2024-03-26
42 分钟Charan Ranganath is a psychologist and neuroscientist who has spent his career studying memory. His new book, Why We Remember, surveys the latest science on the subject and digs into the links between memory and identity. Charan and Adam discuss surprising evidence on why we remember, what we forget, and how learning new ideas happens.
Ted audio collective.
Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant.
Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the Ted audio collective.
I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
My guest today is Charan Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist who directs the dynamic memory lab at the University of California, Davis.
Are you a forgetful person?
I am a very forgetful person.
I know that I am the prototypical absentminded professor, and so I do have a lot of problems with memory.
So it's probably a reason why I'm interested in the prefrontal cortex.
As a result, he's a Guggenheim fellow and the author of the new book why we remember, and he's about to turn some of your assumptions about memory upside down.
How did you get interested in memory?
I took a class from Danny Kahneman.
And Danny at that time, wasn't like the Nobel Prize winner, but he's just still as charismatic and smart as ever.
And so he was talking a lot about decision making and how people can be irrational.
But a lot of what the work was about is really about how memory leads people to make decisions that are irrational.
Then later on, I go to grad school, and I'm actually working in clinical psychology.
But a lot of that clinical work is seeing patients and testing them for brain damage.
And no matter what was wrong with them, like, nine times out of ten, they came in saying they had a problem with their memory.
Or worse, a relative would bring them in and say they had a problem with their memory.
And the range of things that people were having problems with could be clinical depression.