Total recall: A neuroscientist on how to supercharge your memory
Everyone is interested in – if not downright worried about – their memories. Illustration / Anthony Ellison
There’s a cliché that doctors at parties are always being buttonholed when people find out their interesting specialties. Spare a thought, then, for memory expert Charan Ranganath, director of the memory and plasticity programme at the University of California, Davis. Because everyone is interested in – if not downright worried about – their memories.
“Nine times out of 10, people will say, ‘Oh, you should study me. I have a really bad memory,’” says Ranganath. “But with the 10th out of 10 I get, ‘Oh, I’ve got a great memory’, or occasionally, ‘I don’t remember unless I can visualise something. Do you know anything about that?’ There are interesting questions.”
Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, comes at such questions differently from most of us. He’s not concerned about remembering more. In fact, he has turned down requests to write self-help books on the subject. “There are lots of good books out there on the topic. I wanted to say: ‘Well, what’s optimal for memory in the first place?’ And to get to that, you have to understand what memory is for.”
Which you might have thought you knew already. But not quite. Ranganath’s theory will be a comfort to the forgetful. “You’ll never remember everything. So, if your expectation is that you’re supposed to, that’s probably off. People don’t necessarily try to remember in the way that our brain was optimised to do, and so that makes it harder and unnecessarily frustrating.”
In fact, we are designed to forget, he says. Forgetting isn’t bad, as long as you can remember what you need to. And he wants his new book, Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us to change the way people think about what their memory should be doing for them. It’s a book full of startling but practical conclusions about … um, oh, you know.
Ranganath is specific about his intentions: “I would like people to first of all see the way memory gets into their lives in so many places, whether it’s decisions, whether it’s plans, whether it’s creative activities, as well as, of course, the day-to-day things like finding your keys.”
We Can Train Ourselves
Ranganath’s parents emigrated from India to the US when he was a year old – so, of course, he has no memory of that event, but “for my parents, this was an interesting memory thing. When they left India, they were pretty young – my mum was 18. Their memories got crystallised at that point. The period of adolescence to young adulthood is so important to people’s memories. So, every time we would go back to India, [they would notice] a lot of change.”
His family’s story was the opposite of the populist narrative about immigrants being a drain on the system. “My dad was getting a PhD in mechanical engineering. And then, when my mum was ready to give birth, she went back to India to be taken care of by her family because they didn’t have health insurance.” His mother “didn’t get her college degree, but she worked in retail in computers very early on, in the 80s, then worked all the way up, co-ordinating networks and marketing”.
But there was pressure on the young Ranganath to succeed. “You either became an engineer or a doctor or you were homeless. I was fully expected to become an engineer.”
He had bad school study habits, which he thinks were probably due to ADHD, but he dutifully began studying engineering at college, “and I hated it. I just couldn’t pay attention, no matter how hard I tried, because I wasn’t interested in it.