The Neuroscience Of How To Improve Your Memory & Focus - Dr Charan Ranganath - #939

Why is memory important? Well, memory is probably not important for the reason people think it is, right? So we always think, well, memory is important when we can't remember. Then we get frustrated about it. We say, oh, why can't I remember this person's name?

Why can't I remember the name of that guy who was in that thing? Why memory is really important is because it's absolutely central to helping us understand the present, where we are at space, when we are at time, and to be able to plan and imagine possible futures. So if you look at people with memory disorders, their problem in life is not that they can't remember the past per se. It's that their inability to remember the past makes it hard for them to remember whether they've eaten recently, or they end up repeating themselves over and over again, or they just don't have much foresight into what they will do in the future.

They have all of these deficits that keep them from living independently, not because they can't tell you what happened, you know, an hour ago or something. It's because that inability leads them to just not be able to do almost anything that uh healthy people do in society in a day-to-day basis. Yeah, so you've sort of touched on something there. You've got a self that experiences stuff, and you've got a self that remembers you experiencing stuff.

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