Charan Ranganath (on memory)

Dax Shepard
Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. Experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Misses Mouse. Hi. Hello.

Today we have, what a unique guest. We don't interview a lot of neuroscientists who are in a neuroscientist punk band. I think only the one. I think this is our first Charan Ranganov, who is a professor at UC Davis in cognitive neuroscience, where he leads the dynamic memory lab. So Charan is one of the foremost experts in the world about memory.

Monica Padman
We're all obsessed with memory, I think. We are obsessed, concerned. I think generally when people are talking about their memory, they're worried. Well, cause we know. And he says in here, you know, basically not.

If you have dementia, you essentially, you're losing most 20%. Yeah, we interviewed him and then I went and brought the girls up to set and then we went to Goldberger and we ate outside and then we got home that night and I was thinking about this episode and then I. Was thinking like, oh, yeah, I can. Picture when we were in front of Goldberger and there was three tables and the middle table was three people eating and I can see them. And how fucking weird is that, that your brain can do that?

There's probably something that was novel about it that made you remember it, though. What a mystery that happened. But yet I can look at it right now, it's just so weird. It's very cool. Anyways, his new book is out now.

Dax Shepard
It's called why we unlocking memories. Power to hold on to. What manners. So that's what's great about this, an explanation of how the memory works, but, you know, some prescriptive ideas on how to remember what you want to and be thoughtful and mindful about it. So it was very cool.

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Dax Shepard
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Charan Ranganath
Okay. I brought you guys a swag bag. Oh, my goodness. I play in a neuroscience cover band called Pavlov's Dog. I actually love it.

Dax Shepard
A neuroscience cover band. And then this is my actual band where I played original music. It was a shoe gaze band. That genre's called shoe gaze. Yeah.

What does that mean? You look down at your shoes while you're performing? Well, you have, like, a whole bunch of effect pedals, boxes, and laws. And so for people who do that. Cause there's just, like, all sorts of sound effects and things.

Charan Ranganath
And so people will often just look like, where am I gonna.

Monica Padman
Do you need to use a restroom or anything before we start? You do? Oh, yeah. Yeah, let's do that. We don't have a door, so we step.

Yes, we're gonna do a quick step out. All right. You can come in. Yeah, that's not my job. I think it's maybe your job to.

Dax Shepard
Tell her to, probably, but I have a hard time delegating people to do. Yeah, maybe. Rob, would you ask me? I think that would be. I'm just sitting there waiting for her protective nature to take over.

Monica Padman
No, that's not fair. She cares more about animals than I do. I know, but it's your dog. You can be a boss. You can say, hey, do you think you could take whiskey to the vet?

He keeps crying all day. My sister works for the family. She's wonderful. She's incredible. But because she's my little sister, I really can't ask her to do anything, you know?

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, no. Oh, I know. We're on year ten of this. It's like, my daughter. I wanted to pay her to edit my book and just do, like, copy editing.

She's just like, hell no. I'm like, I can deduct it for my taxes. You don't understand. No, no, no, no. It's actually kind of funny.

Cause we were talking about my daughter. After finishing my book, I came to terms with the fact that I have ADHD. And when I say this, I mean, my teacher said it when I was a kid, my school and so might have been diagnosed, but it was the seventies, so nobody gave a shit. Sure. And how skilled were these diagnosers?

I don't know. That's the thing. It was the seventies. Because, like, what would they have done? Speed, maybe?

Yeah. I don't even know if Ritalin was a thing yet. So they basically told my parents that I have bad hand eye coordination and that I had ADHD. Is that even a symptom of ADHD? I don't know, actually.

I think it is. It kind of makes sense that it would be. Cause it's. A brain's working too fast to slow it down to operate the hands. Well, it's definitely affecting me now.

Cause I fell off a skateboard a few weeks ago, broke my arms. Oh, no. And did you have surgery? I had surgery, yeah. You busted the humerus?

Yeah. And did you get a rod? Clean break. Clean break, yeah. Were you on a ramp?

I wish. Were you 13ft above the coping? What was going on? Most like, incompetent thing. I could basically say.

Bad shoes, bad pavement, long work day. Were you using the skateboard at that time for transportation? Yeah, just a little bit of adrenaline after work. There's supposed to be a small amount, a safe amount. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Wow. That has got to be a very painful break. Oh, I went into shock afterwards. I bet. Was that the second biggest bone in your body?

Behind, I think, the femur. Like this thing. I have pretty long arms and long legs, so I don't know which one is this. Yeah. And so how many days out of surgery?

Charan Ranganath
It's about two weeks. I had the stitches removed yesterday. And how does it feel? It's sore, but I'm off of painkillers. I didn't stay in painkillers for that long, and I've got mobility thanks to the plate.

Dax Shepard
That's a big scar. It would be badass were it not for the Steri strips, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was gonna say, I need your advice on getting a good tattoo because I wanna get something that would complement it. Maybe either compliment the badass scar or.

Cover it to go another direction. That in itself is its own tattoo. So if you want a tattoo. Get it on the other arm and keep that on display. I kind of agree.

Monica Padman
I think it'll look cool. Yeah. What's my company? I want to start with charlie. Scars and veins.

Dax Shepard
Scars and veins. Yeah. Speaking of ADHD, if I get back to what I was telling you, the story. So after I finished my book, my daughter started saying, dad, you totally have ADHD. I'm like, oh, you guys say this about everybody, and I all of a sudden remembered this thing that just had been buried in my mind, that my mom put me on a special diet with no artificial colors and flavors, and they bought me an Atari, and that was what they could do.

Charan Ranganath
So then I started seeing a coach and talking more to my daughter about it. And so she was, like, saying one thing that I guess people with ADHD do is body doubling, which is this thing where you find someone around you to help you focus and get motivated. Interesting. So, for me, I realized, whether it's music or whether it's science, I need to have people around me to feel energized. You look like David Bowie.

And he managed to be creative throughout so many years because he surrounded himself with these amazing people. And of course, he's brilliant. I'm not brilliant, but it's like I've surrounded myself with all these amazing people, and it just keeps me going. How does that differ from just being an extrovert and getting energy from social interaction? It differs in the sense that I could be very easily a blob, but with people, I feel accountability.

And with people, I get ideas. Sometimes it's even just if I'm writing in a cafe, having people around somehow makes things flow better. I'm not really linear in my thinking about things. My children are in elementary school, and of course, many of the kids now have diagnoses, so they give the kids with ADHD, fidget, toys, spinners. That seems to help a lot.

Dax Shepard
I wonder if you need a certain level of distraction. I think everybody does. The key is giving people control. Distraction. I don't want to say anything about people saying they have ADHD now because I don't know enough about it.

Charan Ranganath
But I will say that we live in a time where people's habits create a reality. Difficulty in focusing. Because when I got my iPhone for the first time, I remember all of a sudden feeling like, any time there's nothing happening, I have to check email, right? Sure, sure. Pause in the conversation.

I got to check email. And for someone like me, this is really hard. But everybody does this, and I talk about this in the book that. That moment when you think about checking email, you've already lost the ball. So just to get back to this conversation, I have to now shift back and reset.

And there's a little bit of a switch cost there. If you actually scan people's brains, the prefrontal cortex, there'll be a little blip of activity, and it takes about maybe 30 seconds to get back on track. And so people will go, oh, I'm multitasking. I'll be at conferences and I'll do this, too. People will be checking email and responding to things while an academic is giving a deep scientific talk.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. At best case, you will be hanging on by a thread to understand with full focus. Yeah, exactly. Then what happens is people leave and go, oh, yeah, I knew all that, but they weren't really paying attention. They're not sure.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. What was actually said. Well, you say in the book, too, that act of emailing, the phone, even grabbing a camera to take a picture, it takes you out of the moment in this way that impacts how you create a memory. Absolutely. First of all, we don't see the entire world.

Our brain is always economizing. You might feel like you're seeing everything here, but really your eyes have just moved around a little bit and you're using memory to fill in. So there's a very limited amount of information that you can actually apprehend at a given moment. Things can grab your attention or it can be a goal, focused attention. And one of the things that we found in our research is that actually memory encoding, the little birth of a memory, doesn't happen continuously like a movie.

It tends to happen more at these points where we shift gears or we're surprised or something new is going on. And that's what we would call an event boundary. And at these event boundaries, you're kind of switching, let's say, between the conversation, oh, I got this interesting text message. Let me go back to Dax now. Right, yeah.

And so what happens is when you switch, you get these little fragmented memories because I've got a little bit of low quality, meaning I haven't integrated across a long period of time to get a deep sense of what we're talking about. Right. So I got a little bit. And every time I switch, I'm behind schedule. So I'm cognitively trying to catch up.

People who study task switching, they've got a whole vocabulary of switch costs and mixing costs. There's just costs. It's bad. Right. And so what happens is I'm behind schedule.

I'm trying to catch up, and I've got a lot of fragments of memories. And so then later on, I try to remember it. And what do I remember? Well, I remember coming in and having a conversation, but I don't remember what I talked about. I don't remember what you're wearing.

I don't have any of the details that give me that sense of mental time travel, the details that give me the sense of I can recollect this. And so, for me, right now, I'm on, because I want to remember this experience. I'm in one of my zones of hyper focus right now. That process you just described, doesn't that nullify the entire point of a memory? When we think about how a memory serves us evolutionarily or how it helps us exist, which is it helps us understand the present and potentially predict the future.

Dax Shepard
And so if the memory you're drawing on, like, oh, right, I was in a room like this, talking to another person, but it was like I was on 15 different text messages. There's really nothing to glean from that memory. Wouldn't help you understand the presentation and or predict what's coming next. Well, this is where there's some really interesting filtration that happens in the brain. So there's a lot of work in molecular neuroscience about plasticity.

Charan Ranganath
We think that there's actual changes in the connections between neurons, the basic computational unit of the brain. And that's what allows us to learn, because if I can reactivate some sequence of neural activity that is similar to what's happening here, I can have a conscious re experience of that. But the key to that is being able to grease the wheels so that that sequence of neural activity can be reopened again. So you change the connections between neurons to make that happen. And so when you do that, these changes in the connections between neurons can be very transient.

But it's like you get a bunch of neurons that are co active and they're firing, especially when there's moments of surprise. But what's really cool is there are certain chemicals in the brain, like dopamine, noradrenaline, cortisol, serotonin. I think you are probably really familiar with these terms, and many people are nowadays, especially now that there's so many psychiatric drugs that are involved treating these things. And so these are called neuromodulators. They don't just cause neurons to fire willy nilly.

They actually focus your attention, but they also stabilize those changes in the connections between neurons. So when you look at what drives these neural responses that result in dopamine release or noradrenaline release or cortisol, serotonin. They're things like surprise, novelty, attachment, fear, disgust, things that are evolutionarily more relevant. They'd all be under the umbrella of survival. Like, novelty is exciting.

Dax Shepard
Cause it could mean a new food source. It could mean a dangerous predator. We don't know what it is. And it would be very important for us to assess what that is. Quick.

Charan Ranganath
That's the beautiful thing. Because if I'm seeing something that's similar enough to what I already know, I already have the memory for it before it even happened. So why would I tweak all of these neural connections just to get this one little bit? It's more or less the same. It's like you're not gonna release any of that that's familiar.

Monica Padman
Cause you don't need to unless it's familiar. But at the same time, I get a reward out of it, or there's a knife. Even if it's familiar, it's like, oh, it's that familiar guy that I. But is this why marriages over time get less exciting? Oh, I mean, there's something there.

You're not creating the same level of dopamine in a long time relationship because it's familiar. Like, there's no novelty. There's no need to. I feel like this is a fact with anything in life. So I wanted to say, first of all, just to my wife, that it's only getting stronger.

Is it as exciting as it was? It is exciting. Well, you're trading. This is well known. You're trading here and now chemicals for dopamine chemicals.

Dax Shepard
You are losing a big bit of your chemical excitement, but you're gaining different chemicals. The here and now chemicals attachment, actually. Serotonin, all these other ones that you hear about, oxytocin. So what I would say, though, is you do need to kind of find the novelty. And I talk about curiosity.

Charan Ranganath
It's something that you can cultivate. But we, based on our research, suggests that it's associated with a release of dopamine or activity in dopamine producing areas in the brain. And it produces this state in the brain where you can actually build memories, even for things that you weren't curious about. And I especially love the fact that when I listen to your show, it's so infused with the joy of curiosity, because that really is what keeps you going. It's a matter of kind of finding new things, reinventing yourself.

I have a colleague who I talked to. I said, what's the most exciting thing you're working on right now, because that's what I want to know about. If you're excited about it, I think I will be, too. And he said, yeah, nothing's really new. Everybody's redoing the same things over and over again.

I feel like I have to keep reinventing myself so I don't become that person. Is there a physiological component to that? Do we decline in the ways that we decline every way of having less dopamine, of having less. Go explore, go find. We must be battling some physiological imperative in this.

I think we do. I don't like talking about it as decline. And the reason I don't is there are factors that happen as we get older. Of course. Our ability to remember details are proactive, ability to control information.

It does go down, on average, over time. But I also feel like humans live way beyond reproductive years. Yeah. It's a very confusing species to study because in some cases, 65% of our life reproducing is not relevant. Yeah.

In my field, the narrative has often been, you have this period of time as a kid where your episodic memory, your memory for events is not very good, and it's kind of random. And then you become a young adult, and everything's great, and then you pass 30 and you start to decline. Episodic memory goes down. And it got me thinking about this idea of life stages. When you're an older person, you have still preserved semantic memory, which is your knowledge about the world.

It's basically your wisdom. And if you look in most cultures throughout human history, older people are the source of the wisdom, and they're often teaching the children. They're passing on the traditions, language. It's not about you. It's about this broader community.

And one of the things I found fascinating in looking at this stuff is if you look at other species that live past menopause, they tend to have this intense social culture, like orcas, and orcas are led by post menopausal females. Whoa. And they're the ones that pass on the tradition of saying, hey, I want you to kill this great white shark and just grab its LIver or Something. And they're teaching all of these cultural traditions. At least that's my understanding.

I did go down a little rabbit hole of curiosity for this, where I wrote the book. Orcas are so fascinating, it's crazy. We could do 3 hours on. I think they had the only ones that have a larger neocortex body mass index than humans. Is that right?

Dax Shepard
I think so. I learned that at one point in college. That's been debunked. Okay, but I've been meaning to go back for twelve minutes now. Sorry, I'm going.

No, no. Can we start with what are the mechanics of a memory? How did they actually exist in our brain? Is it a recipe of chemicals? Is it a series of switches turned on and off?

Are we making any physical impression on any material, like a record? Like, what are the mechanistic properties of a memory? Do we even know? We know a lot, but there's a lot of arguments. So the standard view is what's called synaptic plasticity.

Charan Ranganath
So imagine you have a neuron, there's a little gap between them called a synapse. And so imagine you have a big web of these neurons that are connected to each other. So one neuron's active, meaning that there's these little pulses of electrical activity called spikes. When a spike happens, you get a release of chemicals. Usually it's glutamate is the big one, and that's an excitatory transmitter, meaning it can excite other neurons, start firing.

So what happens is there's little receptors for these chemicals on the other side, on the neurons on the receiving end. So the synapse is where one neuron can influence other neurons. When there are more receptors, a neuron can be more likely to be activated by another neuron. So the standard synaptic plasticity about this would be in the long term, you're getting more receptors that happen through learning, through these genes that express themselves. As an aside, people often talk about nature and nurture.

And I find this thing to be so tedious because for learning to take place in almost any theory, gene expression has to happen. Yeah, I don't know if you read, behave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love Sapolsky. What I loved most about his book was this is such an erroneous division.

Dax Shepard
There is no division between nature and nature. It is one thing happening at all times. Yeah. It's all connected. By definition, learning is based on your experience, but genes regulate that learning.

Charan Ranganath
My colleague friend Sam Gershman has shown that you can get learning in single celled organisms. So they don't have neurons, they don't even have synapses. So there's another idea, which is learning can actually be encoded in DNA. David Glansman at UCLA actually has done some work on this too. And that club is kind of smaller than the synaptic plasticity club.

I wish I knew more about this. I just need more time to read to be honest. But there's all this parts of our DNA that are called junk DNA that's not thought to be encoding any gene. And I think one of the ideas is that the junk DNA can be passed back and forth between cells. You should probably fact check this.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Good luck. I'll write an email after this and just make sure. Please cut this out.

But that's an idea. There's also an idea about what's called dendritic spines, which is just more synapses that can be created. But the simplest version of this is that you're changing the efficiency by which one neuron can activate another neuron collectively. Now there's an assembly of cells that we like to activate when we get a particular memory. So that's the cell assembly theory, that there's not one neuron that is the memory, but a bunch of them.

Dax Shepard
Is it the combination that produces a new thing? Yeah, that's right. But it's also overlapping. So there's an ecosystem of memories with overlapping cell assemblies that are supporting these memories. So there is this kind of infiniteness to it, but at the same time, you're constantly recombining and reshuffling elements of other cell assemblies.

And is that all with the goal of efficiency? It's super efficient, if you think about it. Chat GPT has sort of a photographic memory. Think of the carbon footprint. I don't even think they disclose this information.

Charan Ranganath
And it's like estimates of the human brain is twelve to 20 watts super efficient. So you don't get that by just encoding everything over and over and over again. You use, you reuse. And one of the arguments that we've made in some of our computational models is that you actually don't even just connect everything from every neuron that's active at the same time. You just tweak the synapses that are the most important.

You make the important ones stronger, and you make the less important ones. So you have a part of the cell assembly that's not carrying its weight, some willy nilly neuron, you just shut down that part of the cell assembly. This process of prioritizing in that moment sees something, and it's got a million different options to draw on, right. And then now it's making some high probability prediction. We're unconscious of that.

Dax Shepard
Right. I don't know that I've experienced that selection process where we're trying to find the right memory or the most useful comp. So what governs that process? This is, again, one of those things that you could debate, but the general idea would be, is that there's inhibitory neurons that are keeping the peace, basically, because if you don't have enough inhibitory activity, you just get seizures. I get seizures.

Charan Ranganath
Oh, my God. Okay, so we should talk about this. Yeah, I'm curious. I'd be very interested in knowing about your memory experiences from this. We should talk deja vu, too.

Monica Padman
Yeah, we were just talking about. We just talked deja vu the other day. I feel like you've talked about this before. I find deja vu scary. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
She's afraid she's gonna get trapped. Let's come back. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Monica Padman
Ten. So what happens is there's only so many neurons in a network that are gonna be active at a given time because you have this competition that's being mediated by the inhibitory neurons. And I hope I'm not losing many of your listeners, but basically, the idea. Is sometimes you got to go, who cares? Okay, so, basically, it's like you have these neurons, and they're kind of in this cage match of, I want to be activated.

Charan Ranganath
I want to be activated. And those are the principal cells that would be thought to carry the information of a memory. And then there's these interneurons saying, well, this one's a little bit more active than this. I'm going to shut down this weaker one. And so that's what creates this thing where one memory can pop up, at least in a computer simulation, one memory can pop up, and the others get squashed.

Dax Shepard
Something evaluates the relevancy of the one that popped up. You do have some control over searching for the right memory. And so this is where you jump from this level of the neurons to brain regions. And so an area that I've really been fascinated with is called the prefrontal cortex. Basically, it's about one third of our.

Neocortex and the newest part of our brain. Yeah. If you look at, for instance, dogs and cats, they have a very small prefrontal cortex. Primates big, humans really big. And so it allows us to say, hey, here's my goal, but it's going to happen about five minutes from now.

Charan Ranganath
Let me shut down the neurons that are not relevant and activate the ones that are based on what I need to get done. But it's not in front of me. It's an idea. You can create a model of the future in your head, and it's based on a goal. So somebody who has no prefrontal cortex can be very abstract.

They can have an understanding of the world but. Exactly. They don't use that information. It's like this deficit in being able to use what they know. And so you can see this, and I think this is really relevant in addiction, because I think people don't get the nature of addiction.

And part of it is that you know what you don't want to do and what you want to do, and that's a high level knowledge. But there's often a disconnect between that and action. And especially depending on the dynamics of what's happening in the brain, you can actually kind of lead to a shutdown of these frontal functions that would say, here's what I really want in the future. But your brain's also trying to say, hey, I got something in front of me. I don't need to plan for the future.

Dax Shepard
My explanation of addiction also is that when the amygdala is firing, it has a priority. It can hijack everything else that's happening. Right. If the amygdala fires in a manner, it will shut down your executive function in the prefrontal cortex. You're going to be reacting much more out of instinct and other things.

So if the amygdala is driving the boat or another area of the brain, the hippocampus or whatever, you actually can't even access that prefrontal cortex. I mean, that's my explanation of it, right? Like, so, once you're in that reward cycle and dopamine deficit, the part of your brain that's driving can't access, the part that's thinking about tomorrow and long term goals. Is that flawed? No, I don't think it's flawed.

Charan Ranganath
But maybe I'll offer some cheerful context to this. So I want to be careful not to be the neuroscience guy to say, hey, this is addiction. It's your amygdala taking over. I think sometimes you could just put labels on these things without really kind of getting into the nuances. But there's actually an interesting interplay between the prefrontal cortex, which is, again, using goals, the amygdala and the hippocampus, which is important for saying this event happened in this particular context, this place in time.

And so there's actually ways in which the hippocampus and amygdala can teach the prefrontal cortex and say, hey, look, this is relevant in this context. Here's where I get the reward in this context, or, here's a threat. Let me avoid this. And so, in fact, sometimes what happens, you can see this a lot in fear conditioning research. So imagine you have a phobia, let's say, of rats, right?

So you see rats, and you just freak out. You get into amygdala, big threat response. You have a big phobic reaction. Now, what happens is, I'm doing therapy with you. You habituate to now you've got the rat right in front of you, right?

And you're actually calm. Now, you go out on the street and you see a rat, and you freak out again. So what's happening is, when you're actually getting used to the rat, you're not actually unlearning the fear association. You're learning to suppress the fear association. And so the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala are thought to be working together to say, in this context, it's safe, it's okay here, but when you go out there, it's different.

You never know. And so I talk about in the books how context is such a driver of addictive behavior in some cases. There's a whole model of this in the animal literature called condition. Place preference is one of those things where you can give an animal a drug in a particular part, in a room, and then the animal starts hanging out in that part of the room. And so it's thought to be that what happens is the context.

Now, all of a sudden brings up this whole mindset of, I got to get this drug. I used to see this when I did my clinical training, which is that I had patients who were really motivated. They wanted to be off drugs, and they were doing great. I had one guy, we worked for, like, months together, Vietnam vet, and he just got everything together off of crack, off of alcohol, in a really difficult situation. But he lived in a house where his brother was dealing drugs.

So if you can't get out of that context, you're with the same people, you're in the same places. Maybe this resonates with you as someone in recovery, but I feel like you have to change the context, because those are reminders. They activate. Oh, I'm gonna go deeper than that. The person witnessing what we would say is a trigger, which is a context thing.

Dax Shepard
It's not just that they're observing it. The body starts releasing dopamine. You start actually getting a bit high from the trigger. It's not just, oh, this is my memory. Your brain chemistry changes.

You get that dopamine anticipation of novelties around the corner. So you're already a little bit high. Now, once you're a little bit high, we all know how addicts make decisions. Once they're a little bit high, they want to stay all the way high. But I'm curious, have they ever hooked up?

Certainly they have put someone in an fMRI who was smoking crack. Is the prefrontal cortex even online? Do we have brain imagery of people? I mean, I'm not talking about an addict three days later. I'm talking about someone currently smoking crack.

Charan Ranganath
I would hope not. Yeah, they probably wouldn't. But they do studies of people, for instance, looking at drug cues. So people who are suffering from addictions, who look at drug cues. A picture of a crack, piper, and that's enough to activate the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain.

Now, I cannot. I read dopamine nation and the other one, and that word I find to be the hardest word to pronounce. Oh, well, you know, dopamine jetic. It's so hard. Dopaminergetic.

Dopaminergic. Dopaminergic. Dopaminergic. Dopaminergic. Just think like a pirate going, I.

Monica Padman
Wish they could do it with. It's not unethical. The dude's already smoking crack anyways. I mean, a lot of people would say it is, I think, for alcohol, a little less unethical. If you did a brain scan of someone who is maybe not fully addict, but someone who struggled with alcohol.

Dax Shepard
Have we looked at people's fMRI's when they're intoxicated? Like drunk? Somebody must have done that. So let me get back to context. Yeah, yeah, this is relevant.

Charan Ranganath
No, no, no. This is relevant to your question. A lot of memory studies have been done where you give people drugs or you give people alcohol. This was done in the seventies. Now, it's harder to do this kind of research, but they would give people things like barbiturates, lsd, they would give people weed, half a bottle of vodka, you name it.

I mean, some serious hardcore stuff sometimes. And one of the weird things that they would find is if you learn something in that state, you would find it easier to remember it when you're in that state. Again, there's a particular context, but it's a mental context. It's a state of mind, and it's a feeling that you have. And so what happens is your prefrontal cortex, I would argue you're activating a mental context, a frame of mind that says, okay, in this context, here's my goals.

And that's part of what activates this window of memories. And so I would argue it's not just addicts. You know, I can be like, I want to be in a diet, and I go into a pizza place, and all of a sudden, my prefrontal cortex, my whole brain, is basically in this context. Here's the reward that I get. There's a whole thing called the empathy gap, where people have this inability to empathize with their future self.

I heard this beautiful interview on the Hidden Brain podcast with this woman who, when she was younger, she was raised in this family with like, you can have sex but just take birth control. And then she gets with this one guy who's like, I'm not going to use condom or whatever. And she just doesn't. In the heat of the moment, she does not. And the thing is, is that she couldn't anticipate what the feeling would be like and how the state of mind changes.

So we tend to think of the prefrontal cortex as being my logical mister Spock saying, don't do this. It's really about saying, here's my goals in this context and here's what I want to do. But as I was saying, it's a competition. If I've really reinforced a particular goal, which is getting drugs, you don't need much to activate biologically relevant goals like avoiding threats, getting rewards, which drugs hijack the reward system, or getting sex. Sex, drugs, rock and roll.

You know, you don't need much of a learning mechanism for that. And that's going to produce this competition that suppresses these more distant kinds of things where it's like, well, I might get something down the road out of this, but look what I got right now. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by Ziprecruiter. Are there some fantastic concerts coming to your city this summer?

Dax Shepard
Mine too. In fact, Anderson Pack's playing at the Hollywood Bowl. I can't wait for it. Ooh, that's exciting. If you want to be sure to see your favorite artist, you need to jump on it right away.

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Well, back to the context memory. This reminds me of hearing that people who study using Adderall in college, the mistake they make is that they don't then do Adderall for the test because weirdly, they would remember better because they memorized all this stuff in this Adderall state, and they would be better at retrieving it also in the Adderall state. Well, it's even worse, too, because unless you've really mastered the material, being in this high arousal state, especially if you got high cortisol released too, it can actually hurt your retrieval of information because you're in this high arousal. So if you were taking Adderall, that could produce a problem too, because now you're too wired. Actually, that kind of shuts down the prefrontal cortisol.

Charan Ranganath
So it's kind of damned if you do damned if you don't, because it is context dependent. But at the same time, if you're too jacked up, you can't remember anything. And so there's kind of this optimal level. Back to the question of the mechanics of a memory. Is it electrical or chemical?

Yes. Okay. That was my hunch. So part of it is ions, right? And so these ions move and that's producing these voltage changes.

But the chemical part is that the synapse, the electrical part, is within the cell. And what we record when I record an EEG or we do intracranial recordings of people with epilogue, we're actually recording electrical activity that's reflecting these large scale movements of gobs and gobs, of neurons exchanging neurotransmitters. We're seeing these big field potentials. It's like a broadcast, almost, of neural activity. What do most people have wrong about memory?

I would say that we're supposed to remember everything and that memory is about a replay of the past. Neither of those are true. Anyone who's been studying most of the details of their experience will be forgotten. Okay, so AR memory is not nearly as good as we think it should be. And then what was the second part?

Oh, that. It should be a literal replay. Oh, right. Like you're watching a recording of it. That's right.

Dax Shepard
What is our capacity as humans memory wise relative to a other species? And then b machines. I love this question. What I would say, first of all, is I try to avoid good and bad memory because, again, the implication is somehow if I'm hoarding a bunch of my memories, that's good, right? But it's not necessarily good.

Charan Ranganath
You want to be more selective. I come in here, I could go like, Dax. Monica, what are you doing? You have all this empty space. Why aren't you just putting a bunch of stuff in here?

Right? And it's like you're probably asking. There's probably a little bit too much. I don't think anyone would suggest there's. I think you got plates in the bathroom or something like that.

Dax Shepard
Proverbial 80 pounds of shit in a ten pound bag. This attic. But nonetheless, you've got all this open space. Why not hoard? Right.

Charan Ranganath
Right. And of course, that's the wrong answer. We know that the frontal quartet is very well developed in humans and because of language and because of, just in general, the long developmental period of the neocortex where it's like it's just taking years and years to mature. The way humans remember is going to be very different. We're going to be very conceptually driven.

We're going to be very goal focused, much more. We're going to have a longer timeline on which we can remember. So that's humans. But one of the things about machines which I just love is people will go, okay, well, it's chat GPT, it's so smart. It's really not in the sense we have semantic memory, which is very much like chat chipt.

It's basically getting the average in this context. Here's what I can expect, or here's my knowledge about Los Angeles. I know in Highland park villas, tacos is this great place to go to, but that's different than remembering. Oh, my God. This is a blue corn tortilla that was handmade and tasting it and time traveling to that big event.

Dax Shepard
That's semantic versus episodic. Those are our two options in memories. Okay, so semantic is like dates, times, places, geography, all those things, the concrete. Yeah. So let's say I went to that same place, and now there's a different taco stand, and I get food poisoning from it.

Charan Ranganath
Maybe not food poisoning, because that gives a different kind of learning. Let's just say I had a bad taco. So now I'm going to have to use episodic memory to say, hey, I don't want to go back to that place again because they've changed this taco stand. But chat GPT is going to take forever to learn this because it already learned that this is a good place to go to. And so it doesn't have that episodic memory that can allow it to stop on a dime and flip.

And so what episodic memory allows us to do is to learn the rules, but also to learn the exceptions to the rules. And that's what makes humans so uniquely intelligent. Now, sometimes we over fit to that and we say, hey, I remember hearing a story about this murder that happened in Los Felice. And so Los Feliz must be a sketchy neighborhood. Sometimes we overfit to that, and we create these weird kinds of things in our head that aren't true, but on average, it gives us a particular kind of intelligence that machines don't have right now.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, I was recently reading a brief history, history of intelligence, which is a great book, and it was talking about the breakthroughs with AI competing in both chess and go. And what they had to do is completely change how they were deploying that computer, because originally they thought, well, shit, this computer has the power to actually model out every single move and tell specifically what is the highest probability of success? But it said, in fact, there's more potential moves in a chess game than there are atoms in the universe, which is almost incomprehensible. And, in fact, no computer can actually model out every single move. And then it had to teach it to do what human brains already do, which is go to this really quick, thin slicing, high probabilistic way.

So then it had to basically tone it down, like, just look at 10,000, then see what pattern emerges for that. And this is, like, all stuff the brain just already does naturally, and then you gotta get, like, fascinated all over again with what this thing can do. They use deep reinforcement learning for a lot of the stuff. My friend Dennis Hasabus at DeepMind has done a lot of cool stuff. Part of the reason why AlphaGo beat the best go player is because it was doing something a little different than the go players were doing.

Charan Ranganath
Otherwise it would have a lot of trouble. So it is doing something a little different. But you're right that you can't get everything, and so you have to analyze the problem from a lot of ways. One of the cool things about episodic memory is that you have a lived experience. Maybe you just saw this game once by some people on the street playing chess in New York, and you can uniquely go into that lived experience that happened from you going into the world.

You had a roommate who was doing something, and that influenced you in some way. Chess is a bad example of this. I like to think of it more in creativity and imagination, that you have these unique lived experiences that Dolly does not have or these other generative AI things don't have. And that's what allows you. You're playing a part on a play, and you can channel this one person who lives in your dorm floor when you're at UCLA and bring that in.

And that is the beauty of episodic memory. That just injects it into problem solving creativity and gives us this uniqueness that makes you different from me. Yeah, sorry. I have a really quick question, because you were talking about hoarding. There was a revisionist history episode once about hoarders and how strong their memory is.

Monica Padman
Do you know about this? Oh, the reason they're hoarders is actually connected to memory, that they have, like, a very big capacity for memory. Does that add up? There's some links to this. So there's a thing called highly superior autobiographical memory that was studied by researchers at UC Irvine and now in other places.

Charan Ranganath
And so Mary Lou Henner, they overindex. On OCD as well. That's right. They can just remember some detail from, like, ten years ago. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
What was the weather like, Tuesday, March 5? Yeah. And then their closet is insanely organized. Yeah. That's the opposite of hoarding.

Charan Ranganath
OCD sometimes manifests. Manifests in hoarding, too. You can also see in certain realms of the autism spectrum, there's a thing called memory savants. This is the original rain man in Utah. That's one example.

Yeah. And there's people like Stephen Wilcher who can, like, go in a helicopter of a city and then paint this incredibly detailed, almost photorealistic painting of it. Right. And so there is kind of this overlap with OCD related symptoms there that have to do with these kind of obsessions and sometimes anxiety and control. What's happening with their memories that isn't happening in hours.

We don't know about how different people are. Ours. I don't even know what ours means. Right. Yeah.

Monica Padman
Right. Yeah. It's just such a fascinating topic. But I can't paint a city after looking at, you know, I don't have that ability. Just in general, you have an area of expertise.

Charan Ranganath
Let's say you're looking at different things and somebody's not an expert, and so you can subdivide the world in so many beautiful ways. And so, as a result, your memory for the stuff that you're an expert in will be amazing. Chess experts can remember entire matches. Think about again, how many pieces are on a board, how many infinite possibilities of moves they have. A chess grandmaster can remember an entire game.

Now, you look at someone like LeBron James, and you look at LeBron's ability to call back entire sequences of events and basketball games, and you look at YouTube videos. It's just phenomenal. Another fun one is they put headphones on these Formula one drivers, and they play 20 seconds of the engine noise and they'll go, that's Imola. Turns six and seven. Wow.

Dax Shepard
They know what the engine sounds like on every track in every turn, and they have every track memorized to that detail. Half shift up. Okay, that's the hill going up. Spa. What's even more insane is they see that pattern happening in real time.

They also make them drive the course blindfolded, and they drive the course perfectly. That's who we should study. That's what we gotta get into. You should. They can not only see what's happening now, but they're seeing into the future.

Charan Ranganath
They're, like five steps ahead. And that's this beauty of this expertise that it gives you is not only being able to memorize, but really able to project into the future and have this just unbelievable sequences that you unfold in your head. Is it also helpful to them that because the experience is quite heightened with adrenaline and every other great neurotransmitter, does our memory record better in those situations? Yeah, it records a little bit. In neuroscience, people will often say better.

I would say slightly differently. If you imagine, like, a tv, right? You turn up the brightness on the tv, everything just gets brighter. And that would be like the equivalent of saying, well, memory is just getting stronger, but really emotional arousal ratchets up the contrast. So the things that are the most important, salient, emotionally relevant, get jacked up, and everything else kind of stays the same.

So that emotional arousal will definitely heighten whatever is most surprising, whatever is most urgent. And the other stuff kind of goes in the background. Okay, this is incredible. This is seven years in the making. I've had this theory forever.

Dax Shepard
I've launched it on a couple of people that we've had in neuroscientists, but I've never had the perfect guest to ask this. Okay, so, really quick, perfunctory knowledge. Do you know how slow motion works in cameras in film and television? I will say no, because I probably would think I do, but I don't. Okay, so the cameras normally taking a picture 24 frames per second.

And when you want to create slow motion in a movie, you actually record at 100 frames per second, but then you play it back at 24 frames per second, and that creates this illusion of slow motion. So my explanation for why everyone who thinks the car accident they were in was, like, three minutes long is that in that super heightened state, you are so aroused, you take in so much more data, more smells, more sounds, more everything. Your brain is hardwired to run at 24 frames a second, but you've basically compacted about four minutes worth of data into this sliver of time, so that when you're going through your memory, there's all this data you're going through, which makes it feel like it was slow motion. Huh. That's interesting.

Now, this negates the whole watching back of video premise that you stated already, but I'm so curious what this phenomena of thinking time was moving very, very slow in an accident is explained by. And I feel like that's the comp. What you're talking about is a phenomenon called time dilation, where essentially it's like time feels bigger than it actually is when you're just in an aroused state, literally your heart's beating faster. Right. And so it's a lot like what you're talking about, which is that essentially, you're getting more frames per second.

Charan Ranganath
And so as a result, I can imagine that gives you a different sense of time. I just feel like we play it back at the same frame rate no matter what. Cause that's how we play back memory. But we probably are not playing it in the sense of playing a recording. We're still getting bits and pieces.

Ah, okay, here's too much. This is total speculation. Probably some time researcher is gonna call it, Dax, this is completely wrong. But I think what may be happening is that you've got a lot of this information, and now you get little bits and pieces of that information when you're trying to remember it, and you're assembling it into a story, but you got lots of bits and pieces more than normal, and you're assembling a longer story out of it. And at the same time, you've got some of the physiology and it's making your heart race.

But it's taking you a long time to reconstruct this emotionally relevant memory because you got so much to say. Yeah, you gotta go through all these pieces. And then I saw the seatbelt, and then I saw the airbag. There's just so much stuff. And so you are imagining it in slow motion.

Right. And that is what memory is. It's imagining how the past could have been. Okay, great. Cause that's one of my questions.

Dax Shepard
So explain the relationship between a map, imagination and memory. I feel like this will be disheartening for some people. I think it should be heartening for people because it's so cool. Right. So remember, I was saying this idea of why encode something in memory if you already have it?

Why encode something in a memory evolutionarily? Why would you use space for it if it's already there? That's right. Think of how many times you've probably gone through airport security, how many times you've gone to get a coffee at Starbucks, and you probably walk out and have no memory of anything other than the fact that you went there. There's this general economy that we have in the brain of just grabbing the most important or novel stuff.

Charan Ranganath
So as a result, what happens is you get those bits and pieces from memory, and that's a little bit of data that you have. You get some context, but then what we do is we fill in the blanks with our knowledge about what happens. If you remember the last time you got a cup of coffee. I can remember it because I was just at a coffee place before I came here. When I do this, I'm using a lot of my general knowledge about what happens at a coffee place.

I don't have to form an entirely new memory of, oh, my God, I gave a credit card, and I tapped it on machine because I knew that stuff already. I know it had to have happened. And so we do that in memory, and we do it very quickly and very efficiently. We have these knowledge structures called schemas for different kinds of events. And so you could think of it as you go to a housing tract.

Right. So I grew up in San Jose, where it's, like, one out of every three houses look alike. Yeah. Yeah. The floor plan's the same generally, but.

Every house has a different paint color. Maybe carpeting versus flooring wallpaper. They all have this different surface, but they have a similar structure. And that's how I think events work. So you have this structure of the schema, which is knowledge about events, but then you have this episodic memory, which gives you some color for the paint and the carpeting and all this little decoration that you have on it.

So once you have all that, the structure is what allows you to just unfold it into a story. That's the human readable part that you can translate. And so that's the connective tissue of a memory, is the knowledge that you build a model out of. You build a narrative or a story out of it, and that's imagination. And that's something that you do even when you navigate in space.

So if I ask you, okay, I came from coffee bean and tea leaf, let's say, if you're going to go back there, you can simulate that path that you have based on your knowledge. And so you might be thinking, while I'm remembering where it is, but you're really inferring a lot of those gaps, because there's a whole block that you don't need to simulate yourself walking along the entire block. You've got that block in your head, and, you know, it's one segment. So when we remember, we get little bits and pieces, and then we use imagination to make it meaningful, to build a story out of it. Now, what that means is sometimes we imagine it wrong.

Sometimes there are bits and pieces that we didn't catch, or we imagine it from a particular perspective. This didn't happen. But I look now at a relationship that I had in the past, and I know how badly it ended. Well, actually, I can think of a musical relationship where this happened. I know how badly it ended.

And now when I remember all of these experiences, I'm now all of a sudden remembering. Oh, yeah. I remember this person would just talk really negatively about their friends. And that comes into my stories about my experience in this band, because that's how I'm imagining this person talked about me. And so these beliefs that we have in the present are being used to fill in the blanks and fill in our imagination.

And so that's why I say memory is so much about the present, because who we are now, that's the lens through which we're searching through and reconstructing these memories. Then, of course, it really begs the question, and I think a lot of people are often questioning this about themselves, which is how much of it is real, or one thing I like you gave this example of. There was this study where they had people read the description of a house, and they asked one group to read it from the perspective of a home buyer. And then they quiz them about different details, and they had a specific set of details that was consistent. And then they had another group read it as Rob, and then they had to recall the details of the story.

Dax Shepard
And then what's really interesting. So at first it proves, like, oh, you pick up different things if your perspective is different. But then they ask them to flip into the other perspective, and now, all of a sudden, they remember details that they didn't previously with the other perspective. The details were there, but they weren't accessible through this specific perspective. That's right.

It's deeply troubling. Right. It shows this is, like polarization at its core. Like, we're seeing stuff through a very specific perspective. If only we could switch.

Monica Padman
We would pick up on details we aren't picking up on. Yeah. People don't have that as a modus operandi, and they should. It is troubling. But back to.

Dax Shepard
And you talk about it in the book, our memories are really responsible for our sense of identity. And, as you say, our identity is on shifting sand, quicksand, something like that, which is fascinating. And it's a little bit scary. Cause you don't know which you should trust. I mean, I guess there's some freedom in that, which is that any time, you could probably use your imagination to recall these memories in a different way and find new inspiration, but at the same time, it is scary.

As someone who's writing a memoir, I'm really conscious of this. I'll call my brother. This couldn't have been a more traumatic event. We were both there. And he's like, no, we weren't even in that house.

We don't even agree on the house. That's substantial. It scares me to think how subjective these memories are. They are subjective, and it's what I really want people to take away, because there's a lot of work on errors in memory, and there's no question in any scientist's mind who thinks reasonably about this stuff that memory is literal and photographically accurate. It's just not.

Charan Ranganath
But that doesn't mean it's all mush. And this is really important because there's a lot of work that's being done in the forensic field about ways in which eyewitnesses can have their memories corrupted, but that doesn't mean everyone who's been sexually assaulted is just making it up from their memories. So it's a very real and dangerous perspective. Just say memory is completely made up, because it's not. Yeah, it's very fallible.

And most of the important stuff we do get, I like to say memory is like a painting. It's not like a photograph. So you have that painting over there, both of you. Yeah. And it's like this painting captures some elements of who you are.

You can see there's a context there. There's features of you that are moderately accurate, and then there's some stuff that's clearly inaccurate, and there's some stuff that's neither accurate nor inaccurate in the scheme of things. It's just the perspective. And that's what memory is all about. And like a painting, you go back to those old Renaissance paintings when they didn't have enough money for canvas, so they just reused stuff.

You can go back to that painting and you can change it and go, oh, Nax now has a beard. Let me put a longer beard on him. And that's what we do with memory, too, is we revisit and we repaint those creations in our head. Now, that doesn't mean there's no data there. So, as a scientist, I also like to say memory is data.

And we have theories that we use to explain that data. And the problem comes when we confuse the theories with the data. The data is the sensory details that really bring us back to this place in time. The thoughts, the imagined stuff, the conclusion. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
The lesson, the judgment, the theme. That stuff is the theory. How does the mood we are in affect the memory we retrieve in that state? So when we are in a particular mood, that's part of our mindset, and that's part of the context. It's part of the lens through which we're searching for memory.

Charan Ranganath
Memory. You have this particular kind of filter that you're using when you're searching for information in memory. You find the stuff that happened when you were in a sad mood. You tend to find the negative stuff. And so what I used to find in my work in the clinic was that this is one of the reasons why depression was so hard to pull out of.

Because what happens when you're feeling negative? Something, feedback, you pull up more negative memories. Listen to sadder music. Yeah. Then you pull up negative memories, you feel worse, and then you pull up more.

And so it turns out to be this kind of filter for your memories when you are in a particular mood. This also gives a little bit of. A scientific backing for the power of positive thinking, I'd imagine, too. It makes it a little less, you know, woo woo, woo woo. That's the word I'm looking for.

Yeah. Well, actually, the funny thing is, on average, people who are not depressed have a positive bias in memory. They tend to remember more positive events from the past, and they tend to reconstruct the event more positively than it really happened. Oh, really? And as we get older, people tend to get more of an optimism bias, on average.

Again, everybody's different. That's a blessing. That's exactly your question. It is. It really is.

Dax Shepard
Okay, how are memories different from the feelings we have about them? The feelings that we have, these emotions are related to survival system, the parts of our brain that help us respond to stress or threats in the environment, uncertainty, novelty. And so those will give us a pattern of activation in our brain and also peripheral nervous system change that interact with our brain. People go, well, trauma's in the body, but the brain's a body part. One of these other erroneous, compartmentalized ways of looking at things, those feelings are.

Charan Ranganath
Part of the memory. But the thing is, is that our memory for the context and the details can be split apart from those feelings that give us the vividness of memory. So if you look at people who don't have an amygdala, they don't get that emotional arousal with memories. They don't have an effective emotional arousal on memory in the same way that somebody does. But they can often remember a lot of the details of an event.

And somebody without a hippocampus might still have that emotional arousal but not remember the details. And what we found in some of our MRI research and others have found this, too, is that when you give people emotionally arousing things to remember. People will report that as being more vivid when they remember it later on, like a picture of a car crash. But they don't remember any more details than for something like a picture of a mom holding a baby. So it feels more vivid, but it's not, in fact, more vivid.

Exactly. So when you get activation of both the peripheral nervous system, but also kind of the survival systems that are kind of making you feel aroused, that becomes part of this immediacy that you get, but that is dissociable. And the reason why I say this is because you can change the way that you frame an event, and that knowledge is separate from that feeling that you. Sometimes the feeling people get will give people a sense of, this is exactly how it happened. And that is not the same as your actual understanding of what happened and the details of what.

What happened. I suffer from this. I really trust my. Everyone does. Memory and conclusion.

Dax Shepard
But it is interesting, I guess, the way I could find purchase in a lot of these things that you're talking about in the book is, let's say, two months after I broke up with Bree, my girlfriend of nine years. If I had to tell you why we broke up, I would select all these memories that confirmed it was entirely her fault. And over time, and with some growth and some recognition of my own character defects and failings, when I look back and review it now, I weirdly see way more of the stuff I did. My overall perception of the breakup has altered as I've gained new knowledge. And I guess that's a way in which it's potentially good and healthy.

In a weird way, it feels wrong to update memories. In theory, that's what happened. They shouldn't be reinterpreted or rewritten. But if the only purpose of the memory is to serve you in the present and in your future, then of course, that's what should happen. That's exactly right.

Charan Ranganath
Let's say 20 years from now, we get together for a beer. You would probably look at me, and you'd go like, okay, well, he's aged so much. Or not a beer. Sorry. Coffee or something like that.

Dax Shepard
I knew that was gonna stumble you up. It's like I just. Let's get together for some lines. Sorry. Okay.

Charan Ranganath
I just. It's been 20 years. Don't even worry. Please kill me. People always.

Dax Shepard
It's so funny. Someone will go like, oh, we did that. And, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. Some people it would bother. Yeah.

Monica Padman
Yeah. No, I mean, I used to work in the alcohol treatment program at the time. Well, he has a na beer, so you guys could. There it is right now. We could bang back some Ted seegers.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, yeah, let's do. I will do it. Okay. I'll wear your band shirt and you drink my beer. Symbiotic.

So let's say we get together for non alcoholic beers. Then another year later, it goes by, and you see me. You'd probably go like, oh, he's way older than I remember. Now, if you updated your memory perfectly, I wouldn't be that much older because it would only be a year since the last time you saw me. So if you updated your memory, ideally, then you would actually have less of a sense of, hey, something's new here.

But we don't update our memories enough sometimes. And so that's why we have this experience of relatives that we haven't seen in a while. But really quickly, that seems like a function of prioritizing which impression is more important, because if I were to now permanently make my image of you at 62, it feels more relevant that I remember my initial for my survival. I could see why the brain prioritizes the initial and cements the initial summation of you, because we're evaluating whether you're good or bad for us or safe or you're a threat. And so, I don't know, it feels like, why wouldn't my image of you be at 62 if that's what you are?

Dax Shepard
Why do we hold onto these earlier images? We form of people. The strategy is to split the difference. There's a thing in machine learning called overfitting, where you have some thing that you're trying to learn. You learn too much about it.

Charan Ranganath
It actually is bad because you can't generalize in a good way. So there's a general strategy that you want to have where you want to learn just enough. I mean, imagine if I just got this perfect memory of you right now, and the next time I see you, if you shaved, and I'd be like, I have no idea who this guy is. Right. Nose looks familiar.

Exactly. You know, it's like cheeks tattoo. I've seen that somewhere before, so you don't want to over fit like that. And so I think that the brain is updating, but it's not updating completely. And then there's also all sorts of interesting, weird things where sometimes you just form a new memory of remembering.

And so there's separate memories, but it's like I'm remembering that time. I remember that time. Okay, so that's great. That brings me to. Now, this is not in your book, but this is something that has plagued me, like the car accident time shift I have on numerous occasions.

Dax Shepard
It's generally, I'm at my mom's house, I'm flipping through a photo album, and I believe I have a memory of standing on my porch at four years old in this house we lived in. And I can see it perfectly, and I know it's my memory. And I'm flipping through the pages, and I go, oh, my God. That's the exact image I have in my mind. And then I have to admit to myself, I don't think I actually have a memory of that time.

I have a memory of this photo. And I have come to realize so much of my memory is really my memory of these photographs. What's happening there? Well, so. And I get this, by the way, from people who go, I remember when I was, like, six months old.

Charan Ranganath
And it's like the data says that you do not remember when you're six months old, but you might remember seeing pictures of yourself and hearing stories about when you're six months old. And then the imagination kicks in. You just lose the ability to tell the difference in things that you thought about or seeing a picture and things that actually happened, because they're all just mental experiences when you just activate a memory. And so in your head, thinking about something and remembering something are not all that different. But getting back to your question about why is it that it doesn't feel like you have that sense of mental time travel?

You don't feel like you're going back in time. It's just sort of like something you read about. What happens, at least in our computer models of the brain, is that when we recall a memory, we're recalling it in a new context. And so the hippocampus might be saying, time travel back to this particular time and place, but then you have this disconnect between the thing that you're pulling up and the context you're in now. And so what happens is you tweak the memory so that it's less tied to that place in time.

Now, what happens is you keep recalling this thing over and over, and it's not locked into this hyper specific place and time. It's not overfitted to a contact, so it's easier to pull up. You pull up now, the edited version you last made. That's right. And it becomes more general and more flexible, more accessible.

But at the same time, it doesn't give you that sense of traveling back. It's not like you didn't even realize you had this memory. And then all of a sudden, you go back to your childhood school, and boom, it pops into your head again. This isn't in your book or on my questions, but now you've said this, and it made me think of this. What is your overall belief in, like, hypnosis and being able to actually go back in a way that you normally couldn't consciously?

I think that hypnosis is problematic because hypnosis is a very deep state of relaxation, from what I understand. And the problem with hypnosis is basically you're turning off the prefrontal resources, the executive functions that you need to monitor the accuracy of your memory. So we can be accurate, but it takes time and it takes a little bit of executive function. So we tend to remember things badly when we're stressed out or tired, not getting enough sleep. Kind of like I am now, except for this.

I'm super piped now. I'm in a good mental place right now, but those are the times that we tend to struggle. So hypnosis kind of is also taking those executive functions out of the picture, and the difference in imagination and memory kind of goes out the window at that point. And you start to think about things that could have happened, and you're getting suggestions and being asked to say, well, you know, remember, some other time this happened, maybe could this have happened? And it seems plausible because you're not able to counteract these suggestions and you're being encouraged to elaborate on them.

Dax Shepard
And those then can also become edited memories that you would recall as if they were the same as any other. Theoretically, you can form, I mean, well, it's happened that you can form a. New memory about something 30 years ago. About something that never happened. Right, right.

But in theory, yeah, happened at eight years old. But it's just an assembly set of bits of, like, I saw this movie, I recalled this family interaction. You just put it all together into some crazy thing. And people who are more susceptible to hypnosis are more likely to do this. When you're in a hypnotic state, does it prevent you from doing the thing you just described, which is you can't go back to that place in time, so you adjust that memory to fit into your current context under a state of hypnosis.

Would you perhaps just plop back into the old memory without that ability to update it and make it fit your current context? That's a really good question. We don't know. I don't know. This is something I like to say a lot is I don't know, or we don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's like you don't hear scientists say that enough. That's like a big part of the science. But what I would say is you can pull up a lot of context, but then free associate and glom together, a bunch of stuff that becomes associated. And so I think, yeah, you might end up creating something that's so new.

Charan Ranganath
You create this memory of imagining or this memory of remembering and imagining that's separate from the original event. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. We are supported by Viator now. Monica. I'm going to Lisbon.

Monica Padman
So exciting. And I'm going to use Viator because, you know, I can book a tuk tuk tour of the city on Viayo. Yeah, I feel like you can look up even other fun things you guys can do together. Yeah, absolutely. That is where you go to find an experience while you're traveling.

Dax Shepard
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Dax Shepard
Education Intuit that's intuit.com education. Get ready for the greatest roast of all time, the roast of Tom Brady, a Netflix live event happening May 5 hosted by Kevin Hart, the seven time world champion, gets his cleats held to the fire by famous friends and frenemies on an unforgettable night where everything is fair game. Tune in on May 5 at 05:00 p.m. Pacific time for the roast of Tom Brady live only on Netflix.

The brain is good at delineating between memories of dreams. Like, I find it's kind of shockingly good. It's only once in a while where. I sometimes I am like, did I dream? Yeah, sometimes.

Occasionally I'm like, I don't know if I dreamt this or this happened, but again, once every two months, that happens to me. And you're creating a story every single night that's super detailed. And really, you're not confused for the. Most part that it's kind of to make it real. You know that it's fake because you flew.

Monica Padman
Or I had one the other day where there was a moving photograph, you can hopefully know that, discern the difference. Yeah, this is something I think about a lot. So there's all sorts of interesting work being done on dreams right now in memory. And one of the things that people are finding is that dreams aren't just associated with rem sleep, they're associated with other phases of sleep. There may be dreams throughout a night of sleep, and a dreaming's a big.

Dax Shepard
Part of how we create memories. No file memories. The file cabinet analogy we've heard is. That that's what we're saying. So I like that you don't like it.

Charan Ranganath
I guess I'm sort of a punk neuroscientist, because in neuroscience, there's a view of memory as being very literal and these kind of, like, traces and so forth, and you strengthen the traces. But the problem is that works in an animal that has very few memories in its life, like a lab animal. But humans have so many memories. It's a big ecosystem. One of the things that many sleep researchers have found, and we founded at one study, is that sleep is this time really to combine information across different kinds of events.

Because if our episodic memories are tied to a particular context, you can really restrict yourself from building some kind of a general schema. You're siloed. Right. So it's like connecting silos at night. Exactly.

So if I walked into your garage and I saw that you had, like, a bunch of Costco packages of cheetos, then the next time I come and I see, like, a bunch of Costco things, of oreos, at some point during sleep, I can build this larger concept, which is Dax stores junk food in his garage. And so that is a kind of magic that comes out of sleep. And what you see after sleep is often people are more fluent in producing the information. Like, if you're learning a new language, that people are better at producing that information or trying to learn a new piece of music, and you're better at producing that later. I hate to flip the script on you both, but I've been dying to ask a proper actor, and you're both proper actors, how do you memorize lines?

And do you find that over time, your memory changes and does change over sleep? And does it change after you watch your yourself in a performance? That's a good question. I feel like it depends. When I was doing theater school, I could memorize a whole part in a play, and that didn't feel crazy.

Monica Padman
Now, that would kind of feel crazy. Like, I'm surprised I was able to do that because I'm not in that mode, but I just would read it. I don't think I had any major. Techniques, but you can improve on it at a staggering pace. So I had done movies for six years in a row.

Dax Shepard
Then I got on a tv show. On a movie, you shoot 120 pages in four months. On a tv show, you shoot 60 pages in six days. So over the course of nine months, you're shooting ten movies. While it was always hard to memorize long monologues and movies, year two of the tv show, you could hand me a four page scene while I was sitting in the makeup trailer.

I could read it one time and go out and do it. And I remember just being shocked with how easy and good it got. But I also want to add that I changed how I memorized the lines. I think I inadvertently stumbled upon something that probably would have helped in the movies, which is, if you try to get every word of this sentence down, I get overwhelmed. Like I did when I had dyslexia.

Like, well, this is not possible. When I tried to remember the point of everything I was saying, and I literally just memorized 13 points. Lo and behold, all those words were attached to that. Is that very well known and demonstrated? Well, yeah, you hit upon a few things.

Charan Ranganath
One is you developed a skill, but the other is the importance of meaning. What I tell people, if you want to improve your memory, in other words, you want to remember something that you need and be able to pull it out when you need it. Plant cues. So there has to be something that you don't have to engage in all sorts of executive functions. Search around something right there in front of you can pull it up.

So if you're thinking about the intentions of your character and you're thinking of the goal and the point, it's actually, in some sense, from a memory research perspective, you're adding low to what you need to remember, but you're locking it in to all of this stuff that you already have. You're locking this new information that's kind of arbitrary and made up to this information that's, well, locked into your head. So now when you think of the character, the words just kind of come out because it's a cue for the dialogue. If I'm trying to memorize a name, it really helps. If I have listened to your podcast and now I see your face, I.

That's Monica. Because I have this knowledge that I can lock that name into. Is that the mental castle idea where people are trying to remember a long list of, let's say, groceries or something? You can build a one word story. No, no.

Monica Padman
It's like you would go to this attic in your head, and I would put bread at the lamp and bananas at my purse. So then I'm walking around the attic in my head, and I can remember it. Like, for memory games. Yeah, it's called the Memory palace. Memory palace.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cancel palace. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I like castle better. We should go with that.

Dax Shepard
This is her further running from her indian roots. Palace. Yeah. Cause there's a lot of palaces when we were just in India. Not a lot of castles.

Monica Padman
I like it. But, you know, that's also. Harold and Kamara went to White Castle. Castle. I guess you're right.

Dax Shepard
That kind of counteracts culpeps. I have two things that plague me in the way that you're plagued. They might be the same, but one is repressed memories. Do you believe in them? Yeah.

Charan Ranganath
So the standard view, which I subscribe to is that repression is this idea that Kemp's. From freudian psychology, these urges that are so unacceptable that you purge them from the conscious mind, and it's just an automatic defense mechanism. Freud once proposed that memories can be repressed by that mechanism of something traumatic that's happened to you later on. From what I understand, he even distanced himself from it. But there's a school of thought that that happened.

There's no evidence of any kind that suggests that there's this automatic mechanism that suppresses memory. Now, that said, there's a bunch of things that can happen. One thing that can happen is, is people try to suppress the memory consciously. Because they don't want to think about it. And my friend Mike Anderson has done research to show that that can make the memory less accessible.

It can make it a little blurrier again through this updating mechanism. So that can be part of it. But also, sometimes people just aren't in the right context. And when you're in that context, this memory just pops up that you didn't have before. Sometimes it's that people remembered it, but then they forgot that they remembered it was accessible to them.

But then they kind of went, okay, well, that was the past. It's not now. And then later on, it pops into their head and has this new immediacy. So there's all sorts of things that can happen in the world. We kind of worship Paul Bloom, and he said he doesn't believe in them.

Dax Shepard
And so we kind of were like, okay, then we don't need that. I like this is a little more. He's not a memorable guy. Important. A trick I heard on set from a camera operator, Scipio Africa.

A camera operator has to know people's names more than most. He has to know the stand ins names. He has to know all the guest actors names because he's going to be constantly asking them to stand in different positions. And he said his trick was to stand at craft service in the morning and loiter there. And as new people would arrive, he had learned if you need something from somebody, it helps you remember their name.

So stand in would be at the thing, and he would say, what's your name? Oh, I'm Gail Gale. Could you hand me a creamer? And I wonder if there's any validity to that technique. I find it kind of fascinating.

He certainly was great at names. I like that. What I have noticed, and this is shameful, but this is so true. I say, I'm bad at remembering names. I am not bad at remembering high status names that are in charge of my future.

I don't have any trouble remembering the boss's name or the director's name or the producer's. I need something from them. And somehow I'm great at remembering names. Well, there's a bunch of things. So one thing is motivation and motivational circuitry that like the dopaminergic parts of the brain, for instance, in promoting memory.

Charan Ranganath
So that makes sense. The idea of linking it to a goal. To the extent that there's a social reward, there is something that probably would make the event more memorable. I think what's missing from it is it's not linking the creamer to the facial features, because people will say often that they don't remember a name, but usually it's that they don't remember which name went with which face. Monica is a great name.

There's nothing that links your face to that name other than the fact that people say that name every time they see you're around. There's nothing inherent. That's right. It could be Courtney Cox's association. She was Monica and friends.

So that name, there's all this competition there. But the creamer gives you a distinctive thing to lock into that makes it unique and makes this moment different. So you've got meaning, you got goals and motivation, and it also just is focusing your attention on those factors. Just the commitment to do it is halfway there. Probably.

This is something that I say a lot, which is, if you know that 80% of the details in your life or more are going to just vanish, what is the 20% that you want to hang on to? And I don't think we actually have the bandwidth in most of our daily life to think about what we want to hold on to. I lose names before I even have a chance to think that I need to memorize this name totally. I never thought about it this way, but it's sort of like the memory palace. People who study rats will say, well, it's because our brains are spatial and we put everything in space.

Really what it is is it's a structure in your mind of organizing information. And so if you imagine, for instance, we do take the file cabinet analogy, and we have different files for different memories, then they're not competing with each other. It's not as if they're in the same folder in the same cabinet, so there's less competition. So if you know a role for each person on the set, that gives them a unique slot. It's almost like a room in your memory palace.

All the great mnemonics, like songs, have a structure to them, but social information, all this stuff. That's what I wanted to ask about, why music is a full time travel. I feel we've talked about that before, how if you hear a song, you can immediately transport back to an old memory. Why? Why is that?

There's a number of factors. Number one is music tends to be on as a soundtrack to our experiences, so it's part of the context that we talk about that uniquely tells us about a time and place. So I went through a metal phase in late junior high to early high school. So a lot of metal links up uniquely to that period because it's part of that context. Now, if there's a song you've listened to every day for 20 years, it's not going to give you that quality.

But if there's a unique period of time that has helps, then you form your musical tastes during this period of time where you're forming your sense of who you are. And that's this period of time that we often look back upon. They call it the reminiscence bump. It's this period from about 14 to 30. I have you quoted as ten to 30.

Ten to 30. Okay. Yeah, that's probably the more reminiscent bump. I'm not good with remembering details, but, yeah. So that period of time that we tend to call back upon very often.

Dax Shepard
Well, and in that reminiscent bump, that's where most of your favorite movies, your favorite books, your favorite music, they all live in that period. And it's so true for myself, I think of all of my favorites, very few of them exist outside of that window. Cause that's when the identity is being formed. That's when you're really getting a sense of who I am. Another part of it is music tends to be emotionally arousing, evocative, and it's social.

Charan Ranganath
We listen to music with other people, and it has a structure to it, too, where that naturally links up different things. But I really feel like the emotion, the social nature of it, and the time limited part of it. So I have a colleague friend, Peter Genotta, who studies music and autobiographical memory. And so he gets biographies of people by playing songs that were popular on the billboard charts during particular years of their life. Oh, he uses that to cue up.

Cue up the memories. Wow. I thought you were going to talk about these Alzheimer's. Well, that, too. People.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. Who can just play everything they ever learn musically. Yeah. Victims of trauma. This is something we talk endlessly on this show about.

And I think this is something conceptually I wrestle with daily. As someone who's in therapy and regularly talking about the past, there is some voice in my head that says, it is time to let that be the past and to not let the first nine years of my life dictate the remaining 90. There's almost a motive to forget. And I'm curious what your thoughts on that are. Well, remembering traumatic experiences is painful.

Charan Ranganath
I hear from people. I get emails from people. There's always people in my audience who say, how can I get rid of traumatic memories? And with the sensitivity to the fact that I get it, but it's like, you don't want to erase the memory. You want to change your relationship with the memory, and that's very hard when you're trapped in your own head and trapped in your own perspective.

Dax Shepard
That was another one of my questions. But you're kind of incorporating into it, which is how memories that are formed with another person are different and how forming memories together, it's its own thing as well. I used a statistic that I got from an analysis in the book. I think it was something like 30% of human language is spent basically communicating memories with others. And I would argue that's probably why we evolved language, because I don't have to make mistakes to learn from them.

Charan Ranganath
I can learn from your mistakes, and that is this enormous capability that we have, language. So memory is so intertwined with that social language function that we have of community. And there's many parts of it, but one big part of it is you have this memory updating capability, which is if I share a memory and now you give it back to me again, you've got a memory of my memory because I've shared it with you. But now I'm seeing that memory from your perspective, even just telling you, making a story that you can understand and trying to use theory of mine to say, hey, let me explain this in a way that DaX will be interesting. Let me put this thought that's in my mind into your mind, and that.

Is creating a narrative that wasn't necessarily there before, and that's now a new memory, that's a new part of your life story. And so these social interactions that we have reshape our memories constantly, and then you think about things that are shared experiences. Like, we all live through the COVID lockdowns, and maybe I had my experience. You had your experience. We talk about that.

It's a collective memory. And so, so much of human memory, we're so intricately social that our memory of our experiences. You'd be hard pressed to pull out a lot of memories from your life that don't have a social component to them, right. Well, it did make me think. Often when I tell my brother about a memory that we both should have, we rarely agree.

Dax Shepard
And then I have my childhood best friend Aaron weekly. This happens all the time on this show. I'm like, I think these fucking five ninjas jumped out, and they can't be possibly what happened when we left this bar? And then we'll call Aaron and I'll go, what happened? We got thrown at that bar in New York.

He's like, he had, like, five ninjas and Adidas jumpsuits jumped out of nowhere. He and I are always in lockstep, which I find to be very rare, even married. Our memories are much different. But I'm just curious if there's something to the fact that he and I are so similar and our perspectives are so similar that there's rarely any disjointedness in our shared memory. Whereas other people that I have a much different perspective of, just baseline, rarely did those match up.

Charan Ranganath
I think that's true. And not just that, but you're communicating during these shared experiences, and you're communicating with this beautiful understanding of each other. This is actually a fascinating thing about the brain, is in this context, we're creating this shared. I'm trying to get into your head and understand your goals, and you're understanding the world. You're trying to understand mine.

And so who I am in this context is different than who I am in other contexts, because I'm engaging in a different kind of shared narrative that we're creating. We tend to think of the brain as a bunch of localized areas that do their own thing, but brain areas interact with one another another in a sense that's parallel to people. And the function of a brain area actually can change. We can computationally show this in models based on these interactions. But getting back to your point, if you're very good at creating this kind of a shared mental space, who we are in this moment, and communicating so beautifully to each other, you just look at each other, you're communicating just through a look.

Your perspectives are going to be very similar because it's a collective experience. And so much of your experience of that event is your partner. They've told that story together before. And so even the word ninja, like, you guys did that in a telling at some point. Sure.

Dax Shepard
Probably the morning after it happened. Exactly. And so you guys are creating the story together, so it's gonna match up. We co author all these memories. Yeah.

So you do have prescriptions in this book. The goal of it being to make mindful and intentional choices, to maximize the positive effect of. Of memory on well being and adaptive function. So I think people will want to know, what kind of things can they do to make better choices, given that, as you say, most of everything we witness, we're not going to remember. So if we're only going to remember 20%, how do we focus and become intentional upon that?

Charan Ranganath
I think we need to allow ourselves time. Executive functions take effort, and it takes time. And I think that's a big part of making these mindful choices, just giving ourselves the time to say, what is my goal here? What do I want to remember? And then there's another part of it, which is, what are my goals in general.

And so if I'm planning for the future, I might plan a vacation. And I know full well that a vacation involves me sitting around and just obsessing about Airbnbs and trying to find the perfect place, trying to find the perfect price, sitting in line at airport security. But later on, when I think about what happened over the course of the year, that's what I will remember, is spending time with my wife and my daughter and going out to some restaurant laughing. And those things, those are the moments that I want to remember. But on the other hand, sitting, watching TikTok videos made, no offense, that's not something I want to remember a year from now.

It's about being mindful of what are the memories that I want to plant and curating those future memories for your future self. Again, that makes me think of Kahneman and the experiential self versus the narrative self. It sounds like you're prioritizing the narrative self. That's the self that calls the shots, and that's the only self that lasts. This moment is already gone.

It's memory. This has to be addressed because it's probably the thing that's most present when you leave your house, which is you go to a concert and everyone is filming the entire thing as if they're a videographer and as if they're going to watch this thing, which no one ever will watch this video. How are you obscuring your memory by doing that? How are you tainting it? I love this because I'm noticing this.

I was at a descendants concert, and it's like this older punk band, but there are all these young people there with their phones up. And I was like, people would be staged, diving into these, for sure. Swatting them out of hands. Exactly. The interesting thing is, this relates to people's idea that if I document what happens, I will remember it because of.

Dax Shepard
Their spurious association with the memory. Working like a video camera. Exactly. And I think there's two things wrong with that. One is you're no longer actually in the moment.

Charan Ranganath
You are thinking about recording. You're not actually experiencing this anymore. I'm actually experiencing the recording of this event. But then on top of it, if I'm doing that, I'm focusing on what happened. So if I go to a show and I'm seeing a musician, it's not about the music.

It's about the connection. The experience of feeling that music, being with my friends, being in this place, the physical punch of the bass drum into your chest, and you're losing all that when you focus on your phone. I might even remember what happened. I remember, yeah, they played this particular song, but I don't re experience it because I wasn't attending to that conscious experience. And this is partly why I focus people on the details that will put you back in this place in time.

And the emotions are part of it, because that's what you want to remember. I can go on YouTube now and pull up any video that someone else recorded. And also, you're so right to say you're making the mistake to think that the priority of a show is the band playing the music. That seems very obvious and the thing that should be filmed. But I went to a thousand shows as a kid in Detroit, and I can tell you there was a girl in a green sweater standing by the speaker.

Dax Shepard
And that's really what I watched that show. And then there was a guy that I thought was too aggressive in the MoSfet that I wanted to go fucking sheriff on. And then there was a drink. I want, like, really, the experience was all the other things that were happening in the context of the band playing. This is the mistake that people make, is they think memory is about what happened.

Charan Ranganath
Episodic memories, but the experience, not just the content, what is only a small part of it. There's the feeling, there's the place that context is such a big part of it, which is not content. And you lose that when you don't attend to the context and you get something different. And you're absolutely right. It's like, when I do remember the show itself, it's about what I felt when I looked into them, and they're just totally immersed in the music, and I'm feeling what they're communicating to me.

It's not the content. It's not like, oh, yeah, I remember they played this song at 160 beats per minute. That's not it. It's like letting in the vibe of this bizarre optimism and this notion of youth, and we're gonna do whatever the fuck we want, and this isn't school. That's the thing you're there for.

Oh, yeah. Wow, wow, wow. What a fascinating topic it is. I gotta imagine it's one of the harder things to tackle. Cause, like I'm saying, you've said it to me, and I still am.

Dax Shepard
Like, I would want to hear, no, you create a memory, and it builds a new cell, and in that cell is the data. But this is just so much more complex. It is. And it's so much more nuanced. It's a very hard thing to track down.

Monica Padman
Yeah. Even I was like, oh, it's the hippocampus. We learned that in 9th grade. I'm like, no, not really. Kind of.

Charan Ranganath
It's definitely a big part of it. Oh, let me just say one thing about the photographs, and which is you can use the camera in ways to enhance the memory. You can say, I'm going to take a picture of this moment because this means a lot to me right now. I'm going to take 10 seconds of video of them playing my favorite song because I have this feeling in my heart at this moment that I want to have a cue to pull up. Or you can say, my daughter is just loving this pasta that we got.

I'm going to take a picture of her. She's not going to want me to do it. I'm not going to show it to anybody else. But it's forcing me to attend to this moment, and it's planting a little cue in my head so that I think of that restaurant. Well, you said on vacations you now take candid pictures, which I thought was a great distinction.

Dax Shepard
And it made me think immediately. Monica liked this picture a lot the other day that I posted, and I remember the picture very well because Aaron and I were supposed to be posing for a picture, but then we both started laughing at how embarrassing it was that we were posing for a picture. And in the picture, I'm kind of doubled over laughing with embarrassment of what we're doing is in the sand dunes, and Monica's like, oh, my God, I love that picture of you and Aaron. Cause it's really you and Aaron, us posing. It's not Aaron and I.

Me laughing with embarrassment that we're posing is Aaron. And I'm so funny. I just yelled at my dad for doing this, like, three days ago in Arizona. Yeah. He was just standing up, taking random pictures, and I was like, dad, what are you doing?

Monica Padman
We're not gonna use any of these pictures or look at them again because no one's looking, no one's paying any attention. And I guess that was the wrong thing to say. I'm not. I feel like, because you're both indie and I want to explore this fun thing, which is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your own story is present in the book, which is lovely.

Dax Shepard
And even when you're talking about dealing with your memories and constructing your identity and having been this kid who was hiding his indianism outside of the house and very much practicing the indianness inside the house. Allowed to eat meat at friend's house, not eating meat at home. Racism. Where do I fit in school? Cut to.

You're being interviewed by the New York Times. These are incongruous. You can't have both identities working at the same time. One is like, I'm a total outcast. I'm so unique, I don't fit into anything.

And then, no, I'm also worthy of being. So you have to, like, marry these things. Yeah. And depending on what context I'm in, this gets into this complexity thing because I think for a lot of memory researchers, I don't think we would be able to figure out in our heads what this is. But it's like this code switching thing that happens.

Charan Ranganath
I'm around certain people and I could just get into this mindset. I can even pull up memories that I wouldn't necessarily pull up otherwise. And I get into a different group. I can be very confident when I'm talking to a big group of people and I'm performing and I've got something to say and I've got a role. And then you could put me in a group of people where I'm supposed to be social and I'm just like, oh, back then, it was really true.

I'd be the only brown person on stage playing a guitar or the only brown person in this room full of really nice but, you know, all white dudes. The indian parent thing. I will try to make peace with how my family acted and how Monica's family acted. The priority placed on safety and economic security and the lack of indulgent I love yous and you're so perfect, you know, these cultural differences that clearly exist. The flip side of that coin is Monica will be so hard on her parents.

Dax Shepard
And I'm like, this is kind of great. It's like a two way street. All of it culturally is so fascinating to me. Monica, you want to tell me about your childhood? I don't think it's better, though.

Monica Padman
I'm not looking at this very affectionate white culture now. I'm not, anyway, looking at it and thinking, like, oh, man, I wish I had that. I'm happy with what I had. I think it served me very well. It's different, but I don't think better or worse.

Dax Shepard
I don't either. I am endlessly fascinated by the power of culture. I just love it. And my wife should, too. It's all functioning with the same outcome.

In essence, you're, like bringing these little creatures that can't fend for themselves out into the world and turning them over. And there's, like, all these different approaches. There's pros and cons of it all. And it's interesting, when I read your story, I thought, oh, this kind of mirrors Monica's in a way, where a lot of guests we have that are indian. They were very immersed in it and were expected to act that way outside of the house, whereas Monica's parents are, I guess we'd say, very liberal.

In the conventional immigrant story, they weren't telling her she has to be a lawyer or a this or a that. So it's like there was a lot of flexibility that seemed kind of novel, but yours sounded very novel, too, in that. Yeah. When you're out of the house, blend in, eat meat. We really had this immigrant mentality of keep your head down, assimilate and assimilate, because it's not necessarily.

It's dangerous. Yeah. My parents, I feel like I had a lot more dissonance with that experience than they did in some way, or at least then they'll talk about. But for me, anyway, that was very much the sense that I got, is, on the one hand, this very strong belief that you have a culture that you need to preserve. This is who you are, but you also need to keep your head down and just blend in in the outside world.

Charan Ranganath
And that was just a really difficult thing for me to be able to do because I just do me for better or for worse. But it was hard, and it really did mess with my way of thinking about things in certain ways. This relates back to the traumatic memory thing. I can look at a bunch of people who came from my background at the same time but didn't seem to come out of it the same way that I did. And don't, you know, come back and they've got a hangover or something and they're, like, thinking about all these crappy things that happened to them 30 years ago.

I do. I don't know what makes us different, but there's something we come up with these narratives in these stories. Right. But the fact is, the majority of people who experience trauma do not develop post traumatic stress disorder. The majority of people who take cocaine do not become cocaine addicts.

Dax Shepard
Right. There are people who can smoke crack fairly often and do not become addicted. Yeah. So there are these differences that are there, and it doesn't mean that the person who becomes an addict is weak. It doesn't mean that the person who gets PTSD is weak.

Charan Ranganath
If anything, it's like our brain are just optimized for different checks and balances, different competing goals that we have of survival, of getting rewards. There's some parallel between memory and story and memory and identity. They're kind of linked. Any human is, I think, attempting to pressure test their story. I find it very hard to do.

And I think this is where memory can be either limiting or liberating. Often it's limiting because it feeds into our beliefs. And you remember that one time that you embarrassed yourself in front of everybody and that shaped your belief that you mess up in public, you can't speak in public, there's something wrong with you. And so that's your prediction going into the event, that's shaping your attention, and then that's filtering. Your memory becomes confirmation bias.

Exactly. But you can do the opposite. You can see this in people's things with visualizing the positive outcome. You can remember times in your life where you violated that expectation. You can remember exceptions to this, believe.

People have done this in experiments. Dan Schachter's lab has done some cool stuff where you imagine yourself or you remember an event where you're altruistic, and people will feel more altruistic in the present. You can remember a time when you were happy, and you will feel happier in the present. Memory can give you options if you do that little mental effort to pull out the memory. That's not easy, but it can constrain your options if you let the context dictate what's going to pull things out.

Dax Shepard
Okay, the last thing I want to say, I am not educated enough on it to make this observation, but here we are. I've read a third of a buddhist book, every single concept I'm so attracted to, and I'm reading your book, and I'm like, this is all Buddhism. The core tenet of Buddhism is there's no self, because consciousness arises from a context, and context is constantly changing, so consciousness is constantly changing, and the idea of a self is an illusion because you're a different self in every context. And so when I look at how malleable the memories are and how we access them and what mood we're in when we. It's all about context.

And I just feel like it overlaps so beautifully with what limited amount I'm learning about Buddhism. I've been thinking a lot about Buddhism as I was writing the book. Are you versed in it? A bit. Not enough.

Charan Ranganath
I was raised Hindu, and Buddhism is really an offshoot of Hinduism, a really important and interesting, fascinating offshoot, but there's a lot of similarity. I actually think a lot about the parallels between the Bhagavad gita and the tenets of Buddhism, because one's about renunciation and another is about not renouncing everything but renouncing the fruits of your action, renouncing the outcome and embracing the reason for doing it, not for the outcome. But getting back to your question, I had done mindfulness based stress reduction at one point. What I got from this was that I was a miserable failure at mindfulness. George, I think most people feel that way.

Completely low self esteem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was talking to Amishi ja, who's been on your show, and you're reading her book and thinking about things. I was writing in my book, and I realized this is exactly what it's supposed to be, because I'm entering the world of memory all the time and remembering things, imagining things, anticipating things. Mindfulness was really being aware of that, observing it when it's happening.

And that's error driven learning. Right there, you're learning this habit. And so people will say mindfulness changes the brain. Well, everything changes the brain, so that's stupid. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Candy bar. That was exactly right. But the interesting part of it is you're learning a new habit, which is to observe from the third person, changing the perspective, and you're observing this thing that's coming in. And that meta level of observation, I think, is a hugely important thing in terms of being able to distance yourself from the effect of an intrusive memory. To distance yourself and see the predictions that you're making about the future.

This is the basis of CBT, right. CBT is relevant, but it's more about challenging people's beliefs by giving them counterexamples. And then the behavior part is just having them repeatedly do things that they're afraid of. But this is why mindfulness has really gone into the therapy world. And really balanced as well with CBT is part of it, is you have to see the belief in action.

Charan Ranganath
You have to recognize it when it's happening. Because the problem is, this goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning, is once you get into that mindset, you're off to the races. But if you can see it flipping and you can distance yourself from it, that's what you want. Cause you can't remember it if you didn't observe it. Basically, it's like you can't control that shift in context if you don't see it happening in the first place.

Right. If you don't have this intention of a goal that you know you're keeping in mind, or if you just don't have a habit of stepping backwards and saying, I'm feeling something. What is this I'm feeling? Let's be curious about it. Another thing that I got from Buddhism is also just this fact that I love memory.

You don't want to be remembering all the time. You want it to be a resource. And then a lot of the time, you want to be in the moment. There is a very philosophical question about everyone would want a better memory. And even there is talk.

Dax Shepard
And these people who think we are going to ultimately augment our memory with some kind of offshore database. And that. That appeals to people. But I almost wonder if it almost ends up living your entire life filming the concert. You don't want that accurate of a memory, because you're then destined to live in the past, and we should be living today and forward.

So there is this weird paradox to it all, I think so. You want to form memories in an intentional way, as best you can, and you don't want to be pulling up memories all the time. It's a resource that you say, hey, I'm struggling right now. And this is our computational models of memories. We're saying if we were remembering all the time, you'd almost be hallucinating.

Charan Ranganath
It's actually relevant to theories of psychosis, but you want to be able to use it at moments when you're struggling and you need to call back on your past to figure things out. So it should be intermittent. It shouldn't be this whole world that you go into and disappear in, unless that's what you want. Yeah. Because people would probably just end up living in the ten to 30 zone that they created.

Dax Shepard
All their favorite everythings. Yeah. Oh, well, this is wonderful. I really appreciate. Everyone should check out why we remember unlocking memories.

Power to hold on to what matters. And if you're lucky enough to attend UC Davis, you should definitely take a class. Enjoy this. Punk rock neuroscience. I want to take a class.

So great having you. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you for having me. This has been a blast. We'll go take a couple pictures and our punk rock shirts stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong.

Okay, I don't know if this is the right foot to start on, but I do need to make a correction. When you asked me for Monday's fact check if there was any blowback about the sunscreen. I actually now realize I hadn't looked, but there was. Certainly they came. The sunscreen police decided to show up.

They descended on me. Okay. Big sunscreen. Yeah, big sunscreen. But someone sent me an article, and now I feel inclined to add some details.

Okay, what do you think about that? Defensive. Probably. Let it go. Probably.

Well, there's just tons of interesting information. In this article about why we shouldn't wear sunscreen. That really supports what I was saying. No, I'm not. I want to be dead clear.

I have no advice for somebody on sunscreen, but the fact that I'm saying I wear it very selectively and people are saying I'm stupid because of it, I'm inclined to say that, you know, minimally. You should know there is an alternative argument that is from scientists, not just me, but skip it. I think we skip it. And I think whoever's saying you're stupid because of it, maybe this is why you don't read comments. Because somebody's gonna say you're stupid about fucking everything.

Yeah. But the one really important thing that did come out of the article I want to say, is that melanoma is super common. One in five is now the number of people. It is the most common cancer in the world, and one in five people will have it. Or maybe it was one in seven, but it's enormously high.

The kind that can kill you is actually a very, very low percentage. And then the people who have that kind, people who were indoors and unhealthy, were eight times more likely to die of it. So there's this really ironic association with people who were. Actually had massive skin exposure to the sun have a survival rate from the very low percentage that's lethal at eight times the rate survival. Okay.

Okay. I won't read you the article. It was my opportunity, though, to do Taylor's commencement speech because it was way too long. But it is a real, real, just straight up legit fact. Sun is not good for the texture.

Monica Padman
Thousand percent of your skin. Yep. Makes you look older and wrinkly. Worn out. Speaking of update, I went to the dermatologist.

I did not get Kybella. Oh, I gotta say, I was a little disappointed. That flipped, huh? First you were nervous I was gonna tell you not to do it. Right.

Dax Shepard
And then I was really neutral. And then you came over on Saturday to play cards. With who? Aaron. Hi.

Ah. They didn't even know he was sitting there. Surprise. A friendly pop out, though. There's scary pop outs.

Monica Padman
There's Liz. Not Liz. Plank. Liz. Dateline pop outs.

And then there's Aaron. Pop outs. Yeah. Different bfaw pop outs. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Okay, so, yeah, you came over to play spades. You obliterated Aaron, and I wouldn't say. Obliterated, but we wasn't thrashing. Well, we came back from the thrashing. Oh, we shoot.

Aaron Paul
It definitely was a thrashing until. Oh, yeah. When you made a big comeback. We gave it a run, but then we did win. You shellacked us, and you had just come and you said, I didn't get it.

Dax Shepard
And then I found myself a little bit go, like, no. Why? Because you were excited to get it, and it would have kind of shown the side of you. I always try to encourage. It's kind of a little more reckless because you're very.

You know, you're very responsible. I am, and I still am. Yeah. I didn't get it for a couple reasons. Bring Aaron up to speed.

Monica Padman
Okay, go ahead. No, I was listening. Saturday. Yeah, I think I'm up to speed. Oh, okay, great.

You would know that I wanted to get Kybella. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you were very hesitant Saturday. Yeah. And it sounded like Dax Saturday, at least to me, sounded like he wanted you to get it.

Now is. Feels worse. Yeah, well, before, I was like, don't fuck with yourself. You're a ten. What are we doing?

Dax Shepard
And then I. Then I came around, like, whatever makes you feel good. Like, I want you to do what makes you feel good. Then I was happy with that. That's the right answer.

Okay, great. And then when you didn't get it, I should've been happy for you. You didn't get it. It's like, whatever you want. Yeah, same thing.

Monica Padman
Whatever you want. Whatever you're feeling. Chef's choice, cuz. Member? The one part that we all recognize would be horrible is if I said, I'm thinking about getting Kybella.

And then the person said, yeah, about time. Yeah, that was the. Yeah, that's what he. Dax is saying now. No, but this all stems from which Aaron is not up to speed on.

Dax Shepard
I hold firm on this position. Okay. Fucking Monica was considering getting veneers. Fake teeth up front. Yeah.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. And I was like, what? I was just confused about that part. See how big they are? These are.

Monica Padman
And these are. No one knows. What Aaron and I see is a set of teeth we would kill to have. They're white as hell. They're straight as an arrow.

Aaron Paul
I almost thought you would only be doing it as a joke, like, to get big teeth or something? No, no. Just. Which would be funny even at all. Owl anyway, it doesn't matter.

Monica Padman
I'm not getting them, probably. And I probably. I don't want to commit, but I'm probably not getting them also because I don't like the permanence of shaving them down. That's why I'm not. I mean, you can't go back.

Dax Shepard
It's like electrolysis. It's more permanent than kypha. Cause you could regain your neck fat. Yeah. Okay.

Monica Padman
Okay. So when I went there, the reason I didn't get it, I was gonna get it. Don't spare me any details. You wake up that morning, you know, you have the appointment. Are you excited about the new you, or are you already nervous about it?

I'm nervous and excited and telling myself I can make the decision when I'm there. I don't need to think too much about it. It's okay. And then I went in there, and she has me fill out paperwork. So on the paperwork, it asked me about my medications and stuff.

So I have to put my anti seizure medication on there. And she starts asking about that and the seizures and stuff. Then she starts asking about my face. She says, what are your concerns? So then I start telling her about all my skin, like, my skin issues from being a kid.

And, I mean, she's a dermatologist. I know, but I doubt that's what she was asking. Well, okay. So I'm telling you. Let's start from the beginning.

Let me show you a picture of. Me as a baby in a field of grass. Yeah. And then I want that skin. No, I would say, look, she has a neck problem.

Even then. This is her story. Yeah. Okay. So I tell her about all my hormonal acne and all this stuff, and then I say, dating history, basically.

Like, I can't. No one likes me. Right. Let me tell you about this dairy Queen situation. So I'm saying all this, and then I was like, okay.

But, like, I kind of, like, snapped back into it, and I was like. So you thought she was yawning or she had gone to sleep? No, I just realize, like, that's not why I'm here. Cause I have a witch for that. Yes, you're here for some cosmetic adjustments.

Right? But maybe you even wanted to justify why you were. Like, that was your way of feeling, like you weren't there for cosmetic reasons. No, but everyone's there for cosmetic reasons. I know, but the wine teller all about.

Exactly. I don't know. I think I was nervous. Okay. So then I say, but really, I just, like, I hate my neck.

I hate the way it looks. Let me show you this video. I mean, I know you can see me in person, but let me show you this video. And this is what I don't. And she was like, okay.

And then she kind of, like, feels around. Was she squeezing it and stuff? Well, yeah. Yeah. And she said, I guess what I would recommend is Kybella.

And it's a non surgical. It's an injection. What it does is it melts the fat and it tightens. She said, but actually, you actually don't have enough fat. Fat there.

You have a very small chin. Okay. Yeah, we could build that out a little bit. Yes. She was like, so we could do some filler in the chin.

And then I started panicking. I was like, oh, God, this is getting out of hand. This is quick. And she said something like. Or you could do a full.

Something crazy, right. Some big surgery, but you shouldn't do that. She was just saying a lot. And the panic was starting to increase. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
You were starting to feel peer pressure, which is your trigger. Yeah. But then she said, but first, let's start with your skin. So then she did address my skin issues and my long history, and actually, that was the majority of the appointment. And what options?

Monica Padman
Because she put me on a new regimen, and. And then I was like, fuck. I wasn't here for this. But, like, now I'm buying all these products. Oh, I know.

And then I didn't even, like, fuck all that shit. Give it the Kybella. We're getting out here. No, but actually, I'm. I think I'm gonna love the regimen.

Dax Shepard
Oh, so hard to know. It's really hard for me to support you. Like, you. You are zigging and zagging like you're running from a crocodile. Anywho, she wanted me to check with my neurologist.

Monica Padman
She wanted me to double check with the neurologist before doing anything. So she said, so crazy. Check about the laser and check about the. The laser. Makes sense.

Definitely. Okay. And she's like, it'll probably be fine, but I just want you to, like, yeah. There's trying to offlay any liability at. All costs, which is.

Which is smart. And I was actually. I liked that she said that because she could have just had it. She could have had it done if. I'd be so annoyed if I were a neurologist, though.

Dax Shepard
I keep getting all these calls from my patients, like, hey, I'm thinking about buying a convertible is that okay with my epilepsy? Like, Jesus Christ. What are you talking about? I'm thinking about getting a laser treatment. It's near your brain.

The laser's not shooting into your brain. Light affects seizures. Often, flickering light on your eyes triggers seizures. I'm gonna get in a conversation with. Heaven forbid.

I know. It is the flickering. It's the flickering and the strobing that sets off seizures. It can also. Whatever.

Charan Ranganath
Okay. Anyway. Okay, next topic. One other thing she said about it really turned me off. I was like, what are the downsides of Kybella?

Monica Padman
And she was like, well, you know, there could always be stuff. She's like, but there's really nothing. But what happened. What happens is the fat, basically, she says, kind of like pockets. So she was like, you might feel bumps.

And I was like, oh, my God. This is exactly the thing I was worried about. And this is the thing that can go bad, is if those bumps don't dissolve. So then I was like, I gotta get out of here. Give me my new acne skincare routine and I'm gone.

Aaron Paul
Give me everything on the shelf. I'll take a to z on the products. So you're. Are you completely off Kybala now? That's it.

Monica Padman
I'm gonna wait. I'm not off of it completely, but I'm waiting. Okay, that's the update. So I don't have it. Okay.

So no need for anyone to comment on my neck. I didn't have it. I didn't get it. Yeah. What if all the posts in the future were like, your neck looks great?

Dax Shepard
Because, by the way, this is what I was telling Monica, Aaron. And I'm not to lead the witness. But I said, do it. Do whatever makes you happy. But I am here to tell you.

No. No one has looked at your neck and said, oh, boy. Well, I haven't, but, yeah, nor have I. But thank you for. I have seen people's necks and said, oh, boy.

Sure, some. Next you say, oh, boy when you see him. Well, that's not your. Yeah, they probably have more than just a small chin. It's more a men, though.

Would you agree, Aaron? Like, I'll talk. I'll be talking to a man. I'll go, wow. His chin goes directly down into his chest.

It's just one huge plate of, like. Oh, definitely. Yeah. As people get older and heavier. Yeah.

Monica Padman
And, like, skin sagginess. Yeah. See, at least you had the courage to walk out even though you bought a bunch of stuff. It's kind of impressive. I would have fell forever or I would have just said, fuck it.

Get it all, get it everything. Aaron and I have a lot of the same patterns. And so that situation. Yes, agreed. I would have done everything.

Dax Shepard
And it's motivated by couple things, I think. One is like, and this is why we've invented a coffee called Mike's coffee, which we'll tell you about. But one of them is like, I never want to do the thing I'm doing again. Like, I want to get anything done. I can get permanently, forever.

Monica Padman
Oh. But nothing's really like that. I know. Well, obviously, this is why it's. This is a defect of character.

Dax Shepard
This isn't like. This isn't a virtue of ours. Okay? But I think both of us have this thing. Like, just do the whole fucking thing.

Aaron Paul
I don't know, over with. Because we've invented it now. We don't have it yet, but we've invented a coffee coming soon, Mike's coffee. Okay. And it's for men who hate buying coffee.

Dax Shepard
So first of all, you have to own a truck to buy our coffee, because you have to come and we sell it in a 55 gallon drum. You need a couple friends as well. Yeah. And if you have a work. We'd be much happier if you showed up in a work truck to get the coffee.

And the coffee works the same. Same as coffee. That tastes good. What do you mean? Well, I mean, it doesn't taste very good, but you'll never have to buy coffee again, and I think that's gonna be very appealing to a lot of men.

This one will be brewed. Men will settle. No 55 gallon gram of ground coffee. And you're gonna go one time for the rest of your life. 500 pounds of coffee.

Yeah. And then you put that in your kitchen. Okay. So they're also gonna be, like, a big garage or something. A big kitchen.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. Big quarantine garage. Oh, my God. They can't be married. Closet.

Monica Padman
This is single men. Sure. With a big kitchen. Maybe keep it outside. Right outside the door, but don't.

Dax Shepard
Moisture is an issue. I think it has a lot of properties. No, it's. Maybe you'll sprinkle some anti rancid stuff in there. It'd be a funniest business.

Like, four years later, we start getting people returning the coffee. It's like we sold it four years ago, and they finally got a third of the way through, and then it went bad somehow. We're gonna have to think about that legally. Well, you do have to. The recommended way to drink it is boiling, so, yeah, it's best.

Monica Padman
Boiling all the bad stuff. Well, I think any rancidness would be boiled. You would remember this from Michigan. What I think you remember because I think you were annoyed by it. Everyone else was.

Dax Shepard
Aaron and I's obsession with hot coffee. Remember we were at Dairy Queen and we were like. We were laughing that the person would have to hand you the coffee with, like, a welding mitt on. Because we want you to boil the coffee and then immediately to the microwave for seven days. An extra seven after boiling.

Yes. The coffee cannot be hot enough. And when you brew it, it's got. What's going on? You guys don't have taste buds or something?

Monica Padman
Like, what do you mean? I don't even get this. Yeah. Not shocked. No, but I'm asking.

Aaron Paul
And even the weirdest thing is I'm super sensitive to hot. That's what I know. I don't think you guys are, like, not capable of getting scalded. There's just something about it being so piping hot that seems really appealing. That's how a coffee.

Charan Ranganath
Manly, masculine. Yes. Yes. And same with, like, buying coffee in a 55 gallon drink. Not masculine.

Monica Padman
Let me tell you. Some man taking a sip of coffee and, like, practically dying because they can't swallow because it was so hot and scalding their mouth. But he'd never let you know. No. You are so stupid if you think that we can't see what is going on and we have to act like we don't notice.

Charan Ranganath
No. Aaron and I would both. We'd have our glove on our mitt, our, like, flame retardant mitt and our coffee, and we would take a sip. Then we would look at each other, and it would be burning for sure. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
But we would never acknowledge it. And we would just get it down. Cause that's some good, hot coffee. So is Mike's coffee supposed to be scalding, too? You don't need the microwave cycle.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, you do have to boil. You do have to get it at 212. Yes. At least. I mean, I guess, to be fair, my tea is at 212.

Dax Shepard
Is it? Cause that's how you're supposed to brew tea. That tea. Black tea. Also, Mike's coffee isn't the cleanest coffee.

So the more you can boil it and get something, there's some bugs in it. It's a 55 gallon drum of coffee. Stuff happens when you take that humongous lid off. Yes. It's gonna be an hour.

Monica Padman
Why can't you make a good product? This is a good product. It is. Because every man in the country will buy one can, and that's it. And then it's also a weird business strategy because once we sell one to each man, that's it.

Dax Shepard
The company's over. Because it's a lifetime worth of cost. But the best is the taste tagline is that it works the same as coffee. That tastes good.

Monica Padman
All right. Monica's against it. If you happen to be listening and this appeals to you, just let us know in the comments that we're on the right path. We have a second product that you're gonna understand even less. What is it?

Dax Shepard
You wanna hear about it? I'm not sure. Bob's paper towel. Yeah. Oh, you've already.

Monica Padman
We've done this. We can't. We cannot revisit Bob's paper. Have you done this already? Yes.

The two of you have talked about this. Oh, my God. I've got the actual product that you guys made. I'm shocked. It's good.

Charan Ranganath
I know. It's phenomenal. Thank God. More and more shocked than you, to be honest. Because we would drink anything if it was in something created.

Dax Shepard
But I want to defend ourselves and say it's a little different, Monica, than just straight masking. What it is, is it's about the working man. It's way more about a work truck and your tools and your coffee and your paper towel. It's about an honest day's work. And it's about sweating for a living.

Aaron Paul
And it's about. Most working men at our age have a little blood in their urine, have. A lot of leaning. You gotta clean up some messes, you know. Not your average paper towel isn't gonna soak all that up.

Dax Shepard
We have to pee too often. So you're constantly in your work truck and you can't find a bathroom, and you don't wanna pee in public. Cause now that would be hyper masculine, toxic masculinity. Just get out and pee anywhere. No.

Monica Padman
Yeah. You wanna pee in your vehicle. Sure. And just line your little can or cup full of Mike's paper towel as. Hard as it gets.

Dax Shepard
Confusing. Yeah. You guys are such mixed messages. It's like you're gonna go into my dermatologist and get every single facial surgery. Come out new man yet.

Monica Padman
You're about the working man. We are. That's who we are at our core. Embarrassed by the surgeries. Well, one thing that is serious.

Dax Shepard
Can I hit you with one serious thing? So those are fake products, but we have a real product. Head seekers. Yeah. Yes.

Obviously. And we have a community pledge that will be written up and it'll be on that website. But I wouldn't mind saying it here verbally, which is we have a community pledge and a customer pledge that we are going to dedicate 10% of all profits to a race boat team and fuel cost.

Want. That's. You could actually. Yeah, that's really bad. Well, you cannot do that.

Yeah, that's. We're gonna. We commit. We. We pledge that 10% of all province will go to fund a future Ted seekers race boat team.

Aaron Paul
And fuel. And fuel costs. And transportation costs. Cause you gotta get those boats to the races. He just lost a customer.

Dax Shepard
Anywho, you lost a customer. I think you lost a few, but you definitely lost one. If we lost three and gained one, that's a win for us.

Aaron Paul
We'll make it up in our coffee and paper towel. Can I send you a picture of the race boat? I think you've shown it is pretty amazing. I showed you. Oh, no, you showed me the blimp or something.

Dax Shepard
The blimp? No, the seaplane? No. Oh, sorry. That's another commitment we have to our community.

First of all, there is no money. Let's just start there. This endeavor is losing money, so there's no money. Okay. I think it started with, we're not turning a profit, so we can at least say it right.

But in the future, when we do turn a profit, which is going to happen at that point, when we're profitable, we are going to, for our community, invest in a race boat team. Look at your phone, if you will. And then ultimately you're right. The long term goal is to have a seaplane, which you already know, but which is really funny because it has us very committed to waterways, both by the water racing and we can only travel to places that have a big river or a lake to land on. We don't have anything terrestrial.

Nothing on Terra firma. How sexy is that boat, though? Did you look at it? That's nice. Oh, okay.

Thank you. Yeah, it's nice. It looks pretty. Yeah, it's hard to argue that it's a good look. It's hydroplane.

Monica Padman
It does look, like, really nice. So what should it cost to get this mocked up? Well, this is a great story because people do think we have, like, a bunch of money. The company, Ted seekers, does not have a bunch of money, and we spend more than we take in. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, anyways, Aaron. Well, Aaron, you got the email, so take it away. Yeah, well, it boils down to people want us to advertise and spend money with them.

Aaron Paul
Course, now people have gotten to the point where they're mocking things up for us. So that boat, I can't. First of all, Dax and I can't even imagine making it more perfect than what they did. I know, it looks really nice. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
There's all this. So I was telling him, though, in the email, it said, here's what we can do for you. Fantastic. Yeah. Sticker up the whole boat.

Paint it. Yeah. But I just want to say, too, it's a hydro plane boat. The kind with the jet engine. Right.

The highest form of race. The catch is for us to sticker up that boat for a race. A race. Monica, it's 400 grand. Oh, my God.

Aaron Paul
And we were. So this led us to start talking because as cool as that is, we're like, wait a second. How do we make our money back? Like, who's watching this? Who's buying dead seekers because of this?

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. I mean, I don't know how many people are on the shore of those races. Like, I don't know, maybe 5000 because you can't see it. And they're really. And the break it down about 700 miles an hour.

Dax Shepard
So you're really paying at 400 grand for five. You're paying like a several hundred dollars per person who saw it. I don't think that's the smartest way to go about it. Well, we're gonna go for it anyways. But we did decided to be much.

Monica Padman
You're gonna go for it? Well, we're not gonna. We don't have any money. So literally we can't do that. But.

Dax Shepard
But instead of us spending 400 grand a race to sponsor someone else's boat, we will take 10% of the profit as committed and as pledged, and we will buy our own race boat. Why don't you just sticker up your house? Okay. You're already built house. That is true.

So my wagon that's almost done being built is going to be the very first vehicle in the race fleet for Ted Seegers. So my 1980 Mercury Zephyr station wagon is already. I got it painted white, the same color as the can. And then on the hood, I'm going to have the Ted head put on the hood. And on the back, it's going to say in red, Ted seekers racing.

That'll be our first vehicle. That's cool. And you're right. That'll have been my money. Do you want me to put a bumper sticker on my Prius?

Oh, yeah, that would be great. I'll do that. Well, we already have the cute little round stickers. Maybe you could start there. I'll start there and put it on.

Your window because I don't want you to have to scrape it off at any point, ruin your paint. Just put maybe on your window. Well, I'm not gonna put on my mercedes. No, that's fine. Yeah, it's not a mask.

Monica Padman
Very sl. Exactly. Branding wise, it doesn't really go. I mean, the Prius isn't a great match either, but we'll live with that. I have it on the Durango.

Dax Shepard
That's perfect. That's a good match. But, yeah, I wouldn't put it on the mercedes. It's just so pretty know. Also the Mercedes is very, very highbrow.

Monica Padman
Exactly. And ten seekers is for a man or a woman. Well, no, a man or a woman who puts in an honest day's work. Yeah. No, at a construction site.

Okay. What are you considering an honest day's work where you swear what we do in honest days? Absolutely. I don't think anyone in America would consider what we do as an honest. It's time consuming as all hell.

Dax Shepard
It is. But do you think anyone in America, if you asked anyone in America, like, what we do, is that an honest day's work? You couldn't find one person that would. Say yes, I think it is. It's very honest.

Monica Padman
We're very honest on here. Yeah. It gets confusing like that. You know, it's actually literally an honest day's work. That's fair.

Dax Shepard
When you explain it to people, maybe they would change their mind, but just the notion of, like, sitting on a couch and shooting the shit, is that an honest days? Why is that? Yeah. You mad about that? Yeah.

Look, if I was shingling all day long, like 12 hours a day, and I had bundles on my shoulder and I was climbing a ladder, and you said to me, yeah, I hang on this couch in the air conditioning. I chat for a few hours. Is that an honest day's work? Then I do a lot more. You gotta have some then.

Monica Padman
We've never had someone on here who's had an honest day's work or who does an honest day's work. And probably none of our listeners do. True. But I think a lot of the people that on here did previously have honest days work, as did you. You've had lots of honest days work.

Let's. How about this? Can we do a hierarchy of the most honest day work, which is like, you're sweating and you're using your body as much as you can to exert force on this object. Manual labor. Manual labor.

Dax Shepard
That's got to be the most honest. Like, farming is the most honest gendered. It's like. It's very problematic, actually, to say that that's the idea of real work, because women don't do that. They do.

They've always been in the farming fields. I would say that's probably the most honest day's work, is farming. I'm talking about what you're talking about. Currently, you're probably not talking about farming. Well, I'm telling you, I do think farming is, like, the most honest days work someone could do.

Like, they're like. I say we leave the honest day's work to the paper towel coffee drinkers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. Ted seekers is actually not for.

Monica Padman
Yeah, better not be. I feel like most people who. Yeah, okay, talk to me. No, I was gonna say most people who do what you're saying is an honest day's work are not gonna be drinking na beer. Oh, that's interesting.

We're gonna be drinking beer with alcohol. Well, there's a lot of sober people that are doing honesty's work that are in a. Like. They've had to go to a. Like in your meeting.

Dax Shepard
Not in. Oh, man.

Go to log cabin. No. Yes. Not the meeting in my friend's living room. Right.

But you're asking of whether people do honest days of works are sober or not. For sure. I'm sure there are. I would say most likely they're probably drinking beer with alcohol. Well, when I was doing honest day's work, there was nobody sober.

Monica Padman
Right. Thank you. Yeah, we were doing some really good drinking back when we were doing honest day's work. My whole point, the drinking is it lends itself to an honest day. Well, that is the reward of an honest day's work, is that drink tastes so much better.

Dax Shepard
Like, when I would get off of filming and have a drink in New Zealand. Ceiling. It wasn't the same as when we get done fucking cleaning out the slaughterhouse. Yeah, it's the reward for the. Those MGDs were just.

Yeah, those. Wonderful. But you did call me. One of us called each other when we first got some Ted seegers made. You did something, I think, building the little pavilion with link.

Aaron Paul
Yes. You built something. Had a real good, sweaty day. And then you crack the cold segers so it can be done with na beer. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
It tastes six times better than when I've had it. Just to have it around the house. Like, it really goes up exponentially when. You'Ve been sweating I think that's right. Yeah.

Or barbecuing. I just had one because I was playing pickleball with perfect ten, Charlie. Oh, you were? How was it? Fantastic.

Monica Padman
I really wanted. Unlike Dax, who does not want to learn. I do want to learn. I'm there. Oh, now he wants to learn.

Dax Shepard
Okay, well, I'm in, then. I. In fact, I'm gonna. If we can find a minute, I'm gonna play with Aaron while he's here. Yeah.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. I brought a couple of paddles with me. Cause I thought, dad's gonna play. It's gonna be. And then with me.

Dax Shepard
There's a win for both parties in this. So one is Aaron, and Charlie just played. Charlie's just barely ever played. I think he's only played. He said he played six times.

Six times. Yeah. Yeah. And Aaron can see that. He's already gonna be great at it.

Monica Padman
Oh, really? He is a college level athlete. Yeah. So that's a win for Charlie, then. What I also like is that Aaron mopped him up.

Dax Shepard
Cause Aaron is a tremendous pickleball player. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He said, forced to be here. Not to mention it, but I'll mention it.

Yeah, I kicked his asshole fucking apart. But you're an athlete as well. A crazy athlete. Non stop. And you play.

Aaron Paul
Yeah, no, he would if we played for a week together, he'd probably fucking creep. I don't know about that. It's really funny. Cause I have a type like the man I hang out with most frequently in life probably is Charlie. And he, too, is just athletically so superior to me.

Dax Shepard
It's interesting. I like that dynamic. I like to feel unathletic around my good friends. Yeah, I don't know how that works for you. Yeah.

Aaron Paul
Doesn't make much sense. You know what? It probably is because I grew up with a brother five years older than me that was infinitely better at everything than me. And I don't know, maybe something feels familiar about it. Yeah, maybe.

Dax Shepard
But what's really fun is when I get to be on either of their teams. Like playing volleyball with Charlie on the same team. Or Aaron is really fun. Yeah. Okay.

Monica Padman
Should we do a couple facts? You too, Monica. First, you have elite muscle mass. I thank you. Yes.

Dax Shepard
And you're a state champion. I am. You have much greater accolades than me. But you've never seen it. I've watched videos.

Monica Padman
Well, yeah, I know, but it's not that. I'm like, you know, showing you up, taunting me. Yeah, but again, it is the pattern. It's true. Yeah, you're right.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. This is a good time for you to be here, Aaron, because this is a memory episode. Oh, good. All right. We talked about us.

Monica Padman
You guys have memories together. Yeah. And we do. We did bring it up. Yeah.

How you guys have. We always have the same memory, which. Is you repeat the memory in a similar way. Right, right. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Cause with my family, it's not that. Almost consistently. My family and I all remember things differently. Right. Which I think is the most common.

Like, most people's memories do not match up. But what is really weird, I think about your and I's memory, and then Monica had a theory, which is probably right. Cause we have told these stories so many times together. Really helps the story together. That's a lot of friendships.

Monica Padman
In friendships, when you have shared memories, it's about the telling of it, so it's the same. Unless it's something you guys both have never talked about, then you're revisiting. But there is this curious aspect of most relationships, which, in general, if you hear a husband and wife tell a story, they're constantly going, no, no, we left the day before. Like, couples correct each other nonstop. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Don't you think that's the pattern? They do, but I think couples, and maybe this is sad, but I think couples do less of a combined storytelling. You and Kristen do actually a lot of combined storytelling, but most people don't. Like, I don't really notice some of our other friends as a couple presenting a story, and they're like, back and forth telling it like you do with the friend thing. That's curious.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. Most often I hear couples, though, going like, no, they're always correcting each other. I know people do that. Yeah. It's interesting.

Monica Padman
I don't know. Anywho, okay, so was Ritalin a thing in the seventies? It was FDA approved in 19 55 55. Yeah. This was the heyday of pharmaceutical amphetamines because this is when dexadrine and all these, quote, housewife drugs were invented.

Yeah. But it says the explosion of Ritalin happened in 1999. I became aware of it in probably 97 or eight. Oh, it says, actually Prozac. They believe Prozac sort of paved the way for it.

Dax Shepard
Oh, really? Yeah. Because that's not a said. It became more acceptable and easier to take a psychiatric drug, Prozac. So then shifted the mindset.

But then super Ritalin came out. Adderall. I think most people are prescribed Adderall now, which is like. Yeah. Or like, via bands or whatever.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. Yeah. People like that don't learn about it. Okay. Vyvanse.

Dax Shepard
Sounds like it would be a babenzo, though. But whatever. Um, wait, hold on. By vans, upper or downer? I think it's like Adderall, right?

Aaron Paul
No, it is a benzo. You're right. Oh. Cause the girl. Most Ann's are benzos.

Monica Padman
Oh. Prescription medicine using. Used for treating attention. Adhd. Well, then it probably isn't stimulant.

It's amphetamine. Oh, you're talking about Ritalin. I thought you just looked. Oh. Vivan.

Dax Shepard
Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. I could see, like, a benzo addict rifling through someone's cabinets in their bathroom and seeing that, like, Ativan. Like, Ativan is a benzo and thinking like, oh, great.

And then. Yeah, why did I think it was probably Ativan? But, yeah, I was prescribed Ativan. Yeah. And it worked for you?

Monica Padman
Yeah. I mean, I would take it very sporadically. Mm hmm. I don't really like it, though. Well, it's almost hard to evaluate because you're taking it when you're really, like a parent, so it's probably weird.

Dax Shepard
Associate. I was taking it when I wanted to have a good time. Sure. Not benzos. Stimulants.

Monica Padman
Oh, right. Well, I've never taken that. I've never taken, like, Adderall or anything. I think that would make me feel so bad. Like, it took me a while to get used to caffeine.

Dax Shepard
Mmm. I don't think I would do well on that. Okay. Oh. Can ADHD affect hand eye coordination?

Monica Padman
Poor motor coordination or motor performance is another common coexisting difficulty in children with ADHD, though it has received less attention in research, children with ADHD who experience motor difficulties often display deficits in tasks requiring coordination of complex movements, such as handwriting. Well, I have shitty ass handwriting, that's for sure. But you don't have a hand eye coordination problem? I don't think so. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
It's not like Aaron's or Charlie's, that's for damn certain. But I don't think it's under indexing or. No, yours is fine. Except for maybe your eyes are affecting it now, lately. Yeah.

Aaron and I were bonding over our. Declining welcome to the club. Right. It's kind of fun. Well, you've had it long enough that you're, like, total acceptance mode still.

Like, where is this going? Am I going to be blind in two years? Cause it's just like, it feels like it's falling off a cliff, and why would it ever stop? Sure. But as we learned in this episode, you can choose how you perceive the world, and you can choose to see it as new lens, a little novel, like a little cloudy in a great way when things are too sharp.

Monica Padman
When I first got my glasses, I hated. I was like, everyone looks a little uglier. Yeah, I look uglier, and everyone else does a little bit, too. It's like the proverbial lights going on in the bar. Oh, man, I'm so glad I never have to experience that.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, it's cruel. I guess people just won't leave unless they do that. But they should let everyone leave in the dark. Yeah. Then people still don't leave.

They don't leave even with those lights on. Yeah, that was my experience. Would you do that when you owned a bar? Would you turn the lights on? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Paul
Music off. Lights all on. Oh, fuck. Tell everyone. Get the fuck getting, like, out of there.

Dax Shepard
Terrible feeling just hearing that. Yeah, that's rough. PTsd. Okay, so he had. He broke his arm before he came.

Broke in half. Broke his humorous. Had to get a rod. Oh, yeah. And you said you thought that was the second biggest bone in the body.

I do. I expand by that. It goes the femur, the tibia, and the fibula. No kidding. I wonder if we're going length or girth.

Length makes sense. The largest three bones of the body are the long bones of the thigh, the shin, and the lower leg. I accept that. I accept. Shout out while you're looking at your next fact to MotoGP Aaron, who's never, not even interested in it.

I forced him to watch two races this weekend. We were screaming last night watching the race. Oh, I loved it. I wish I could just watch them with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe we should, like, facetime each other or something. Okay, so I mentioned that there was an episode of Malcolm Gladwell's show about hoarding and memory, and that is called dragon psychology 101. Ooh. It's a revisionist history episode, so feel free to listen to that and learn about hoarding. Mm.

Monica Padman
It was a really good episode. That's it. That's all. That's all. I really liked him a lot.

Dax Shepard
Just side note. Me too. He was so fun and smart, and memory's so fascinating. He was a professor at UC Davis, and he's in a punk band. Yeah.

And he broke his arm skateboarding. And he's my age, and he's in a neuroscience punk band called Pavlov's Dog. Neuroscientist. Everyone in the band's a neuroscientist. Oh, my God, I love that.

Yeah. He's phenomenal. Can't wait to listen. Yeah, it's a kind of heady episode. When I was listening back, I was like, it's a bit heady, but it's really interesting.

It was a dense one. It's one of the most dense ones we've done in a while. There's a lot to learn about it. Can I send you one more picture? Speaking of punk rock, Aaron just sent this to me.

Monica Padman
This is a picture of Dax at a punk show. Yeah. Wow. How old are you here? 17.

Wow. Now can I tell you. Here's what I told Dex about it. I was like, I thought he looked so cool. And I was like, it looks like there's a lot of brill cream, maybe, like, oil in his hair, but it's super shiny blonde and it's bleach white.

Aaron Paul
Really fucking cool looking. And then look at the little guy next to him. Doesn't he look like Michael J. Fox or is that just me? It does.

Monica Padman
I can see that. Yeah, I remember that kid. I kind of remember him, too. He was at all the shows. Yeah.

The one behind him with the cowboy hat also looks like. You know who that is? That's. Go watch. That's Aaron.

Dax Shepard
Go watch that. Go watch. Have you met him over here? He's a good. He's still our friend.

Monica Padman
I don't know if I've met him. He's so cute. But, Aaron, you're not in this picture, right? No, that's my baseball hat. But behind the cowboy hat, there's a white baseball hat.

Aaron Paul
But, yeah, no. How fun. And then Tyrell is just behind me with the glass half a face with the glasses sticking out. Oh, my God. Fun.

Dax Shepard
Future founders of Ted Seegers with a commitment to our community. Wow, how cute. Very fun. Bottles from the past. Yeah.

All right. Love you. Lovely to have you, Priya. Hell, yes. I'm so happy to be here.

Aaron Paul
Bye.

Charan Ranganath (on memory)

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction: Memory Basics

2. The Mechanics of Memory

3. The Impact of Technology

4. Practical Memory Strategies

5. The Future of Memory Research

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

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Transcript