YouSaid · the spoken record

Charan Ranganath

lines on the record: 203
first: 2024-05-25
most recent: 2024-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“From traditional learning theories, some learning theories, anyway, this seems weird. Why would you do better giving yourself this extra error from testing yourself rather than just giving yourself perfect input that's a replica of what it is that you're trying to learn? And I think the reason is that you get better retention from that error, that mismatch that we talked about, right? So what's happening in our model, it's actually conceptually kind of similar to what happens with backprop in AI or neural networks. And so the idea is that you expose, here's the bad connections and here's the good connections. And so we can.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think this falls into a category we've done other modeling. One of these is a published study in PLOS computational biology where we show that another way, which is, I think, related to the spacing effect is what's called the testing effect. So the idea is that if you're trying to learn words, let's say in Spanish or something like that. And this doesn't have to be words. It could be anything. You test yourself on the words and that act of testing yourself helps you retain it better over time than if you just studied it, right? And so”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, feel kind of like there's just things that we read about almost, you don't vividly reimagine them, right? It's like they're just these things that just come to us like facts, right? Yeah. And it's a little bit different than semantic memory, but it's like basically these events that we have recalled every, you know, over and over and over again, we keep updating that memory so it's less and less tied to the original experience. Then we have those other ones, which it's like you just get a reminder of that very specific context, you smell something, you hear a song, you see a place that you haven't been to in a while, and boom, it just comes back to you. And that's the exact opposite of what you get with spacing, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is different. So your current situation doesn't match up with the memory that you pulled up. There's error. There's a mismatch between what you pulled up and your current context. And so in our model, what you start to do is you start to erase or alter the parts of the memory that are associated with a specific place and time and you heighten the information about the content. And so if you remember this information in different times, in different places it's more accessible at different times in different places because it's not overfitted in an AI kind of way of thinking about things. It's not overfitted to one particular context. But that's also why the memories that we call upon the most”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need it very quickly, right? But the problem is that you tend to forget it later on. But on the other hand, if you space things out, you get a benefit for later on retention. And so there's many different explanations. We have a computational model of this. It's currently under revision. But in our computer model, what we say is that maybe a good way of thinking about this is this conversation that you and I are having. It's associated with a particular context, a particular place in time. And so all these little cues that are in the background, these little guitar sculptures that you have and that big light umbrella thing, right? All these things are part of my memory for what we're talking about, the content. So now later on you're sitting around and you're at home drinking a beer and you're thinking, God, what a strange interview that was, right? So now you're trying to remember it, but the content.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. If I'm trying to memorize something, let's say if I have an hour to memorize as many Spanish words as I can, if I just try to do like half an hour and then later in the day I do half an hour, I won't retain that information as long as if I do half an hour today and half an hour one week from now. And so doing that extra spacing should help me retain the information better. Now there's an interesting boundary condition, which is it depends on when you need that information. So many of us, you know, for me, like I can't remember so much from college and high school because I crammed because I just did everything at the last minute. And sometimes I would literally study like, you know, in the hallway right before the test. That was great because what would happen is I just had that information right there. And so actually not spacing can really help you.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that mental structure of yours. And then you could walk through the different path and find all the pieces of information you're looking for. So the method of loci is a great method for just learning arbitrary things because it allows you to link them together and get that cue that you need to pop in and find everything, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? It's kind of connected, and that's it. Yeah, yeah. And I'm serious, though, that these kinds of weird associations now I'm building a richer network. I mean, one of the things that I find is if I'm like, you can have somebody's name that's just totally generic, like John Smith or something, not that no offense to people that name, but if I see a generic name like that, but I've read John Smith's papers academically and then I meet John Smith at a conference, I can immediately associate that name with that face because I have this pre-existing network to lock everything into, right? And so you can build that network. And that's what the method of loci or the memory palace technique is all about is you have a pre-existing structure in your head of like your childhood home or this mental palace that you've created for yourself. And so now you can put arbitrary pieces of information in different locations.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know he has a shaved head though, or he's bald, but you're not. You've got a great head. If I trade hair with you any day. But something like that. But if I can come up with something, like I could say, okay, so Lex Luther is this criminal mastermind. And then I just imagine you. You talked about.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arbitrary stuff. So, what you need to do is build connections somehow, visualize a connection. And sometimes it's obvious or sometimes it's not. I'm trying to think of a good one for you now. But the first thing I think of is Lex Luthor. But that's great. Yeah.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I feel like we've got a lot in common. When people introduce themselves to me, it's almost like I have this blank blackout for a moment. And then I'm just looking at them like, what happened? I look away or something. What's wrong with me? So, I mean, I'm totally with you on this. The reason why it's hard is that there's no reason we should be able to remember names. Because when you say remembering a name, you're not really remembering a name. Maybe in my case you are, but most of the time you're associating a name with a face and an identity. And that's a completely arbitrary thing, right? I mean, maybe in the olden days, somebody named Miller, it's like they're actually making flour or something like that. But, you know, for the most part, it's like these names are just utterly arbitrary. So you have no thing to latch onto. And so it's not really a thing that our brain does very well to learn meaninglessly.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, how do people do this? By all accounts from people who become memory athletes, they weren't born with some extraordinary memory, but they practiced strategies over and over and over again. The strategy that they use for memorizing a particular thing, it can become automatic and you can just deploy it in an instant, right? So again, it's not necessarily going to, one strategy for learning the order of a deck of cards might not help you for something else that you need, like remembering your way around Austin, Texas, but it's going to be these, whatever you're interested in, you can optimize for that. And that's just a natural byproduct of expertise.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the things that surprised us were the biggest effects as people became experts in identifying these different kinds of just crazy objects that we made up. As they develop this expertise of being able to identify what made them different from each other and what made them unique, we were actually seeing massive increases in activity in the prefrontal cortex. And this fits with some of the studies of chess experts and so forth that it's not so much that you learn the patterns passively.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can say that, in fact, we do in certain ways, right? So if you are an expert in something, you are training attention. So we did this one study of expertise in the brain. And so people used to think, let's say if you're a bird expert or something, right? People would go like you get really into this world of birds, you start to see the differences in your visual cortex as tuned up and it's all about plasticity of the visual cortex. And vision researchers love to say everything's visual. But it's like we did the study of attention and working or working memory and expertise.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there are different schools of thought on training attention, for instance. So one of my colleagues in Amishi Jiao, she wrote a book called Peak Mind and talks about mindfulness as a method for improving attention and focus. So she works a lot with military like Navy SEALs and stuff to do this kind of work with mindfulness meditation. Adam Ghazali, another one of my friends and colleagues, has worked on kind of training through video games actually as a way of training attention. And so it's not clear to me. One of the challenges, though, in training is you tend to overfit to the thing that you're trying to optimize, right? So you tend to, if I'm looking at a video game, I can definitely get better at paying attention in the context of the video game. But do you transfer it to the outside world? That's very controversial.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brain uses something like 12 to 20 watts, you know, in a day. I mean, that's just nuts, the low power consumption, right? So it's all about reusing information and making the most of what we already have. And so that's why basically, again, what you see biologically is, you know, neuromodulators, for instance, these chemicals in the brain like norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, these are chemicals that are released during moments that tend to be biologically significant, surprise, fear, stress, et cetera. And so these chemicals promote lasting plasticity, right? Essentially, some mechanisms by which the brain can prioritize the information that you carry with you into the future. Attention is a big factor as well. Our ability to focus our attention on what's important.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think improvement depends on what your definition of optimal is. So what I say in the book is that you don't want to remember more. You want to remember better. Which means focusing on the things that are important. And that's what our brains are designed to do. So if you go back to the earliest quantitative studies of memory by Ebbinghaus, what you see is that he was trying so hard to memorize this arbitrary nonsense. And within a day, he lost about 60% of that information. And he was basically using a very, very generous way of measuring it, right? As far as we know, nobody has managed to violate those basics of having people forget most of their experiences. So if your expectation is that you should remember everything and that's what you're optimal is, you're already off because this is just not what human brains are designed to do. On the other hand, what we see over and over again is that the brain does basically one of the cool things about the design of the brain is it's always less is more, less is more, right? It's like, I mean, I've seen estimates that the human”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have a very good internal model throughout that event. You don't need to do much memory processing. You're in a predictive mode, right? And so then at these event boundaries, you encode, and then you retrieve and you're like, okay, wait a minute, what's going on here? Brandon asked now talking about orcas. What's going on? And maybe you have to go back and remember reading my book to pull out the episodic memory to make sense of whatever it is I'm babbling about, right? And so there's this beautiful dynamics that you can see in the brain of these different networks that are coming together and then deaffiliating at different points in time that are allowing you to go into these modes. And so to speak to your original question, to some extent when we're talking about semantic memory and episodic memory and working memory, you can think about it as these processes that are unfolding as these networks kind of come together and pull apart.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singular experience, right? You're just only going to happen once. But if you capture it at the point of maximum uncertainty or maximum surprise, you have the most useful point in your experience that you've grabbed. And what we see is that the hippocampus and these other networks that are involved in generating these internal models of events, they show a heightened period of connectivity or correlated activity during those breaks between different events, which we call event boundaries. These are the points where you're surprised or you cross from one room to another and so forth. And that communication is associated with a bump of activity in the hippocampus and better memory. And so if”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, one of the fascinating things that we've been studying, and this is we're not at all the first to do this. Jeff Sachs was a big pioneer in this, and I've been working with many other people. Ken Norman, Layla Devachi, or Columbia has done some interesting stuff with this, is this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe, also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it's maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory. So I used to think, oh, well, we're just encoding episodic memories constantly, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But think about how much redundancy there is in all that, right? It's just a lot of information that you don't need. But if you capture an episodic memory at the point of maximum uncertainty for this.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way, they're all connected, even though it's different. The things that we're focusing on and the way we organize information in the present, which is working memory, will play a big role in determining how we remember that information later, which people typically call long-term memory.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the idea that we form internal models of events, the obvious one that I always use as birthday parties, right? So you go to a child's birthday party. Once the cake comes out and they start, you just see a candle, you can predict the whole frame, you know, set of events that happens later. And up till that point where the child blows out the candle, you have an internal model in your head of what's going on. And so if you follow people's eyes, it's not actually on what's happening. It's going where the action's about to happen, which is just fascinating, right? So you have this internal model. And that's a kind of a working memory product. It's something that you're keeping online that's allowing you to interpret this world around you. Now, to build that model, though, you need to pull out stuff from your general knowledge of the world, which is what we call semantic memory. And then you'd want to be able to pull out memories for specific.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the things that Alan did that was quite brilliant was he said, there's this ability to kind of passively store information, you know, see things in your mind's eye or hear your internal monologue. But we have that ability to keep information in mind. But then we also have the separate what he called a central executive, which is identified a lot with the prefrontal cortex. It's this ability to control the flow of information that's being kept active based on what it is you're doing. Now a lot of my early work was basically saying that this working memory, which some memory researchers would call short-term memory, is not at all independent from long-term memory. That is that a lot of executive function requires learning and you have to have like synaptic change for that to happen. But there's also transient forms of memory. So one of the things I've been getting into lately.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so memory researchers, we love to cut things up and say, you know, is memory one thing or is it two things or two things or is three things? And so one of the things that there's value in that and especially experimental value in terms of being able to dissect things. In the real world, it's all connected. Speak to your question, working memory was a term that was coined by Alan Badley. It's basically thought to be this ability to keep information online in your mind right in front of you to a given time and to be able to control the flow of that information, to choose what information is relevant, to be able to manipulate it and so forth.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And in humans, you have this more complex set of ways memory works. As I said, the knowledge or what you call semantic memory. And then there's these memories for specific events, which we call episodic memory. And so there's different pieces of the puzzle that require different kinds of cues. So that's a big part of it too, is just this kind of what we call retrieval failure.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no, you wouldn't go and you'd say, This is the memory, right? It's like the whole network, I mean, the whole ecosystem of memories is in the weights of the neural network. And in fact, you could extract entirely new memories depending on how you feed.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could think about this on a number of levels. Maybe I'll give you the simplest version first, which is we tend to think of memories as these individual things, and we can just access them maybe a little bit like photos on your phone or something like that. But in the brain, the way it works is you have this photo pool of neurons. the memories are kind of shared across different pools of neurons. And so what you have is competition where sometimes memories that overlap can be fighting against each other, right? So sometimes we forget because that competition just wipes things out. Sometimes we forget because there aren't the biological signals which we can get into. I would promote long-term retention. And lots of times we forget because we can't find the cue that sends us back to the right memory and we need the right queue to be able to activate it, right? So for instance in a neural network.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and for the ecology of the system. So I looked into this and it's like another species that has menopauses orcas. Orca pods are led by the grandmothers, right? So not the young adults, not the parents or whatever, the grandmothers. And so they're the ones that pass on the traditions to the, I guess, the younger generation of orcas. And if you look from what little I understand, different orcapods have different traditions. They hunt for different things, they have different play traditions. And that's a culture, right? And so in social animals, evolution, I think, is designing brains that are really around. It's obviously optimized for the individual, but also for kin. And I think that the kin are part of this, when they're a part of this intense social group, the brain development should parallel that. The nature of the ecology.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think, I mean, if you go back and you think how many species actually stick around naturally long after their childbearing years are over, after reproductive years are over, like menopause, from what I understand, menopause is not all that common in the animal world, right? So why would that happen? And so I saw Alison Gopnik said something about this. I started to look into this, about this idea that, you know, really When you're older in most societies, your job is no longer to form new episodic memories. It's to pass on the memories that you already have, this knowledge about the world, what we call semantic memory, to pass on that semantic memory to the younger generations, pass on the culture. Even now in indigenous cultures, that's the role of the elders. They're respected. They're not seen as, you know, people who are past it and losing it. And I thought that was a very poignant thing.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the best way to do that? Let's explore. I don't want to be constrained by goals as much. I want to really be free, play and explore and learn. So you don't want a super tight prefrontal cortex. You don't even know what the goals should be yet, right? It's like if you're trying to design a model that's based on a bad goal, it's not going to work well, right?”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Older adults, or worse than young adults at episodic memory, and I always say, would say, God, this is so weird. Why would we have this period of time that's so short when we're perfect, right? Or optimal. And I like to use that word optimal now because there's such a culture of optimization right now. And it's like, I realize I have to redefine what optimal is because for most of the human condition, I think we had a series of stages of life where you have basically adults saying, okay, young adults saying I've got a child and I'm part of this village and I have to hunt and forage and get things done. I need a prefrontal cortex so I can stay focused on the big picture and long haul goals. Now, I'm a child. I'm in this village. I'm kind of wandering around and I've got some safety and I need to learn about this culture because I know so little.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the areas that I'm very interested in is the prefrontal cortex. It's an area of the brain that, I mean, I could talk all day about it, but it helps us use our knowledge to say, hey, this is what I want to do now. This is my goal. So this is how I'm going to achieve it. And focus everything towards that goal, right? The prefrontal cortex takes forever to develop in humans. The connections are still being tweaked and reformed like into late adolescence, early adulthood, which is when you tend to see mental illness pop up, right? So it's being massively reformed. Then you have about 10 years maybe of prime functioning of the prefrontal cortex. And then it starts going down again and you end up being older and you start losing all that frontal function. So look at this and you'd say, okay, you sit around episodic memory talks. We'll always say children are worse than adults at episodic memory.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would necessarily describe it as a trauma, and we can get into this whole stages of life thing, which I just love. Basically, those first few years, there are, I mean, you know, I mean, think about it, a kid's internal model of their body is changing, right? It's like just learning to move. I mean, like, you know, if you ever have a baby, you'll know that like the first three months they're discovering their toes, right? And it's just nuts. So everything is changing. But what's really fascinating is, and I think this is one of those, this is not at all me being a scientist, but it's like one of those things that people talk about when they talk about positive aspect. And they have this kind of openness towards the world. And so that prediction error is not a negative traumatic thing. I think it's like a very positive thing because it's what they use. They're seeking information.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best explanation. The third explanation is a child's sense of self takes a while to develop. And so their experience of learning might be more learning what happened as opposed to having this first person experience of high remember. I was there.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But another is the neocortex of the whole folded stuff of gray matter all around the hippocampus is developing so rapidly and changing. And a child's knowledge of the world is just massively being built up, right? So, I mean, I'm going to probably embarrass myself, but it's like if you showed like, you know, you trained a neural network and you give it like the first couple of patterns or something like that. And then you bombard it with another year's worth of data, try to get back those first couple of patterns, right? It's like everything changes. And so the brain is so plastic. The cortex is so plastic during that time. And we think that memories for events are very distributed across the brain. So imagine you're trying to get back that pattern of activity that happened during this one moment. But the roads that you would take to get there have been completely rerouted, right? So I think that's my...”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. In fact, actually, I was just talking to my really good friend and colleague Simona Getty, who studies the neuroscience of child development. And so we were talking about this. And so there are a bunch of reasons, I would say. So one reason is there's an area of the brain called the hippocampus, which is very, very important for remembering events or episodic memory. And so the first two years of life, there's a period called infantile amnesia. And then the next couple years of life after that, there's a period called childhood amnesia. And the difference is that basically in the lab and even during childhood and afterwards, children basically don't have any episodic memories for those first two years. The next two years is very fragmentary, and that's why they call it childhood amnesia. So there's some, but it's not much. So one reason is that the hippocampus is taking some time to develop.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and I think the other part of it is that, you know, as I guess I was a little bit too firm in saying that memory determines who we are. It's really the self is an evolving construct. I think we kind of underestimate that. And when you're a parent, you feel like every decision you make is consequential in forming this child and plays a role, but so do the child's peers. And so do, you know, there's so much, I mean, that's why I think the big part of education, I think that's so important, is not the content you learn. I mean, think of how much dumb stuff we learned in school, right? But a lot of it is learning how to get along with people and learning who you are and how you function. And that can be terribly traumatizing, even if you have a perfect, you know, parents working on you.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I do feel like adolescence is much more important than I think people give credit for. I think that there is this kind of a sense like, you know, the first three years of life is the most important part. But the teenage years are just so important for the brain, you know. And so that's where a lot of mental illness starts to emerge. Now we're thinking of things like schizophrenia.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In life, and some of it is memories of things that we want to Overcome or things that we build on in a positive way. But either way, they define us.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, yeah. So let's say after this, you and I decided we're going to go for a beer, right? Do you choose where to go? You're probably going to be like, Oh, yeah, this new bar opened up near me. I had a great time there. They had a great beer selection. Or you might say, oh, we went to this place and it was totally crowded and they're playing this horrible EDM or whatever. And so right there, valuable source of information, right? And then you have these things like where you do this counterfactual stuff like, well, I did this previously, but what if I had gone somewhere else instead? Maybe I'll go to this other place because I didn't try it the previous time. So there's all that kind of reasoning that goes into it too. I think even if you think about the big decisions in life, right? It's like you and I were talking before we started recording about how I got into memory research and you got into AI. And it's like we all have these personal reasons that guide us in these particular directions. And some of it's the environment and random factors.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, and I learned from that it's like, I don't look back on that enough, actually, because I think we often, at least for me, I don't necessarily have the confidence to think that things will work out, that I'll be able to get through certain things. But my ability to actually get something done in that moment is better than I give myself credit for, I think. And that was the lesson of that story that I really took away.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just die alone. And so I just said, Well, failure is not an option, and eventually I got out of it and froze and got cut up. And, I mean, the things that we were going through were just insane. But a short version of this is, you know, my wife and my daughter and Randy's wife, they gave us all sorts of hell about this because they were just like, they were ready to send out a search party. They were giving me hell about it. And then I started to tell people in my lab about this and then friends. And it just became a better and better story every time. And we actually had some photos of just the crazy things like this generator that was hanging over the water. We're like ducking under this or these metal gratings. And I'm like going flat. And it was just nuts, you know. But it became a great story. And it was definitely, I mean, Randy and I were already tight, but that was a real bonding experience for us.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of these things where if you have people who you've gone through, since you said it, since you've gone through shit with someone and it's like. That's a bonding experience often. You know, I mean, that can really bring you together. I like to say it's like there's no point in suffering unless you get a story out of it. So in the book, I talk about the power of the way we communicate with others and how that shapes our memories. And so I had this near-death experience. At least that's how I remember it on this paddle board where just everything they could have gone wrong did go wrong almost so many mistakes were made and ended up like at some point just like basically away from my board pinned in a current like in this corner like not a super good swimmer and my friend who came with me randy who's a computational neuroscientist and he had just been pushed down past me and so he couldn't even see me and i'm just like if i die here you know i mean no one's around it's it's like”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are the things that you remember, right? So I really do think about what's going to be like something that's memorable and then just do it even if it's a pain in the ass because the experiencing self will suffer for that, but the remembering self will be like, yes, I'm so glad I did that.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that I try to live by, especially nowadays, and since I wrote the book, I've been thinking more and more about this, is how do I want to live a memorable life? You know, I think if we go back to like the pandemic, right? How many people have memories from that period, aside from the trauma of being, you know, locked up and seeing people die and all this stuff? I think it's like one of these things where we were stuck inside looking at screens all day, doing the same thing with the same people. And so I don't remember much from that in terms of those good memories that you're talking. You know, when I was growing up, my parents worked really hard for us. And, you know, we went on some vacations, but not very often. And I really tried to do now vacations to interesting places as much as possible with my family because like.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in grad school, I played in a band, and yeah, we traveled, we would play shows, it wasn't like we were in a hardcore touring band, but we did some touring and had some fun times. And yeah, we did a movie soundtrack. Portrait of Serial Killer. So that's a good movie. We were on the soundtrack for the sequel Henry 2 Mask of Sanity, which is a terrible movie.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spent all this money going all the way there. There was only everybody left after the opening acts were done, and there was just that stoner dude.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, I'll say I wish I could take you on the road with me because that was such a great description. Can I be your opening exer? Oh my God, no, I'm going to open for you, dude. Otherwise, it's like, you know, everybody leaves after you're done. Believe me, I did that in Columbus, Ohio once. It wasn't fun. Like the opening acts drank our bar tab.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think what's valuable about that illusion is when it's broken, it gives us the information, right? So, I mean, I'm sure being in AI, you know, about information theory. And the idea is the information is what you didn't already have. And so those prediction errors that we make based on, you know, we make a prediction based on memory and the errors are where the action is.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But having seen some of your work, I just, you know, generally my expectations about life, I'm not expecting that. I have a certainty that everything's going to be fine. We're going to have a great time talking today, right? But we're often right. It's like, okay, so I go to see a band on stage. You know, I know they're going to make me wait. The show's going to start late. And then, you know, they come on. There's a very good chance there's going to be an encore. I have a memory, so to speak, for that event before I've even walked into the show, right? There's going to be people holding up their camera phones to try to take videos of it now because it's kind of the world we live in. So that's like everyday fortune telling that we do, though. It's not real. It's imagined. And it's amazing that we have this capability. And that's what memory is about. But it can also give us the that we know everything that's about to happen.”
2024-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source