1025: Boosting Your Learning and Presenting with the Science of Memory with Dr. Charan Ranganath

By January 20, 2025Podcasts

Dr. Charan Ranganath discusses the science behind our brain’s capacity to remember (and forget) and how it can help you make better decisions and impressions.

You’ll Learn

  1. How emotions shape memory
  2. How to hack your brain for enhanced retention
  3. The 4 C’s of memorable messaging

About Charan 

Charan Ranganath is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. He lives in Davis, California.

Resources Mentioned

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Anna Dearmon Kornick Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Charan, welcome.

Charan Ranganath
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to hear what you’ve got to say about memory and your book, Why We Remember. And could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating insight you’ve discovered about us humans and memory from all of your research?

Charan Ranganath
Two things that I think are particularly interesting, one is really recent research is showing how much we reuse the same kinds of elements across different kinds of memories. In other words, you think like, “If I take a bunch of pictures of my dog, my phone will store different photos of my dog. It doesn’t reuse the same space on my phone for multiple pictures, but my brain is really using a lot of the same elements across multiple memories that overlap.”

So, memory seems more like a structure that you would build out of Legos, and you could just as easily take those Legos apart and use some of the same Legos to build something completely different, right? And that’s, I think, what I’m most excited about right now, is just seeing how economical our brains are. It’s not laying down something brand new for every event that we experience. It’s really doing a lot of recombination.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is really intriguing. And then there could be some interesting implications there associated with misremembering things. Like, if your brain has a Lego block for dog, your dog, and then your dog may have had a very different, I don’t know, facial expression, posture, whatever, in a particular memory, but if you’re using a more generic dog memory, then those nuances are not present and perhaps more prone to distortion. I’m just totally speculating, making things up here.

Charan Ranganath
No, that’s absolutely true. In fact, what happens often is, as people remember the same event multiple times, the memory drifts more and more towards what people kind of knew beforehand, and you get less and less of the details that are unique to a particular event.

So, what we think the brain is doing is it’s taking this kind of a template and then it’s tacking on some details that make this particular moment unique. And so,  you might remember something specific about what your dog actually did the last time you took your dog for a walk, but most of that memory, the backbone of it is going to be based on just my general knowledge of what happens when I walk the dog and the expectations that I have about it.

If you actually look at brain scans of people who are, let’s say, watching a movie, what you find is that if people remember the movie, you’re using a lot of those same Legos as you do when you’re watching the movie. And then if you ask people to imagine something completely new, we think what’s going to happen is that you use some of those same Legos again to imagine something that hasn’t happened.

In other words, when we remember, we’re using those Legos basically to assemble a little model of the past, to imagine how the past could have been. But you could just easily take those Legos and assemble a little model of the future, or assemble a little model of what’s happening right now. And I think that’s a pretty profound idea that we’re very excited about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then that gets me thinking about the sort of like the state or mood that we’re in and how that’s influenced by what we’re focusing on, and whether in the present or what we’re choosing to reminisce about, whether that was a very pleasant or unpleasant experience, or what we choose to imagine about the future, whether that’s a worry or a visualization of a dramatic victory that you’re going through.

So, that would seem to imply that we have a tremendous power within us in terms of what we choose to focus on and visualize and the moods and, I guess, vibe, presence that we bring into a given moment. Is that accurate?

Charan Ranganath
Oh, that’s totally accurate, yeah. In fact, what you can find is that when people remember an event, you can say, “Hey, try to remember it from the perspective of this other person who’s part of the event.” And people will remember a lot of details that they didn’t remember before. So, we can always reframe and revise our memories of the past by looking at it from a different perspective, right?

But, likewise, what can happen, especially when we’re in particularly emotional experiences, is the emotion kind of puts us in a particular frame of mind and filters a lot of the way that we think about the memory later on. So, I think with emotional memories, especially more difficult memories, people feel a bit stuck, and often you need to actually talk about that information with someone else to be able to incorporate a different perspective and see the experience from a different way of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I mean, this is just intrinsically fascinating stuff. We could poke and dive into all kinds of tidbits, but how about you give us the broad frame for it? What’s sort of the big idea or core message from your book, Why We Remember?

Charan Ranganath
The core message is that memory isn’t this repository of the past that is keeping a comprehensive library of everything that we’ve experienced it as we’ve experienced it. It’s much more about the present and the future than it is about the past.

And so, the analogy that took me months after writing the book, but I really like it because in the months after publishing the book, I’ve been traveling a lot. And one of the things I came to notice is that when I’m packing, I’ve become very good at anticipating what I’ll need. And so, you don’t want to pack too much because then you’re lugging around a bunch of stuff. And if you pack really too much, you’ll never find what you’re looking for. And you don’t want to under-pack and miss out on the stuff that you need that you’re going to use all the time.

And I think it’s like people approach memory as if we’re supposed to take everything that we’ve ever experienced with us on the journey of life. And I think our brains are much more designed to pack just what you need so that you have it when you need it. I mean, there’s all sorts of stuff that I own that I like, like my lamp and stuff like that, that I’m not going to take with me when I go on trips. And I think our brains are really designed to take what we need and to leave a lot of the rest behind so that we have the information that we need when we need it in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting, and yet it seems sometimes I have memories that seem to be not at all helpful, and, in fact, counterproductive that I would like to forget. What’s this about?

Charan Ranganath
It’s a great question. And sometimes those counterproductive memories can be because we just happen to be zoning out and paying attention to something and got excited about some random factoid during the moment. And that excitement can actually create a memory or kind of improve your ability to remember something later on.

Sometimes it’s because we’re not focusing on what we’re supposed to be focusing on, and so we end up going on these, having difficulty filtering out our experiences. And, in fact, there’s some work suggesting that, as people get older, that inability to filter out what’s irrelevant means that you end up remembering stuff that’s irrelevant at the expense of the stuff that’s important and relevant. So, that could be a factor too.

But you can also think of it like we don’t necessarily know what we need later on. And so, sometimes our brains are probably just taking their best guess. And it could be because something was just a little surprising and made you go, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” Or it could be because you were in a particular emotional state at the time, or who knows, right? It’s really hard to reverse-engineer a particular memory that you might have. But there are all sorts of reasons why you might have access to some memory that seems really random.

Pete Mockaitis
And since there’s so many dimensions or directions we could take this into, what do you think are some of the top implications of this research for our professional lives and careers?

Charan Ranganath
I think that one big implication is if you’re trying to communicate, which is essential to almost all jobs, but especially in knowledge-based jobs, I feel like you need to start with the assumption that most of what you communicate will be forgotten. And so, that is very, very important because once you start with that, then you can say, “What are the key points that I really want someone to take away?”

And you can use some strategies to really emphasize those key points over and over again. But I think often what we can get caught up in doing is we just say a lot of things and then we expect everyone to remember them later on.

Likewise, one of the things that you find is that people will usually tell me, “Hey, I have a terrible memory. Help me out.” But then in the moment, they assume that everything that’s happening, they will remember it later on. So, people have this weird overconfidence in how much they’ll remember.

And so, if you’re listening to someone else, it’s also really important to factor in that you’re not going to be able to remember everything. And so, that can be very important, too, because sometimes you might need help to document all the things that are going on if it’s something that’s super memorable. I feel like it’s really good to rely on devices that have a photographic memory because humans don’t.

And so, when it comes to reminders of things, I think devices are great. Now there’s all sorts of problems with our devices that can cause problems for our memory, but we can talk about that, too. I mean, I think that’s another big important thing for the workplace, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just because it’s hanging in the air. Problems with these devices, are you talking about like interruptions or what do you mean?

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, so the problems with the devices, the biggest one I would say is interruptions, but not only interruptions that are external, but our own kind of conflicts that are happening in our heads. So, in other words, you have a phone, let’s say if I have my phone in front of me, and I know I have my phone there, well, that phone is associated with checking email. And if you have a habit of checking email on your phone constantly, even when you’re not checking email, you might have an urge to go on the phone and check your email because it’s there, it’s around. So, it’s this cue.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, it’s reminding you of the behavior, “So, let’s go ahead and do it.”

Charan Ranganath
Exactly. And so, the phone itself isn’t the problem. It’s the habit that’s the problem. And, likewise, you have social media. If you check social media habitually, if you have social media apps on your phone, every time that phone is around, you’ve got a little bit of an urge to check it that’s going on in the background.

One of the weird things, I’d learned about this after I wrote the book is when you do something, let’s say that’s long and tedious, like we often have to do at work, what tires you out is not necessarily doing the tedious work as much as the fact that our brains start to ask ourselves, “Okay, what could I be?” And I realize this is sounding very unscientific, but there are more mechanistic ways of describing this.

But essentially, our brain starts pulling up other options the longer we persist on something that’s not rewarding to us. Our brain starts popping up other options, they’re going to give us immediate rewards. Our brains really like things that are immediately rewarding, as opposed to activities that have some benefit in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing. Well, could you tell us a story of someone who struggled in some of these dimensions and then implemented some of your approaches and saw a cool transformation as a result?

Charan Ranganath
I can talk about myself as somebody who struggles with all these issues and talk about how I’m trying to transform my life. I mean, it’s not easy, right? I get all sorts of messages from people that are labeled urgent. And so, it’s very hard for me to completely disengage from things like email. In fact, actually, come to think of it, I should quit my email program that’s running in the background right now.

And I have to say, I don’t know how they actually came to this conclusion, but my school, when I was a kid, told my parents that I have ADHD. And this was long before the whole, like, thing where schools had real benefit in actually assigning these diagnoses. Back then, it was just like nobody even thought about this stuff. And so, more recently, I’ve kind of come to terms with that. I sort of stuck that, that was in the back of my mind for a long time.

And then, recently, after the book came out, I had some reminders that brought that to mind. And I started to go, “Oh, yeah.” And then I had this aha moment of all of these things that I do and things that go on in my life that are seriously problematic because of ADHD. And so, one of the things that I’ve done is really tried to engineer my environment. And what I mean by that is I’ve removed my social media apps from my phone.

I was getting really stressed out about the presidential election, so I removed all my news apps from the phone. I’ve really removed all the alerts except for things that are calendar alerts. I removed everything else from my phone so that I’m not getting notifications. I have a whole kind of set of things that I do for planning and so forth, but I guess relevant to memory, the biggest things that I do are things that involve minimizing distractions, trying to reduce switching.

Switching is very costly to us in terms of our mental resources. And if we switch too much between things, what can happen is that that leads us to have very fragmented memories of the activities that we’re doing so that’s not a really good thing either. So, on an ideal day, I might block off time to do things like social media and email and so forth, and then block off time where I’m going to be doing other activities. So, I would say that these are some tools.

But I think the biggest thing is that I’m learning that slow thinking is a lot more effective than fast thinking, and really trying to catch myself when I’m going into this kind of panic mode of all the hundreds of things I have to do, catching myself and then kind of taking one thing at a time. And the reason is that, if I am scattered too much and I’ve got too many things going on that I’m thinking about, I really will have no memory of that day afterwards. So, that’s a big thing.

I guess another thing I’ll say, this is probably the biggest transformation that I made, is I really think about bigger decisions in life in terms of how I want things to be remembered. And what I mean by that is, like, we just all got through the New Year. And every time you get to the end of the year, it’s natural to reflect on what happened earlier in the year. And then people make their resolutions for the next year.

And I feel like it’s really important to ask yourself, for all the things that we do, “Is this how I want to remember this year that’s gone by?” And there’s all sorts of activities that we do that we won’t remember. And even if we did remember, we won’t want to have remembered our lives that way. It’s not like you sit around and go, like, “Boy, I’m really glad I spent like four hours watching TikTok videos,” or something. Nobody says that, I don’t think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is powerful stuff. Well, so let’s put some things into action. Let’s say, in the course of doing my professional duties, I want to learn some things. I want to develop some skills and recall some key information, tips and tricks, and insights from the How to Be Your Job podcast, etc. Like, I’m learning some stuff and I want to remember more of it. What are some best practices?

Charan Ranganath
One of the best practices, I would say, if I had to pick one thing, is give yourself the chance to fail. And what I mean by that is you tend to think, “Okay, well,” and realistically speaking, I mean, it’s a very understandable intuition that if I’m trying to remember something, if I’m trying to memorize something, saying it to myself over and over, is the best way to do it.

But, in fact, if you give yourself the chance to try to remember it later on, and you don’t remember it, and then you give yourself the answer, that’s going to give you far better retention of the information than if you didn’t give yourself the chance to do it. It’s called, I talk about this in my book, as error-driven learning. Other people talk about it as active learning.

But this error-driven learning principle is so powerful that even before you learn something, if you test yourself on what the answer could be, you’ll remember that answer better than if you just tried to memorize that answer. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Yes, I hear you. We had Dr. Manu Kapur on the show, and talking about, I think the label he used was productive failure. And this very notion that, and I’ve noticed it myself ever since he tuned me into it, is that if I do a thing and then fail, and then I learn what happened there, it is so much more impactful in terms of, “Oh, it feels like an epiphany. Like, that’s where I went wrong, of course,” as opposed to I’m just passively receiving one of thousands of things in the day, which can wash right over me.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. Yeah, and it’s really funny because in certain activities, it’s almost a given that that’s going to be the way you want to learn. Like, if you’re going to be in a play, you don’t just sit around and memorize the script. You actually try to recite the lines. And that’s when you realize how little you know, but also your brain can repair those memories and optimize them so they’re more accessible later on. Or if you’re learning to play basketball, you don’t watch a bunch of footage. You actually do it, right?

And, likewise, I think we don’t do this with other things. I mean, if you look at school, school is all about good performance. It’s not about learning. It’s really about mastery. And I think it’s what you really would want to do is be able to encourage people to push themselves to the point where they’re getting C’s and then they learn the answer, and then they actually get better as a result. But we don’t really do that.

And so, I think that’s why there’s this intuition out there that we’re just supposed to be good at remembering, and that’s not true. I mean, you’re going to be better at remembering if you fail to remember and then learn from that mistake.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got me thinking about my kids and the learning that’s happening right now. So, I’ve got my five-year-old Mary, we have a keyboard, a little Casio. She’s been playing around on it, and she was trying to learn how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And it was so interesting to watch because she would get a few notes right, and do the wrong one. And she could hear and recognize that it was wrong. And she would sound so frustrated, like, “Aargh!” It’s like, “It’s totally okay. This is just how it works.

But, in a way, that frustration, that “Aargh!” moment is, in fact, quite valuable. Like, she’s better off, for the purposes of learning “Mary Had a Little Lamb” as far as I understand it, experiencing that than not experiencing that to cement the learnings.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And the key is that you have to, and I know this is kind of a hot topic because of all the stuff with the growth mindset, for instance, but it’s absolutely true. The key is that you have to see the mistake as an opportunity to learn. You don’t want to see the mistake as evidence that you have a bad ability. You want to see the mistake as, “Okay, here’s how I fix this memory.”

And that’s really key because you want to be able to focus your efforts on the right answer as opposed to simply, like, just getting mad at yourself and kicking yourself. That doesn’t help you. And so, what’s important about that is, again, we don’t really do a great job of incentivizing people to try and fail. And, at the same time, I think it’s also important, in the “Mary Had a Little Lamb” case, it’s good to have a teacher who can actually say, “Here’s how you should do it.”

On the other hand, if she knows how to do it, she could take a moment to slow down, and then say, “Okay, here’s where I made the mistake. Let me try this again and focus on the right answer.” And that is where, again, you can get the biggest gains.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I was also thinking about, talking about kids and learning, I was inside the Khan Academy app. And so, my other child, Johnny, we were doing some math stuff. And I had these thoughts about productive failure in my mind. And I noticed just from top to bottom, the sequencing is, first, “Here’s the video of how to do the math problems. And here are some math problems to do.”

And I wondered, not to think that I know better than the mighty Sal Khan, but it’s like, “Would it be better if this were completely flipped in terms of ‘Try to do these math problems and fail miserably. Now, hey, here’s how to do them.’?” That might be a better way to learn, even though it’s the exact opposite of what I’ve done in my learning and how the app is set up. What are your thoughts?

Charan Ranganath
Yes. Yeah, I absolutely think that would be the case. It might be better to give yourself the chance to screw up and then, after each problem, get “Here’s how you do it.” And then get another problem, because this is a general skill that you’re trying to learn. You could give the question, give yourself a chance to screw up, get “Here’s how you do it,” then get a similar question, and then screw up, and then, “Here’s how you do it” again. And keep giving yourself those opportunities and keep bringing up.

I mean, the algorithms could easily bring up the ones that you’ve struggled with the most and give you very similar problems. And I think that’s a much more effective way to learn than to, you know, it’s still good that they include those tests in there, but I think it would be better if you could really optimize it in a way that’s sort of pushing people to struggle a little bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s flip it. Let’s say we are the dispenser of wisdom, knowledge, information as a presentation or training or any form of communication. You said it really is helpful to think about, “Hmm, give most people will forget most of what we have to say, really hone in on the top key messages that we wish to be remembered.” Do you have any pro tips on how we implement that in practice?

Charan Ranganath
Yes. And, in fact, I actually wrote an article about this in Harvard Business Review. It was the four C’s of memorable messaging, is what I called it.

Okay, so one is chunking. So, chunking is a principle by which you take all the things that you’re like, let’s say, if I’m presenting information, and there’s all these details, you want to be able to explicitly tie it into, like, one chunk. So, for instance, what you can do is you can start to say, “Okay, here’s a general principle.”

I’m trying to tell people to basically try to take care of their brain health. And I’m trying to remember what all the things are there that I tell people because there’s a hundred different facts I can tell people about how to improve their brain health. Well, one of the key principles is your brain’s a body part. So, what’s good for your body is good for your brain.

Now you start for that and you can say, “Okay, well, what’s good for my heart?” “Oh, yeah, so doing all these things to reduce your blood pressure, to reduce your cholesterol and so forth. Those are things that you could do to improve your brain health.”

And then another one is callbacks, where you want to keep going back to what you said previously. So, now people have to take a moment to remember what they were just being, what you told them about five minutes ago, and they’re tying together what’s happening now with what’s happening then. And, again, you’re creating this little chunk of knowledge.

Another is curiosity. And so, you were asking me before about one of the discoveries from my lab. And one of the things that we discovered, which really surprised me, was how curiosity can drive learning. And it relates to this error-driven learning stuff that we talked about, where we were interested in this idea that being curious is a motivator.

And when you look at other motivators, like, people trying to get money, for instance, or people trying to get food, what you find is that you get activity in these areas of the brain that process dopamine. And dopamine isn’t really a reward chemical. It’s really about energizing you to get reward and teaching you about what’s rewarding.

And so, what we found is that when you give people a question and they’re really curious about the answer to this question, they don’t know it, what happens is there’s an increase in activity in the areas of the brain that process dopamine. And it’s triggered, as I said, by the question, not by the answer per se. Now, if the answer is surprising, then you might get more of an effect. But, in general, just getting a question can energize people and drive them to find the answer.

And when they’re in that state of curiosity, they’ll be better at memorizing things that they’re not even curious about. So, if you can start off by getting people interested in the question before you give them the answer, that’s really important. And so, for instance, when I wrote my book, I had to relearn this principle and I had to really think about, “Okay, what are the counterintuitive in memory research?”

Because once you highlight a counterintuitive, then you can start to ask, get people thinking about your points in a way that gets them more likely to stick because they really are going to be curious to find out the answers to these questions. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it does. And I’m thinking about, yeah, I believe Bob Cialdini in his book Influence mentioned that this was an approach he liked to use in the classroom, in terms of, he generates a question and then deepens it a little bit, so it’s like a full-blown mystery. And some YouTubers do this very well in terms of like there are many documentaries. And so, that’s a good tip is like we start with the question.

But then help me out. If we ask a question, but then, sometimes when I hear a question, I just don’t care at all. And so, then it feels like I’m not getting the benefit of that curiosity in terms of, “Okay, you asked a question, I don’t care.” So, I guess that’s a tricky number. How could I…?

Charan Ranganath
Well, so the question needs to trigger curiosity. And for people to be curious, you have to hit this sweet spot. Because if it’s something where you have just no knowledge about anything in that area, well, you’re not going to necessarily be curious about it because, “Yeah, of course I don’t know the question. I don’t know the answer to this question.” And if you know the answer to the question, then you’re not going to be curious if it’s obvious.

Where you really want to get people is where there’s a gap between what you’ve just told them and what they need to know to answer the question. And that gap should be something that is bridgeable. So, one way you can do it is by highlighting this thing that people go, “I hadn’t thought about that,” or, “I thought I knew this topic but now there’s something I realized that I didn’t know.”

So, I mean, I’m just pulling something out from just random, but if somebody were really into The Beatles, and you said, “Hey, do you know the lyrics to the song?” and they hadn’t heard that song, they would be really curious about it. But another way to go is to also be able to say, “Hey, there’s this thing that you thought you knew, but, in fact, I’m going to flip it on its head, and, in fact, I’m going to ask this question that really prompts you to realize that there’s an error in what you thought you knew.”

So, in general, these tools to increase curiosity are driving what’s called prediction error, which is essentially you’re expecting to know the answer to something, and then there’s, all of a sudden, this gap between what you knew and what you’re actually getting. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s actually perfect, thank you, in terms of, I’m thinking about, I had some podcast sponsors for like really deep software technology things, as come through the agencies, like, “Hey, do you want this sponsor?” And then I go to their website, it’s like, “I have no idea what they’re even saying about some deep cloud architecture something or another.”

“And so, they may very well be solving an important problem for somebody, but I feel like I’m not your guy to speak this advertisement because, if I don’t know what it is, I’m not going to be compelling. And I can’t vet it properly in terms of whether it really is a good, cool thing or not.” And so then, there’s no curiosity because I don’t have a clue. I’m not even on the same map.

And then on the flip side, if I have full knowledge, they’re like, “Hey, Pete, you’re a podcaster. Do you know the number one thing podcasters do to grow their audience?” Like, “Yes, I do.” So, it’s like, “You were trying to make me curious, but you failed because I already know it.” And so, I think that’s perfect with the gap.

And, in fact, you’re identifying one of my favorite types of books, which is an event occurred some time ago, and we have some perspective on that in deep layers in terms of the author went deep with the interviews of the people like, Bethany McLean, her books are so great. Like, the smartest guys in room about Enron. It’s like, “I know, I’ve heard about Enron.” “Well, here’s what really went down and all the details.”

Or, the housing finance crisis in 2008, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I kind of know a little bit about it.” It’s like, “No, here’s all the details.” And so, Bethany McLean just lays it all out for me. I love it. And it’s exactly that, it’s, like, I have some knowledge of the thing, but there’s some gaps, and she fills them with gusto and it’s a delightful experience.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. And I think it’s like in the current age of the internet, you have to be careful because it’s like, I know for me, I’ve seen enough stuff now where it’s like people sell a book and they say “Everything you used to know about this topic is wrong.” And I think there’s a little bit of fatigue that you get from reading those kinds of things.

But to the extent that you can highlight a genuine counterintuitive or a genuine gap that people just hadn’t actually thought about, I think that’s going to be effective at triggering curiosity. And your example actually brought up something else, which is another point I talk about is making things concrete.

So, your example of the AI companies, if you’re talking about these very abstract concepts, it’s really hard for people to remember that stuff. But if you give people a concrete story or a concrete example, they’re going to be much more likely to remember that. And, in fact, it’s going to dominate their judgments about whatever it is you’re telling them about because it’s going to be so memorable.

So, when I wrote my book, this was a big challenge because, in science, we’re often in our heads in this very abstract world, and we’re trying to make these arguments about things that are very not tangible. And I had to come up with stories, which you try to write from your experiences, so there are stories from my life all through the book that talk about all these crazy things. But those stories make concrete some point that I’m trying to convey.

Or they open up this question that people wouldn’t have necessarily thought about it and again trigger their curiosity. But either way, that concrete story, especially if it’s emotionally engaging, it will plant itself in people’s memory. And then anything that you attach to that story now becomes more memorable too.

Pete Mockaitis
And it also helps explain why I can binge watch TV shows because the gap is “What’s going to happen to this character?” And I’m situated, I’ve got the scene, I know the context, the environment, the stakes, what they’re trying to accomplish, but what I don’t know is how it’s going to turn out. And I might just have to watch many episodes to satisfy that.

Charan Ranganath
And that’s why if you’re watching it something with commercials, they always stack the commercials towards the end because, by that time, you’ve built up enough knowledge about what’s happening that you’re really urgently trying to figure out what’s happening. And so, if you put a gap there and you have a commercial break, people are in the state of curiosity, and, in some sense, they’re going to be more receptive to that commercial.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, Charan, before we hear about some of your favorite things, any key things you want to make sure to mention or put out there?

Charan Ranganath
I would say one big one is, since we’ve been talking about AI, humans are very different in the way that we learn and remember relative to machine learning. And I think I like to get this point out, I don’t get enough opportunities to say it because there’s just so much hype and, frankly, a lot of bullsh**.

There’s so much bullsh** out there about AI and this concept of artificial general intelligence, which is a very dumb concept. Because, essentially, if you look at the kind of constraints on machine learning and the constraints of human learning, they’re very, very different. And, realistically speaking, humans are dumb in many ways that machines aren’t, and machines are really dumb in ways that humans aren’t.

And I realized that you need to have a lot of humility when you talk about where technology is going because there’s lots of stuff we haven’t been able to foresee. But the thing is that the human brain basically evolved to get certain things done, basically to propagate our genes, to keep us alive long enough to propagate our genes, and to get the offspring protected and so forth, and be able to help us find a mate.

Machine learning doesn’t have those constraints. So, machine learning doesn’t have the same resource limitations. I mean, if you look at like ChatGPT, it can take down an entire power grid. I mean, the carbon footprint is huge. My brain is using less power than an incandescent light bulb. It’s just orders of magnitude different.

And people will say, “Oh, that’s because we just need neuromorphic computing and everything will figure itself out,” and that’s just not true. The principle of human learning is we try to get as much information as possible from as little information as possible. And so, there’s this kind of sense in AI where it’s like we just dump enough training data and these machines can do everything.

And humans are like constantly reducing the amount of data that they get, the amount of data they process and work with, but we’re doing it in a way that’s fairly intelligent. It’s optimized for the information that’s new and surprising. It’s driven by things that are biologically significant to us. And so, you can hook up a camera to a kid and train, like use the video information to train like a state-of-the-art AI system, and it’s going to do all sorts of interesting things.

But that’s because the kids done the hard work of looking at everything that’s important. So, ChatGPT can do a lot of cool stuff but that’s because humans reasoned about all these things, put it in writing, and then it’s just memorizing what we’ve given it, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “You don’t get the credit for all that.”

Charan Ranganath
Exactly. Now, that doesn’t mean that algorithms, in general, are consistent, and they can have a memory that is more faithful to what it’s been trained on than humans can be. And humans have all sorts of biases because, I have a whole chapter talking about this, that there’s a lot of learning that happens under the hood in our brain that we’re not necessarily aware of. And that learning can bias us in a lot of ways.

It can make us go for things that are very familiar. Like, if you hear the word Budweiser over and over again, it’s going to seem like it should be a better beer than some beer that you’ve never heard of before, because, like, if it just is a generic store beer. And, of course, for people who are into beer, they might not think Budweiser is good. But the point is that Budweiser advertises, even though you’d think everyone knows what Budweiser is.

But Budweiser advertises because if you say that, you get that name out in front of people and you put some image in front of people enough, maybe you’re going to be 5% more likely to pick out Budweiser than Miller Lite at the grocery store, and that translates to huge amounts of sales. So, I think that’s something where humans are really susceptible is in our biases.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Charan, this is fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for sharing the time with us. And I wish you many happy memories.

Charan Ranganath
Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun and it was a memorable conversation.

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