How memory changes you

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But listen, twice a week, we will still continue to bring you the thoughtful, ideas focused interviews you've come to know and love. You'll be hearing from some familiar Vox voices in the host chair while I'm out. Jacqueline Hill, who is the host of Vox's, explained it to me podcast and Miles Bryan, a reporter on today, explained, and there will be a couple new guest host. I'm excited for you to meet. And I'll also be popping in now and then with some conversations we're pre-recording before I take off. So you won't have to miss me too much. So stay put. I'll be back better than ever before you know it. Hey, it's Sean. Today, we're rerunning a conversation I had with neuroscientist Sharon Roganath about memory. It's an episode that I frequently return to because in our culture, issues of truth often feel unsettled. This conversation forces me to reflect on why that is. Chiron and I discuss how memory works and why the stories we tell ourselves end up changing us. Close your eyes. Think of the first voice you ever loved. The smell of a room you can't quite place or think of something much simpler like the last time you took a walk on a sunny day or that last company Christmas party where you're absolutely positive your dumb joke offended the CEO. Sit with those memories for a moment. The feelings they evoke. The sensations they bring back. Are you actually remembering all that? Or are you inventing it? We think of memory as a record of the past but remembering is also an act of creation and it's possible that the next time you remember taking a walk on a sunny day, you'll also remember that you were listening to this podcast episode even though that's definitely not the case. Memory doesn't keep the past. It remakes it. It stitches fragments into stories. And those stories, true or not, are what we end up calling our life. And on a group level, it's what we end up calling our history. I'm Sean Elling and this is The Grey Area. My guest today is Charon Rangana, a neuroscientist and author of a book called Why We Remember. I asked him to join me for a conversation about the strange alchemy of remembering and how the stories our minds create end up creating us. Dr. Charon Rangana, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Sean. It's a pleasure. It's been too long since we had a legit full-blown scientist on the show. Lots of pressure there. Yeah, you got to carry the banner. Let's get into this wonderful book. You wrote, I learned a lot. And one of the things you say very early on is that the most important message to come out of the whole science of memory isn't that we should remember more, which is what everyone just naturally wants to do. You say that we actually have the wrong expectation about what memory is actually for. So I just wanted to start there. What is memory for? Well, I can tell you what it's not for. And this is where the wrong expectation comes in. It's not for storing and hoarding every experience from the past. It's about really giving us a resource that we can draw upon to understand what's happening right here now and to plan ahead and to anticipate what could happen in the future. So when people say, I have a bad memory, my memory sucks, my memory is spotty, what do you think they're actually misunderstanding about how memory functions? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I have that voice in my head too that says I have a terrible memory, right? But I've been saying that for a long time and I never struggled in school. I could always remember things that I needed to for work, for instance. And it wasn't so much that I had a bad memory as much as I couldn't always remember what I felt was important in the moment when I needed it. And I think that's what sometimes people feel. But if somebody really has a bad memory, like a bad memory, they couldn't function in life. They couldn't work, they couldn't live independently. And I know, because I've tested people and I've interviewed patients with bad, really bad, clinically bad memories, and they just can't function. So I think often when I see people complain about their memory, they're often hyper-functioning people who just feel like they should be remembering everything. And so that's what I'm talking about is I'm really addressing those people. If a truly bad memory means you can't function as an adult in the world, fair enough, but clearly some memories are better than others, right? Or is the mistake, my mistake, insisting on using words like better or worse? That's exactly the mistake is using words like better or worse, right? So it's often, and I say that meaning that people often conflate more with better. So here's a good example of this, right? So there's people who have what's called highly superior autobiographical memory. So these are people who can go back years into the past and recall from a particular date like what they did for what they had for breakfast or who won a baseball game that day and what the score was, the weather that day, all of these details that most neurotypical people would not remember, right? And so you think, okay, these people have a great memory. But for one, they don't, in the sense that if you ask them to learn a new language, they will probably learn at the same speed as anyone who doesn't have highly superior autobiographical memory. Based on the research that's out there so far, there doesn't seem to be some kind of a benefit that makes them just better at everything. The second thing is we know if you look at reports from people with highly superior autobiographical memory, it's not like they're like Bradley Cooper on limitless. They're not like controlling the world. They're not any more happy or successful than other people as far as we can tell. And if anything, they're a little bit plagued by this memory because they often will ruminate about things that happen, even very minor things that happen that were negative. And so is that a better memory? I mean, some people online I've seen have described it as a curse that they wouldn't wish on anyone. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to be, you know, rainman or Bradley Cooper here, but I'm sure I'm not alone. I wouldn't mind being Bradley Cooper for a day. Well, I'm sure he has his own issues. Everybody does right there. It would be fun to be more handsome for a day, but setting that aside, my question would be why is it that I can have near photographic memories about certain things, certain books, certain events, other mostly random, stupid, trivial stuff, and have so little capacity so often to remember things like faces and names, even though I'd very much like to remember faces and names. And I think there are very good reasons, moral, social, whatever, to remember faces and names. And yet, I just consistently botch it. Why is that? Well, there's a whole lot of reasons, but if we talk about the problem of faces and names, this is something that everyone who complains about memory, this is the first thing that comes up. So you're not alone. Essentially, when we're trying to pull information for memory, we have a challenge, which is that memories compete with each other. So any experience that we have, there's all sorts of competition for it. And just as an analogy, you know, my desk right now, I'm trying to gather information for my taxes because I postpone them. And so there's just papers all. over my desk. And I spend a good amount of time trying to find things all the time, right? And so memory can be thought of in a very similar way, that when you have a lot of similar things cluttered around and not organized, you're going to have a lot of competition, a lot of trouble finding it. But if there is one thing that truly stood out here, like if I had a violin amidst all these other things, I would be able to find that pretty easily, right? So here's the problem now getting back to faces and names is we hear many, many similar names, sometimes the same name attached to multiple faces, right? And faces are exceptionally similar to one another. There is obviously your face is different from mine, but we both have two eyes, we have a nose, we have a mouth. And even amongst, you know, people we know well, there is often a lot of similarity. So now we have real problems that we have a bunch of faces that kind of are similar to each other. There's a number of names that are similar to one another that we've seen in the past. And the association between a name and a face is just utterly ridiculous, right? I mean, how do you, there's nothing meaningful linking a name to a face. So if you met somebody whose name was Baker, you know, hundreds of years ago, that would be easier because at least they were probably you know, or Smith would be the guy who's making your suit of armor or your swords or whatever, right? And so now there's just no link between names and faces. There's nothing meaningful there. So that's why it's so hard. How differently does a memory function at different stages of life? I think we all understand that memory declines as we get older, but there are certain kinds of memory that seem to hold up better than others as we age, right? What is the reason for that? Well, let's get into the different kinds of memory first of all. So there's many different kinds of memory, memory researchers love to slice them and dice them in different ways. But one that I think is meaningful, especially when we talk about development is the distinction between what's called semantic memory and episodic memory. So semantic memory might be like, you know, remembering something about, let's say, like, you know, a history lesson that you took when you were in high school, remembering the facts about World War II or being able to build knowledge about like computers or something like that and that kind of expertise that you can build up. But episodic memory is the ability to link something to one particular moment in time, like a movie that you saw about World War II when you were on a strange date when you're in college or something. And for some reason, you've decided to see an old showing a midway or whatever it is, right? And those particular events that are unique to place in a time are called episodic memories. And so when people say that a memory gets worse as they get older, they're almost always talking about episodic memory. When you get older, you find yourself more forgetful misplacing things and not being able to remember where they were or not being able to remember faces and names or the details from a conversation. Semantic memory actually remains solid and even kind of improves a little bit as people get older. That knowledge about the world, it's not like when you're 70, you lose knowledge about all the things that you've learned, all that wisdom, so to speak, right? So what you do lose, though, is the ability to pull up those facts sometimes. And so you'll end up being like, I know the name of that actor, but I can't get it. It's that guy who's in that thing. And that happens a lot too. And that's not an issue of losing the memory or not being able to form semantic memories as much as it is a problem of not being able to pull up that information. And that has to do with something else altogether, which we call executive function. And in fact, that's actually probably one of the biggest reasons why memory gets episodic memory gets worse as you get older is you lose that ability to regulate your attention, that ability to pull up strategies, that ability to kind of like not just make memories, but make memories useful. And that's related to the functions of an area called the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex's function starts to decline pretty much from the age of 30 and it's a gradual decline in most people that continues throughout lifespan. I'm on the wrong side of that. I mean, too. Unfortunately. I always tell people the biggest memory hack I can give is to tell people, what do you want? Tell me, ask yourself, what do I want to remember in the first place? What's the important thing that I need to take away from this? If you came in to a cocktail party and you knew you wanted to be a good person and meet, you know, get to know the names of all the people you meet and remember them, then start with that intention. Most people think that they'll get the memories for free and that's just wrong. There are studies showing that the happiness and satisfaction we get from the outcomes of our decisions do not come as you might expect from what we actually experienced. But rather, it comes from what we remember. That seems like a pretty significant finding. What is the explanation for that? Well, memory really is so transient. And what I mean by this is that we don't forget everything, right? But we forget many of the details very, very quickly. Some of the earliest studies of memory showed that in fact within about one hour of memorizing things, that you lose about 60% of what you tried to memorize. Think about that. That's like 60% of the details of your experiencing self at this moment gone in an hour, right? Now that doesn't mean that you don't remember anything. But Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he has actually said a lot of smart things about memory. He just said smart things about a lot of things. Well, one was memory where he said people generally remember the beginnings and the endings and the highs and the lows. And that in some ways is the important stuff that you need for making a decision, not necessarily every bit of experience. But one takeaway for me here is is that the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives that make up our memory really matter in terms of our well-being. And that would seem to mean that we could gain more happiness in life by deliberately focusing on the right things, by trying to remember the right things. I think that was a beautiful way of putting it. I like to say that memory is more like a painting than a photograph. You know, there's a famous painting by Van Gogh of this French church. And I like to show this sometimes when I'm talking to people. And people immediately recognize the painting as one of the church, right? But it by no means is exactly like the church that's there. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that could be thought of as missing or distorted relative to what it looks like. But there's a lot that's just his perspective that's in there. And that's what makes a painting beautiful in some ways is stuff that's neither accurate nor inaccurate, but it's just how the person sees the world. He painted it at night. You could have just as easily painted it in the morning. You could paint it from a different point of view. You could paint it small. You could paint it big. You could look at one door, you know? And every time we remember an event, we're creating a new painting, right? So often people will tell me about good and bad memories, good and bad experiences, but that could change. And I think even though that seems a little bit counterintuitive, I think many of us have had times in our life, which were objectively bad, sometimes terrible. And we can look back on that from a completely different point of view. So in my book, I talk about an experience which is just like almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong when I was going on this paddle boarding expedition, almost died, you know, that thing. And now is a pretty funny story. I really like to share it. Yeah. Well, that that story actually in the book made me think about trauma and memory and even more kinds of traumatic experiences than that, right? I mean, so for someone who's been through real trauma, just terrible, terrible trauma, forgetting can feel impossible. I mean, how do traumatic memories differ from ordinary memories in the brain? Do they differ at all? Oh, they do for sure. For one thing, the brain is wired in a way to preferentially keep memories for things that are emotionally significant. And the reason is our emotions are tied to, they're not equivalent to, but they're tied to these motivational circuits in our brain that are trying to keep us alive, right? And so often when people have a traumatic event, they feel an existential threat. And they're often arousing or stressful. And there's chemicals in our brain that are released during these experiences, nor Adrenaline's one, cortisol is a stress hormone, there's gobs of hormones that are released during stress. There's also exciting kind of more positive experiences like that kind of moment when you're going to get your first kiss or something like that and associated with dopamine release in the brain. And there's all sorts of chemicals like this. They promote plasticity. They allow new memories to be locked in much more effectively, right? So that's why these traumatic memories tend to stick with us often. But what's interesting about it is we've studied some stressful memories and some emotionally significant memories, not in ways that are remotely like something that a trauma, a survivor really experiences. But what we find even with those is there's a difference between the brain systems that actually are involved in giving you the details of what happened. And the brain systems that actually just rev you up and give you the visceral feeling of the experience, right? So let's say you got into a car accident later on you remember the car accident. Well, there's the details of what happened, right? Like this person ran a stop sign and they crashed right into me and they're driving like a red car. And then there's the feeling, the feeling of imminent danger, the feeling of pain when you got hit and you jerked forward or something, right? And it turns out that those are different, but the thing that makes people feel like it's a photographic memory or they can experience it like in the moment is not the details. It's really the emotion that's associated with it. And so that's a key thing that makes traumatic memories different. And this brings me to another point that I like to bring up to people who tell me, you know, can I, can you help me forget this experience? It's a common thing and it's a tragic thing and I never, ever, every time I hear this, I feel like a lot of empathy and I don't say this in a trivial manner. But you don't want to forget those experiences. You want to be able to remember them without that emotional punch in the face, right? Lots of people who do survive traumas can do that. The brain has natural ways, Matt Walker says that it happens to sleep and I think that is a part of it, that the brain changes these memories to become more useful to us and less toxic to us later on, less radioactive. But when it doesn't happen, that's when people get PTSD. I really enjoyed the bits in the book about music and the unique power it has and I thought it was fascinating when you were talking about the study you worked on. I think when you were just a baby grad student and you expected that having subjects listen to sad music would make it easier for them to remember sad events in their lives and that remembering sad events would make them sad. What is listening to sad music make us remember sad events and does the dynamic also work in the opposite direction? I think this is a very important point is that our episodic memories are rooted to a place and time and part of what makes a unique time in our lives a unique moment and time significant is the feelings that we have in the time. You might be remembering something like, you know, your high school graduation and there's the content of that memory but then there's also the feelings that you had at that moment and that those feelings are part of what we call the context. And so if you imagine episodic memories, if they were books in a library, you would be sorting those books not according to the content but really to the context and that, as I said, the emotions are part of that context. And so if in the moment you are in a particular emotional state, it makes it's almost like as if you're looking at the section of the library that has information relevant to that context and so that's why music can be such a powerful vehicle and it's not only the emotional part, it also can be because you listen to particular kinds of music during particular times in your life. Yeah, that's, it's such a unique trigger in that way. I think you, I mean, you talk in the book about, you know, if you hear a couple of chords of born in the USA, it reminds you of some of the racist bullshit. You would hear when you're in like junior high or high school and, you know, it made me think, if I hear the rolling stone song Wild Horses, it takes me right back to when my mom died in 2020. I listened to that song over and over again when she passed away because it reminded me of her. It was her favorite song and for the rest of my life, if that song comes on, I am right back there when that happened. I mean, it's just, there's nothing else that quite does that in that way. Yeah, and I think part of it is the emotional pole and part of it is the uniqueness of particular kinds of music or pieces of music to particular kinds of relationships we have or times in our life who we are is constantly changing, right? And music is often tied to our sense of who we are that it's like we choose particular times of music based on who we are in particular time in our life. And so music is this beautiful vehicle to access those memories of who we were. And that's part of I think why there's this nostalgia that's associated with music is because it really takes us back not only to the memories of what happened, but the feeling of what we were like when we were at that point in our lives. Meet Clavio, your brand's new best friend. With all your data in one place, Clavio knows you and your customers. It's AI agents build campaigns from one prompt and answer questions 24/7. Always on brand, always with your okay. Go to klaviio.com/bestfriends. Ball is here and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. It's the one we've been waiting for. So whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte or ready to mix it up with an ice pumpkin cream chai, the new ice pumpkin cream matcha or the new ice pumpkin cream shaken espresso, you can find your favorite taste of fall only at Starbucks. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month and clothes that takes weeks. You'll become what you spend on and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/af I wanted to ask you about the role of memory in shaping our identities, our sense of self. And you talk about how our life narrative is really this thing stitched together through memory and our social interactions and the stories we tell about who we are and what we are. My question is, why do we need these stories in the first place? Is the self or whatever we call the self just a memory system holding a story together? And some ways, yes. I think so. In fact, there are people who talk in my field about the self memory system. I, in the book, if there's one thing I'm guilty of is avoiding some of the hard questions, about consciousness and the self. That's smart. Yeah. That was just a little bit of a cop out. I totally admit that. But I think you're onto something and I think that it's like we have, so I talk in the book about schemas as a very powerful way in which we can learn. So schemas, for instance, could be something as simple as I know what happens during a basketball game. I know what happens during a wedding. So these particular kinds of events. We have blueprints in our head about things that are almost certain to happen, things that could happen, and things that won't happen, right? And that helps us orient ourselves towards the unique aspects of what you're trying to remember at any given time. But we also have those ideas about ourselves called a self schema. And I think this is important because a big part of imagination and planning is under understanding a little bit about who we are and why we do things. We don't just remember the past in terms of like regurgitating a bunch of details. When we're really remembering events, we stitch it into causes and effects. And that's really important because if something is not a cause or an effect. it's kind of window dressing, right? And so we don't remember that somebody was like, you know, left the room, but we remember they left a room because they were angry at us or because they were they just got interrupted by an emergency phone call. And I think our sense of who we are gives us a way of organizing our past and organizing things into causes and effects too. This is more of a philosophical question than a scientific one, but this is the show so I'm going to ask anyway. If someone loses their memories, if they cannot remember their life, can they still be themselves? Can they be the same self they were? There's a person named Stan Klein at UC Santa Barbara who asked this very question and he makes a strong case. I tend to think a philosophy is above my pay grade, but there's a, you know, I tend to invert the usual, I kind of tech bro view of the world and I kind of think of math and physics as easy fields because there's an answer and psychology is a much more of a hard science because there's not really clear answers and philosophies like where you get into the stratosphere. It's like what yeah, so anyway, but we just have to sound like we know what we're talking about. You people, the scientists actually have to know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's like the real experts will say, I don't know and I don't know, but Stan has studied people with very, very dense amnesia and has made a good case that these people still have a sense of who they are. But here's the thing. So there's not cases literally of people losing every memory of what they've experienced, but there are people, for instance, like a patient named Casey that Endole Tolving studied. He's really, he came up with a concept of episodic memory and the claim was he could look all the way back in the past and he still didn't have that ability to mentally time travel, right? And there's a little bit of an emptiness to them, a little bit of a flatness. They're in the moment, but there's not a sense of what they could do or what they could be because they don't have these episodic memories to draw upon to give them like kind of more of a flavor of who they are. And I think that's really important because it's like I said, our sense of self normally is constantly changing as we keep acquiring episodic memories. But people who have amnesia, even if it's like something more like the typical kind of amnesia is you have a stroke or something and you're unconscious for a while when you come to you lose memories for something you lose your ability to form new memories and you might lose memories going back 10 years, but you still remember your childhood. And what happens is these patients who have severe amnesia will get stuck in time. You know, they'll look in the mirror and they'll say, oh my gosh, who is this person? But to them, they still feel like they were the person. They were 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And in some cases, I think that's why people with severe Alzheimer's use sense that they're regressing as they kind of like lose that ability to go back to that well spring of episodic memories. So I think, yeah, we have a capability of having a self, but that self becomes much emptier and thinner as you lose memories. Can we say that political movements in some sense are doing the same thing just at another level? Are they stitching collective memory into a collective identity? 100%. This idea of collective memory is still one that is still a developing concept in our field. A lot of the work that's been done in collective memories actually done in the fields of history and sociology, but it's a very relevant concept. How would you define that if you don't mind me asking? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can define it very broadly, which is a memory that's shared amongst multiple people. If you have close family members, you probably have a collective memory of the family. And that gives you a sense of your familial identity because you all have the shared story, right? And your experience might be different than the experience of your parents or siblings. But once you share those experiences with each other, it's no longer your memory. Just the act of expressing that memory in a way that someone else can understand it changes the memory for you. And then now the other person has a memory for something they've never experienced before because you've told them about it. And so as these memories go get passed back and forth, they're constantly modified, right? And I think this is key to what makes humans so successful in the world is that we can build memories and benefit from other people's experiences and wisdom. But it creates huge problems because memory can be selective and memory can be, you know, so it can be highly incomplete. And it can also be inaccurate many times, right? And so sometimes intentionally, sometimes intentionally, exactly. So if you want to form an authoritarian regime, the first thing you do is you seize collective memory. You take down statues. You start to regulate, you know, the teaching of history in schools. You remove references in historical archives, right? Almost any authoritarian regime. This is part of the playbook. And I think it's a powerful one because once you start to shape that narrative, just like people have narratives of I'm terrible at math or I'm like a failure in life. And those are often rooted in a particular interpretation of your past. If you can enforce most people to have a particular view of their nation's past, that's going to shape their sense of what it means to be a member of that nation or that society. The relationship between individual memory and collective memory or between individual identity and collective identity is so fascinating to me. I mean, how much of our sense of self is determined or shaped by our social or tribal affiliations? I imagine the relationship here is pretty damn complicated, but there has to be a relationship there. There's absolutely a relationship and it's a two-way relationship. So a lot of the research shows that on the one hand, you develop your sense of tribal affiliations or familial relationships through these kind of collective memories that you have. But also, you're able to connect with other people if you have shared collective memories and you view those memories in a similar light. And so what I mean by that is, you know, if you're in England and you support, say, the Tottenham Spurs or something like that, you can meet someone anywhere. And once you start talking about the same game, they will become friends, right? Here in the US, it would be like an American football team or a baseball team, same thing, right? Or let's say you're both, you both have similar political views and you both, like, saw the same debate or something like that. Just sharing those collective memories can make you feel more connected with that person. Oh, I grew up in the South. That's where I'm now. And, you know, like, college football is sort of our thing. It's a religion. But it is people who didn't grow up in that don't quite understand it at this level. What kind of cultural shared cultural language it is. I mean, it is that shared memory really. As you meet someone, they got on an LSU Tigers shirt and before you know it, you're having a conversation about, no, I went there when I was five, the Auburn game. Could you believe? You know, I mean, it has this way of stitching together a history and a community in a way that very few things can. But it is that it is that that shared cultural language and history that's like the container for the community really in lots of ways. Yeah, it's beautiful in many ways. And it's toxic in many ways, right? Yeah. That's where I was going. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's both because it's like you see someone else with an LSU Tigers thing shirt. And now you feel like you've got a bond with them. And that's a really good thing. But then you're both watching an LSU Tigers game and you talk to each other. And you'll remember the game based on your love for the LSU Tigers. And you'll go, yeah, the ref totally blew that call. And you might forget a really good play that was made by the other team. And the other person reinforces that story and you build a collective memory that's more selective and more distorted than it would be had you never talk to each other. And that's the downside of collective memory is if we're not careful, if we don't surround ourselves by a lot of checks and balances, what happens is we can develop very impoverished and inaccurate collective memories. And we're very susceptible to misinformation because we like misinformation if it comes in a flavor that we already like. And we're much more likely to take it in and digest it. Yeah, now this is something This is the challenge or one of the challenge that Comes from the fact that memory it's itself is so Constructed and slippery in this way. I mean you even in the book you you talk a bit about how as we grow more segregated politically culturally We end up with just totally different memories of the same events and therefore different realities And if if memory is Reconstructive and in the ways you're talking about and we are moving More and more into a world that's segregated informationally Does that seem like a massive massive political problem to you? I mean, I've argued that it's just straight up unsustainable, but it's also possible that I'm being dramatic So I put it to you. I think this is one of the biggest Threats we have in the present day and one of the biggest dangers that I foresee as you know technologies like AI become more and more powerful is you know, and maybe I'm I'm looking at this from too much of a personal lens and too much of a you know Often we kind of look at things like now is somehow special, right? But I do feel like I've never lived in a time where it's so easy for people to just believe What makes them happy? Right, we used all have shared news sources and shared sources of information and expertise That you know, they could tell us things that we didn't like like smoking is unhealthy and even if we didn't like that We sort of had to believe it because we were all you know because we had news sources that fact checked and we had like Experts who we trusted and experts aren't always right, you know, and news sources are definitely not always right and you know news Could be a selective lens on collective memory but now we have so many sources of information and The thing that I have you know, I've done a lot of podcasts now and it's been a fascinating experience for me because I hear You know, I remember going on one podcast and the person was talking about the legacy media's death And then they're trying to go after podcasters because podcasters are telling it like it is and giving people these long-form things and the idea Somehow if we hear somebody talking for an hour, and we just let them say whatever they want that Eventually people will figure out the truth, right? But that's not really how it works. What happens is people pick and choose what they will remember from all of the podcast They've listened to based on what they believe. That's how they're going to form that memory for all those things that they've been exposed to and The more we allow misinformation to thrive The more it likely it is that people can just Pick and choose what they get in a way that makes them feel good I brought up this idea of causes as being really important causes and effects and so We often will decide about Facts and will make decisions about things in the world based on our understanding of causes and effects But the way our brains do it is kind of like making the best of bad information So for instance, it's like if I were to hear about somebody who Gets a shot and they you know gets a vaccination and they developed a severe allergic reaction to it and they go into anaphylaxis I will be more likely to think that that vaccine Causes problems and is dangerous But I'm not hearing the stories about a bunch of people who took the vaccine and didn't get sick They're not hearing them and because that's not an event That's not something that you can form a memory for is something that didn't happen You know hearing a statistic that nine out of ten people who took the shot didn't get COVID or whatever That's not really going to produce a vivid memory that's going to influence you nearly as much as this vivid memory of somebody You know, even if it wasn't you just somebody telling a story about this Do we understand how malleable Collective memory is is this something that can evolve pretty quickly if I can tell myself a new story about myself that transforms how I Experience the world or think about the world and if you can do that as an individual Can a country do that? Can a community do that? Everything we know about collective memory, which is not a lot, but everything we know Has really pointed to the idea that collective memory just magnifies The strengths and the weaknesses of individual memory, and so what I mean by that is we know that I can give people Misinformation after an event has occurred so you you know Elizabeth Loftus did some really beautiful work on this Where she would show you know a slide show of this car accident and then The car accident like somebody might have run through like a stop sign and she'll say how fast was it going when it passed the yield sign And later on people might be more likely to remember that there was a yield sign there instead of a stop sign Right, those are effects that you can find in the lab for fairly mundane kind of pieces of information But now you're in a group of people and you're remembering that and one person remembers something wrong Especially if that person has kind of a position of status They're a little bit higher status and they talk more Which we can all think of what kinds of groups tend to do this right, you know manslating things and so forth Those people will have an undue influence on how people remember the event later on and that misinformation can really thrive like I mean they talk about it as Social contagion because it spreads like a virus So that selectivity and that malleability of memory that we have as individuals Even for fairly mundane experiences tends to just magnifying groups But of course you also have the power of belief and the beliefs are this kind of Filter that affects what kind of memories we can pull up and what kind of memories we have then What's the causal direction here? I mean do we Do we have memories and then we form Belize on the basis of those memories or do we choose Beliefs and then selectively arrange our memories. So has to Validate those beliefs My sense is yes That is like we build our beliefs based on partly we build our beliefs based on memories for things that we've learned But I think also based on things that we've done There's a literature on what's called cognitive dissonance. That's very old And in in the cognitive dissonance studies they used to have people Right essays on things that they didn't actually believe that went against their beliefs and then later on They would their beliefs would change to accommodate what they did. It's kind of like the tail wagging the dog, right? And so that memory for what we've done and what we've heard off or you know what loved ones people we like and care about have done Will often have a poll on what we believe later on but of course what we believe will affect the kinds of memories We can access and the way we remember them, right? So just at the simplest level people tend to remember Positive events more from their lives than negative events But more importantly when they reconstruct them they tend to remember them more positively and they tend to remember themselves more positively Um, and that can be good in some ways but it can also mean that you tend to think that you're better than you really are All right, and so now you magnify that to your social group and you pull up collective memories about You know the past based on your beliefs and then You and then you construct a narrative out of it and maybe that narrative is that our people are great Maybe that narrative is we used to be great and now we're terrible. We need to be great again Oh If you're looking to hire you need indeed With indeed sponsored jobs you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes Less stress last time more results and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job Get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast Indeed.com/podcast Terms and conditions applied need to hire this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs You At T-Mobile the new iPhone 18 pro is here with a big leap in battery life And you can get it on us with so many reasons to choose T-Mobile. You don't want to talk about it A T-Mobile you can get iPhone 18 pro on them. Pass it on my friends that you can get it on T-Mobile. 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Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, engine customers save more than $300 million on travel, with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box. Do we sometimes have to forget let go of memories in order to forgive and move on? Or is there another way to do that? I'm really asking about this at both the individual and the social level. We're talking about politics and tribal identities and shared memories. Do you think, even at the level of society, that sometimes we need to forget in order to move forward? Or is the price of that kind of amnesia too high? And I'm thinking of something like truth and reconciliation commissions, right? Or even the battles we have in this country over our history. I mean, I've always believed that we have to confront the truth of our past before we can move beyond it. But I guess I can also understand how someone might say, if we're constantly litigating the past and re-remembering the past, we'll be stuck there forever. Yeah. And I think the answer is somewhere in between based on what we know right now. And again, there's serious limits to what we know. But I had a whole section in my book that I wrote at one point on truth and reconciliation and restorative justice and memory. And I had to delete it because, like my editor said, this is just too controversial. Oh, really? Not necessarily substantive enough. And I think the right that the substance was a little bit low in terms of the science. But it's a very controversial topic. You can look at South Africa as a great example of this. And this comes back to what we talked about before with trauma. And this idea that you don't want to forget, but you want to remember it in a way that's not radioactive. And so a friend of mine named Philippe de Brigade at Duke is doing this beautiful, beautiful project called the Memory and Forgiveness Project. And he's both a philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist. And he grew up in Columbia. And the time he grew up in was just really tumultuous. There were all these paramilitary groups and government and crackdowns and insurgencies and so forth. And just many, many, many people were killed. The whole country is still traumatized from this. He has experiences of harrowing things. And he had a pretty privileged life compared to a lot of people. But just all sorts of harrowing memories from him. So what he did was he decided to bring in people into communities and actually teach them about memory and forgiveness. And not tell them you have to forgive people. But just give them the information and see what they do with it. And so the jury's out. We don't know. But what I love from this is he has this quote from somebody named Celio Cruz. And the quote is forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering without pain. And I think this is crucial because often you have experiences like the Truth Commission in South Africa. And I think where they went, where it might have been really making things worse for people, or at least that's what some people have reported, is they often felt like it was just regurgitating the past, but not processing it. And people can find this in psychotherapy too, where you can have therapists who just dig and dig and dig for trauma. But they don't do much to kind of actually the assumption is always the truth will set you free. And if you remember something that's traumatic, somehow you'll just be free of the psychopathology. And that's not at all true. I mean, we like we've talked about remembering something horrible makes you feel horrible, right? So unless you work to change the way you think about the past, it's going to be just kind of like retraumatizing people over and over again. And I think that's where forgiveness comes in is forgiveness is changing the way you look at the past, not changing the memories of what happened per se, but changing your relationship with them. What about self forgiveness for someone who is stuck in the past or cannot help but ruminate over what they did wrong, what they could have done, stakes that were made, etc. And can't forgive themselves and sort of move on. What do you think about that? Do you have advice for people who are stuck in that way? Well, I mean, I look at, I'm one of those people, so it's really hard for me to give advice in the sense of like telling people confidently, this is what you do, but ultimately, if we think of memory as this resource as opposed to this repository of absolute facts, right? Then you can take the same information from the past and make it useful or make it counterproductive, right? I mean, the past is literally over, it does not exist anymore, at least, you know, I mean, aside from physicists telling you something about quantum mechanics, you know, the past doesn't exist anymore. Therefore, it's almost like as if it's not real. All we're living in is the present moment. So to the extent that we have this ability to call on the past, the question is, what do we do with that, right? If we see that past as being something that's an absolute marker of who we are, what we're capable of, that's not going to be productive. But you can look at the past in a different way, right? I mean, I talk about in the book just at a very minor level, giving you yourself the opportunity to make mistakes is the most powerful way to learn, right? And self forgiveness in some way is really about seeing the things that you've done that were theoretically wrong and learning from them. And so, like, yeah, you can always look at mistakes you made and see them as learning experiences, as part of what it takes to, you know, learn and grow, or you can see them as, you know, markers of how bad you are and how incompetent you are. And obviously, one's more productive than the other. I'm still beating myself up for a stupid shit I did in junior high. Yeah, middle school for me was like being in a state prison. So, you get that idea. Is there anything else you want to say or any advice you want to offer to anyone listening before we write off into the sunset? The point that I really want people to get, and I have to hammer this home over and over again, is memory is not free, memory is not easy, and memory is not absolute. And so, the first thing you have to do is set an intention to what really is important for you to remember, whether it's going on a family trip and, you know, deciding do I want to take movies all the time, or do I want to be there and experience it, or being at a party and trying to memorize people's names. It's all, you know, the same kind of thing, which is that your intention will change what you remember and how you remember it for the better. Once again, the book is called Why We Remember. It's fantastic, as was this conversation. Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me. It's been a lot of fun. All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm sure you could tell how much I did. But, as always, we do want to know what you think. So, drop us a line at the Gray Area at box.com, or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please great review, subscribe to the podcast if you can, that helps us grow the show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Isla, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Orrington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area, drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe. The show was part of our story. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. Go to klavio.com/bestfriends. Ball is here, and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. So whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte, or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai, the new iced pumpkin cream matcha, or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso, you can find your favorite taste of fall, only at Starbucks.