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Person

Charan Ranganath

Guest; Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, UC Davis; director, Dynamic Memory Lab

Professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology at UC Davis, director of the Dynamic Memory Lab, and author of the New York Times bestseller Why We Remember. Argues forgetting is the brain's healthy default, not a malfunction — the goal should be remembering better, not remembering more.

Covers Ebbinghaus's original forgetting-curve research (trigram memorization, spaced repetition, and Agnew's live "capital of Tuvalu" demonstration — see Spaced Repetition (Forgetting Curve), Nudge Podcast Tuvalu-Capital Forgetting Demo); Endel Tulving's episodic-vs-semantic memory distinction and context-dependent recall, including a lockdown-era poll on time perception (see Episodic vs. Semantic Memory (Context-Dependent Recall), Ranganath Lockdown Time-Perception Poll); the role of attention and intention in encoding, including media multitasking's harm to memory (see Attention and Intention in Memory Encoding, Uncapher Media-Multitasking Memory Study); and chunking as the real mechanism behind "memory athlete" feats, illustrated with Yanjaa Wintersoul, Ron White, Herbert Simon's chess-grandmaster research, and LeBron James's basketball recall (see Chunking and Expert Memory, Memory Athlete and Expert Chunking Cases, Miller Magic Number Seven Study).

Returns for a second full guest interview in Episode 232, on false memory. Uses the 1980 "Satanic Panic" bestseller Michelle Remembers as a real-world case of memory as "imaginative reconstruction," per Frederick Bartlett's founding 1932 framing (see Michelle Remembers Satanic-Panic Case, Bartlett War of the Ghosts Study), covers the DRM false-memory word-list paradigm (see Roediger McDermott DRM False-Memory Word-List Study), and walks through Elizabeth Loftus's body of work on implanted and altered memory, including her own personal experience of a false memory about her mother's death (see Loftus Lost-in-the-Mall Study, Loftus Stop-Sign Misinformation Study, Loftus Slate Fake-News Memory Study, Loftus Own Mother's-Death Misremembering Case) and a 2015 study finding a majority of participants could be led to falsely believe they'd committed a crime (see Shaw Porter False-Crime-Memory Study). See Illusion of Memory (Confident Misremembering).

Returns for a third full guest interview in Episode 234, on the testing effect ("error-driven learning"): a 2024 dental-students trial, the founding Roediger/Karpicke foreign-word study, a live pretesting demonstration, the "spillover" benefit of testing interconnected facts, and why cramming ties memory too closely to a single context (see Testing Effect (Error-Driven Learning), Varghese Dental-Students Error-Driven Learning Trial, Roediger Karpicke Testing-Effect Foreign-Word Study).

Discussed in

  • Episode 230 — 230-surprising-truths-about-memory-with-dr-ranganath
  • Episode 232 — 232-can-you-implant-fake-memories (full guest interview: false memory, Michelle Remembers, Loftus's work)
  • Episode 234 — 234-one-simple-trick-to-improve-your-memory (full guest interview: the testing effect / error-driven learning)

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