods.

• 47:21Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Lewis Howes?

  You know, not as good quality of life.

• 47:24Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, I mean, and just to hit this home even further, there's some really new research that that's come out and I need to find out more about it. But they're starting to study these so-called superagers. So these are people who go into their 80s and they seem to just be as sharp as ever.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  Super sharp. They remember everything. They've got it all down. They can still drive perfectly. All this stuff, right?

• 47:47Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the estimates are anywhere between 5 to 15% of older people are like this, depending on who's measuring and how they measure it.

• 47:55Lewis Howes?

  Now, are superagers, is that more of a genetic thing? Or is it more of other research proving otherwise?

• 48:01Charan Ranganath?

  I think nobody knows for sure, but it's probably all of the above, like most things in psychology and neuroscience is all of the above. I'm guessing. There's definitely some genetics that play a role in healthy brain aging. But there's a lot of it has to do also with the the context that you're in. And I think like one of the things that that people had observed, the researchers had observed in these superagers. And I need to learn more about this. So this is a big caveat. But that a lot of these superagers weren't necessarily great on all these four, six characteristics, but they were really socially connected and engaged.

• 48:39Lewis Howes?

  So so it sounds like social engagement is one of the key things for longevity as a neuroscientist, memory researcher, but also from the blue zones, the blue zones, people that age the longest.

• 48:51Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 48:52Lewis Howes?

  Or live the longest, they have a lot of social engagement. They're not isolated.

• 48:56Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Lewis Howes?

  And they feel like they have a purpose within the community, within family roles, status.

• 49:01Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Lewis Howes?

  As they age.

• 49:02Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Lewis Howes?

  Their importance is still there.

• 49:05Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Lewis Howes?

  And I think that's an important factor to think about from all these different things.

• 49:09Charan Ranganath?

  And it's about that, kind of like, I think you said it best, healthy relationships, right?

• 49:14Lewis Howes?

  Not just in a negative relationship and screaming at each other every day. We stayed together, but it's like actual peaceful, harmonious relationships.

• 49:22Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, the stuff that makes you feel connected.

• 49:25Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 49:26Charan Ranganath?

  And you can even, one of the coolest things that I learned about was this research on memory in couples. And couples who are in these long-term relationships. What they found was that, in fact, they could also remember better because they shared the burden of remembering.

• 49:43Lewis Howes?

  Shared memory.

• 49:43Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 49:45Charan Ranganath?

  And so what would happen would be like, the husband would, in the research, they have transcripts of this. It's really beautiful to see these things, because like, the husband will go like, "Do you remember when we were at this, like, theater production? What was the name of it?" And they go, "Oh, it was Cats." And you go, "Yeah, and I was, I thought this was so ridiculous, and you loved this." And then the woman will say, "No, I, I, I was, I had some moments where I liked it." But, and together, they put together this story.

• 50:15Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 50:15Charan Ranganath?

  And there's even research to suggest that people can actually, when you have someone you can lean on like that, it can, it's not clear whether they actually show better memory performance over time, or they just appear to be non-debented.

• 50:32Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 50:32Charan Ranganath?

  Later on, because they've got this person that they can lean on.

• 50:36Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating. So, staying in a healthy, long-term relationship, the research shows that you'll be able to hopefully have shared memory support, as opposed to having to recall everything on your own.

• 50:49Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Lewis Howes?

  There are some benefits to sharing the memory with someone else that you care about.

• 50:53Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful.

• 50:55Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 50:56Lewis Howes?

  I want to go back to what I said that I'm curious about. I think this might be one of the most important things that we talk about today, is on the topic of repressed memories and traumatic memories. I think a lot of people are starting to open up more in society about their past. They're starting to have open conversations and dialogues with therapists, or consultants, or coaches, or priests, and feeling more accepted in sharing their shame.

• 51:25Lewis Howes?

  Although I hear two different sides to this opinion that expressing the pain of the past is a good thing, but also reliving painful traumatic moments over and over again creates a negative energy within yourself, creates a negative mood. Is it better to repress our thoughts and keep them blocked and, you know, away from our memories the best that we can? Although I feel like they'll always kind of come up in some other way. Is it better to do that? Or is it better to talk about our traumatic memories? And if so, how do we do it that it empowers us instead of reliving a traumatic event over and over again?

• 52:04Charan Ranganath?

  That is a really rich question, and there's a lot here. So let me break it down piece by piece. So first of all, you just mentioned repressed memories. And so this is a big, big topic in my field because there's a lot of ideas out there in this sense that, uh, that the brain has an automatic defense mechanism, that when you've had an experience that's so traumatic, the memory becomes suppressed deep down within the dark reaches of our unconscious mind, right? And Freud had proposed that as part of a, and as an extension of his general idea of repression, which is more about urges than memories. Now, from what I understand, he actually rejected that later,

• 52:48Charan Ranganath?

  but other people definitely latched on to this idea. And it became big in the eighties because there was a, a book that was released called Michelle, it was like Michelle Remembers or something. And it was this book that talks about this woman who had therapy and then recovered all these memories of like, you know, ritual abuse and so forth. And she ended up marrying the therapist. You know, something's wrong with this story.

• 53:12Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 53:13Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. So it was like, uh, and at the end, I think Satan comes out. It is, it's just a really crazy story.

• 53:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 53:19Charan Ranganath?

  And so this became a big thing in the eighties, this repressed memory therapy. And So what happens is that a lot of memory research was done on this topic. And it turns out, if you want to implant a memory in somebody that they've... So Beth Loftus at UC Irvine did some beautiful work on this, but many other people since then. Where basically, if I want to get you to generate a memory that you... For something that never happened to you. What I do is I get one of your relatives and they say, "Hey, you remember that time when you stole that beer from a liquor store?"

• 53:59Lewis Howes?

  And you're like, "I don't remember that."

• 54:01Charan Ranganath?

  You don't remember that, right?

• 54:02Lewis Howes?

  She's like, "No, I was there and this happened." And you're like, start to doubt yourself.

• 54:07Charan Ranganath?

  You start to doubt yourself. And then you start to imagine it. Well, how could it have?

• 54:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:11Charan Ranganath?

  And so then you start to think. And then I come back to you again tomorrow and I say, "So did that memory pop into your head then? Do you remember it?" And now what happens is, well, you tried to remember it and you imagined how it could have happened. And on day two, you're remembering your attempt to remember it.

• 54:29Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 54:30Charan Ranganath?

  And so now you create a richer story about it, right? And so I keep asking you over and over again. And I say, "Hey, tell me more about that. What were you thinking at the time? How do you think you would get away with this?" And so then you start going into it more and more. You create this whole story about how you really wanted to impress this girl by getting beer, whatever it was, right?

• 54:51Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 54:51Charan Ranganath?

  And so you start doing... You create this giant story. And so they've done this in the lab, many, many different kinds of things.

• 54:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 54:58Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, it's very... Now, not everybody... This doesn't happen to everyone. But on average, it happens when you have someone you trust. I ask you, try to imagine these things, recall it. You really... This must have happened to you. We do it over and over and over again. We have you dig into the past. And maybe I can even go further. I could say, "Well, let me hypnotize you. Let me give you some medications to help you remember," right?

• 55:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 55:27Charan Ranganath?

  And so if you look at all of those ingredients, they're exactly the ingredients they use for repressed memory therapy. There's somebody who you trust, who's convinced, often with very good intentions. They're convinced that because you're engaged in self-harm, because you have low self-esteem...

• 55:43Lewis Howes?

  Something happened.

• 55:43Charan Ranganath?

  Something happened to you. And we just have to figure out what it was. And some kind of sexual trauma usually.

• 55:49Lewis Howes?

  Is it important to remember what happened to us in order to heal the... Self-harm, or limiting beliefs, or negative talk that we have, or the depressed thoughts that we have. Do we need to find something to heal, or can we just heal?

• 56:04Charan Ranganath?

  Well, I just want to finish, because I do want to be clear about something, which is, people can recover memories. And this is the crazy thing, is that, and the reason why I just had to close this, the book on this one thing, is because I just want to make it clear that not everyone who says I have a memory of being abused is lying. That's not true. In fact, people who've been abused will remember it really well. And that's the problem, is that this gets us back to the next question. They keep reliving it. But sometimes people can have a recovered memory. And sometimes that happens because maybe they've been trying to suppress it. And there's some research that shows if I try to suppress it over and over, the memory can become kind of blurry and harder to access.

• 56:47Lewis Howes?

  Like eliminate or something.

• 56:48Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 56:50Lewis Howes?

  Can you truly eliminate a painful memory?

• 56:53Charan Ranganath?

  No, I don't think, well, we don't know, but nobody's shown it completely that you can.

• 56:58Lewis Howes?

  What, I mean, let me give you a personal example. You know, I've talked about this publicly on here, so a lot of people have heard this. But if this is their first time here, they'll hear it for the first time. I was sexually abused when I was five. And for 25 years, I never told anyone. But it was like a, like a movie replaying in my mind. I wouldn't say every day, but it felt like weekly for 25 years. Maybe some weeks it wasn't as often, maybe other weeks it was more frequent. And it was something that I would just, it would come up in my mind, I would remember it vividly. And I'd just try to like distract myself from the memory, right?

• 57:33Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Lewis Howes?

  Until I, 11 years ago, started opening up about it.

• 57:38Charan Ranganath?

  Yes.

• 57:38Lewis Howes?

  For the first time.

• 57:39Charan Ranganath?

  Yes, yeah.

• 57:40Lewis Howes?

  And created a very painful open up about it. It was probably the hardest thing I've ever done emotionally, because it felt like I was going to die.

• 57:47Charan Ranganath?

  Yes.

• 57:48Lewis Howes?

  It felt like death. It felt like my life was over.

• 57:51Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 57:51Lewis Howes?

  If people knew this about me.

• 57:52Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 57:53Lewis Howes?

  I started to open up about it and was terrified, but actually had a lot of relief because I was in a safe environment where I felt seen, accepted, and not shamed

• 58:05Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Lewis Howes?

  for the experience I went through. And then, you know, a process of a few years of allowing me to process it, feel like I was reclaiming my power as opposed to allowing this abused moment to be my story.

• 58:22Charan Ranganath?

  Yes.

• 58:23Lewis Howes?

  reclaiming my identity, my power, and creating meaning from the painful event. Creating meaning in how I could use this of service.

• 58:34Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 58:34Lewis Howes?

  How I could benefit from this and how I could, not that it's a benefit thing, but how I could help others

• 58:41Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Lewis Howes?

  in this process. And that has given me more relief and more harmony and peace in the last 11 years since starting to tell this. But for 25 years, I don't know if I tried to repress it or just more block the memory. The memory was there.

• 58:58Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Lewis Howes?

  But I tried to like, ah, get it away from me. Suppress it. Get away from me. I don't want to think about this. Let me just go make more money or, you know, chase girls or whatever it was. You know, it's like get bigger, stronger, so this won't happen.

• 59:09Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. It's a very, it's a very poignant story, and I think it captures so much of what I talk about in the book. Because really, I mean, so let's go back to this idea of the traumatic memory. What do you do with it, right? So there's insight oriented therapy is all about basically if I open up the box and I remove the memory, I'll be relieved of this burden. And I don't think it quite works that way.

• 59:35Lewis Howes?

  You can't remove a memory, really.

• 59:36Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, well, not just that, but it doesn't reflect, I mean, you brought this up yourself, which is if you just recall something that's painful and you just wallow in it, that does not help. That actually can be re-traumatizing you. And if you look in PTSD, what happens is people recall these traumatic memories and they get the physiological response.

• 59:58Lewis Howes?

  It's like they're back there.

• 59:59Charan Ranganath?

  They're back there, exactly. And they relive the trauma in all of these new contexts. And so what happens is these memories become generalized and updated to all of these different contexts. So now nowhere is safe. Everywhere.

• 1:00:11Lewis Howes?

  Everywhere you go, there you are.

• 1:00:13Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:14Lewis Howes?

  In that traumatic memory.

• 1:00:15Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:16Lewis Howes?

  You're still there, even if you're in a safe environment at home with someone that loves you, you're still traumatized from 10, 20, 50 years ago.

• 1:00:23Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly.

• 1:00:25Lewis Howes?

  By recalling the event.

• 1:00:26Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly.

• 1:00:27Lewis Howes?

  So it's almost like recalling or suppressing doesn't work for you.

• 1:00:30Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:00:32Lewis Howes?

  What can someone do then?

• 1:00:34Charan Ranganath?

  Well, so recalling is part of the story.

• 1:00:36Lewis Howes?

  Yes, it's the first step.

• 1:00:38Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, so the key things to keep in mind are our memory for what happened is both driven by a lot of beliefs and, you know, driven by the way we construct the story. It's driven by our perspective.

• 1:00:53Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:00:54Charan Ranganath?

  And it's also different than the feelings that come with remembering. Biologically different, meaning that there's different brain areas involved. But they interact with each other and they're connected, right? So you have the feeling of going back in time and then it makes you feel like this kid again and there's shame or there's fear. But then we can engage with that in a way that magnifies that feeling, right?

• 1:01:19Lewis Howes?

  And amplifies it.

• 1:01:20Charan Ranganath?

  And amplifies it based on getting into that mindset and into that perspective. And we reconstruct the story in a particular way.

• 1:01:28Lewis Howes?

  So which creates a more, a deeper sense of feelings emotionally and physiologically in the body, which makes you feel unsafe.

• 1:01:36Charan Ranganath?

  It makes you feel unsafe and now the memory becomes updated because you've recalled it in this new place and you take this part of the present and you glom it on, you associate it with those past memories, right?

• 1:01:47Lewis Howes?

  So what can someone do when they recall the memory? And a lot of people don't have a safe environment to even recall it.

• 1:01:54Charan Ranganath?

  The safe environment is key, but it could be a safe person.

• 1:01:58Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:01:59Charan Ranganath?

  And the reason why people, I say, are so powerful is not necessarily because having a person is special. I mean, who knows? Maybe AI at some point will be useful for this, I don't know. But what I could say is that having a person is really valuable because if I tell you my story, and I mean, I'd really love to know if this resonates with your experience because I don't want to be telling people much of BS, but I feel like. If I, when I was on the other side, when I was doing work with people who were, had PTSD from Vietnam, I ran a therapy group. And so these guys would come in for the first time and they would tell their story. And they were just so terrified and nervous and you could just see it in their eyes.

• 1:02:37Lewis Howes?

  Sobbing and crying and emotional, yeah.

• 1:02:39Charan Ranganath?

  But then, they tell their story. And just the act of telling the story in a way that makes sense to someone else, is changing your perspective. You're no longer talking to yourself, I'm talking to you. So this is transforming the story. It's transforming the memory itself. Because part of this, part of the memory is the storytelling.

• 1:02:59Lewis Howes?

  Do you think, do you think someone can heal the traumatic memories, or the emotions that come up from the memories we have that were traumatic, without sharing with another person? By just internalizing and journaling only? Or do you think part of storytelling with another human, that social engagement factor, which helps us live longer and be healthier and happier, is part of the healing process?

• 1:03:27Charan Ranganath?

  I won't say that you can't do it without that. And I think journaling is a great example of something that can really help. But what I would say is, is that having another person is very powerful. Because once I share that memory, now it's a memory for you. You, I've created a memory in your head of something you've never experienced. But you're looking at it from your perspective, not mine. And if you can tell me back your impressions, based on your views as an outsider, I can see the same experience from a different perspective, and look at it from the perspective of you, because you've communicated that to me. And this allows me to separate the storytelling from the actual information.

• 1:04:11Charan Ranganath?

  And now maybe I can go back and recall things in a different way. And basic, basic research has shown that if I change your perspective, you can actually recall different information, right? It's why, if you're a fan of one, like, football team, and another person's a fan of an opposing team, you both watched them playing in the Super Bowl, you'll walk away with different memories of like, you're talking about all the heroic plays of your team, and they're talking about all the bad calls they got from the ref, right? But if you can change that perspective, it's very hard for people to do that. On their own.

• 1:04:45Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:04:45Charan Ranganath?

  But it's natural for someone who's caring and doesn't have that experience to be able to do that for you. And through that process, you can now update the memory. And it's not about, you don't want to, I mean, as much as, I mean, this is a risky thing for me to tell you, but I would, I would tell you, I don't want you to lose the memory of what happened to you, but I want you to be able to change your relationship with it.

• 1:05:14Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:05:14Charan Ranganath?

  Because the perspective is very different. And what I mean by this is you're a survivor, you're resilient, that's part of your story.

• 1:05:22Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:05:23Charan Ranganath?

  You've also learned a lot about how people work in a way that other people don't know about.

• 1:05:28Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05:29Charan Ranganath?

  And you've, it's sent you on this path that is doing a lot of good for a lot of people.

• 1:05:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Charan Ranganath?

  It's given you this mission, you know, so it doesn't define you in the ways that might be associated with shame and guilt. It defines you in a way that emphasizes these parts of you that you want to keep, right?

• 1:05:48Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:05:49Charan Ranganath?

  And so they, and it's just like what I was talking about with the, you know, I mean, I don't want to be trivial here, but it's like, it's what I was, it goes back to what I was talking about with the cell phones and watching the concert, right? There's the concert and there's your feelings about the concert and your re-experience of it.

• 1:06:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:06:08Charan Ranganath?

  And it works the other way too, that there's sort of the what happened, but the shame, the guilt, the fear is stuff that you experienced, but it's not necessarily inherent to the what happened part of it, right? It doesn't have to, you can view these from a different perspective, just like you can view, and again, I don't want to trivialize this, but just like you have this great relationship and then you find out your partner's been cheating on you. You could look back on all those things from a very different light.

• 1:06:38Lewis Howes?

  Perspective, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:38Charan Ranganath?

  Different perspective, so you can do that in a positive way too.

• 1:06:41Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. So when you're, I mean, there's so much you're sharing here that I love, but it sounds like, you know, the story or the memory and the story you tell yourself about the memory.

• 1:06:54Lewis Howes?

  Ties to your beliefs plus your feelings plus the perspective that you have. If I'm getting that correctly. And the perspective you have is the meaning you give yourself on that story and the beliefs about it. So when you're working with, you know, Vietnam War veterans who come in and share for the first time their traumatic experience about losing a brother or watching something horrific happen next to them or whatever might have happened.

• 1:07:21Lewis Howes?

  And they share this repressed feeling or memory or stressful memory that they've been suppressing, whatever it might be. And they share it for the first time or maybe one of the first times. And they relive the traumatic experience and they have a physiological reaction response as if they're living that again from five, 10, 20, 50 years ago. Whatever it might be. What is the next step in the process after someone shares with another the story of the memory? On how they can start to integrate healing?

• 1:07:53Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Lewis Howes?

  Wholeness.

• 1:07:54Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Lewis Howes?

  Perspective, meaning and transmute that into a mission that is service based rather than depression focused. What are the next steps?

• 1:08:07Charan Ranganath?

  Oh, I mean, it's so hard, right? But I think.

• 1:08:10Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't happen overnight. It's not like one session, okay, I'm healed and I can like create meaning from this horrible thing that happened in my life or this traumatic moment.

• 1:08:18Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Lewis Howes?

  Or series of events. It's really hard to do that overnight, obviously. It's, you know, it doesn't work like that, but what's.

• 1:08:24Charan Ranganath?

  I really look at your story that you told me and I can see a lot of facets in it. One is that you engaged with this with different people in different contexts. So what you see, if you look at, and I feel a little silly making this comparison, but if you look at studies of animals, let's say when they get an electric shock and they learn that some sound is associated with a shock. Well, if you put it in a box and you just play the sound over and over, they can, their, their fear response will go down over time. So their brain's saying, you're safe. But it turns out if you put them in a different box, they'll get scared again. So they're learning this context is safe, right? So I'm with this therapist, I'm in this group, and this is a safe space.

• 1:09:08Lewis Howes?

  You need to get out of that and do it in multiple spaces.

• 1:09:10Charan Ranganath?

  You have to do it in multiple spaces.

• 1:09:12Lewis Howes?

  Otherwise, there's only one safe space you can go back to.

• 1:09:14Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, it's just like what we talked about with when you just experienced the trauma in many places. Now it generalizes, but the safety can also generalize too. And it can become more of something that you can think about in a way that is associated with an outside perspective.

• 1:09:35Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating. I'm so glad you're saying this because you're, you know, based on, I guess, your neuroscientist perspective and research. You know, I feel like I did these things intuitively because first I did it in an environment of a group setting where I felt safe and intentionally went there to try to transform and find some type of healing opportunities or letting go of certain things that were holding me back, right? So I did that in a group setting. But then afterwards, I said, okay, I feel safe here because other people were also vulnerable and opening up about stuff in their life.

• 1:10:12Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Lewis Howes?

  But I could never tell this to my friends or family. And then I was thinking, oh, this traumatic event or memory has power over me still then. If I'm unable to share with another person, it therefore is controlling and consuming my energy.

• 1:10:31Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Lewis Howes?

  And therefore blocking my abundance, my peace, my harmony, my ability to love myself for all of me. So then I said, okay, let me tell my family members one by one. Terrifying.

• 1:10:44Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Lewis Howes?

  Horrific experience for me leading up to it because I was like, what if they don't love me? What if they don't accept me? What if they, whatever, all the scenarios of the future events that might occur.

• 1:10:55Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Lewis Howes?

  But doing that process one by one gave me more safety processing with each one of them. And it's by sharing the story.

• 1:11:04Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Lewis Howes?

  I felt safer with each one of them. Then I said, okay, well, they're my family. They have to love me, but my friends, they're going to disown me.

• 1:11:10Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Lewis Howes?

  I was like, oh, but this event still has power over me. It's still controlling me then. So I started to tell my friends one by one. Terrifying because I don't want to be alone and want to lose my friends, all these things. But one by one, I felt like, oh, I felt seen and accepted and, you know, they're not gonna leave me because of this traumatic thing I felt dealt with when I was five. And the more I did that, and then I eventually was like, I felt the need to do it publicly. So I talked about it on my show many times. I don't think everyone needs to share something traumatic publicly or whatever, but I felt like I don't want this to have power over me. I want to have an identity where I feel I am safe no matter anyone accepts me or not, but I feel safe.

• 1:11:53Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Lewis Howes?

  I am the safe environment.

• 1:11:55Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Lewis Howes?

  Not needing one or two places to go to to feel safe, but I am safety inside of me. And that process of doing this continually, not re-traumatizing myself by recalling the event, but sharing from an empowered place of here's how I'm transforming, and here's the meaning I'm giving the event.

• 1:12:17Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Lewis Howes?

  Gave me purpose and peace. And again, I go back to, should people continue to talk about the traumatic event? Because it's gonna re-traumatize them? Or is there a way to talk about it where it doesn't traumatize but supports them?

• 1:12:37Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, I think it's really important to get a different perspective and not reinforce your perspective. The perspective is huge because it's like, if you, I mean, everything you're talking about in your example was so characteristic of how our memories shape our predictions of the future. So you have this traumatic memory and your prediction is, if people knew the truth about me, they would not like me.

• 1:13:05Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:13:05Charan Ranganath?

  They would just dishone me, right?

• 1:13:07Lewis Howes?

  That was the fear.

• 1:13:08Charan Ranganath?

  That's the fear, right?

• 1:13:09Lewis Howes?

  That was the story I was telling myself.

• 1:13:11Charan Ranganath?

  And so the critical part is being able to violate that prediction so that you can change the way that you think about the memory.

• 1:13:18Lewis Howes?

  It's terrifying, though.

• 1:13:19Charan Ranganath?

  It is.

• 1:13:20Lewis Howes?

  Or it was for me, I should say.

• 1:13:21Charan Ranganath?

  Oh, I mean, I work with enough patients during my training that I get it. It's not just you, it's a lot of people.

• 1:13:31Lewis Howes?

  But that it sounds like that is the necessary step of the process. Is what you say violating the fear of people abandoning you in the future?

• 1:13:41Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, basically getting counter evidence to these predictions that you have and these beliefs that you have.

• 1:13:47Lewis Howes?

  And if you only do it with one person or a therapist or a pastor or a priest or, you know, psychologist or whatever, if you only do it with one person and not at least the closest people to you, what happens to the brain or our memories or our feelings around this past event?

• 1:14:05Charan Ranganath?

  Well, it's likely that what happens is you one possibility and I never reverse engineering these things like it always works in the averages or in these animals who you have in the lab. But basically the general answer would be that you would learn that in this context, I'm safe. Not I am safe. Yes, exactly. I'm like the wrath that's in the safe box. But when I go to this other box, who knows what's out there, right? It's like I told this in the context of the sacred confession and the church is the sacred safe space. But when I go out in the real world, anything can happen to me, you know?

• 1:14:45Lewis Howes?

  So it's not only just doing it in confession and feeling like, okay, I'm safe in this little box. With the priest is saying like, I forgive you of your sins or whatever. But it's like when you go out of the real world outside of the church, do you feel safe?

• 1:14:58Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, right? I'm trying to keep you alive.

• 1:15:06Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:15:07Charan Ranganath?

  If you remember that time that you got attacked by the bear at a bunch of random moments where you there's no possibility of a bear being there. Maybe it's okay. It's better that than forgetting that you saw the bear, right?

• 1:15:23Lewis Howes?

  Well, we're not talking about physical safety. We're talking about emotional safety, psychological safety.

• 1:15:27Charan Ranganath?

  And as social beings, social animals, a lot of those basic systems are recruited into our social interactions and become part of our social interactions and things that are. And we all know that many times like, you know, feeling like rage can be triggered by something that you've seen online, which is evolution did not shape that.

• 1:15:50Lewis Howes?

  That's just so interesting that somehow sometimes our emotional or psychological fears can feel like physical fears. And like we have to defend ourselves, or I'll cause a scream, or do something that's like erratic, I guess, when really you are emotionally, you are physically safe.

• 1:16:10Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Lewis Howes?

  But you feel psychologically or emotionally unsafe.

• 1:16:13Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:14Lewis Howes?

  And it may not even be real, it may just be based on a trigger from a memory.

• 1:16:19Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, just to keep in mind the physical thing, I think in neuroscience, we tend to get focused on the chemicals, right? But it's like, if I'm, if you just pulled a knife on me right now, my fight or fight or flight response will go off, right? But if I just decided to like, uh, go bungee jumping after this, my fight or flight response will also go off. Two very different emotions, but very similar physiology, right? So the, the way we frame these experiences can shape our emotions. And it's not just about the chemicals that are being released, right? I mean, everything's connected, don't get me wrong.

• 1:17:04Charan Ranganath?

  I mean, the chemicals are part of how we feel and how we think, and they shape, you know, when I get these things going on, my brain gets mobilized into activating memories that are consistent with threats. But that actual physical response doesn't necessarily mean that I'm under threat, just like if somebody like goes off on me on a, you know, on a tweet that I had or something like that, I'm not physically being threatened.

• 1:17:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Charan Ranganath?

  And in fact, this person, there's almost no consequence if I'm, you know, I mean, in many cases, there's almost no consequence of these things.

• 1:17:41Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:17:42Charan Ranganath?

  And yet, we still feel that threat, and that's based completely on our mental construction of the situation. The, the narrative that we piece together.

• 1:17:53Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating. Now, again, what I'm hearing you say is that the more we can focus on

• 1:18:01Lewis Howes?

  creating a positive attitude and energy state in the present, it sounds like the better our life will be because we'll be recalling more positive or empowering memories from the past and we'll be predicting potential future abundance and positive possibilities in the future.

• 1:18:22Charan Ranganath?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:23Lewis Howes?

  But if we ruminate, if we think negatively about others, or think lower energetically about ourselves, or identify lower than we're capable of, or if we're gossiping, or stressed, or ungrateful versus grateful, it sounds like that energetic state will recall more negative memories or painful memories from the past and will predict more negative outcomes in the future from that energetic attitude state of being. Am I accurate here?

• 1:18:56Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I like to say that memory can give you more options in life, or it can give you fewer options.

• 1:19:04Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:04Charan Ranganath?

  And so it's like, the key is if we can get out of our, you know, I mean, sometimes people are, as we've talked about, incredibly narcissistic and unable to see their weaknesses and overconfident in their ability to do certain things. And remembering these times where you were overconfident and things didn't necessarily go as well as you thought can be very helpful.

• 1:19:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:19:26Charan Ranganath?

  In allowing you to learn from those mistakes. But likewise, if you wallow in the mistakes, then it's like, you don't see, you know, yeah, maybe this didn't work out in hindsight, but at that time, I couldn't have known that. Or maybe there's something I could have done and I can learn from it and take it in a positive way. But basically, you want to be able to mine these memories in a way that gives you more options and not less.

• 1:19:52Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Now, you mentioned the idea of mental time travel in the past, going back to these memories.

• 1:20:00Lewis Howes?

  Have you explored or researched the ability to mentally time travel in the future? To predict, to put ourselves in a state of being or an environment of abundance? And then be able to draw that future closer to us now in the present?

• 1:20:16Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah, we've done a little bit of it and other people. We've done more in this kind of like prediction kind of thing in a more concrete sense. But there's other people who've gone even farther and said, imagine you are going to meet President Barack Obama. Or imagine that you're going to go like, uh, complete a triathlon or whatever it is, right? You can imagine, and if you look at the brain activity. And it turns out that that brain activity is very similar to what happens when people are remembering something that did happen. So if you ask me.

• 1:20:47Lewis Howes?

  That did happen.

• 1:20:48Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. So if you ask me one year ago, imagine.

• 1:20:51Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna be a school great.

• 1:20:52Charan Ranganath?

  Having a conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow.

• 1:20:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:54Charan Ranganath?

  Right? And you scan my brain while I imagine that sort of now it's a day after I just had this crazy thing that I never thought would have happened to me. And if you ask me to recall it, the activation patterns in my brain would be very hard to distinguish from my memory of what happened versus my imagination of what happened. Because to our brain, all you're doing is you're reactivating these concepts, essentially. You're reactivating these percept and these concepts. There are some differences between memory and imagination, but a lot of it is the same because a lot of memory research, and this is a very old idea, actually, goes back to a psychologist named Bartlett in the 30s. He proposed that we don't replay the past.

• 1:21:40Charan Ranganath?

  We imagine how the past could have been, right? So it's like you're an archaeologist, you get a few like fragments of pottery. And then you say, this is what this society was like.

• 1:21:49Lewis Howes?

  Ancient civilization, I saw the whole thing.

• 1:21:52Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly, right? And this is what we do with memories. We use these bits and pieces that are pretty good indicators of the past. But then we use it as fuel for imagination. And likewise, if I'm imagining the future, I'll take my memories of the past, use those bits and pieces of different things that have happened and imagine something. And so some researchers have found that people with memory disorders actually have an impoverished ability to imagine the future.

• 1:22:21Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:22:22Charan Ranganath?

  That is like, they'll just go like, imagine that you're on a beach and they'll go like, yeah, there's sand.

• 1:22:29Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:22:30Charan Ranganath?

  And water, that's it.

• 1:22:31Lewis Howes?

  I mean, this is a fascinating concept because in, in our world, everything that is physically constructed is based out of one person's imagination.

• 1:22:42Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Lewis Howes?

  To create that, this book, you know, this pen, this, these cameras, this life, this room, this building, is all of these clothes is all someone's imagination. That was alchemized into the physical world, the three dimensional world. But it didn't come from three dimensions. It came from mental imagination, which is fascinating. That we can imagine something, come up with a memory of the future and then actualize it. It is fascinating to me that this is what human beings can do.

• 1:23:14Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Lewis Howes?

  So how do we imagine a future to create more abundance, joy, fulfillment and happiness in our lives and alchemize anything we want in the material world?

• 1:23:28Charan Ranganath?

  Well, one thing that I really have gotten into, and I just don't do it enough, but I really try to, is gratitude practice. And I know it sounds like a real, like, I'm not a wellness guru or anything like that. But I tried to do this stuff early on and I just never, I would tell people, it's like, I'm really bad at gratitude. I suck at gratitude. And then one day I decided to be very concrete and minimal and say, let me just recall three things that happened to me that are specific events, episodic memories. They can be as trivial as I want, but they're things that gave me some happiness. I got an email from a friend.

• 1:24:07Charan Ranganath?

  I saw a story from someone on Facebook that was a friend of mine and something good happened to them or something like. I mean, anything, right? Like I found a shirt on sale, I, my coffee was better than usual, whatever it is, right? And I found that when I started to do this. Think initially it would be hard. I would go tired. I'm in a bad mood. I just had a bad day at work, whatever. And it would be really hard and I just had to get into that mindset. But once I pulled up something tiny, it made it easier to pull up something else. And the next thing you know, I'm like realizing, boy, something, I really had a great week. And I just had no idea about this, right?

• 1:24:47Charan Ranganath?

  So once you start getting all those memories, now you have the fuel to imagine things that could have happened. Because memory is the fuel for the turbocharges imagination. Say that, say that again? It's like the fuel that turbocharges our imagination allows us to put all sorts of unique possibilities, right? It's like you and I, we may have very similar cultural knowledge that we've all soaked up, just like ChatGPT has, right? But at the same time, you live next to somebody in the dorms at random in college than I live next to different people. You know, I just happened to walk in, I just happened to listen to this song one day that got me curious about something.

• 1:25:29Charan Ranganath?

  And so far that we all have these unique experiences in our lives, right? And that's what allows me to imagine things in different ways than you can. Um, but it all is about basically having these, first of all, just giving yourself a diverse range of experiences, exposing yourself to things that are maybe sometimes even outside of your comfort zone, right? Like, here's this music and it seems kind of weird to me, but there's something makes me curious about it, right? And you get curious about something else. And the next thing you know, you have all of these diverse episodic memories that you can call upon when you're trying to imagine something new, you know? So some of this imagining this abundant future is is being able to see things that are not obvious, right?

• 1:26:13Charan Ranganath?

  And one of the things I find in research is that it's like, there are these great scientific questions and approaches and experiments. They're right in front of us, but we can't see it normally. And I sometimes have to go to some talk that's completely outside of my area of research and then boom, it just comes up, right? And so sometimes you need to allow yourself to make these random connections to visualize or to basically just see possibilities that don't appear there. Yes. Because you're stuck in this more. Narrow mindset.

• 1:26:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes. How do we, I mean, it sounds like freeing our minds up with positive memories of the past gives us a better opportunity to have playful imagination in the future, right? Like more open-minded imagination and exploring the imagination of possibilities as opposed to limiting our imagination.

• 1:27:11Lewis Howes?

  How can someone on a daily basis set themselves up to open their minds to imagination? Is it giving time for play and activities and social engagement? Is it not only thinking about work, but also giving yourself downtime to just allow for randomness? Like, how can we unlock our minds for imagination to attract more of what we want in our lives as opposed to things we don't want?

• 1:27:37Charan Ranganath?

  I mean, definitely downtime is good. There's a friend of mine, Sarah Mednick, who wrote a whole book called The Power of the Downstate. And it's like, it's amazing, giving yourself downtime can be enormously helpful. And in fact, we've even shown, and other people have shown this too, that when we're resting, like you just ask people, just lay down there, don't do anything. You can actually see evidence, it's not super strong. You can see this in studies of Rats though too, where memories kind of bubble up. And you can get kind of a glimpse of what happens during sleep, but just even while people are resting. And that rest can actually sometimes allow for memories to be reactivated and strengthened or recombined in interesting ways.

• 1:28:21Charan Ranganath?

  And so there's something about that opening up of yourself and turning off some of these, turning off the goal-directed brain to being able to allow these memories to just sort of bubble up and recombine in interesting ways. I mean, in some sense, that's the core of daydreaming, right? It's like dreams are basically...

• 1:28:44Charan Ranganath?

  Most likely, I would guess, memories that are being recombined in ways that don't make sense. Right. And you're not trying to force them into any particular story. They just kind of collide with each other and you're just trying to make sense of it. Yes, yes. And that's kind of, I think that's, that's a core part of it is that. And also really just diversifying your training data, right? It's like ChatGPT, in my opinion, is never going to produce interesting art on its own because it's just getting this homogenous junk that it's gotten from the internet, right? Sure. You and I have these opportunities to just be curious about things that are just bizarre.

• 1:29:24Charan Ranganath?

  Actually, just as in praise of curiosity in general, one of the cool things that one of my postdocs, Matthias Gruber, did in our lab was, he did a study where he was just really interested in the role of curiosity and memory. And what we had found was that when people get a question that they're curious about the answer for, the question in and of itself is sufficient to trigger a spike in activity in the dopamine processing areas of our brain. And dopamine is thought to be this reward chemical, but it's actually more about chasing rewards and motivating us to get rewards and learning about rewards, right? It's that feeling of like energized that you can get when you want to get a slice of pizza or something and you're like, oh, I can't wait to get this, right? Yeah.

• 1:30:06Charan Ranganath?

  Or something like that. And so that energizing, we could see a little neural signal related to that in these brain areas that process that are involved in reward processing and motivation and involved in processing dopamine. When people got the question, not just getting the answer, not just getting the easy solution to the question, but really the question itself when they were curious. And when they're in this curious mindset, there is a little window where people could be exposed to just a face that they weren't interested in. Nothing to do with the question and they would get better memory for the faces. So curiosity can open up this little window of plasticity.

• 1:30:48Charan Ranganath?

  And other researchers and rats and humans have shown that novelty can also do. It's like if you're exposed to something that's very new, like you put a rat in a new box and let it just explore the box at random. That can actually save or cause a release of dopamine that actually can cause plasticity. And save memories for things that happened before they were put.

• 1:31:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow, interesting.

• 1:31:10Charan Ranganath?

  And so there's this whole literature on the way in which these chemicals in the brain can enhance plasticity. And so curiosity is a big part of that. But you know, when people, and I think this is a real decision point that people have is that you can have something unexpected or novel or unfamiliar and be threatened by it. I mean, how many times do people see an idea or or they?

• 1:31:38Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't follow their beliefs also.

• 1:31:39Charan Ranganath?

  It doesn't follow their beliefs, right? And it causes a little discomfort.

• 1:31:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it causes like a separation, not a a bridge.

• 1:31:45Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's like, I mean, we often in science get people talk about innovation all the time. And I can tell you from hindsight that you know, an innovative idea when half the people listening say we already knew that and half the people say this is obviously wrong. Basically, it's like they get that discomfort and they're like, let's make this go away. We knew this or.

• 1:32:08Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Yeah, we dismissed this a long time ago.

• 1:32:10Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's like, if you can make the flip from instead of anxiety to curiosity, there it opens up all sorts of opportunities for new learning.

• 1:32:21Lewis Howes?

  That's so interesting. My my fiance, she's really good at this because she says, when you say something or when someone in my life says something that I don't maybe agree with or associate with, or it's not part of my belief system, instead of judging them and making them wrong. She says she really tries to come from a curious perspective first.

• 1:32:41Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Lewis Howes?

  Like, wow, I'm really fascinated that you think a completely different way than me. As opposed to being like, no, you're bad and wrong.

• 1:32:48Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Lewis Howes?

  And something I really appreciate and love and respect about her because I don't think I've always done that until in the last few years, I've been like, okay, let me be more curious about this person and why they think the world is flat or whatever it might be, you know, whatever thing they think of. And I think it, when you come from a place of curiosity, you're also less judgmental and a judgment energy is a kind of a lower state energy also. It's less imaginative.

• 1:33:13Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:13Lewis Howes?

  And it kind of, it just shrinks your ability to think more openly.

• 1:33:18Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating. I'm curious about, you know, as a, as, as a memory doctor and a neuroscientist, do you think we can learn more from our mistakes or our failures or shames versus our successes and wins in life? Which one do we learn better from or have more, you know, opportunity for imagination and growth from?

• 1:33:45Charan Ranganath?

  Well, we can definitely learn more from our mistakes. And this goes at the most basic level. And I say learn more as opposed to master. There's, there's a really interesting distinction there. But it's like, um, in our research, and I mean, there's a number of different ways of looking at this. But basically, um, if you look at the way learning happens in the brain, if you just were to just passively record everything, what happens is, is that you kind of run out of space pretty quickly, at least in computer models of the brain. And so one way to get around this is you actually tweak the brain to say, hey, look, rather than just trying to grab everything, let me strengthen the connections between neurons

• 1:34:29Charan Ranganath?

  that were helpful in getting me the right answer and weaken the ones that promoted the wrong answer.

• 1:34:35Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:34:36Charan Ranganath?

  But you can only get that when you allow yourself to actually generate the wrong answer. And so I'm, I'm kind of dramatically oversimplifying this, but we have like a whole computer model of how this happens in the brain. So like, this, the simplest example is something called the testing effect, right? So let's say that I were to, uh, um, say, okay, so name one function of the amygdala, right? Well, let's say if you knew nothing about neuroscience, you might say, well, um, I don't know, reading. And I would go, no, that's not correct. Actually, uh, one function that you might think about is it's been implicated in studies of fear condition. I don't know, whatever. I just said something, right?

• 1:35:19Lewis Howes?

  By getting it wrong and then being corrected, then I'm more likely, oh, I don't want to get that wrong again. So I'm going to remember this.

• 1:35:25Charan Ranganath?

  Well, it turns out you do remember the answer better, the right answer better when I've given you the opportunity to get it wrong, even before you knew what the answer was. And if

• 1:35:35Lewis Howes?

  Because I'm like, I don't want to get it wrong. So let me focus on the right answer or?

• 1:35:39Charan Ranganath?

  There's, there's probably some of that, which is what we would call a meta cognitive thing. It's a change in your way of looking at the learning that it humbles you. So you're a little bit more focused because people tend to be dramatically overconfident in their memory. But there's another thing, which is that we think in the, when you generate the wrong answer, and then you're confronted between the difference between the reality of the right answer and the wrong answer. The cell assemblies, so to speak, the sets of neurons that activate the wrong answer, will be less likely to be activated the next time around. And so you're more likely, because memories compete with each other in this big ecosystem. And so if you have this in, these set of neurons that are going to activate the wrong answer,

• 1:36:22Charan Ranganath?

  and you can wipe those out, you're more likely to activate the right answer. And so that's why people learn most under the conditions where they're struggling. Like if you test yourself as opposed to if you re-study the material over and over again.

• 1:36:39Lewis Howes?

  Ah, so re-studying without a test doesn't allow you to remember as well?

• 1:36:44Charan Ranganath?

  It doesn't allow you to remember as well because you've recalled, because when you recall the information, your memory is never going to be as perfect as the actual answer. You're always going to be getting a noisy bit of recall. Even if I recall the right answer, it might take me a little time. I might have to struggle with it. And then when I get the right answer, there can be this comparison between my prediction, so to speak, and the reality. And what I can do is I can learn from that difference so that the next time around, I'll be more likely to produce the right answer. It's just like, if you're trying to learn a new neighborhood, and you're actually driving, you will do better than if you're in the passenger seat, right?

• 1:37:24Lewis Howes?

  And you gotta take the wrong turn once or twice, so you can know where to take the right.

• 1:37:28Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:37:29Lewis Howes?

  So for someone, you know, as a memory doctor and a neuroscientist, for someone like myself, who has been attempting to learn Spanish for 25 years, what practices could I start to implement more regularly that would allow me to retain the language of Spanish, or any language, better than less?

• 1:37:54Charan Ranganath?

  Well, so there's a lot of people who actually use foreign language words in these studies, and we have two. And so, one thing that you want to do is, even before you see it, try to guess what that word could mean. Then you get the real English meaning, and then you go, okay, now that's the real answer. Then test yourself on it. But also revisit these things after some time. You know, so space out your learning techniques, learning experiences, that's another powerful technique.

• 1:38:22Lewis Howes?

  Don't exhaust yourself constantly with it.

• 1:38:24Charan Ranganath?

  Don't exhaust yourself constantly with it. Don't cram either. Really try to space it out. And then, another thing is, is that try to use it in context. Try to give yourself opportunities to speak to people, and give yourself the opportunity to be bad at.

• 1:38:42Lewis Howes?

  And fail, right?

• 1:38:43Charan Ranganath?

  And fail at.

• 1:38:43Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:44Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah. And again, do it in different contexts. So there's, it's one thing to sit in your house.

• 1:38:49Lewis Howes?

  Not in a safe environment.

• 1:38:50Charan Ranganath?

  Not in the safe environment, because what happens is, in your house, in front of your laptop, you're great at speaking Spanish.

• 1:38:57Lewis Howes?

  There's no consequences.

• 1:38:58Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly, exactly. Then you kind of like walk off the plane in Madrid, and you're like, all your learning was based in this one context, so you can generalize it.

• 1:39:07Lewis Howes?

  And you know, I, yeah, I'll test that, because I've been practicing more and more, because part of my thing is like, I don't want to look stupid.

• 1:39:14Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:15Lewis Howes?

  So I'm not going to attempt it. So my fiance, who speaks Spanish perfectly, she's from Mexico. You know, I'm always like, okay, you go ahead and do it. And you order, you, you speak for me and all these different things. But now I'm attempting more and more in unfamiliar situations. Not just with her, not just with their family. Uh, but in social settings where I feel completely out of, out of the box.

• 1:39:37Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:38Lewis Howes?

  And I'm just attempting to at least practice a little bit.

• 1:39:41Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Lewis Howes?

  Little phrases here and there and just like to fail consistently. The more I fail consistently, the less afraid I am to fail.

• 1:39:47Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Lewis Howes?

  Cause it doesn't hurt as much.

• 1:39:50Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:50Lewis Howes?

  When I do it more frequently. If it happens once and someone's like, oh no, that's not the word.

• 1:39:54Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Lewis Howes?

  You're like, oh, I'm an idiot. I forgot this thing and how, ah, I'm not ready for this. I'm not going to try it again.

• 1:40:00Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:00Lewis Howes?

  You don't feel emotionally safe.

• 1:40:02Charan Ranganath?

  And you also learn more from it. Like there's actually more learning that's taking place.

• 1:40:08Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:40:08Charan Ranganath?

  Better learning that's taking place.

• 1:40:10Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating.

• 1:40:11Charan Ranganath?

  I mean, could you imagine you're an actor, you're about to go on to the set? And you just decide you're going to read the script, but you don't actually rehearse it. Right? I mean, or you're doing a play, right? If you didn't rehearse the play and you just thought, okay, well, I'm here. I'm reading these lines. This is great. And I'm just, I, I'm seeing all my blocking stuff. I'm just going to do it. Right? I mean, it's insane. Why would you do that?

• 1:40:33Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:40:33Charan Ranganath?

  And it's like, we don't use, I think our educational system. Education's hard, but I, I do feel like we could do something differently, which is to change people's attitudes about learning. That learning is supposed to be easy, that we're supposed to be able to just memorize effortlessly. As opposed to saying, isn't it nuts that we ask kids to memorize so much and we don't teach them how to learn?

• 1:40:57Lewis Howes?

  So hard.

• 1:40:58Charan Ranganath?

  I mean, it's nuts that we don't do memory 101 in, you know, for the first three years.

• 1:41:03Lewis Howes?

  Expect people to learn how to remember.

• 1:41:04Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, exactly. And, and then it's like, we use tests as a way of saying, how good are you? As opposed to using tests to, to get people to learn in the first place. So if I'm getting like straight A's on every test, I'm not really learning.

• 1:41:21Charan Ranganath?

  Nearly as much as if I'm actually trying and I get the wrong answer. And then I've learned from that test. Now, it may be that I've mastered whatever it is I'm being tested on. That's why I'm getting a perfect score, but I'm not learning anymore from it. There's no point in my taking this class anymore.

• 1:41:40Lewis Howes?

  Right, you already mastered it.

• 1:41:41Charan Ranganath?

  Exactly.

• 1:41:42Lewis Howes?

  What's the point?

• 1:41:42Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Lewis Howes?

  Not growing beyond it.

• 1:41:44Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:44Lewis Howes?

  So everyone should be getting like a B plus constantly then.

• 1:41:47Charan Ranganath?

  This is actually, yeah, I mean, there's actually, even in machine learning, this is true, is that there's kind of a sweet spot of learning. I think they call it like, I think it's the 80 20 rule or something. You want to be right 80% of the time, around 20%.

• 1:42:01Lewis Howes?

  This is interesting. This is fascinating. I've got, I've got a bunch more questions for you, but I feel like this has been a good start to this conversation with you. You've got an amazing book called Why, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memories' Power to Hold On to What Matters. And there is, I don't know, 40 or 50 pages of kind of citation and research. Maybe it's 100 pages, I don't know. That's kind of backing all of the different things that you've researched and talked about in here. I think it might be 100 pages of research.

• 1:42:29Charan Ranganath?

  It's about one third notes.

• 1:42:31Lewis Howes?

  It's, it's unbelievable. So you, you know, you're a, you're, you're a professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. You've been doing this for over 25 years. If someone wants to understand their memories themselves better and how to create better imagination for their future, I recommend people get this book, Why We Remember. If someone is having trouble unlocking their memories, check this out. There's lots of different practical tools and advice and wisdom and research in this book. And I'm just so grateful that you are doing this work. So I want to acknowledge you for the efforts you have, for the studies, the research and your ability to kind of.

• 1:43:14Lewis Howes?

  Try to simplify, you know, a complex thing, the mind, the brain, the memories, the past, the future, all these things. And I acknowledge you for, for creating this work and for sharing it so openly in this conversation. This has been really beautiful. There's so many more things that I, that I want to ask you about, but I want to give people this first to start. Maybe we'll have you come back on in the future.

• 1:43:36Charan Ranganath?

  Happy to do it.

• 1:43:37Lewis Howes?

  And there's so much I'm sure that will unlock for me. If someone has a question or a follow-up to anything we've talked about here, leave it in the comments on YouTube or post about it on social media. You are the Memory Doctor on Instagram. Also, your website, what's your website again?

• 1:43:55Charan Ranganath?

  Charanranganath.com.

• 1:43:57Lewis Howes?

  Charanranganath.com. But get this book, it's, it's online, it's in bookstores. Make sure you get a copy for friends. This will just be a powerful resource for you in your life. And again, for me, you know, the School of Greatness is all about helping people improve the quality of their life in different areas around health, relationships, money, mindset, purpose, mission. And I think the neuroscience, understanding our minds,

• 1:44:26Lewis Howes?

  who we are, our identities and our stories, all those things can either hurt us or help us based on the tools we use to empower ourselves. And so I just think this is a beautiful

• 1:44:38Lewis Howes?

  resource to empower ourselves if using these tools appropriately and not sinking back into the past negatively. So many more things I want to ask you, but we're going to save this for another, another part two with you. I do have two final questions before I dive into it. Is there anything else we can send people to or anywhere else we should send people to besides the book, Instagram, the website?

• 1:45:01Charan Ranganath?

  I also have a Twitter account, Charanranganath as well.

• 1:45:05Lewis Howes?

  Charanranganath on Twitter.

• 1:45:06Charan Ranganath?

  And if you just look me up, you can find it too.

• 1:45:08Lewis Howes?

  Perfect.

• 1:45:09Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah, and that would be another way too, but the, the website is a great one and we're going to set up a mailing list and and so I'll be able to, hopefully, if I can find time, write a newsletter.

• 1:45:20Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:45:21Charan Ranganath?

  So, yeah.

• 1:45:21Lewis Howes?

  I love this stuff, man. This is great, Charan.

• 1:45:23Charan Ranganath?

  Thank you.

• 1:45:24Lewis Howes?

  This is a question I ask everyone towards the end of our conversations. It's a hypothetical question. It's called the three truths. So I'd like you to imagine. Again, we're talking about imagination. So I could imagine the last day on earth for you. But you get to live as long as you want to live. So, you know, AI and science extends our lives, you know, as long as you want, right? And you get to imagine, you get to create the exact life you want from this moment until the last moment. Friends, family, relationships, work, career, passions, hobbies, they all come true in a beautiful way. For whatever reason, on the last day, you have to take all of your work with you. This book is gone, anything you've researched and talked about publicly,

• 1:46:09Lewis Howes?

  or, you know, this conversation is gone from this world. Hypothetical scenario. And on the last day, you get to leave behind three lessons, or three things from everything you've learned in life, whether it be from career, personal, professional, whatever it might be, spiritual, you get to share three final truths. And this is all we have to remember you by. What would be those three truths from you?

• 1:46:34Charan Ranganath?

  God, this is such a deep question. I'm feeling so not great, but no, I'll try. So number one is just kind of a life lesson that I've learned, which is, sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is to get what you want when you want it. And I've learned this so many times because so, because I've had times where I wanted to get into this particular grad school. I wanted to get this particular job. I wanted to have whatever it was when I wanted it. And it turned out that I didn't get it. And some other door opened up that was far better than anything that I had anticipated or imagined, right? So we've been talking about imagining this abundant future,

• 1:47:18Charan Ranganath?

  but let's face it, the world has endless possibilities, right? And so sometimes I think it's like... The world hits you in the face, but it points you in a particular direction when they're done. And so I think that's been something I never, ever would have thought I would become a scientist.

• 1:47:35Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:47:35Charan Ranganath?

  Never. Yeah. Yeah, never. I mean, it was like, to me, science was just a bunch of formulas and laws and rules. I don't like laws. I don't like rules. So it was a, yeah, but it just kind of happened. And it happened through a series of, of random coincidences and things that opened me up to a lot of the world that I never would have thought of, you know?

• 1:48:01Lewis Howes?

  Random coincidences or purposeful synchronicities?

• 1:48:04Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04Lewis Howes?

  However, you want to look at it.

• 1:48:05Charan Ranganath?

  However, you want to look at it. But that's the thing. It's like you can find meaning in these things after the fact, right?

• 1:48:10Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:48:11Charan Ranganath?

  And I guess that's the second thing I would say is cultivate curiosity in your life.

• 1:48:19Charan Ranganath?

  I can, I can even go further than that. I will say,

• 1:48:26Charan Ranganath?

  be curious about things that make you uncomfortable, or maybe just be more comfortable with discomfort. What I mean by that is, if you look in the field of memory research in general, what you find is if you want to remember, if you want to learn more, if you want to remember more accurately, if you want to inoculate yourself against misinformation, you have to, or if you want to overcome even traumatic events, part of the process of learning involves being able to challenge your beliefs, challenge your assumptions, but also giving yourself the time to do these things. It's like Kahneman talked about thinking fast and slow.

• 1:49:10Charan Ranganath?

  And a lot of which you need to remember accurately, a lot of which you need to use memory to make better decisions, involves. Giving yourself the time and likewise, these things that we've talked about error-driven learning, giving yourself the opportunity to make a mistake and actually test yourself on what you think you remember as opposed to just assuming that you remember. So there's so much about, when I wrote the book, that came back over and over again about becoming comfortable with discomfort was like another big one. Yep. And then the third thing I'll just say is, your hypothetical scenario notwithstanding,

• 1:49:48Charan Ranganath?

  all we're left with is memories. And so what I mean by this is, this moment is over. The moment I said moment, that's over. All we have left is what I, what I talk about it based on, you know, a term that Danny Kahneman came up with is the remembering self. It's not the person who experienced these events, but the person we have when we look back on them. And I've really taken as part of my life, this idea of saying, what are the memories that I want to have one year from now? Wow. And really use that as, as kind of a signpost for, hey, I've got some time off.

• 1:50:29Charan Ranganath?

  I mean, I don't, I never really get time off, but I've got some time where, where my wife and my daughter have some time off. What do I want to do? Well, I know it's going to be a pain to look up airbnbs. I'm going to kill myself to get the best airfares, blah, blah, blah. But a memory of taking a week to go to some river and hang out is going to be far more memorable to me than sitting watching TikTok videos or whatever it would be that I would do, right? And I think it's like, if you look at it from the perspective that when we look back, we'll remember the highs and lows and everything else is just noise, you know? And so what are the highs that you want to take with you as opposed to just thinking about everything?

• 1:51:13Lewis Howes?

  That is a beautiful third truth and kind of point that you just said. What are the memories I want to have a year from now? I think that's a question if everyone asked that to themselves right now, they could start to imagine and get intentional about decisions they want to make over the next three, six, 12 months.

• 1:51:32Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay, I wanna, a year from now, I want to have this memory. I want to have this memory of going on this trip with my family. I want to have this memory of taking time off to go work on this hobby or project to write this book. I want to have this memory of these shared interactions with friends, family, whatever it might be. I want to have this memory of doing a random adventure across the country, whatever it might be. I want to have this memory of being uncomfortable and how much I learned about myself in this process of discomfort.

• 1:52:02Charan Ranganath?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:03Lewis Howes?

  You know, for me, I want to have a memory of going through Mexico City and being able to talk to people that don't speak English and being able to have somewhat of a conversation and be like, wow, I'm so proud of like what I overcame and how I was able to connect with people with a different language. All these things, I would have people put in the comments also, what are the memories that you want to have a year from now? Put that on YouTube or wherever you are watching or listening to this. John, this is fascinating. I've got one final question for you, and that is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:52:38Charan Ranganath?

  Oh, man, that is really tough one.

• 1:52:45Charan Ranganath?

  I guess for me, I would say someone who really like can inspire and bring, make everyone around them better. You know, when I think about all the, I mean, one of the cool things about what I do is, you know, I'm not a big believer in genius. I think there's somebody out there who's better than me at. Something everyone's better than me at something. No one's better than me at everything, right? And so it's like, but I'm especially fortunate to be in a field where there's people who I can get in the room with and I know nothing about what they're talking about. And that they'll tolerate me and help me become better in the process.

• 1:53:28Charan Ranganath?

  And I can think of a thousand people in my life like that, who I would say, this is a great person because every time I spend with them, I come out feeling both that I come out more knowledgeable and feeling better about myself in that process. Yes, that's beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is amazing.

• 1:53:49Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

• 1:54:33Lewis Howes?

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.